Lausanne World Pulse – What Do You Think, Mr. Guttenberg? The Challenges Print Evangelism Ministries Face in Meeting the Needs of Oral Cultures

October 2006

By Avery Willis and James Greenelsh
October 2006

Bible storying is a powerful tool in India.

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?

Avery Willis is executive director of the International Orality Network. James Greenelsh is director of International Partnerships for Harvest Media Ministry. He has written and produced documentaries for Christian organizations in fifty-five countries over the last thirty years.