Start with the commitment of 3 or 4 people to meet on a regular schedule to help each other learn to tell Biblical stories. It will be like planting a seed. It will remain underground for quite a season.

The watering comes with regular meetings, practice, and sharing stories of where and how you have told these stories in other settings. Some guilds meet monthly. Others are organized around storytelling events that they open to the public.

At your meetings, use learning processes modeled at our festivals -- or follow the suggestions in the paper, Steps in Leading a Biblical Storytelling Workshop. At your meetings, besides testing different methods of learning the stories, make sure you have exercises for relating the stories to your personal and/or community experiences.

When the time seems right, you might plan a weekend for yourselves and other interested people. This gives the opportunity to delve deeply into one or more stories around a particular theme. The stories can provide the framework for your worship as well as study.

When you have committed to a core group, then with patience (and it does take a long time) the time will come when you are ready to extend the call to a program or workshop where the idea of a regional group can be proposed. Again, experience dictates that at first you should keep your structure very simple.

Don't plan for more than your group has the time and energy. One regional group has only a fall and a spring meeting. At each meeting, they ask for someone or a group to host their next meeting at their church or center. The host group usually also sends out the invitations or flyers a month or six weeks in advance. They ask for suggestions for program leaders. The regional coordinator, with informal help from others, makes sure that the program gets set up. This format has worked pretty well when they found they couldn’t get an executive committee to come to program planning meetings.

When a group feels that it would be helpful to be formally affiliated with NOBS, it should send a letter to the Executive Director requesting affiliation and recognition.

Your responsibility to NOBS:

• To notify the office about the meetings in advance to allow us to publicize your event.

• To send brief written reports to NOBS (by e-mail) after each meeting you hold.

• At least once a year, to prepare a brief article about some aspect of your work for The Biblical Storyteller. NOBS will, in turn, report to you on people who become members from your region and others who write for information. They will also keep you informed of resources related to Biblical storytelling.

• As soon as you have settled on dates of meetings (preferably for a year), send them to the central office, so they can be advertised. You may get many more suggestions about programs and formats that have worked by talking individually with the coordinators of different regional groups.

Learn more about existing Guilds in the US, Australia, Canada, and Singapore. If you are in Europe, contact the NOBS office at nobsint@nobs.org.

ORGANIZING A GUILD | LEADING A WORKSHOP