It is our stories that connect us to one another and enable us to become a community. When we come together to worship and share the stories of our life, our stories become God's story. In fact, our personal and community stories are inseparable from
sacred narrative. Worship is the telling of God's story, but we ourselves are part of the very story we are telling.
This book uses a method of "narrative communication" that integrates feminist perspective with aspects of narrative theory and Christian communication theory, to look at the significance of storytelling as a medium for evolving inclusive worship.
The author speaks specifically from and for the context of the tribal Baptist Christians in North East India. Women have been rendered storyless because of patriarchal traditions in local cultures and inherited from early missionaries. How may women
tell their stories in worship then? The author asserts that we have to overcome our storylessness by using the scripts of our lives as our sacred story. Our stories can be woven into our prayers, sermons, and rituals. We can also read the stories
of the Bible as women and re-imagine biblical narratives to challenge traditional perceptions. Our stories invite our hearers to experience our story, to view things from our perspective, so that we and our hearers are no longer strangers but become
one community. The underlying premise of this book is that storytelling can be an ideological tool to challenge discrimination against women and girls.
Contents
Preface Acknowledgments
1. Introduction 2. The Method 3. Apartheid in Worship 4. Trinitarian Koinonia and Spiritual Renewal 5. The Church as an Inclusive Community 6. Storytelling Models of Worship 7. Conclusive: As One
Bibliography
Rev. Dr Marlene Ch. Marak is a member of Tura Baptist Church and an ordained minister of the Garo Baptist Convention, Meghalaya. She earned her PhD in Christian Communication and Worship and Preaching from the University of Divinity,
Melbourne, Australia. She is currently Associate Professor of Communication at Eastern Theological College, Jorhat, Assam. She is married to Rev. Dr Zhodi Angami, Associate Professor of New Testament and Greek, who also teaches at Eastern Theological
College. They are blessed with a daughter, Mima Tejoé Marak, and are also guardians to a young girl, Rangkambe Ch. Marak.
|