Orality and Discipleship

Ask any group of Europeans or North Americans if they would rather read the book or watch the movie and their preference becomes obvious almost instantly. The vast majority of westerners are oral learners, but they are capable of reading. Therefore, principles of orality are not just things that apply “over there,” but are extremely relevant to pastors and others promoting discipleship in developed contexts as well.

Chronological Bible Storying is a means of presenting the Gospel of Jesus Christ to oral communicators--illiterates, functional illiterates, a large segment of semi-literates, and numerous individuals who favor an oral communication learning format.  Chronological Bible Storying has proven to be very effective among people who are very resistant to the Gospel, and among people who are persecuted once they become Christian.  Basically, Storying, as it is often called, allows one to communicate the Gospel to oral communicators whether or not those individuals become literate at some point in their life.  In other words, hearing, understanding and remembering the Gospel should not hinge on literacy.   Oral communicators, most of whom have great difficulty in understanding literate, expositionally formatted Gospel presentations, and almost all of whom cannot remember and recall expositionally formatted presentations, can, as a result of a narrative presentation, understand, apply, remember and recall the entire scope of the Biblical story.

We see Kenya rising as a poster child country. There is no doubt that evangelism and discipleship results are leaping in Kenya from the effective oral training of Simply The Story (STS) being used to teach the Bible.

Apart from the obvious difference that literate people will tend to read the Bible when oral learners prefer to listen, the literate person is much more likely to dissect parts of Scripture, systematise and structure it and to prefer to read parts of the Bible that more easily lend themselves to these practices. As a result highly literate people tend to focus to a large extent on Paul’s letters in the New Testament.

Oral learners on the other hand are more likely to hear the narrative of Scripture, seeing it as a whole and placing each part within the wider context. They will have much more tolerance for ambiguity, viewing the narrative as a complex relational whole which cannot be reduced to a system or simplistic structure. Oral learners may tend to focus on the narrative parts of the Bible, as well as the wisdom literature.

Neither approach is necessarily right or wrong, but as with any cultural differences we can learn a huge amount as we become aware of the perspectives of others and our own biases. As the church engages with people of different cultures it is vital to be aware of how people view the world and how they learn, not simply assuming that everyone is the same as us. The e-book points out that many times when communities have been assumed to be highly resistant to the gospel the use of oral learning methods, including Chronological Bible Storying, has shown that the community is in fact merely struggling with the literate ways in which it has been communicated and is very open to the good news about Jesus when it is presented in an appropriate way.

A final point to note is that while we may tend to think of oral cultures as being located in Africa and Asia, the post-modern West is in many ways becoming increasingly post-literate. A large number of people in Europe and North America don’t read a single book after finishing school (58% in the US according to the e-book) but instead take in information largely through images and audio-visual media. As the church in the UK is largely middle-class and generally geared towards highly literate people, how much can it learn from its brothers and sisters around the world and the ways that they engage oral communities with the good news about Jesus?

Scott Moreau