How Do You Make the Bible Relevant When People Don’t Know It

Ask someone to tell you the story of Daniel, and you may get a name and a moral with nothing in between. If you love a Bible story but freeze when it comes time to tell it to someone who has never heard it, this guide gives you one practice: choose a story, learn it closely enough to retell it in your own words, and tell it to one specific person this week. Your retelling has to be easy to follow and faithful to the text. Those two goals pull against each other, and most of the work below is learning to keep both.

You can work through it alone over a few days, about an hour in total. A group can use it across two meetings, with the telling itself happening in the week between. It draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Chaz Smith, a content creator who has spent a decade making videos online and is building an animated series that retells Scripture with humor.

First, find out what you actually remember

Lisa Fields describes the problem with a specific memory. When she grew up, Sunday school gave people a general sense of the stories. “They knew the difference between David and Daniel.” Now, she says, people put Daniel in front of Goliath and David among the lions, and some barely know the story of Jesus. Her conclusion is practical rather than nostalgic: “And so it is important to have these stories told in a way that people can engage them.”

Before you read further, test your own map. Pick one story you believe you know well. These work well for this practice:

• Daniel and his friends at the king’s table (Daniel 1)
• Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37-45)
• Esther going to the king (Esther 4-5)
• The father and his two sons (Luke 15:11-32)

Without opening a Bible, write the story out the way you would tell it. Give yourself five minutes and don’t edit. Then read the passage slowly and mark three things on your page: details you left out, details you added that the text never mentions, and places where you remembered the lesson but not the events.

Most people find they have been carrying a summary. A summary sounds like this: Daniel stayed faithful and God blessed him. A story has a king, a menu, a nervous official, a ten-day trial and a result nobody expected. A listener can follow a story. A summary gives them nothing to follow.

For groups: have each person read their memory version aloud before anyone opens the text. The point is to see which gaps are common, not to rank who knows the Bible best. Usually the group notices that names and morals survive longer than plots.

Two scenes where Scripture was made understandable

The first is a description of how Jesus taught crowds: “All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them” (Matthew 13:34). Lisa Fields makes the same connection in the conversation when she links good storytelling to Jesus’ use of parables. With the crowds, story was his ordinary way of teaching.

The second comes from Nehemiah 8. A community back from exile gathers to hear the law read aloud, and the narrator explains how it went: “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). Look at the order. The text is read first, and read clearly. The explanation comes after, and it depends on what was read.

One difference between the scenes matters for this practice. Jesus’ parables were stories he made up to teach. When you retell Daniel or Joseph, you are telling someone else’s account of real events, so your freedom is smaller than his. You can choose your vocabulary, pace and emphasis. You cannot choose what happened. Both passages describe events rather than issue commands, so neither hands you a technique. Together they show that making Scripture understandable is part of how God’s word has always reached people, and that the text keeps its authority over the person explaining it.

The standard: easy to take in, without watering it down

Chaz Smith states his own aim precisely. He wants to be “retelling the stories from scripture in a fun and entertaining way without watering anything down.” The stories should be “digestible for people who may not ever walk into a church, who may not have ever heard the gospel.” He adds that some of those people think the Bible is a book of rules used to frighten people into submission. For a listener like that, the story itself is the surprise, and a retelling that turns straight into instructions confirms what they already assumed.

Smith’s description of his series contains three tests you can run on your own version.

1. Is the heart of the story intact? He wants plenty of jokes and humor, “but still keeping the heart of what each story is.” Write one sentence that names what your story is actually about. Then check that every part of your retelling serves that sentence.
2. Do the people sound like real people? Smith wants viewers to see that the Bible is “not just a book with a bunch of characters, but accounts of people who actually lived on this earth and were just like you and me.” If Daniel sounds like a statue in your telling, you have lost something.
3. Do you know the setting? His series is “really digging into historical and cultural context of each story.” You don’t need a professor, but you need enough background to keep from making the story say something it doesn’t.

The strongest objection to this whole practice is that simplifying a story, especially with humor, can shrink it. A Daniel turned into a punchline is a Daniel no one will take seriously. The objection is fair, and the three tests are the answer to it. Humor that treats the people as real brings them closer. Humor that treats the story as a fable makes them smaller. If you plan to tell your story lightly, ask which of those your jokes are doing.

Build your retelling

This is the main exercise. Give it a single sitting of thirty to forty minutes if you can.

1. Read the passage twice: once to follow the events, and again to pay attention to the people, what they fear, want and risk.
2. List the events in order, one short sentence each. If your list runs past ten lines, narrow the section.
3. Find the strange detail and keep it. In Daniel 1, the young men ask to eat “pulse” and drink water for ten days (Daniel 1:12). “Pulse” is an older English word for vegetables or seeds, and other translations render it that way. Odd details are often where a story holds together. Don’t sand them off.
4. Look up one piece of background. For Daniel, you might learn why these young men were in Babylon at all. Use a study Bible or a trusted reference, and write down one sentence you are confident is accurate.
5. Write your version in plain words, about two or three minutes when spoken. Wherever you use a church word such as covenant or righteous, explain it in the moment or find a plainer word.
6. Check it against the text. Read your version aloud, then the passage. Anything you invented has to go, or you must mark it clearly as your guess. Imagining how Daniel felt is fine. Presenting that guess as what the text says is not.
7. Decide where the story ends, and stop there. Resist tacking on a moral. A listener who wants to know what it means will ask, and that question opens a better conversation than a lecture would.

For groups: pair people up and have each tell their story to their partner. The listener’s only job is to retell back what they heard, in a few sentences. If that version is missing the heart of the story, the teller has learned something no critique could have shown them. Keep this step encouraging. People are practicing something new.

Choose a person, and know how you’ll respond

The most practical part of Smith’s conversation concerns individuals. He describes Jesus both preaching to crowds and walking with people, sitting and eating with them, and letting them see him up close. He admits this is hard, because it means letting others see your flaws and trusting the Holy Spirit to work through you anyway: “we don’t need to be perfect in order for that to happen.”

Name one person, privately. It might be a coworker, a cousin or a friend who has asked about your faith. Look for a natural moment and ask permission in your own words, something like Can I tell you a story from the Bible I’ve been reading this week? If they say no, that is a full answer.

Decide now what you will do when the conversation doesn’t go as planned, because your posture shows most there. Smith describes growing up with a real relationship with Jesus and still feeling this: “I felt like I always had to do the right thing for God in order to receive his love.” He says he has only recently begun to learn “I’m a son first before I’m a servant of God,” and that remembering God’s love keeps him focused on “loving the person that’s in front of me and not being self-centered.” A teller who feels graded tends to react to a distracted listener by talking faster, adding a moral, or pressing for a response. Plan the other move instead. If attention drifts, finish the story briefly and stop. If they push back, ask what part bothered them and listen to the answer.

Read Romans 5:8 before the conversation: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Love comes before anyone deserves it. That frees you to let your listener’s reaction be theirs, without treating it as a verdict on you or the story.

Expect questions you can’t answer. Smith rejects the idea that a believer only needs Jesus and not knowledge: “Yeah, that’s true, but knowing more helps.” He recommends reading Scripture yourself, asking a lot of questions, and “having conversations with people who you disagree with.” If your listener stumps you, say so, find out, and come back. That return visit may be the most honest part of the exchange.

Questions for discussion

1. Have one person tell Daniel 1 ending where the chapter ends. Have another tell it ending with an added moral, such as obey God and you will be promoted. What does the added moral claim that the chapter itself does not? How might a listener who expects a rulebook hear each version?
2. Nehemiah 8:8 puts reading the text before explaining it. What would keeping that order look like in an ordinary conversation?
3. In the story you chose, which detail could you cut without changing the story, and which would change its meaning if removed? How did you decide?
4. Is there a Bible story you would hesitate to tell with any humor at all? What makes that story different from the others?
5. Think of a time someone presented the Bible to you mainly as rules. What effect did that have on how you heard its stories afterward?
6. Does telling a story from a place of feeling loved seem possible for you right now, or does it still feel like a performance? Answer only if you want to, or keep this one to yourself.

After the telling

Within a day of the conversation, set the version you wrote from memory at the start beside the one you finally told, and note what changed. Write down what your listener asked or reacted to, which may not be the part you expected. Mark the moment you felt most tempted to switch from story to sermon, if there was one.

If the conversation never happened, notice that too, without guilt, and name what stopped you: timing, nerves, or not feeling ready for questions.

Then pick your next story from the list, write the five-minute memory version again, and keep both pages. Over a few stories, the distance between what you remembered and what the text says becomes a record of what you have learned.