Sowing Stories Deep in the Soul

Some adolescent women struggle to maintain positive self-identity, resilience, and personalized faith development on their journey toward adulthood. It is a contemporary crisis recognized by many, including ministry leaders of faith communities. In today's fast-paced digital culture, concerns addressing challenges facing adolescent women are evident in research literature. To strengthen their spiritual well-being, emphasis is placed on spiritual formation practices that enhance faith, hope, and personal relationships amid social, peer, and media pressures pulling them into negative, detrimental, and dysfunctional lifestyles. Empirical research reveals a need to transform negative images and self-destruction utilizing stories of holistic well-being. Sowing Stories Deep in the Soul: Biblical Storytelling with Adolescent Women highlights biblical women touched by the holistic healing ministry of Jesus with deep soul-stirring experiences of God's compassionate love. It meets the need as a spiritual formation ministry model focused on creativity, engaging study, internalized story learning, positive life connections, and performing biblical stories by heart. These expressive aspects form the ancient oral character of Bible stories internalized and voiced in repeated performances for compelling impact and action. Included are replicable results of action research using this model with adolescent women to encourage maintaining Christ-centered lives. Sowing Stories Deep in the Soul offers an oasis desperately needed in today's tumultuous times for women, for persons in faith communities facing challenges from within and without. Johnson leads her readers to a compassionate story-formed bridge between realities in women's lives often unrealized in eyes/ears of privilege and proactive, communal, story-rooted ways to live and love stories deep in the soul. A storytelling wisdom for us all.--Lisa M. Hess, Professor at United SeminaryThis book will be an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to enable the spiritual formation of adolescents of all ages and engagement with the Bible in their lives. The author is a truly wise woman who works and writes from a deep spiritual foundation and a profound understanding of the potential role of biblical storytelling.-- Thomas E. Boomershine, Professor at United Theological SeminaryIn Sowing Stories Deep in the Soul, Joyce Johnson researched and writes an engaging work that empowers self-identity, a positive outlook, and physical, mental, and emotional healing for adolescent woman, millennials, and others through biblical storytelling as a model for spiritual formation. I recommend this work be included on Christian education book lists of African American district associations, as well as state, national, and church conventions seeking life giving models to help make a difference.--Philip K. James, Pastor of the Historic Mount Zion Baptist Church of IndianapolisJoyce Elaine Gill Johnson is a ministry leader in Christian education, discipleship, spiritual formation, and biblical storytelling at Mount Zion Baptist Church, Indianapolis, Indiana. She holds an MA in Education from Butler University, a MACE degree from Christian Theological Seminary, and a DMin from United Theological Seminary.