Bibliolog

 by Frank Muchlinsky, 2006

www.muchlinsky.de

Bibliolog is the German word for Bibliodrama à la Pitzele

Peter and Susan Pitzele brought this American and midrashic style of Bibliodrama to Germany in 1999. Peter had begun this work in the United States in the early l980’s, and at almost exactly the same time some German theologians were developing a method for opening scripture and self they also called Bibliodrama. (Bibliodrama in Germany arose in part out of an attempt to recreate worship and community in the aftermath of the Second World War.) To distinguish Peter’s method from what we knew in Europe as Bibliodrama, we came up with Bibliolog.

Bibliolog is Bibliodrama for larger groups

There were two important things for us about the Pitzele method. One was that it linked European Bibliodrama—exclusively Christian in its orientation— with a Jewish tradition of midrash. (For historical reasons, that link seemed important and healing.) The second was the possibility Peter’s method offered to work with larger groups. European Bibliodrama flourishes in small group settings exclusively where work with the text often leads to deep personal and spiritual work.

Bibliolog is taught as a way of preaching with the entire congregation

Bibliolog has become very popular in Germany. One of the reasons is that many Pastors want to use it as a way to preach not for but with the congregation. Biblio-log emphasizes the relational aspect of homiletic practice and is intentionally associated with the word dialog.

We have created a curriculum to teach Bibliolog that focuses on that purpose.

We teach Bibliolog in five days

Our curriculum contains the teaching of the basic skills you need to do a Bibliolog. Prologue, Warm Up, En-roling, Voicing, especially Echoing, Interviewing, De-roling and Closure. At the end of the workshop every participant performs his own Bibliolog under the direct  supervision of their trainer.

A Bibliolog network was founded in 2006

To guarantee the quality of Bibliolog, we founded the “Netzwerk Bibliolog” in March 2006. We meet annually to exchange our experiences and work on our curricula for advanced classes. The network also runs a website that lists all the classes in Germany and a few other countries in Europe. This way we coordinate the different institutions that teach Bibliolog. The link to the network is: www.bibliolog.de

Uta Pohl-Patalong and Frank Muchlinsky teach the teachers

When the network was founded, Peter and Susan Pitzele appointed Uta Pohl-Patalong and Frank Muchlinsky to train the future trainers. We developed a graduated system to get certified as a Bibliolog trainer. So far in 2006 there are about eight trainers in Germany. The e-mail addresses of Frank and Uta are: mail@muchlinsky.de and uta.pohl-patalong@hamburg.de.  You can visit Frank’s website for more information at www.muchlinsky.de .

Bibliolog is becoming more and more popular in Germany

Meanwhile Bibliolog has become quite popular in Germany. There are several people who perform it in their confirmation classes, in school, even in hospitals and of course in churches. But, as is true in the United States, Bibliolog is also performed in Jewish contexts. Iris Weiss a trainer and Jewish freelance educator and journalist in Berlin offers Bibliolog  in Jewish, secular and inter-religious settings. Her email is iris.weiss@snafu.de.