‘The Story’ Guide Book Finished!

I’ve finished The Story: Personal Journal & Discussion Guide and you can get it free on the Subscriber Specials page, which you can access here! This guidebook takes you through the overall grand themes of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. It accompanies Zondervan’s The Story, which groups Bible excerpts into thirty-one chapters. The Personal Journal & Discussion Guide adds questions that help you apply the concepts you’re learning to your life and that stimulate robust discussions. It explains history and adds charts to help you grasp the big ideas more easily.

The Story: Personal Journal & Discussion Guide

Shelley Leith, National Church Coach and Story Specialist at Zondervan, called this guide “a phenomenal, high-engagement tool”! Cool, huh?

Nearly 200 women in my church started going through The Story with simple discussion questions when we realized we needed more in-depth questions that would help everyone apply the passages they were reading to their everyday lives and that would provide more explanation for those who wanted it. So I wrote this discussion guide for them. Our women’s ministry director, Lori Marshall, sent a couple lessons off to Zondervan, and now Zondervan is adding them to their free online resource library.

Acknowledgements

I owe a quite a few people some great big thanks.

Thank you first of all to my wonderful husband, Clay, who is always my first reader and offers invaluable insights (it helps that he holds a doctor of ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is a full-time professor in the Master of Arts in Christian apologetics program at Biola University). He also did everything he could to free my time when I was in a crunch.

Thank you, Lori Marshall, for entrusting this project to me, and for the encouragement, insights, and kind notes you gave along the way.

Thank you to all the other readers who advised and proofed: Lori Marshall, Holly Robaina, Donna Jones, and Kerrie Parlett. Thank you, too, to Cathryn Wade who is a joy to work with and who kept everything updated and posted at Crossline. Thank you, Angie Wright, who suggested creating discussion pages so people like she who do the lessons as a personal journal would have a place to interact. Thank you as well to our awesome women’s prayer team led by Gerri Donnelly—I so appreciated your prayers!

Thank you to the nearly 200 women who tested lessons 8 to 31 and gave such wonderful encouragement and support. Also, thank you to the women in my smaller summer Bible study group who tested the first seven lessons for me (they attend seven different churches so their perspectives were great).