HOme @ GoTell
Indian Missionary with Children
(photo by Dr. Joseph Palakeel)
Welcome!
Welcome to our site and thanks for visiting. We hope to help you develop your biblical storytelling vocation and witness to Jesus' way of peace. Let us know how we can be of service by contacting us at info@gotell.org.
Mission
The mission of GoTell is to equip people to discover and tell biblical stories as a spiritual discipline for embodying Jesus' way of peace in the world.
July News: Biblical Storytelling Mission to India
Along with Dr. Frances Plude, we will be traveling to India this October for a biblical storytelling teaching (and learning) mission. With our host, Dr. Joseph Palakeel of IMPACT, we will make presentations on biblical storytelling and communications theology in digital culture. Our teaching destinations are the cities of Delhi, Bangalore, Ujjain, and Cochin. We will also attend the Indian Mission Congress in Mumbai.
The primary purpose of this trip is to introduce biblical storytelling as a resource for the life and mission of the Christian church in India. Our hope and expectation is that biblical storytelling will connect with the rich storytelling traditions of the Indian culture. We hope by this trip we will help more people in India learn and tell biblical stories and by so doing enhance the prospects of peace and justice in this amazing country.
Another goal is to support the development of IMPACT as a center for educational outreach in India and to train Indian leadership in the art of biblical storytelling. We will interact with the community of biblical scholars in India and introduce performance criticism, biblical storytelling, and communication theology as potential dimensions of biblical study in theological education. In addition, we will provide a theoretical framework for the work of IMPACT in communicating God's Word in India through digital media.
You can travel with us, at least in our hearts! Funds have been raised to cover international travel expenses, and tickets are in hand, but there is still a need to cover the costs of program and travel within India. Please consider a gift--even a small one would really help! Your gift will be tax deductible as GoTell is a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation.
For details about the background, objectives, and programs of the trip, as well as plans for follow-up afterwards, download "Biblical Storytelling Mission Trip to India."
Contribute by sending a check made payable to GoTell Communications, 620 W. Nottingham Rd., Dayton, OH 45405 or, easier yet, donate online. Thank you!
June News: "Way of Peace"
GoTell advocates and enables deep learning and face-to-face telling of sacred scriptures because we believe this is how the Word of God becomes part of who we are and what we do as individuals and as communities of faith. We also advocate telling scriptures because this is how they were originally experienced. We believe authentic understanding of the scriptures is best gained by experiencing them via the same media as did their original audiences.
We know that the original media of the scriptures—that is, how the scriptures were originally communicated—matters for authentic and powerful communication of God's Word in today's global village. Institutional Christianity has largely lost the ability to communicate its sacred scriptures in their original media. GoTell joins the Network of Biblical Storytellers and the International Orality Network in the important work of revivifying this lost ability.
GoTell's unique contribution to the work of promoting biblical storytelling is focused attention to original meaning. Just as there exists a need to communicate the scriptures in their original media for the sake of authenticity and power, so also we need to communicate their original meaning. These two aspects of communication are closely aligned; neither is truly possible without the other.
And just as the church has largely abandoned the practice of internalizing and telling scripture stories, so too has the majority church largely abandoned what early Christians clearly understood to be the primary meaning of the Gospel: that God had a way to save the world from violence through the love incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and that way was proven by his resurrection. It is our conviction that the telling and the hearing of the stories in this their original meaning is now, more than ever, what God hopes we will do.
Note the new button on the top menu for accessing the Way of Peace section .