Lausanne World Pulse – Perspectives Articles – Taking the Orality Plunge: Confessions of a Print Addict Unawares

By Phill Butler  

I, being the product of a society with a nearly 400-year history of progressively accessible information from external sources (books, tapes, libraries, computer data bases, etc.), of course viewed all this as pretty strange, if not improbable.

“Think about it this way,” Bowman said. “Imagine you are in a culture where there is no external reference material—no books, libraries, magazines or computer databases. The entire database of your life and the world, all history and explanation of things around you, is between your ears. Now imagine you are in a leadership position in a culture like this. No external reference books to fall back on. No written legal or historical precedents. No place to ‘look up’ what you need to help you make a tough decision. Everything you’ve got is between your ears—and those of peers in the culture.”

With a wry smile, he continued, “I think of Jesus. Most of his men—in fact, most of his audience—were oral communicators. The one thing we know he wrote, a message in the sand, was lost. Jesus left nothing behind in writing. But, look what’s happened because of his oral communication strategy.”

Trying to Comprehend the Immensity of the Issue
According to UNESCO, about 2.5 billion in the world are absolute non-literates. However, another 1.4 to 1.5 billion are functional non-literates and receive at least ninety-five percent of their information orally. Not surprisingly, these people are concentrated in areas still considered the least reached with the good news: Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Animist cultures. No wonder we have not seen the massive breakthroughs we have prayed for—hundreds of millions coming to know Christ and walk in his power and grace.

More than two hundred years of the modern missions movement has been led by literates with largely literate-dependent strategies. Instead of reflecting on what our audience needs, our strategies have too often reflected who we are. We have done what we know how to do. A hallmark of Western culture has been an upwardly mobile, ever-growing demand for literacy in all forms of media: print, film, how to use libraries, how to use computers, how to access databases, how to do email, how to “Google.” And these are only the most basic.

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