What Do You Think, Mr.
Guttenberg? The
Challenges Print Evangelism Ministries Face in Meeting the Needs of Oral
Cultures
By Avery Willis and
James Greenelsh
The year
was 1488. A young
boy accidentally left a wooden shape dripping with dye on a piece of parchment
overnight. In the morning he discovered an image remaining after removing the
wood. It was an “aha!” moment that led to the invention of the printing press.
That one insight changed the world in which we live. The boy’s name was Johann
Guttenberg and his idea lit the fuse
on a literacy revolution that supercharged the field of knowledge. The Bible
finally came within reach of the common man. Christianity in Europe
flourished. For the next five hundred years the Church in Western societies
trumpeted the superiority of literacy.
I had thought
for so long that the Guttenberg revolution was a worldwide phenomenon. I grew
up thinking that literacy was the one thing the world needed to level the
playing field for everyone. Then one day I made an alarming discovery: five
hundred years after the invention of the printing press only thirty-three
percent of the world are truly literate. This stopped me dead in my tracks.
Imagine the banner headline: “Approximately sixty-seven percent of the people
of the world are non-literate oral learners! Read all about it!”
If you printed
that headline in every newspaper in every country of the world, in every
language known to humanity and you
threw it on the coffee table of every home on earth, close to four billion
people could not read it!
Let me ask you,
if you had a business and you found
that sixty-seven percent of your target audience were non-literate oral
learners, would you tailor your business plan, dedicate your work force and allocate a huge portion of your operating budget
especially to reach them? Of course you would! That’s just smart business. Then
why are missions not doing this to reach oral learners?
Oral
Learners and the Great Commission The world of missions is just now
waking up to the fact that oral learners are the bull’s eye at the center of
completing the Great Commission. There are four billion oral learners in the
cross-hairs of redemptive history at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
What are you, your church and your
mission agency doing to hit the bull’s eye?
If the term
“oral learner” is unfamiliar to you let me offer a simple definition. By oral
learners we mean those people who learn best and
whose lives are most likely to be transformed when information comes to them
through oral, not literate, means. Oral learners transmit their beliefs,
heritage and values by means of
stories, drama, songs and proverbs.
They have built their customs, culture and
social fabric around storytelling.
What does this
mean for us as we endeavor to fulfill the Great Commission? We must start
asking questions such as: How in the world do we share the word of God with
people who can’t, don’t or won’t read? Or with those who don’t write? Or with
those who may not even have a written language?
Listen to this
story from a young Christian leader in Bihar,
India:
“I come from
village culture. I want to tell you what it is like there. Most of the people
in the villages are non-literate. Village people take interest in stories, in
music and in drama. In the village
in the evening time people meet in the street, tell stories and sing village songs. They learn lessons from
these stories and they put them into
practice in their lives. They have never read a book; they never have been to
school. They are not literate, but they listen and
then they learn.
I come from a
Hindu family. In my childhood I used to join in Hindu customs. I listened to
many Hindu stories. But when I reached sixth standard
in the school I had a chance to hear the stories of Jesus. I had never heard
such stories. I had been taught that there were many gods, but through the
stories of Jesus I came to understand
that Jesus is the true God. I committed my life to the Lord and began to tell people about Jesus.
After some
time I went to Bible College to learn the word
of God. There I was taught a literate Western style of education. When I came
back from the college I used the same Western methods to preach the gospel but
nobody accepted Christ. I was very discouraged and
I was thinking I would leave the ministry. Then I got the opportunity to learn
how to communicate with oral cultures through training provided by Scriptures
In Use. I learned how to share my faith and
plant churches among non-literate people. I was influenced by the teaching and returned to the mission field and started using the same storying method. So many
people believed in Jesus Christ through this method.
I witnessed so
many souls coming to Christ by telling stories from the Bible. So many souls
are being saved! I am now training many missions workers throughout Bihar. The training is going well; every month many
people are accepting Jesus Christ. Each month five hundred to six hundred
people are taking baptism and fifty
new churches are being planted. Through the cooperation of several ministries,
a church planting movement is taking place throughout Bihar.”
This
Changes Everything Brace
yourself for this headline: “An estimated ninety percent of the world’s
Christian workers present the gospel and
do discipleship using highly literate communication styles.” Ninety percent!
Throw that up against the sixty-seven percent who are oral learners
and for whom literate communication makes little
sense, and what do you have? A
strategic problem.
Let me put it
this way. We can try all day to install software on a Macintosh computer, but
if the software is designed for a Windows only PC we will be out of luck. We
can know that our customers need software. We can spend big bucks on designing
great software. Our investors may be excited about the software. But it all
means nothing if when we go to install it on our customer’s computer, we find
out that two-thirds of them are using an incompatible operating system. Oral
learners do not have a literate operating system. They need different software
and this is what that young leader in India
discovered. That one single insight should rock our world as it did his. It
should shock Christian leadership. It should change our mission strategies for
sharing faith, training leaders and
planting churches. It should radically change the focus of our Christian
stewardship.
Fulfilling
the Great Commission Among Oral Learners How do we fulfill the Great Commission among oral
learners? We change our approach just as that man in Bihar
did. He simply learned to use the stories of the Bible to communicate in a way
that functionally illiterate people relate to and
understand. It seems so obvious and so simple.
He put away
his printed books and tracts. He
stopped communicating abstract theological ideas that he had learned in Bible
school. He started telling the stories of the Bible to cross natural bridges
into the lives of his listeners. He used stories from the Bible to bring forth
truths that challenge the worldview of the people in his culture. Then he
watched the Holy Spirit speak through these stories.
The fact that
literate, print-oriented, missionaries from the West have missed this oral
storying method for so long and then
taught it to local leaders may be one of the single most serious tactical
mistakes we have made in the last two hundred years. I grieve over all the
time, energy and funding that I have
personally directed toward print evangelism mission endeavors that missed the
mark for oral learners.
I finally
began to understand. Literacy
software does not fit two-thirds of the world’s population. Until we wake up to
that fact, we will continue to expend manpower and
resources in less fruitful endeavors, with inadequate tools
and methodology. The result of this is that we miss
our audience. We miss our opportunity to effectively share the stories of faith
among oral cultures.
The
development of oral strategies is not meant to detract from print evangelism or
Bible translation. In fact, the opposite is true. The most comprehensive
strategy for communicating the word of God in the heart language of an oral
culture should start with an oral approach that leads to translation
and literacy. The problem is, too often we get the
cart before the horse. Or worse yet, we forget the horse completely.
Rethink,
Recreate, Reproduce I
am convinced that if we take the unique needs of the oral learner to heart
and if we make them a priority in shaping our
mission strategies then we will make monumental progress in completing the
Great Commission.
We urgently
need ministries willing to rethink what they are doing, ministries willing to
create new tools, new methodologies and
new approaches that put the needs of oral learners first. In doing so God will
enable us to harness the greatest force on earth for spreading the gospel
and multiplying the Church—the power of his stories
reproduced by word of mouth over and
over again among each unique oral culture of the world in culturally sensitive
ways. We need a movement of cross-cultural Bible story experts who have the
skill to train people to engage unreached oral learners with a complete set of
Bible stories in the local language that are tailored to transform their unique
worldview. It is cost effective, reproducible and
grassroots accessible.
The goal of
the International Orality Network1 is to influence the body
of Christ to disciple all oral learners. We envision nothing less than a
word-of-mouth Bible storying revolution, tailored to the worldview
and in the mother tongue of each oral culture of the
world. This is our greatest hope for fulfilling the Great Commission among
four billion people who have yet to hear the true story of salvation. It is a
simple insight with world shaking possibilities.
What do you
think, Mr. Guttenberg? Endnote
1. The International
Orality Network (ION) is an alliance of mission agency leaders partnering
together to make God’s Word available to all oral learners in culturally
appropriate ways. ION relates to the Lausanne Committee for World
Evangelization and is committed
to providing oral strategies to communicate the gospel, make disciples, train
leaders and enable church planting
movements among all peoples in ways that are reproducible by oral peoples.
Avery
Willis is executive
director of the International Orality NetworkInternational Partnerships. James
Greenelsh is director for . He has written and
produced documentaries for Christian organizations in fifty-five countries over
the last thirty years. -----