The Network of Biblical Storytellers (NOBS) is an international, ecumenical organization whose mission is to encourage everyone to learn and tell biblical stories. Over the 25 years that NOBS has been in existence, several thousand members have lent support to this mission.

Our members are people who have experienced first hand the power of the stories learned by heart and told well and faithfully. They are Methodists and Mennonites, Baptists and Presbyterians, Roman Catholics and Orthodox, Lutheran and non-denominational -- people of many faith traditions who have in common the knowledge that they are story-formed people, both as individuals and as a community. The membership of NOBS is laity and clergy, educators and learners, professional storytellers and inexperienced amateurs—all of us with a deep love of the biblical stories and a curiosity about how they may be told. So how did the Network of Biblical Storytellers come to be?

The story of the evolution of NOBS begins in the intellectual milieu of Walter Wink's work in the early 1970s. Wink had become increasingly dissatisfied with the results of classical biblical studies and its failure to bear fruit for contemporary Christian faith.

Tom Boomershine, who was to become the founder of NOBS, was a student of Wink. In 1974 when Tom completed his studies that focused on the telling/hearing of the gospel as oral/aural event, there was some question as to whether a Ph.D. would be granted to him because of his project's methodological innovativeness. Tom, too, had rejected the contemporary trend in biblical studies of appropriating the principles of literary criticism to the field because he believed that this approach ignored the crucial role of oral culture in the development of the texts. Furthermore, this approach in the academy was undertaken from scholarly assumption that had officially abandoned and rejected the faith perspective as irrelevant to its work.

Tom Boomershine

During his long term hospitalization in which medication rendered him incapable of study Tom discovered existentially the importance of having the stories "by heart" the power of these stories remembered to connect us with God. His convalescence completed, Tom was awarded his Ph.D. And when Dr. Thomas Eugene Boomershine led his first workshop in 1976, that workshop included a group process dimension that encouraged participants to share their own lifestory connections with Mark's story of the healing of the paralytic.

l-r: Tom Boomershine and Adam (Gil) Bartholomew in 2004

Slowly there formed a small circle of folk who were meeting together to learn and tell the stories, experiencing the depth of the stories and building a community around the spiritual discipline of learning and telling. Tom and Gil Bartholomew -- who recently changed his name to Adam Bartholomew -- made it formal in the spring of 1977 as the "charter members" committed to organizing a group of storytellers at New York Theological Seminary -- among them Steve Rose, Pam Moffat, Bill Weisenbach, Mel Bertram and Peg Eddy -- who became the very first "Coordinator" of the nascent, fledgling organization now called "the Network of Biblical Storytellers" -- NOBS for short. (It is Gil Bartholomew who gets credit for naming the organization and first noting its peculiar acronymn!)

Peg Eddy, one the founding pioneers of the movement, died not long after that. She is a very special witness in that cloud of saints, who just before her death observed that the power of story is "the power of God to change things through us and using us so that new things can happen."

The First Festival

In those early years NOBS was more of a movement or community than an organization or institution. And in some ways it still is. Throughout its history, participants in the Network have been drawn into deep, abiding relationships that draw their strength from the shared experience of the biblical stories. A decade after it all began, NOBS sponsored its very first public gathering. It was called a "Festival of Storytelling" and was held at the University of New England at Biddeford Pool, Maine with the theme, "Telling the Stories of Peace." More than 200 people came from all over the country to that first public event.

Festival Gathering 2000

The NOBS office relocated to the campus of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where Tom Boomershine had become Professor of New Testament. This base of operations was to serve the Network well over the next years.

NOBS sponsored several regional events in Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania. Then in July of 1987 a second "International Festival" was held at Eastern College in St. David's, Pennsylvania, with the theme, "Telling Stories of Healing and Reconciliation." In 1989 the world greeted the very first publication of The Journal of Biblical Storytelling. That same year NOBS gathered for the third time in plenary at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Then in 1991 it was "Telling the Stories of the Marketplace" in a festival held at Simpsonwood Retreat Center north of Atlanta -- a place to which the Network would return in 2000 as the more-or-less permanent home of its annual Festival Gathering.

Dreaming Dreams and Visioning Visions

Tracy Radosevic in 2001

The Board of Directors of NOBS kept on dreaming dreams and visioning visions, and they devised a strategy for keeping the mission of Network alive. Part of that strategy was to invite a young, talented storyteller named Tracy Radosevic to organize the next year's NOBS event. In the wake of this difficult restructuring -- and thanks in large measure to Tracy's drive and personality -- the first Gathering at Duke Divinity School in 1993 was a great success. Apropos of all that the Network of Biblical Storytellers had been through, that 1993 Gathering's theme was "New Beginnings." The Gathering had now become an annual event. Dennis Dewey was featured in 1993, performing stories from the Gospel of John -- his first Gathering.

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