Feature Article
Digital Biblical Storytelling: Calling or Contradiction?
by Tom Boomershine
The need to make the stories of God a media experience became clear to me when I was a pastor working with teenagers in East Harlem and on the west side of Chicago. In their culture, the kind of biblical scholarship that I was learning in seminary was meaningless. To put it bluntly, they couldn't have cared less about JEDP and redaction criticism! They needed to experience the stories of God in a way that would connect with their culture. The stories needed images and music. And the youth needed a way to interact with them that would connect with their own life stories.
So I wrote several plays—an East Harlem passion play, a Christmas pageant called “Amen,” a review called “East Harlem Swings”—and explored being a religious dramatist. Always in the back of my mind was the hope that we would find a way to make the stories meaningful on TV. But the more I learned about storytelling, the more it became clear that storytelling, not drama, was the original and generative medium of biblical narrative. It was the spring from which the stories in electronic media would flow. Ever since that experience, I have been working on telling the stories in oral and electronic media.
Why should biblical storytellers jump on the bandwagon of digital media in a post- literate culture? The task of biblical storytellers is to tell the stories in a manner that is indigenous to every human culture. Indigenous here means using the communication system of the culture. In oral culture, indigenous meant telling the stories. In manuscript culture, it meant reading the stories from the manuscript; in print culture it meant reading the stories from a book to your family; in document culture it meant making sense of the documents as history and theology. And in digital culture, indigenous means making the stories a vivid experience both orally and digitally.
Published in The Biblical Storyteller, January/February 2003 (Volume 21, No. 1)