Lausanne World Pulse – Taking the Orality Plunge: Confessions of a Print Addict Unawares
By Phill Butler
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Long steeped in print-based systems, you can imagine my surprise when Jim Bowman approached us and asked, “Can you folks help us develop an oral partnership training course?” |
It was about seven or eight years ago. Somewhat wide-eyed, I was talking with Jim Bowman, who, along with his wife Carla, pioneered oral Bible training of non-literate, oral-communicating, grassroots church planters. Working with remote Indian tribes in Mexico, they were frustrated with scripture gathering dust in warehouses inaccessible to the Indians because they were exclusively oral communicators. They were what we in the West call “non-literates.” Mentally inferior? Hardly. They have just never had access to learning how to decode a printed page.
Training Leaders for the Local Church with No Bible?
For a one-time professional broadcaster and a person who has depended on the seemingly indissoluble link between print and oral communication, what they were saying seemed almost impossible to me. “Come on,” I said. “I can see leading someone to Jesus without ever having to open a Bible. You can share passages from memory and tell your own story and stories from scripture. But doing discipleship? How do you disciple without reading from the Bible and doing studies on key themes?”
“Oh that’s not all,” Bowman said, responding to my incredulity. “Not only do we teach non-literate, oral communicators how to do evangelism and discipleship, we also teach how to develop and train leaders for the local church—all orally. No printed Bible.” I argued: “But how do you do that without tools like PowerPoint, workbooks or at least white boards or overhead projectors? And, what about the Bible itself?”
The Bowmans’ journey to a solution was a long one. As Bowman will tell you, “We tried just about everything. Story cards, old-fashioned flannelgraph, picture sequences. You name it, we experimented with it.”