Zondervan offers The Story to US churches

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Open Bible

Open BibleTHE Bible is the best-selling book in history, but is anyone reading it?

A Gallup survey reports the average American household has four Bibles.  However, recent findings by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2008) report only 16 percent of Americans read the Bible every day.

“The problem isn’t access to the Bible in America, it is helping people feel like the Bible is accessible,” said Randy Frazee.

Frazee believes that best-selling The Story (Zondervan) provides that accessibility.

Consisting of 31 chapters of carefully selected scripture, The Story helps the reader understand God’s story from Genesis to Revelation and how their stories intersect with God’s.

Frazee helped pioneer a church-wide experience to utilize The Story and to engage everyone in a church, from life-long Christians to those who are new to the faith – many discovering for the first time how the Bible is one continuous story of God’s unyielding love for his people.

The results exceeded even Frazee’s expectations. Stepping into the pulpit at Oak Hills Church, Frazee used the new curriculum as his first teaching series. He saw a 23 percent growth in attendance over the weeks spent on The Story Church-wide Experience and witnessed a new “buzz and unity within the congregation and community.”

“People began literally parking illegally in the access roads to participate in this experience and to find themselves in the best-selling, most-translated book of all time,” said Max Lucado, minister of preaching at Oak Hills.

The Story Church-wide Experience is now available to churches nationwide and is in multiple formats so the entire church, from children to adults, is literally and figuratively on the same page.  The program includes:

*      up to 31 weeks of curriculum for children, teen and adult Sunday school classes, as well as for adult small groups and Bible studies

*    up to 31 weeks of sermon outlines, illustrations, videos and other sermon preparation resources

*   additional support resources including promotional and stage graphics, leader training resources, themed worship song lists for a season of worship, an Easter musical and more

* The Story church kit including copies of The Story, The Story – Teen Edition and The Story for Kids, plus a DVD of the video resources and high-resolution graphics. The kit also contains an all-access pass to the online resource library where age-related curriculum is provided, and where cases of books may be purchased at a 50 percent discount (available for a limited time for just $99.99)

“I would like for this church-wide Bible engagement experience to become a tipping point for our nation to discover the overarching love God has for us,” said Frazee. “The Story is a bridge for people to access the Bible in the simplest way so they might be able to see God in a personal way.”

For details, log on to The Story.

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