Lausanne World Pulse – 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
December 2012

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.”

To reach the nearly seventy percent oral learners in India, Christian workers must present the gospel through non-literate means.

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.

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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.