Our Mission
To encourage everyone to learn and tell biblical stories
Our History
The Network of Biblical Storytellers International is an ecumenical organization whose mission is to encourage everyone to learn and tell biblical stories. Over the last 40+ years, several thousand members have supported this mission. NBSI members include laity and clergy, educators and learners, professional storytellers, and inexperienced amateurs—all with a deep love of biblical stories and curiosity about how they may have been told.
Dr Tom Boomershine is our founder and author of several books including Story Journey, An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling. Listen to his inspiring telling about how a biblical story changed his life after a life-altering car accident and became the impetus for starting our network. Here more about NBSI’s origins and how it’s grown into the international organization it is today.
Our co-founder, Adam Bartholomew, was instrumental in supporting Tom with his vision. Their meeting at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where they were both students in the 1970s, was the beginning of a that led to the launch of the Network.
Our Mission
To encourage everyone to learn and tell biblical stories
We are an ecumenical and diverse community of pastors, educators, storytellers, and laity from many backgrounds. We have experienced the transformative power of embodying and performing stories from the Bible. We ground our approach in biblical scholarship, encouraging discussion and discovery while respecting the integrity of the original texts. Our storytellers are dedicated to revitalizing the proclamation of scripture for worship, conferences, retreats, festivals, and other formational programs.
Our Approach
We base our approach on a tradition of biblical scholarship, specifically the academic discipline known as biblical performance criticism. This methodology involves analyzing, understanding, and interpreting the texts through performance as well as other methods of biblical inquiry, recognizing that most stories were initially embodied and performed in a community. This approach sets us apart and makes our community a fascinating place to learn and grow.
We encourage sticking close to the “script” of the biblical stories and internalizing those words and all they represent into our entire being—mind, body, heart, spirit, and soul.
This method deepens our understanding of the stories while also generating fresh connections to our current lives. We do not seek to determine or manipulate how God should or will move an individual through scripture experienced this way, nor how these stories' embodiment will ultimately look and sound.
As such, NBSI celebrates a diversity of expression: dramatic to subtle, single performer to troupe of tellers, low-key to high-tech, use of music, props, or a lone chair …. All of these can encapsulate the multifaceted and life-giving dimensions inherent to our biblical stories of faith.