Curious about the story behind OneStory? Well, that story starts with Mike McDonald, BibleProject’s Chief Strategic Relations Officer. Mike joined us over Zoom so we could come together to share the highlights.
The following transcription has been lightly edited for readability:
Meet Mike
Nicole Howe: Amber (Riggs) and I are sitting here with Mike McDonald from BibleProject, and we are so excited to have him today. We felt like we have never really shared the story of OneStory and how this all got started.
And we have people asking: how did you get into this? and how did you and Amber meet? and how did you connect with BibleProject? and what's Learn.Bible?
We thought it would be cool to get you on here because the story really starts with you. So why don't you introduce yourself to everyone and tell us a little bit about what you do at BibleProject. You are the chief strategic relationships officer.
Mike McDonald: That's a mouthful. Yeah, you got that right. But it's Mike. How about that? We'll go with Mike.
Nicole: That's how we know you, as just Mike. I'll read your bio and then you can just add whatever you'd like to tell everybody about what you do there.
So Mike works on cultivating awareness — I love the word cultivating — and creating strategic relationships with churches, organizations, and other nonprofits that are looking to use BibleProject videos in their context. He also leads the Global Focus Team, which is working on localizing the videos into different languages. And he previously spent eleven years leading a global development organization as well as serving on several boards for international organizations with compassion and justice missions.
And in a previous life — this is a fun fact — you owned and operated restaurants in Canada, which is kind of fun. You're a foodie.
Mike: Yes, totally. So I'm going to take you on the road with me. One kind of fun fact— I did have a couple of years where I was getting to build out and flesh out what the global landscape looked like for BibleProject.
Since then, I've actually handed that off in the new year to an amazing gal that we've hired and trained over the last few years to take that on, named Alison. So she's now getting to lead the charge on all those languages.
But in that time we did get to grow it to be about 56 languages that we fully localize our content in. Meaning, we don't just do dubbing over or just word-for-word translation. We actually localize the content.
We hire theologians in each of those contexts to actually rewrite the scripts where it needs to make sense from a contextual standpoint in that place. We redo the art that needs to be redone in those contexts. For the overview videos, pretty much everything's redone because it's so much text on screen, and all of that gets redone. And then you can imagine in languages like Arabic, we actually have to flip it and go instead of from left to right, we're going from right to left.
So everything pretty much has to get done. That's why we say we localize it. We truly do take it through a process and we hire local indigenous leaders and artists and illustrators and people in those contexts to do the work, too.
And so it really is made for and by those contexts for that context, which is a unique thing, I think, when it comes to this kind of space for sure.
Nicole: The cultural apologist in me so appreciates that approach of really immersing yourself in the culture that you're trying to serve and not just barreling in with your own version of things.
I just think that is so compassionate and thoughtful. Because it's time-consuming. I can't imagine how much time it takes to take that level of care and intention to do that.
Mike: I mean, it would be easier just to kind of throw it into the app and have it translate. But we do want this stuff to really have the same kind of impact that it's having in English for people like myself when I watch the videos in English and engage with it in that way. And we're not ignorant to the fact that we're in Portland, Oregon, in the western part of the United States making content and art and everything else in that context.
When we go into some of these other places, we really want to make sure that we're not even leading that charge. We're actually doing a lot of listening in those instances. We hire local again, like local theologians that are like, okay, here's why I think we need to change this and do this.
It's a constant conversation with Tim [Mackie] and the scholar team. It's this whole dance to make sure that the same meaning is wanting to be shared, but it might be shared in a bit of a different way. Stories that we're telling here in the US are not necessarily going to translate in Tunisia or wherever else that we're in.
Localizing BibleProject to the Homeschool Context
Nicole: So your passion for understanding context and how BibleProject resources translate into various contexts is kind of the bridge to how we got here because we have our own context. We have the homeschooling context.
Tell us a little bit about how this started with you and what you were thinking as far as what it would look like to get BibleProject resources into a homeschooling context. Not nearly as glamorous as translating it into all of these beautiful languages.
Mike: I don't know—I think it’s just as glamorous. I mean, it's all localization, and that's the beautiful thing. It doesn't have to be a language. It can be a context change that you figure out.
And so, you know, listen, I was not homeschooled. I've never experienced homeschool. I'm not a homeschool parent. And so I walked into this very ignorant. When I interacted with individuals, churches, and nonprofits from around the world, the homeschool community kept bubbling up in a number of different ways, basically, “I wish there were courses we could have our kids go through at home.”
And during COVID obviously, that elevated even higher because everybody practically was homeschooling. Whether or not they got a curriculum from their public schools, everyone became a homeschool parent real fast.
I ask a lot of questions. What strategic relationships looks like to me is just going, “What are your pain points? What do you wish there was more of?” I want to understand the landscape.
Because children's type stuff and homeschool stuff kept bubbling up, I started asking the question, what would it look like for us to do that?Now, the reality is that none of us are homeschool experts at BibleProject, although we do have some homeschool parents and folks that are doing that. I just began the kind of lookout to go, who's doing this? Who's people in the space?
[When I worked] on the global front and in justice and compassion work, I worked really closely with Bob Goff, where we were traveling around doing a ton of stuff in Uganda and Afghanistan and Somalia. And I got to meet somebody he was working with named Stefanie, who's a mutual friend.
Stefanie and I became friends probably seven or eight years ago. And when I was sharing with them a little bit about what I'm working on and what I'm thinking about, she was just so quick to go, you need to meet Nicole. She would be such a great person on this space to ask questions and see where it may go.
And so that's how we got connected, was through our mutual friend, Stef.
Nicole: Yeah, she's a connector. That's what she does. She's so great. So that's where I came in. You and I got on the phone and all of that question-asking and interest in our context, I quickly experienced from you. You just really respected the fact that we were the ones in the context and knew our world and wanted to know more. So we even did some focus groups with some homeschool moms and asked them questions. And that was really fun for me even to hear. What are moms looking for? And dads. We have homeschooling dads. And they just named some really important things.
Not dumbing it down was a repeated thing that homeschooling parents wanted…and to really embrace the complexity and intricacy of the Bible in a way that I think BibleProject captures so beautifully. The imagination of it, the awe and wonder of it.
So we got really excited about how can we take what BibleProject is already really good at and serve our homeschool community.
A Culture of Collaboration
Nicole: I'm saying our, but Amber was not a part of this just yet. This is where Amber comes in because I got off the phone with you and I went, oh cool, now what do I do? I have to write a curriculum. And I quickly realized collaboration is just so beautiful and the way to go. And so I started looking for a partner, and it was similar in the way that the connection with Stefanie landed us in a relationship. It was a mutual friend that Amber and I had that connected me to Amber. I knew a little bit about her, but we got on the phone and within minutes, I just knew she was my person.
Amber, why don't you tell a little bit about how you came to be a part of this?
Amber: This is where we had some major divine intervention. I had been working for a Bible college for 16 years and doing my own theological study and realizing these things that I'm wanting to teach my kids — I can't find them in the kids’ resources that I'm buying. I was looking for them, and I couldn't find it in the language that I wanted it in, with the nuances that I wanted. So I started writing things for my own kids, and this included some homeschool work, drawing things on the board to teach them things.
But I was praying…and I'm like, Lord, what am I supposed to do with this?
I had this job — but this [felt need] was getting heavier and heavier — and I'm like, okay, God.
I have these long walks where I'm talking to God about this stuff and telling Him, if You want me to do this, You're going to have to open the doors so that can happen, because this is just really crazy.
And I remember one day, I was sitting on my bed and this thought popped in my head, you should write a homeschool curriculum. And no joke, I kicked it out ASAP, because teaching my own kids the Bible, that's one thing. But writing a curriculum is a lot of work, and marketing a curriculum is a lot of work. And so I was like, nope. Just kick it out.
Then six months later, I hear from Nicole. So here comes this giant door. And God's like, here you go. You told me I would have to open the doors.
And He did.
Nicole:
It really is pretty remarkable. And I was feeling, I have an apologetics background, but I don't have a strong Bible background, and I don't know anything about curriculum development.
And so I'm talking with Amber, and I'm first just being drawn in by her passion. And I sensed God was up to something in our conversation. It was not until later that I discovered she had a master's in curriculum design. That just about knocked me off my feet because, I mean, talk about a Godwink.
So the way He brought us together was just such a beautiful answer to prayer, I think, in some of the things we were both longing for.
You then, Mike, were just really supportive of turning us loose and supporting whatever we wanted to try. And we sent you a massive Google doc of our first course, which was like a book. That was our first course, Teach Us to Pray. And I was really inspired by Tim Mackie's spiritual symmetry sermons that I stumbled on. I was playing with the idea — and I felt like this was really a God thing too — of the Jesus Creed, you know, Scot Mcknight's book and really understanding how the Old Testament and the New Testament are hinged together by the Jesus Creed. (Which is love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength.) But really wanting to highlight the way BibleProject ties the Old Testament and the New Testament together to show that, truly, the whole Bible leads to Jesus.
And I think a lot of that has gotten lost in our churches. And so even seeing the prayer of Shema and the way that that shows up in the New Testament, just starting to make those connections for people, I was really excited to do that.
So that was Teach Us to Pray. It was our first course, and we finished it, gosh, what year was that? 2021. That's crazy. So then the question became, where do we put it? How there are so many ways to engage with curriculum, and especially when it's video-based, like BibleProject resources are, how do we help people actually engage the curriculum?
Learn.Bible was being developed right along the same time that this was happening. And we thought, oh, maybe that's where we should put it.
Commitment to Making Free Bible Curriculum
Nicole: So maybe you could tell people a little bit about what Learn.Bible is. That's currently the place where our curriculum is housed.
Mike: One big thing that came up when we were initially discussing all of this — I'm a very thin rulebook, strong culture kind of guy — I think that if you create a really clear vision and strong culture on what it is you're trying to do, values-driven, et cetera, you don't need a big rulebook.
There's a couple of things that make sense:
One is that it's always going to be free. That was a big point for us. We wanted to not just to disrupt the homeschool kind of curriculum world, but there's a lot of people out there that can't afford it and that want good curriculum.
But good curriculum often costs money because it costs money to make it. And it does cost us money to make it. It costs us a lot of money to make it. Those videos are not cheap, but they've been paid for by incredible patrons from around the world that allow us just to keep giving them away.
So one big value statement was, we want it to make it for free. And that was huge when we were having those initial discussions. Let's just put something out there that people can find.
And that was also part of the birth around the whole Learn.Bible thing. We were starting to find people like you. Lots of churches and organizations create curriculum. We've got another one with Alpha that's this really neat, like, After Alpha program that's using our content.
So we often, instead of just building it ourselves, we find talented people like yourself and others to go, we've got some resources that I think are good, and if you want to use them inside of your context, we can help you do that. And you can use them for free as long as you give them away for free.And we are coming up against this thing of where do people house it? There are a lot of different LMSes (learning management systems) out there. Most of them are either archaic or they're kind of clunky or they're not pretty. They're not design-forward. They're more backend forward. They're confusing on the back end so that if I've got some mom in Texas that hasn't built websites, they couldn't use a lot of those LMSes.
You have to almost get a degree in how to understand how to build those — code and stuff. So we wanted to build something that was almost like Squarespace for LMS. It's white-labeled, so any organization or church or nonprofit could have their own brand be represented versus the LMS brand. [We wanted something] that could be super easy to use on the backend. Meaning if you know how to turn a computer on, for the most part, you can at least get a base-level curriculum.
You guys have gone the extra level, and it's just beautiful.But then there's those capabilities, too, where you can actually add in a lot of things. And so we try to balance that. We developed it over a few years of actually putting developers on it to go, let's build something that we can give away again to churches, nonprofit organizations to build curriculum using our materials or others that would be free so they can't charge for it. And then it's kind of that kingdom mindset of, like, let's just put it out there. Like, everybody can use it.
So if you've got a small church in Iowa that doesn't and have a curriculum pastor who's developing this stuff, they could go on to Learn.Bible and find, oh, here's some small group curriculum. Here's a homeschool curriculum. Here's a Sunday school curriculum, whatever it could look like. That was the infancy. That was just me talking to a lot of churches, going, what are the pain points? What do you need? And this was one thing that kept coming up: We want to create curriculum. We just don't know where to put it.
And then it's a little scary to put it out to the church, because then every single user has to pay, or the church has to pay for every user, and so the price starts going up.
So we decided, well, let's just see if we can build something. And we did. Thankfully, we were building something called Classroom alongside of it as well, which is an online, free, seminary-level classes that Tim and others teach.
And we were able to use that go, let's hijack some of these things and just make Learn. And that's how it started. And then since then, it's got its own ecosystem and everything else.
Nicole: Yeah, you actually reminded me ours started on the Classroom platform first.
Mike: That was our initial Learn.Bible platform. But it got a life of its own and kind of became its own thing, as well.
Nicole: And it's been fun working with the Learn.Bible team, too, getting to be a part of that process of, like, hey, could you add this? This would be super helpful.
And I can't say enough about how accommodating they've been, too. Again, that value of listening. [We would say] this would really help us if we could have this feature. And they were so quick to do whatever they could to accommodate that. That was amazing. That made it very fun to, like, play around with. And again, collaboration.
Teaching the Bible as a Story that Leads to Jesus
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And you guys were so easy. I mean, this isn't probably in your roadmap to talk about today, but it was very easy to work with both of you because you also were so deeply immersed in the BibleProject content.
So it's not like I had to have a conversation with you, Nicole, and convince you that I think we've got some stuff that could be helpful with kids. Same thing with Amber. Both of you were so deeply connected to the content that it made it very easy for us go, great, let's figure out how to make this work, even with the things you're talking about when it comes to the Old Testament.
The New Testament [is one thing, but] a lot of people are like, why is the Old Testament important? My whole thing is that I don't think you can actually understand the New Testament without the Old Testament. It just doesn't even make it just an entirely different experience.
So it's less about elevating the Old Testament. And for me, almost going like, it's like you can't watch the 7th movie in the Harry Potter series without the first to know anything about the characters. You just don't understand. But we often do that, and then we miss so much of the insanity and the beauty and the magic and all of that.That's what I loved about you guys, too, is that that was a huge value for you. Even with, I think, a lot of times, young people, we almost not just dumb it down, but we just start taking out stuff or we start taking out stories. You were so good at going, listen, no, this is the story. This is how we're going to tell it, and we're going to figure it out.
Nicole: It reminds me — I have to put my nerd hat on here — because C.S. Lewis talks about how — he's pretty biting with this comment — but he talks about non-literary readers and how they just are looking for the event.
They just want to know what happens next, versus a literary reader who appreciates myth and how myth works on us and how story works on us. [A literary reader] is content to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the whole story. (Note: Nicole is using the word myth to refer to a traditional story that plays a fundamental role in capturing beliefs and practices…and not its second, but more popular, definition of a fictional story.)
I think that's what you're talking about. We just want to jump to the event, the big event of the New Testament and all the things, but you can't even understand it if you don't immerse yourself in the whole story. I think that is what I'm hearing you say.
Mike: I mean, it's just the reality that the Bible is a narrative. It is a story. It is a book of story. And we in the west…and the New Testament actually is a little bit like this because it's been Greekified.
I mean, it is a bunch of — even though they're like Hebrews — they're a bunch of Greeks living in a very Greek system, so they're writing even more in that type of way, but even more so. We are so facts equals truth versus truth equals truth. And facts can support those things. But when it comes to narrative and story, facts aren't actually that important to the story as much.We treat the Bible like we're looking for facts a lot of times, and we're missing so much of the actual, like, what's the truth? Because truth to me is what we're looking for and not necessarily facts. And we've often lost that. And so to be able to stir in and bring in the Old Testament and understand the Torah and the Prophets and et cetera and realize that these are people of story. These would have been oral things that would have been told over and over again.
And I'm not saying they're not true. There are facts in there as well. But sometimes we spend too much time on the facts and get really excited. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, but sometimes we get a little excited about the facts and not enough about what's going on here.
Why did this writer weave together these specific things and stories and highlight certain things that make us think about — hyperlink — back to Moses or back to David, et cetera?
Nicole: We could talk about this all day. Like, what do the facts mean? We never get to asking the question of what the facts mean. There's so much more to the story.
Amber: Because it's this truth embedded in story that when we can live into the story, that story begins to work on us and shape us. And when we enter into the same story that Jesus was so immersed in — which is the story of the Hebrew scriptures — it shows us what it means to follow him in richer ways.
So much about OneStory is we want to immerse ourselves in this story.
But so often we find ourselves caught up in smaller stories — these stories of, how am I going to get all my work done by tomorrow?
We get so caught up in little things like that, that we lose this overall context, that this is a story about how God is bringing heaven to earth and partnering with humans to do it. And that Jesus is the ultimate human partner and that in him we get to partner with God.
So much about the heart behind OneStory is how do we help kids enter into the story in a way that's life-shaping.
Nicole: Now we just got into the birth of OneStory because it went from a single curriculum project to really immersing ourselves in these ideas and recognizing that we have a passion for everything that you just said, Amber. And how do we help people experience the Bible this way in these unique contexts?
And so I realized Amber had a whole lot more in her of what she had been dreaming up. We wrote a second course and we have more in our brains of other ideas of courses that could come. But the beauty of Learn.Bible is how BibleProject also puts courses on Learn.Bible that people can adapt. You don't even have to start from scratch. And that's when our brains exploded because we realized there are so many things we can do now.
So we would take a BibleProject course and Amber helped develop some family guides for it. And hey parents, you can go through this awesome BibleProject course and now you can download this family guide to turn around and teach it to your kids—the thing that you just learned. So again, the collaboration there of being able to leverage what BibleProject is doing and then just translate it to our context.
You made it so easy to do that. And we have had so much fun just adapting things and experimenting and trying some things. So I don't know, Amber. Talk about just for a few minutes all the things that are on there now.
Amber: Oh, that's been a lot of fun. Because the heart behind this is as we learn things, we’ll turn around and teach it to our kids, so that it really impacts. It's multigenerational. We’re saying let's remember what this story is.
Because it seems like we're in such a confusing time of history that it's easy to lose track of what the story is. It gets sidetracked by these things going on around us.
And so we have homeschool curriculum on Learn.Bible. [We have a] few courses of homeschool curriculum, and then BibleProject has written Introduction to the Bible, a course on Understanding the Biblical Narrative. Jonah. There are more courses I haven't even touched yet. So we've written family guides for all of those because not every family is a homeschool family and we want to serve families who want to explore the Bible with their kids and practice the way of Jesus.
We've also been able to turn some of our courses into personal Bible studies so that if a parent wants to go through the material first on their own and really let it sink in, they can do that before teaching it to their kids.
It Comes Back to Collaboration
Nicole: Yeah, so that's what we've been up to. I think we told the story of OneStory. I think that's the story. And truly, as Amber and I were thinking through this, I know I've said it so many times, but it really does come back to collaboration.
I think our heart and why OneStory matters to us so much is because it is the unifier. I think we were made to live in one story together and to build the kingdom in community. And you have such a beautiful heart for that.
And BibleProject does — even starting with that value of free, it's just this generous come and see, come and see these beautiful things, come and see the beauty of the Bible. Come and see what we're up to.
And I think we just wanted to follow in your footsteps with that and have a generous collaborative come-and-see approach of what we're doing. So we hope that that is what we get to continue to do.
Mike: Well, I really hope so too. And I don't know who this is going out to, but I will say. Similar to BibleProject — and I know OneStory operates in this way too. Like it is free, but it does cost money. So we've been so grateful that people have supported the work that we've been doing and we used some of those funds to kind of help get this going.
But if these resources are helpful to you and you've got parents and everything else, I'm just saying this to whoever is going to listen to this. Just support OneStory, like, I mean, I just, I am so behind what you guys are doing.
We're friends for life on this whole project. I'm glad we got to kind of kickstart it up. But similar to Bible Project, these things take a lot of time. Like you guys know how much time these curriculums take.And they're not written over a weekend. They're so thoughtfully put together and edited and re-edited. It's wild because I've seen from the back end just how much time and effort it takes the two of you to do this.
And so just in the spirit of collaboration, if you find these helpful, figure out how to support and build more of these because they're free. They're going to be evergreen. They're out there.
They're out there for as long as we say for our videos, as long as people watch videos, they're going to be available for free because they have already been paid for. Now future videos haven't been paid for yet and that's why we continue to have patrons and people.
And I think future content and curriculum for kids has not been paid for yet or made. And so yeah, I just, I just encourage people to get involved, be a part of it, be a part of the crew and it's an awesome project to be a part of.
Nicole: Thank you. Lots of ideas. Yeah, we have lots more ideas. Amber is an idea-generating machine. Her brain's just always going and then I'm the one that kind of goes, okay, how do we do it?
Mike: What's cool is, like, ideas are hard to fund. Yeah. But yeah, once you have seen what can be done, that was the same thing. We produced our first five videos through some friends.
The first few videos, we didn't put it out there as, like, a crowd, you know? But once we put those out and kind of said, hey, here's what we're thinking of doing, as fast or as slow as the crowd wants to allow this to happen. If you like these, jump on board. Join the BibleProject.And I think the same thing could be said for OneStory. Just join OneStory. The beautiful thing is that people can see what can be done, and you actually can execute the idea.
Lots of people have ideas, and most people can't execute those ideas. You two are people that not only have thought of the idea, but have figured out how to make it happen and have done a ton of work to do that. And so just affirm both of you in that for sure.
Nicole: And thanks for helping us make it happen. We appreciate it.
About Learn.Bible
Nicole: We're also just really excited about Learn.Bible. So if there's just a few things that you can say to let people know where to find it and kind of what's going on with it.
Mike: Learn.Bible. It's as easy as that. It's Learn.Bible. It's the Bible domain, and you can go on there and find OneStory in any of the BibleProject curriculum. It's in beta right now, so we've got about 50ish plus organizations that are using it and kind of refining it and building stuff on there.
And these things, because it's the tech world, it takes a while. So I don't know how long it's going to be in beta until we feel it's ready to go into the next stage. We're also potentially looking at giving it away to another organization that would use it for free. We're just very open-source with it. We didn't want to build it and just have it be something that sat on a shelf. And so we're trying to figure out the best way to steward this thing that we've built.
And that could mean keeping it and continuing to build it out. It could mean handing it off to somebody who could do a much better job of us once it's been built. We've don't know, but it's available and it's free and it's not going away.
And so that's the thing. And you can sign up on the website if you're an organization or church to know when the next stage is going to happen. Feel free to put your name, email address, organization in there, and you'll get an email from one of us for sure, but definitely you can find OneStory resources on there.
And they're awesome. They're beautiful.
An Awesome Journey
Nicole: Thank you so much. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it. Well, that's all I have on my. conversation map. I don't know, Amber, if you want to add anything or any final thoughts.
But it's an awesome road, awesome journey, lots of surprises along the way, and it's been a fun adventure. Thank you for being here, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, thank you, too, so much. It's been great. Awesome. Bye.