Bible storying has proven a successful way for missionaries to share the gospel since its implementation in the mid-1990s, but Alabama Baptist missionaries Stan and Lynn Stepleton plan to take it one step further. They want to communicate these Bible stories in sign language on a DVD.
The Stepletons, who serve as missionaries in Central America, are capturing 21 stories on disc for the deaf community in Guatemala. When told through the Bible-storying method, the stories are signed in chronological order using photos to illustrate the stories.
“As we see deaf persons all over the world respond to visual messages in their beginning steps into technology — such as chats over camera on the Internet, streaming videos that can be viewed in a cybercafé and using e-mails — we realized that DVDs would be accessible for use as tracts to share the gospel with deaf persons,” said Stan Stepleton, who, along with his family, is a member of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church, Birmingham, in Birmingham Baptist Association. “A visual telling of the Bible becomes a deaf person’s own private copy of the Scriptures in a form they can understand.
“It is a method of sharing the eternal truths of God’s Word. For any unsaved deaf person of Latin America — or any person anywhere in the world — it is the most important effort.”
The Stepletons produced their first DVD of various Bible stories in sign language in the late-1990s, but it was not the full chronological version of the Bible-storying presentation.
The first DVD, which was dubbed from a video the Stepletons had made, has been a valuable resource for Bible communicators and as a “visual tract” that has been distributed to the deaf in the Dominican Republic, where they previously served as missionaries.
Doug Rogers, Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions communications coordinator, said DVDs are an excellent resource to use in deaf ministry for a variety of reasons.
“They are a visual medium, they can be easily captioned with multiple languages and the different segments of a DVD can be quickly and easily accessed,” said Rogers, whose office assisted in the transfer of the Stepletons’ video tapes to DVDs during their first project.
Once the current DVD project is complete, the Stepletons plan to use it with Guatemala leaders who are deaf or have someone who is deaf in their home. They also hope to distribute the DVD in the schools for the deaf.
Though the DVD is far from finished, the Stepletons already are seeing God work in the lives of the deaf storytellers sharing the gospel in their own language.
To learn more about the Stepletons’ work, visit www.stepleton.blog.com.
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