Teaching live webinars

For the past five weeks, I have been teaching a live webinar series on "Powerful Storytelling" to as many as 100 participants who live and work in Asia, Africa and Europe. I have been doing this each Monday in partnership with the Asia-Pacific Region's communication team, who are handling the tech side of the whole thing while I teach the lessons I've written on how to communicate a story in a compelling way.

It has been super exciting to me that the curriculum I wrote two years ago is getting out to even more Nazarene ministry personnel around the world beyond the Eurasia Region.

Since I began working with Engage in 2009, seeing the stories that people in ministry are developing for their own blogs and newsletters, or submitting to various Nazarene publications, I've realized that offering some basic writing training might be helpful to a lot of people who are already doing the hard work of telling the stories of God's work in their parts of the world. So I've dreamed of this for a long time, and waited to see if my dream was something that God actually wanted me to do.

As the different training opportunities have come my way (a presentation to field strategy coordinators in April 2011, live classroom training India in 2012 and South Asia in 2013, a workshop at General Assembly 2013, and now online webinars for Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa in 2014), I can see that this is a dream God has given me and has been making a reality. It's amazing to see everything materialize without my pushing down any doors, that they just open naturally.

For this webinar, the series of topics is a little different than what I taught in India and South Asia because it's a slightly different demographic of participants. Here's the schedule we've done:

1. Why we tell stories
2. What makes a story
3. Narrative Writing
4. Interviewing
5. Writing news stories and blogs
6. Ethics

We will have the last webinar in the series this coming Monday. We've been recording each session and uploading each session, along with lesson documents, exercises and sometimes bonus audiocasts to a resource website so that the many participants who can't join us live can download the materials and watch the lesson later.

A week or two ago, I shared about this training with a missionary in the Mesoamerica Region (Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean) and she felt that my coursework would fit perfectly into a seminary class they're going to be offering this fall to train regional missionaries on how to communicate about their work with the local church. I've been asked to write a syllabus for the storytelling part of the class and to give them all my materials, which they will then adapt and translate into Spanish. It's really exciting to see the dream and the teaching spread around the world like this.

I feel really humbled that I get to be part of this. I know there're are a lot more qualified and experienced people out there than myself, but for some reason I just can't fathom, I'm the one doing this.

All this to say, thanks a lot to everyone who has been praying for the webinars and for me. It's been a challenging project, and sometimes we've had technology problems or our participants have had trouble logging in to the sessions. Sometimes I stumble a bit as I teach. But overall, the feedback I've been getting from the participants has been really positive and helps to affirm that this has been a valuable use of my time.