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Volume 1, Number 1, 2012

The Oral Reality: From Rural to Hi-Tech Communities,OVEJOY�s�4ERRY�s�3TRINGER�s�,E&EVER�s�%VANS�s�3TAHL

Copyright © 2012 International Orality NetworkIn cooperation with Capstone Enterprises Ltd., Hong Kong

Volume 1, Number 1, 2012ISBN 962-767323-4

The Word Became Fresh

Cover PhotoThe picture of the most important church in Prague, parts of this castle—building complex started in the tenth century. This church took over six hundred years to complete her construction; her design influenced the architecture of churches across Central Europe and as far as England. She stood during the time when oral culture was thriving; she witnessed the printing age; now, she is gliding into the digital age.

My people, hear my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth.

I will open my mouth with a parable; I will utter hidden things, things from of old—

things we have heard and known,things our ancestors have told us.

We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation

the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord,his power, and the wonders he has done.

Psalm 78:1--4 (NIV)

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Editor Samuel E. ChiangAssociate Editor

Laurie Fortunak NicholsAssistant Editor Bill Sunderland

INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL/ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Amos AderonmuCalvin ChongGilles Gravelle

William D. TaylorMary VergheseHannes Wiher

Orality Journal is the journal of the International Orality Network. It is published online semi-annually and aims to provide a platform for scholarly discourse on the issues of orality, discoveries of innovations in orality, and praxis of e!ectiveness across multiple domains in society. This online journal is international and interdisciplinary, serving the interests of the orality movement through research articles, documentation, book reviews, and academic news. Occasionally, print editions will be created. Submission of items that could contribute to the furtherance of the orality movement are welcomed.

The Word Became Fresh

Graphic Design - Cindy MorrisPhotography/Cover - Flickr.com/photos/babasteve

facebook.com/pages/Steve-Evans-Photography/Website: www.internationaloralitynetwork.org

Editorial Email: [email protected]

Orality Journal Disclaimer: Articles published in Orality Journal are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, or the International Orality Network.

Your Feedback Is Very Important!We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions! Let us hear from you. Send your feedback to: [email protected].

Please include your name and organization. Any letters or emails used may be edited and excerpted. Please keep all letters and emails to three hundred words or less.

ISBN 962-767323-4

Copyright © 2012 International Orality NetworkIn cooperation with Capstone Enterprises Ltd., Hong Kong

Wish to ContributeNational Christian Foundation

A/C 4296661311 Tijeras Ave. NW

Albuquerque, NM USA 87102

CONTENTSEditor’s Notes.....................................................................................7by Samuel Chiang

The Extent of Orality: 2012 Update...................................................11by Grant LovejoyUsing UN and OCED stats, the author shares how a credible analysis emerges concerning the size of oral preference learners in the world today.

The Worldwide Spread of Bible Storying:...........................................41 A Look at Where We’ve Been by J.O. TerryAn overview of the recent history and expansion of the Bible Storytelling movement.

The Two Journeys of Shanti and Jasmine..........................................63by Tricia Stringer This article o!ers insights and elucidation of the rippling e!ects when orality is practiced in hi-tech communities.

One Thousand Orphans Tell God’s Story...........................................71 by Marlene LeFeverThe author shares what could happen when a ministry retools in real-time and includes orality principles and practices.

Mind the Gap: Bhutan as a Case Study..............................................75by A. Steve Evans A fresh look at using orality in Bhutan.

Let’s Do the Twist:.............................................................................79 Learning the Dance of Telling Interesting Bible Storiesby Janet StahlThe author explains how we experience stories through our own lenses shaped by our experiences and the cultural norms and values of our communities.

Important Points to Remember when Storytelling..............................83 by J.O. TerryExcellent practical tips on what to keep in mind.

Resources.........................................................................................88A condensed list of books, periodicals, and useful websites.

Editor’s Notesby Samuel E. Chiang

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Orality Journal.

Irony is not lost that we are moving to include a print mode to express the importance of this multi-discipline and multi-faceted matter of orality. So why another journal, and why now? Let us explore together.

A Gutenberg Parentheses* Communications from creation to about the time of the Gutenberg Press were primarily oral in nature as writing systems took time to develop and technology for mass printing had not yet arrived. In the fifteenth century the Gutenberg Press allowed printing en mass; this, coupled with the Reformation, where the Church enthusiastically declared that all should be able to read, fueled the trend toward reading, literacy, and privacy. Memory (community and social memory), which was at the core of society, got outsourced to the containers of paper and filing cabinets.

Oral cultures value face-to-face communication, in context, and living within the ‘story’ of the community. The literate world communicates through textual means and often is not able to convey the whole context in a communiqué. The textual ‘story’ is truncated or emptied of meaning. As we enter the digital culture, one that is defined by collaborating with multimodal content and tasks, strangely we are on a converging trajectory with the oral culture.

In fact, academicians are labeling the period from the fifteenth to the twentieth century the Gutenberg Parentheses: a period where the left side of the brain took over and gave birth to sciences, inventions, and philosophies, but silenced the right side of the brain from creativity. Proceeding into the twenty-first century, the captured images, reality entertainment, and online video gaming actually mirror closer to the pre-Gutenberg era, where the right side of the brain was much more in concert with the left side. The result is once again a more holistic approach to society and tasks, thereby recapturing creativity, collaboration, and community.

Orality Journal 7

In oral cultures, the information is local and always rooted in context and history, so that there is meaning with coherence to the community. In digital culture, like that of Facebook postings, the emphasis is on morphing the private and individual into open, specific, contextual, and communal experiences, albeit at a distance.

This form of communal experience with a digital identity and digital narrative imbedded into social networking is reinforced by the F-Factor—fans, friends, and followers. So pervasive is this practice that we often discover products and services by relying on our social networks. We are conscious of how our postings will be rated. We are constantly seeking feedback both to improve and validate decisions. Our social networks (communities) are often buying together, and our digital communities are themselves becoming products and services. The F-Factor put in a hard closing parenthesis to the Gutenberg Press, period!

A Rummage SaleThe Church can be described as a large social network and in her book, The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle has suggested that it is experiencing what amounts to a large rummage sale, one that happens every five hundred years. In the midst of the convergence of oral, literate, and digital culture, coupled with online digital identity and narrative, and further combined with the phenomena of the Gutenberg Parentheses, what does the Church have to say and how do we move forward in this very fluid state?

During the recent International Orality Network mini-global consultation, “Beyond Western Literate Models: Contextualizing Theological Education in Oral Contexts” (hosted at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College), forty-two academicians and practitioners from eighteen institutions and fourteen organizations indicated (1) an abundance of oral preference learners in the classrooms, (2) the need to embrace orality as a part of the curriculum, and (3) that what is working on the field is now beginning to speak into formal education, o!ering rippling implications for accreditation. This is a defining moment for us to explore and learn together!

8 Samuel Chiang

With the hard close of the Gutenberg Parentheses and the onset of the great emergence, we continue with the residual e!ects of the print-based culture, and we are rediscovering the ancient keys to the oral cultures that are infused with visual digital e!ects. Thus, we commence this new journey with a journal.

Orality Journal is the journal of the International Orality Network. Since the network is based on the voluntarism of individual and organizational members, this journal is your journal. We plan to publish this journal online, semi-annually. We aim to provide a platform for scholarly discourse on the issues of orality, discoveries of innovations in orality, and praxis of e!ectiveness across multiple domains in society. This online journal is international and interdisciplinary serving the interests of the orality movement through research articles, documentation, book reviews, and academic news. Similar to this inaugural issue which is printed, from time to time we will also print other editions.

We welcome submission of items that could contribute to the furtherance of the orality movement. In future editions, we will commence other departments, including a section on book reviews and noteworthy articles. We also welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions! Send your feedback to: [email protected].

Journeying with you,

Samuel E. ChiangFrom Abuja, Nigeria

Orality Journal 9

Endnote*For a more complete discussion please refer to the chapter "Three Worlds Converged: Living in an Oral, Literate, and Digital Culture", James R. Krabill, gen. ed.; Frank Fortunato, Robin Harris, and Brian Schrag, eds., Worship and Mission for the Global Church: An Ethnodoxology Handbook (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2012).

10

The oral cultures of the world pose a particular challenge

for conventional Christian ministry. Oral cultures are not print-oriented and do not respond well to forms of witnessing, discipling, teaching, and preaching that are based on print.

So tracts, Bible distribution, fill-i n - t h e - b l a n k s w o r k b o o k s , and bookstores are largely unappealing and ine!ective within oral cultures. Even spoken communication can be so print-influenced that it has limited impact in oral cultures.

Sermons built around outlines and lists of principles communicate poorly with people whose life is lived in oral cultures. Putting those same print-influenced sermons into audio form on CDs, MP3 players, and the like does

make them audible, which is a step in the right direction, but their print-based way of organizing and expressing truth is still an obstacle in communication.

Christian churches, mission organizations,

and ministries have increasingly had to face the

ways of communicating, relating, and thinking that

characterize oral cultures. In the e!ort to take the gospel to all peoples, Christian workers

have realized that they need to understand orality and to get a better grasp of just how extensive it is and how to respond to it. This article addresses the extent of orality.

It is not a simple matter to determine the extent of orality worldwide. Anyone attempting to do it faces challenges. Chief among them is defining what orality is and determining how to measure it accurately. This article is an

The Extent of Orality: 2012 Updatei by Grant Lovejoy

Grant Lovejoy is Director of Orality Strategies for IMB, where he has served since 2004. From 1988-2004 he taught preaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He co-edited Biblical Hermeneutics and Making Disciples of Oral Learners. Grant has trained people around the world to use biblical storytelling to reach people who learn best by spoken, rather than written communication.

…spoken communication can be so print-LQˊXHQFHG�WKDW�LW�KDV�OLPLWHG�LPSDFW�LQ�RUDO�FXOWXUHV��

The Extent of Orality: 2012 Update 11

e!ort to address both matters in an introductory way, particularly with the needs of Christian ministers and missionaries in mind. Although there are many ways to try to estimate the extent of orality, this article addresses one of the most frequently used, and frequently misunderstand measures—o"cial literacy data. Before addressing the literacy data, however, it is first necessary to discuss what orality is.

DEFINITIONDictionaries define orality rather simply: it is “a reliance on spoken, rather than written, language for communication.”

Notice the phrase “reliance on”. It is significant. After all, the vast

majority of people use spoken language extensively. But what sets orality apart is reliance on spoken language. To the extent that people rely on spoken communication instead of written communication, they are characterized by “orality”. There are degrees of orality, depending on whether someone relies on spoken language totally or less than totally.

Note also that the definition is a positive statement. Historically, those who have written about orality have typically approached it as the absence of literacy. Approaching orality as the absence of literacy focuses on what people cannot do rather than focusing on what they do. That approach takes literacy as the

12 Orality Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2012 Grant Lovejoy

norm, resulting in a predictable, negative evaluation of orality.ii

Reducing the phenomenon of orality simply to “illiteracy” has often led people to conclude that orality is something to be minimized by literacy campaigns. Although literacy certainly has great value and should be encouraged, it is a mistake to take a one-dimensional and negative perspective on orality by simply equating it with illiteracy.

Entire mission s t r a t e g i e s have been built on the c o n v i c t i o n that oral communicators should be strongly encouraged to learn to read. The mission strategies that focused on literacy training have had many laudable outcomes, to be sure. But they have fallen short whenever they have made literacy a de facto prerequisite for full participation in the Christian faith. This happened despite the fact that the early Church grew up, in fact thrived, in an environment dominated by orality.

In the Book of Acts, the Church used oral communication as its primary means of evangelism and discipleship. The possibility of returning to that vibrant, rapidly-spreading, faith-filled apostolic Christianity is a major incentive for taking orality seriously in contemporary mission strategies.

This is not to say that orality and literacy are enemies, or that gains in one must

inevitably come at the expense of the other.

This is not an attack on literacy, education,

or those who provide them.iii But it is a plea

for us not to think of orality as simply the absence of literacy, or to

assume that the sole, automatic response to orality should be a literacy campaign.

Focusing on orality rather than illiteracy highlights the fact that people who live by orality are capable of using beautiful, sophisticated, and moving speech. They are responsible for some of the world’s great verbal artistry, expressed in songs, stories, poetry, and proverbs. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, widely recognized as the greatest examples of epic

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poetry in Western civilization, are oral compositions. Parts of the Bible were also composed orally before being written. So orality should never be equated with backwardness, ignorance, or lack of intelligence.

When large numbers of people live by orality in community with one another over extended periods of time, it a!ects their whole culture. So a fuller description of orality takes into consideration

the collection of characteristics (cognitive, communicational, and relational) that are typical of cultures that function orally. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy is a classic work that describes orality in considerable scholarly detail.iv

Ong distinguishes primary orality from secondary orality.

Primary orality exists in communities that have no written language and little or no acquaintance with reading and writing. Primary orality is increasingly rare. Secondary orality depends on electronic media and the literate people who operate it. Secondary orality uses television, radio, film, and the like to communicate the staples of oral communication: story, song, poetry, proverb, drama, and discussion.

Sociologist Tex Sample has added a third category of orality: traditional orality. He uses the term to refer to situations in which people are familiar with reading and writing and may themselves have learned to read and write in school, but they use oral communication for most of their daily living.

Their reading and writing is largely confined to school, work, and o"cial documents. Even in those cases, however, they choose oral communication over print if they have the option. For example, they ask a friend or co-worker to show them how to do a task instead of reading an


instructional manual. They ask a supervisee to summarize a report to them orally so that they do not have to read it themselves. They see the movie instead of reading the book. They watch television news rather than reading a newspaper. Their identity, beliefs, values, and behaviors come via oral traditions learned from their family, friends, and community, not from their reading.v

To summarize, individuals and communities around the world rely on spoken, rather than written, communication in varying degrees. Primary oral communicators, who cannot read and write and have not been exposed to print, are oral by default. Print makes no

impact on their lives. Traditional oral communicators have been exposed to literacy and may be able to read and write, but they still live by orality. Their orality is often a matter of preference rather than absolute necessity.

Finally, secondary oral communicators are those who, regardless of their educational attainment, are deeply influenced by electronically-delivered forms of oral communication such as songs, stories, drama, and the like. They have a surprising amount in common with primary and traditional oral communicators. They can legitimately be considered when estimating the extent of orality in the world.


Admittedly, these three categories overlap, so it is impossible to count precisely how many people are in each category. This description does, however, have the advantage of reflecting how people actually live. It serves as a reminder that any estimate of the extent of orality must take account of the varying degrees to which people are oral.

LITERACY SKILLS AND ORALITYIn principle, researchers should be able to develop survey instruments to assess the degree to which individuals and cultures live by orality. But that kind of

research has not been done on any widespread basis. Governments do not gather data on orality—they gather data on education and literacy. As a result, the most common way of estimating the extent of orality is to use literacy

data. Where literacy rates are low, it can be inferred that orality is high by necessity. This approach has both promise and peril, as recent publications have shown.

On International Literacy Day in September 2011, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics reported that 83.7% of adults and 89.3% of youth worldwide are literate.vi If the reality were as rosy as that, it would be a cause for rejoicing.

But the UNESCO report relies on easily m i s u n d e r s t o o d statistics reported by U. N. member countries. The little-known truth is that many governments use quite generous definitions of literacy, so the statistics make the situation sound

much better than it really is.

If, like Jesus, we plan on “speaking the word to them as they [are] able to hear it” (Mark 4:33, emphasis added), then we must know how people are best able to hear our


message. When they are able to receive the message through a variety of means, we should seek to determine which one is their preferred means. The stakes are too high for us to misunderstand our audience’s capacities and p r e f e r e n c e s with respect to orality and literacy.

DEFINING LITERACYLiteracy experts raise three fundamental, interrelated concerns about the published figures on worldwide literacy. They question how nations define literacy, how they gather the literacy data, and how the nations and others report it.

First of all, they say that categorizing people as being either “literate” or “illiterate” is simplistic and misleading. As the UNESCO Institute for Statistics puts it, “Measuring literacy is not just a matter of saying who can read and who cannot. Literacy skills are needed at many different levels, from writing one’s name on a form, to understanding instructions on a medicine

bottle, to the ability to learn from reading books.”vii

If we regard people as being either literate or illiterate—no other options allowed—then

we tend to count people as literate if they can merely

sign their name or read a simple sentence about

familiar things. After all, we reason, they can read, at least

simple materials. (This is a bare-minimum definition of

“read”, by the way, which is itself part of the confusion.)

If we call such people illiterate, then they are likely to protest and attempt to prove that they can indeed “read”, however haltingly. But signing their name or reading a poster is a far cry from reading a government document or the Bible with understanding. Just being able to sound out the words does not indicate that people can learn new concepts through reading.

British educators Donna Thomson and Ruth Nixey discovered that many of their students tested well as readers on certain standardized tests, but in fact comprehended very little of what they read. Careful

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additional testing revealed “an extraordinary discrepancy between the children's ability to read and their overall comprehension. The evidence showed that many had very impressive decoding skills but alarmingly poor understanding of the text in comparison.”viii Nor does the ability to vocalize text prove that the readers will embrace new values through reading. Simplistic either/or distinctions about literacy continue to obscure this reality.

To correct this misunderstanding, leading literacy researchers have ceased referring to people as either “literate” or “illiterate” as though a person is simply one or the other. Instead, researchers distinguish four or five levels of skill with literacy.ix Despite researchers’ pleas, though, most countries still divide people into just the two categories for census or survey purposes.

For the reasons mentioned above, this makes it di"cult to get accurate descriptions of the levels of literacy (and thus the extent of orality). What makes matters even worse for international statisticians is the fact that each country is free to define “literate” for its own purposes.

As a result, governments use quite di!erent definitions of literacy. These definitions are crucial because they determine how many people will be counted as literate when the data-gathering takes place, often as part of a national census or household survey.

In April 2011, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics reported the various ways nations define “literate” in their data-gathering. Consider these examples:

including those in the first year of primary school or in literacy classes, to be literate.


completed a primary school education as literate and it also counts as literate any person without a primary school education who answers “Yes” when asked, “Are you able to read and write?”

each person who has completed more than three grades of primary school.

years and older who has never been to school is counted as illiterate.

ability to read easily or with di"culty a letter or newspaper.

ability both to read with understanding and write a short, simple statement on one’s life.

ability to read and write at least a paragraph in any language.x

By comparison, UNESCO’s Standard-Setting Instruments describes as literate any person “who can with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on his everyday life.”xi Many countries use UNESCO’s definition or a variation of it.

With such varied definitions or measurements of literacy, it is

unwise to compare the reported literacy rates in one country with reported literacy rates from another.xii It is also unwise to lump this disparate group of measurements into a single worldwide literacy statistic.

GATHERING LITERACY DATAThese di!erent approaches to estimating literacy reflect budget realities and other factors in developing countries.xiii Most of these countries lack the funds and expertise to test literacy skills directly. Instead, they try to estimate literacy levels through less demanding methods, such as simply asking people whether they are literate or illiterate. Or they estimate literacy based on school enrollment or the number of years of education. These methods of gathering literacy data inflate literacy statistics. They do not account for the poor quality of some schools, learning disabilities, spotty attendance, and social promotions. The World Development Report 2004 included these sobering findings:

While most teachers try conscientiously to do their jobs, one recent survey found a third of all teachers in Uttar Pradesh, India, absent. Cases of malfeasance by teachers are


distressingly present in many settings: teachers show up drunk, are physically abusive, or simply do nothing. This is not “low-quality” teaching—this is not teaching at all. The 1994 Tanzania Primary School Leavers Examination suggested that the vast majority of students had learned almost nothing that was tested in their seven years of schooling—more than four-fifths scored less than 13 percent correct in language or mathematics.xiv

Simply attending a certain number of years of school does not guarantee that students have learned what they were expected to learn.

The above methods of estimating literacy also do not account for the likelihood of reversion. Students dropping out before completing eight years of good quality education may revert to functional illiteracy if they do not keep reading regularly. “A person is functionally illiterate who cannot engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for e!ective functioning of his group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his own and the community’s

development.” Likewise, a person is “functionally literate” who can do all those activities.xv

The phenomenon of reverting to functional illiteracy is well-known among literacy workers. When India’s Human Resources Development Ministry released its 2003-2004 report, it celebrated a 13.17% increase in literacy from 1991-2001, calling it the highest increase in any decade. Over 108 million people had acquired literacy, an extraordinary achievement.

But a news article about the report said,

The report acknowledges that the basic literacy skills acquired by millions of neo-literates are at best fragile with a greater possibility of them regressing into partial or total illiteracy unless special e!orts are continued to consolidate, sustain, and possibly enhance their literacy levels.xvi

This phenomenon is not limited to India; reversion occurs in many places.

Such students may have been reading at their grade level when they left school, but if they do not keep reading regularly, then their reading skills atrophy. They do


not necessarily become absolutely illiterate. But they lose the literacy skills to function as a literate in society. They learn via what they see, experience, and hear, rather than what they read. Speech, not print, is their primary form of communication.

People who have attended school but have “below basic” skills may not be able to do literate tasks like completing a job application, reading the instructions on a medicine bottle, or learning a new task from an instruction manual or book. Despite this, their government almost certainly will count them as literates.

This is the primary factor that makes the 83.7% global adult

literacy figure so misleading. Judging from the results of direct testing of literacy skills in many countries, a large percentage of those counted as literate in UNESCO statistics seem to be functionally illiterate by the UNESCO-recommended definition. As previously noted, international literacy experts know these realities. UNESCO literacy experts themselves confess the inadequacy of the data with which they work:

Existing measures of literacy are inadequate. Most data on adult literacy are not su"ciently reliable to serve the needs of national and international users. Generally,


they rely either on individuals’ self-declaration of their own literacy or on “proxy” indicators such as their educational levels. These are indirect measures, which have been shown not to reflect reality very accurately. Moreover, they are not always collected on a consistent basis, so can be di"cult to compare, and there are many data gaps. More reliable measures require people’s literacy ability to be assessed directly, in surveys that test their skills.”xvii

Literacy researchers advocate direct testing of literacy skills because it is a much more accurate—although politically uncomfortable–measure of literacy.

Direct testing of literacy skills in more-developed Western countries has proven this point with embarrassing consistency. The National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) administered by the U.S. Department of Education in the early 1990s found that 48-51% of adults in the U. S. scored at the two lowest literacy levels (out of five levels).xviii

When the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) tested adults in twenty relatively-

a#uent, developed countries from 1994-1998, similar results emerged in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.xix

Although these countries are more economically developed, sizable percentages of their adult population actually had low levels of prose, document, and numerical literacy. They lacked the skills for handling complex reading material and lengthy documents, although few people were absolutely illiterate. Most of them could read somewhat, but not enough to do the full range of tasks it takes to function as a literate person in those societies.xx

IALS found that five of the twenty countries had even larger percentages of adults with skills at the two lowest literacy levels. Over 60% of adults in Hungary, over 70% in Slovenia, almost 80% in Poland and Portugal, and over 80% in Chile scored at the two lowest levels of document literacy. The Scandinavian countries performed better than the others, but still had at least a quarter of their adult populations who scored at the two lowest levels.xxi About this same time, Denmark,


which had claimed a literacy rate of 100%, discovered that “every second person has a problem with reading.”xxii

To reiterate, then, a government often counts people as literate because they complete a certain number of years of school or because the respondents tell census workers that they are literate. But direct testing of literacy skills reveals that many people counted as “literate” actually have quite limited reading comprehension. If this is true in a#uent, developed countries after generations of compulsory education, then it raises serious

questions about literacy data from developing nations where the schools get meager funding and where literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is no wonder that scholars who have studied the issues conclude that the method of gathering national literacy data is woefully inadequate in most countries of the world.

REPORTING LITERACY STATISTICSResearchers’ third concern relates to the improper use of this flawed literacy data. Researcher David Archer of Actionaid UK points out that even when people know the limitations of literacy statistics, they still use them improperly:

One of the biggest obstacles to change in literacy programs is the way in which literacy statistics are used at an international level. Most international reports on literacy now start with a cautionary word about the accuracy of the figures used. The draft of the 2002 Education for All Monitoring Report is no exception in this, recognizing clearly that the present international data on literacy is unreliable. However, this


report follows the pattern of many before it. After a brief acknowledgment of the flimsiness of the statistics, any doubts are rapidly forgotten and precise figures routinely quoted—such that we forget their inaccuracy and create the illusion that we do know or understand the situation—when this is far from the truth.xxiii

Agencies like UNESCO report questionable statistics because that is often the best information they have, even if it is far from accurate. Their literacy experts know full well the limitations of the data and write disclaimers about its limitationsxxiv, but many people, especially non-specialists, ignore or soon forget the warnings. Even today, well-meaning Christian leaders are making strategic decisions based on statements like the one in the UNESCO news release about 83.7% of adults worldwide being literate. (Note the degree of precision that figure suggests!) The full story, which shows how misleading that figure is, often lies buried in footnotes and appendices or is published in obscure documents read mainly by specialists.

ESTIMATING THE EXTENT OF ORALITYBy carefully studying the footnotes and specialist reports, by making some educated guesses and projections, it is possible to reach a very rough estimate of how many people in the world live by orality either by necessity or by preference. This procedure cannot produce anything approaching a precise number. The argument to this point has stressed the di"culties with the literacy data.

But churches, Christian ministries, and mission organizations need at least some idea of the relative extent of orality. They are making strategic decisions every year and cannot wait until governments around the world provide scrupulously accurate data about literacy in their countries. Ministries need to know whether the UNESCO report about 83.7% of adults worldwide being literate is true.

We begin our estimating with the direct testing of literacy skills done in the 1990s in twenty-two countries and regions, most of them developed countries in Europe and North America.

Although some experts have criticized the methodology in


those studies, they agree that direct testing of literacy skills is much more accurate than census data or household surveys.xxv The NALS, IALS, and NAAL studies, which use a similar methodology, found that almost half of adults in the participating countries of Europe and North America have limited literacy skills. To use NAAL terminology, they function at the level of “below basic” or “basic” literacy.xxvi

Direct testing of adults’ literacy skills in the U. K. in 2003 and again in 2011 produced results similar to the IALS findings in the 1990s. In the 2003 survey, 16% of adults scored at or below the literacy level U. K. schools expect at age 9 to 11; the situation was virtually unchanged in 2011. “Adults with skills at this level may not be able to read bus or train timetables or check the pay and deductions on a wage slip.” Large numbers of adults (39% in 2003, 28% in 2011) scored at the next level, Level 1. Adults with skills at Level 1 “may not be able to compare products and services for the best buy, or work out a household budget.”xxviii

Let’s suppose that the global status of literacy is neither better

nor worse than the countries where this direct testing has been done. If so, we would estimate that about half the world’s adult population is oral by virtue of low literacy. But that underestimates the extent of orality for two reasons.

First, many countries score lower than the U. S., Canada, the U.K., and others of the more-developed countries in these assessments.xxix Recall the IALS findings mentioned previously for Hungary, Slovenia, Portugal, Poland, and Chile. They had from 60% to more than 80% of their adults at the two lowest literacy levels. Given those scores, what are we to expect from Nigeria, Myanmar, Yemen, Mexico, and the like?

Second, the more developed countries like we find in the IALS constitute one-sixth of the world’s population; the less developed and least developed ones account for five-sixths of it.xxx The vast majority of the world’s population lives in countries with less developed educational systems. This strongly suggests that their literacy rates would be lower than in the more developed countries. A critical question is how much


lower literacy rates are in the less developed countries.

Most of the less developed and least developed countries have not done direct testing of literacy skills that is comparable to the IALS and similar studies. But a few of those countries have had students participate in global and regional assessments designed to compare students from various countries with one another. Reaching the Marginalized summarizes the e!orts to compare literacy skills of students in one country to those in other countries.xxxi

The 2007 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) among eighth grade

students revealed that the average student in El Salvador, Ghana, Indonesia, and Morocco was comparable to the worst students from top-scoring countries like the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Japan. In Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco, more than half of their students scored below the bottom threshold in math and science, where students have only the most basic knowledge and skills. Overall, the average scores for students in the top-performing countries were almost twice as high as the average scores for student from the lowest performing country.

Because few of the least developed nations participate in TIMMS, researchers have used


other tests to make country-to-country comparisons. “The results confirm that low-income countries lag far behind others in learning achievement.”xxxii

For example, when researchers in India used questions from TIMMS in another assessment, they found that ninth grade students in the two Indian states that were tested performed about the same as students from the poorest countries in the world.xxxiii

In Qatar and Saudi Arabia, “three-quarters of students register below the lowest [TIMMS] score threshold—a performance comparable to Ghana,”xxxiv the lowest-scoring country in the 2007 TIMMS. (Keep in mind that many poor countries did not even participate in TIMMS.)

The situation is even worse when it comes to assessments of reading skills. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) also assesses students with about eight years of education. Its level 1 is a minimal threshold of literacy. Students with literacy skills below level 1 are unlikely to benefit from further education. They may struggle to enter the workforce successfully because of their low reading skills.

So it is sobering to find that 70% of students from Kyrgyzstan who participated in PISA scored below level 1. In Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Thailand—all with sizable populations, growing economic power, and influence in world a!airs—more than 40% of students were at level 1 or below. Although few countries in sub-Saharan Africa participate in these international assessments of learning, the research that has been done suggests that their students also are not achieving basic levels of numeracy or literacy.

In Latin America, student performance varies widely, with students in Cuba and Costa Rica leading the way, whereas on one recent assessment “less than half of all grade 3 students in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Guatemala had more than very basic reading skills.”xxxv

Even these figures understate the extent of the educational achievement problem, because they do not include children who are not in school and who thus did not take the assessment.

The argument thus far is that most of the world’s population lives in less developed countries where educational attainment


is markedly below that of most of the twenty or so countries that have done direct testing of literacy skills. Of the countries participating in IALS, Slovenia, Poland, Portugal, and Chile most nearly resemble economically and educationally the rest of the world. Even though only a small percentage of the adults in those four countries were completely illiterate, approximately 80% of them demonstrated only limited literacy skills. We will use their performance as a reference to make a rough estimate of the extent of orality globally.

The world’s population was estimated to have reached seven billion in 2011. There are 5.1 billion people 15 years of age and older. If we estimate that they have literacy skills comparable to Slovenia, Poland, Portugal, and Chile, about 80% of whom were at the two lowest levels, then approximately four billion adults live primarily by orality because they are non-readers or have only basic reading comprehension skills. If that estimate seems too high, recall that 82% of the world’s population lives in countries that the Population Reference Bureau calls “less developed,” countries known to have low educational attainment.

To those four billion we can add the children under the age of 15 who have no literacy or limited literacy skills.xxxvi According to mid-2011 estimates, 27% of the world population was under age 15, which totals approximately 1.9 billion people. For the purposes of our rough estimating, suppose about half of the children are so young–ages birth to 7 years—that they must be counted as oral. So we can add them to our total, about 950 million of them.

As for those ages 8 to 15, the situation varies from country to country. Some may read better than the average adult in their country and others, worse. But remember again that 82% of the world’s population lives in “less developed” countries and those countries have a higher percentage of children.xxxvii

If the 950 million children ages 8 to 14 read as well as the adults in Slovenia, Poland, Portugal, and Chile, we can estimate that about 760 million of them should be considered oral learners by virtue of their limited literacy skills.

So if there are four billion adults, 950 million children birth to 7


years of age, and 760 million children ages 8 to 14 with basic or below basic literacy, then 5.7 billion people in the world are oral communicators because either they are illiterate or their reading comprehension is inadequate.

That is over 80% of the world’s total population. Even a rough estimate like this one, which makes no claim of precision, reveals how misleading the UNESCO report is. Even if the estimate being o!ered here is o! by a billion people, it still serves notice that literacy skills are far more limited than one might conclude from reading headlines celebrating over 80% literacy among adults worldwide.

EVALUATING PROGRESS TOWARD GLOBAL LITERACYGlobal literacy levels are improving. But change comes slowly and with di"culty. In the Global Education Digest 2010, Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s Director-General laments, “The share of illiterate women has not changed over the past twenty years: women still represented

two-thirds of the world’s 759 million illiterates in 2008.”xxxviii

A UNESCO conference in March 2010 explored why the education of women continues to lag behind

the education of men in many c o u n t r i e s ,

despite promises by governments

to bring about gender parity in

education:

One of the most significant

conclusions was that current education and literacy initiatives are not responding to the complex needs of women and girls a!ected by compounded forms of discrimination. Achieving gender equality in education is not only about access, but about learning environments, curricula, attitudes, and a host of wider political, economic and social considerations.xxxix

Improving literacy rates in many places requires even more than providing suitable school buildings, e!ective teachers, appropriate curricula, and eager students. Improving global literacy depends on changing

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attitudes, social patterns, and political and economic practices and priorities. Changing all of that in order to raise literacy rates is a big challenge.

India’s national census has reported the literacy rate going up steadily for the last sixty years. In most decades, the reported improvement was about 9%.

1951 18.3%1961 28.3%1971 34.45%1981 43.57%1991 52.21%2001 64.83%2011 74.04%

The 2011 census was the first time that female literacy rates were over 50% in every state in India. This is a cause for rejoicing. However, the report cautions that a “few States have shown a tendency to slip back into illiteracy after having attained a certain level of literacy. This slide back has to be arrested and the momentum sustained in order to achieve the cherished goal of universal literacy.”xli These two facts and the decadal statistics give some perspective on the pace at which large populations can hope to improve their literacy over long periods of time.

Christian groups who unwittingly accept governments’ literacy statistics at face value are likely to perpetuate a tragic mistake. They will believe that the people to whom they minister are more literate than they actually are. They will continue to train their workers to use literate teaching and preaching approaches. Oral people will not grasp the literate teaching, but they will be reluctant to admit that there is a problem or share the problem with others. Ministry leaders may conclude that people are spiritually unresponsive when the real culprit is the literate form of teaching that the teachers are using.

On the other hand, ministries who adjust their approach to the literacy level of their group, whatever that level may be, can expect improved communication, more learning, and more life change among the hearers. Extensive research among Christian outreach in Muslim communities found that incorporating an oral communication strategy into their work with oral cultures was associated with seeing 4.4 times more churches established.xlii

Oral communicators find it easier to pass along their faith, too,


if they have heard it in a way that fits their normal style of communication. That has already been the experience of a number of international ministries that have, as a result, come together to form the International Orality Network. The group exists to share insights and network with others committed to taking the message of the Bible to those who learn best orally. Such people are more likely to be transformed when the message of the Bible comes through their traditional communication forms such as stories, proverbs, songs, chants, ceremonies and rituals, dance, and the like.xliii

Many organizations are using Bible storying, one of several communications strategies developed with this need in mind.xliv Scriptures In Use trains grassroots church planters to use oral methods in their work.

Many other organizations have incorporated orality-friendly approaches into their work. They

have collaborated in publishing Making Disciples of Oral Learners,xlv which includes many suggestions about improving e!ectiveness in working with people who live by orality, and Orality Breakouts,xlvi which describes how various Christian ministries are incorporating oral communication strategies e!ectively.

We can do e!ective ministry with people whose preferred way of learning is oral rather than written. Jesus turned the world upside down with disciples who were derisively called “uneducated and untrained men” (Acts 4:13). But first we have to understand them and how they can best learn. To do that, we will need to get beneath the surface of the literacy statistics. The process used in this article concludes that over 80% of the world’s adults, teens, and children have low enough reading comprehension that they are highly likely to be oral communicators.


Reference List2011 Skills for Life Survey: Headline Findings. BIS Research Paper No. 57. London: Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills, 2011.

Archer, David. “Literacy as Freedom: Challenging Assumptions and Changing Practice.” In Literacy as Freedom: A UNESCO Round-table. Paris: UNESCO, 2003.

Chiang, Samuel and Steve Evans, eds., Orality Breakouts. International Orality Network and the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, 2010.

Giere, Ursula. Functional Illiteracy in Industrialized Countries: An Analytical Bibliography. UIE Studies on Post-Literacy and Continuing Education: Functional Illiteracy in Industrialized Countries, no. 3. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Education, 1987.

Human Development Report 2004. New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2004.

“India’s Literacy Rate Is Now 65 Percent.” Indo-Asian News Service, Sept. 4, 2004; online article at http://in.news.yahoo.com/040904/43/2fvlo.html, accessed March 21, 2006.

International Adult Literacy Survey. http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/IALS.html.

“Joshi Locks Literacy Horns with UNESCO.” The Telegraph, Nov. 7, 2005; www.telegraphindia.com/1031108/asp/others/print.html, accessed March 21, 2006.

Kirsch, Irwin S., Ann Jungeblut, Lynn Jenkins, and Andrew Kolstad. Adult Literacy in America: A First Look at the Results of the National Adult Literacy Survey. Washington, D.C: National Center for Education Statistics, 1993.


Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (LAMP). See http://www.uis.unesco.org/TEMPLATE/pdf/LAMP/LAMPLeafletEng.pdf.

Making Disciples of Oral Learners. Lausanne Occasional Paper, no. 54. Bangalore: Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization and International Orality Network, 2005.

National Assessment of Adult Literacy: A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century. Washington, D. C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2005.

O"ce of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India. Census of India 2011: Provisional Population Totals. Paper 1 of 2011, India Series 1. New Delhi, 2011.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London and New York: Routledge, 1982.

Population Reference Bureau. 2011 World Population Data Sheet. Washington, DC, 2011.

Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Research Division Report no. 46. Washington, D. C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 2004.

Sample, Tex. Ministry in an Oral Culture. Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1994.

Sogaard, Viggo. Evangelizing Our World: Insights from Global Inquiry. Pattaya, Thailand: 2004 Forum for World Evangelization, 2004.

Thomson, Donna and Ruth Nixey. “Thinking to Read, Reading to Think: Bringing Meaning, Reasoning and Enjoyment to Reading.” Literacy Today (September 2005). An edited version of their article is available at http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/database/primary/thomsonnixey.html.


Tuijnman, Albert. Benchmarking Adult Literacy in America: An International Comparative Study. Washington, DC: U. S. Department of Education, 2000.

“Statistics Show Slow Progress towards Universal Literacy.” http://www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?ID=5063_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC

UNESCO. “Adult and Youth Literacy.” http://www.uis.unesco.org/FactSheets/Documents/FS16-2011-Literacy-EN.pdf. Accessed March 19, 2012.

UNESCO. Reaching the Marginalized. Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010. Oxford and Paris: OUP and UNESCO, 2010.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics. International Literacy Statistics: A Review of Concepts, Methodology, and Current Data. Montreal: UIS, 2008.

______. Global Education Digest 2010. Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2010.

Woodberry, J. Dudley, ed., From Seed to Fruit. 2d ed. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Press, 2011.

World Development Report 2004. New York: The World Bank, 2003.

Young People in 1998. Schools Health Education Unit, 1998. http://www.sheu.org.uk/pubs/yp98.htm.


iThis article is a considerably revised and updated version of an article first published in print form in the June 2007 issue of Dharma Deepika: A South Asian Journal of Missiological Research and which was republished in the online Journal of Baptist Theology and Ministry in its spring 2008 issue. We are grateful to the editors of both journals for permission to republish this article.

iiThe English language lacks a familiar positive term for reliance on spoken communication. This shows how dominant the preference for literacy is within the English-speaking world. European friends tell me that other major languages of Europe have a similar gap.

iiiSee my Beekman Lecture, “Orality, Bible Translation, and Scripture Engagement,” Bible Translation Conference 2009, Dallas, TX, October 18, 2009, for more about the complementary relationship that should exist between orality and literacy. There I call for scripture resources to be made available in both printed and oral formats so that people can access them via the formats that serve them best. I a"rm the value of literacy instruction and education in its various forms, including theological education.

ivWalter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London and New York: Routledge, 1982). See Ruth Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond (Oxford: James Curry, 2007) for correctives to some of Ong’s generalizations.

vSee chapter 1 of Tex Sample, Ministry in an Oral Culture (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1994).

vi“Adult and Youth Literacy,” http://www.uis.unesco.org/FactSheets/Documents/FS16-2011-Literacy-EN.pdf, accessed March 19, 2012. The data is from 2009, the latest available.

viiLiteracy Assessment and Monitoring Programme of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (LAMP). See http://www.uis.unesco.o r g / T E M P L AT E / p d f / L A M P /LAMPLeafletEng.pdf.

viiiSee Donna Thomson and Ruth Nixey, “Thinking to Read, Reading to Think: Bringing Meaning, Reasoning and Enjoyment to Reading,” Literacy Today (September 2005). An edited version of their article is available at http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/database/primary/thomsonnixey.html and is the source for this quotation. It was accessed October 28, 2005.

ixIn the early 1980s UNESCO recommended its member bodies use four terms: illiterate, literate, functionally illiterate, and functionally literate. See UNESCO’s Standard-Setting Instruments, Incorporating Supplement 1 (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1981-1982), 4, quoted in Ursula Giere, Functional Illiteracy in Industrialized Countries: An Analytical Bibliography, UIE Studies on Post-Literacy and Continuing Education: Functional Illiteracy


in Industrialized Countries, no. 3. (Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Education, 1987), 28. Major studies conducted in the 1990s identified five levels of skill, calling them simply Level 1, Level 2, etc. See Irwin S. Kirsch, Ann Jungeblut, Lynn Jenkins, and Andrew Kolstad, Adult Literacy in America: A First Look at the Results of the National Adult Literacy Survey (Washington, D.C: National Center for Education Statistics, 1993) for descriptions of the NALS categories. The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) used the same categories and terminology. A more recent major U. S. study, one comparable to the NALS, used the terms “below basic”, “basic”, “intermediate”, and “proficient” to characterize four ranges of literacy skill. See National Assessment of Adult Literacy: A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2005), 3. The 2011 Skills for Life assessment of skills in the U.K. also reported skills using five categories but called them “entry level 1”, “entry level 2”, “entry level 3”, “level 1”, and “level 2+”. See http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/0-9/11-1367-2011-skills-for-life-survey-findings.pdf, accessed March 20, 2012.

xUNESCO Institute for Statistics, “Education Indicators and Data Analysis: Literacy Statistics Metadata Information Table (April 2011 Data Release),” available for download at http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/ReportFolders/ReportFolders.aspx . Accessed March 19, 2012.

xiUNESCO’s Standard-Setting Instruments, 4, cited in Giere, 28. The glossary of the Global Education Digest 2010 defines literacy as “the ability to read and write, with understanding, a simple statement related to one’s daily life. It involves a continuum of reading and writing skills, and often includes basic arithmetic skills (numeracy).”

xiiUNESCO Institute for Statistics, International Literacy Statistics: A Review of Concepts, Methodology, and Current Data (Montreal: UIS, 2008) provides an extensive discussion of the challenges in gathering and reporting literacy data. There is a tendency to assume that a “literate” in one country has the same skills that literates in other countries do. But this is not true at all, in part because the countries are not using the same definition of literacy. Nor is it safe to assume that ten years of schooling—even within a single country—produces an equivalent outcome at every school. Equal amounts of school attendance do not produce equal outcomes. Some students graduate from secondary school ready for elite universities; others, graduate from secondary school barely able to read their diplomas. All are secondary school graduates, but their literacy skills differ dramatically. See more on this subject later in this article.

xiiiEconomic and political factors may also influence definitions of literacy. When major international lenders such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank include literacy rates in their lending criteria,


governments have an incentive to define “literate” in generous terms so that they can report higher rates of literacy. Additionally, government o"cials like to report improving literacy levels. India’s human development resources minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, for example, was quick to protest in 2005 when UNESCO used 1991 data instead of figures from India’s 2001 census. UNESCO projected a 57.2% literacy rate based on the 1991 data; Joshi said India’s literacy rate was 65%. UNESCO o"cials explained that India had submitted their most recent data too late to be included in the report, but Moshi was insistent that UNESCO give India credit for its progress in literacy. Whether Joshi or UNESCO is right is not the issue. The point is that government o"cials are sensitive to public perceptions. It should come as no surprise if they gather and report literacy data in a way that puts them, their party, and their country in the best possible light. (See “Joshi Locks Literacy Horns with UNESCO,” The Telegraph, November 7, 2005; www.telegraphindia.com/1031108/asp/others/print.html, accessed March 21, 2006.) It is understandable that the Indian government was eager to report a few years later that the 2011 census showed the literacy rate of people 7 years of age and older had risen from 65% to 74%. See http://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/censusinfodashboard/index.html, accessed March 20, 2012.

xivWorld Development Report 2004, 112.

xvUNESCO’s Standard-Setting Instruments, 4, cited in Giere, 28.

xvi“India’s Literacy Rate Is Now 65 Percent,” Indo-Asian News Service, September 4, 2004; online article at http://in.news.yahoo.com/040904/43/2fvlo.html, accessed March 21, 2006. See more on this phenomenon below.

xviiLiteracy Assessment and Monitoring Programme of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (LAMP). See http://www.uis.u n e s c o. o rg / T E M P L AT E / p d f /LAMP/LAMPLeafletEng.pdf. Their emphasis.

xviiiIrwin S. Kirsch, Ann Jungeblut, Lynn Jenkins, and Andrew Kolstad, A First Look at the Findings of the National Adult Literacy Survey, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, O"ce of Educational Research and Improvement, 2002).

xixSee http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/IALS.html. See also Albert Tuijnman, Benchmarking Adult Literacy in America: An International Comparative Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 2000); also available at http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/Benchmrk/2.htm. The participating countries were part of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).

xxIbid.

xxiOrganisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development and Statistics Canada, Literacy in the Information Age: Final Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey, (Paris: OECD, 2000), 17.


xxiiViggo Sogaard, Evangelizing Our World: Insights from Global Inquiry (Pattaya, Thailand: 2004 Forum for World Evangelization, 2004), 11. Furthermore, in late 2005 the U. S. released findings from its National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted in 2003. NAAL discovered that in direct testing of literacy skills, approximately 43% of adults in the U. S. had “below basic” or “basic” skills in prose literacy. These figures are virtually unchanged from the 1992 NALS survey. In 2003, 44% scored at the “intermediate” level, and only 13% scored “proficient” in prose literacy, which involves reading and understanding text consisting of paragraphs, like newspaper articles and books.

xxiiiDavid Archer, “Literacy as Freedom: Challenging Assumptions and Changing Practice,” in Literacy as Freedom: A UNESCO Round-table (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), 42. Emphasis added.

xxivUNESCO Institute for Statistics, International Literacy Statistics: A Review of Concepts, Methodology, and Current Data (Montreal: UIS, 2008) discusses these challenges and others at length.

xxvIbid.

xxvi“‘Below basic’ indicates no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills.” People at this level can sign a form or search a short simple text to determine what a patient can drink before a test. “‘Basic’ indicates skills necessary to perform simple and everyday literacy activities” such using a television guide to determine

what programs are on at a particular time. See National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 3.

xxvii2011 Skills for Life Survey: Headline Findings, BIS Research Paper No. 57 (London: Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills, 2011), 20. http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/0-9/11-1367-2011-skills-for-life-survey-findings.pdf, accessed March 19, 2012.

xxviiiIbid.

xxixStudents from countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Japan do better on international examinations than their counterparts from countries in Western Europe and North America, as noted below. So do the Scandinavian countries, as already mentioned. But the point here has to do with the larger picture, the extent of orality globally. Note the IALS findings mentioned above for Hungary, Slovenia, Portugal, Poland, and Chile.

xxxPopulation Reference Bureau, 2011 World Population Data Sheet (Washington, D.C., 2011). Unless indicated otherwise, population figures come from this source.

xxxiUNESCO, Reaching the Marginalized, EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010 (Oxford and Paris: OUP and UNESCO, 2010), 105.

xxxiiIbid., citing studies by Altinok in 2008 and Hanushek and Woessman in 2009.


xxxiiiReaching the Marginalized, 105.

xxxivIbid., 106.

xxxvIbid.

xxxviLiteracy data is frequently reported on ages 15 to 65 or 16 to 65, but as noted above, some countries include children as young as age 10 when they count who is literate. The estimates being o!ered here do not attempt to reconcile such discrepancies. Coming to precise worldwide figures is impossible, for reasons noted above. To reiterate, this is simply a rough estimate to get some idea of the magnitude of orality.

xxxviiIn the “less developed” countries, 29% of the population is under age 15; in the “least developed” countries, 41% of the population us under age 15, according to the 2011 World Population Data Sheet.

xxxviiiInstitute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2010 (Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2010), 3. Available at http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/GED_2010_EN.pdf; accessed March 19, 2012.

xxxixIbid., 3-4.

xlO"ce of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, Census of India 2011: Provisional Population Totals, Paper 1 of 2011, India Series 1 (New Delhi, 2011), 102. Literacy is the subject of chapter 6: http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/data_files/india/Final%20PPT%202011_chapter6.pdf, accessed March 20, 2012.

xliIbid., 126.

xliiJ. Dudley Woodberry, ed., From Seed to Fruit, 2nd ed., (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Press, 2011), see the technical data article on the CD that is included with the book.

xliiiSee www.oralBible.com

xlivSee http://oralstrategies.org.

xlvMaking Disciples of Oral Learners, Lausanne Occasional Paper, no. 54 (Bangalore: Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization and International Orality Network, 2005).

xlviSamuel Chiang and Steve Evans, eds., Orality Breakouts (International Orality Network and the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, 2010).


40

INTRODUCTION

In 1990, I recall that the only reference to “storying” was

an advertisement for a book on “management by storying.” It was a few years later that the search engine Lycos.com found a few websites where people had posted items related to Chronological Bible Storying.

Fast forward to the present and most of the search engines now find a wide variety of articles related to Bible storying,

The Worldwide Spread of Bible Storying: A Look at Where We’ve Beenby J.O. Terry

Before missionary appointment, J.O. Terry served as a radio program producer for the Baptist Radio-TV Commission in the U.S. Appointed to the Philippines as a media missionary in 1968, Terry initially served that country as radio program producer, and later as media consultant for the Asia-Pacific Region Baptist missions. During 1984, Terry transferred to Singapore to be closer to South Asian countries and local radio, film, and audio cassette projects. In late 1987, he was introduced to Chronological Bible Teaching and the following year began studying the developing Chronological Bible Storying while learning to tell and teach the Bible stories to mostly non-literate village peoples in South and Southeast Asia. Until leaving for retirement in 2003 Terry taught hundreds of Bible Storying sessions and taught Bible Storying methodology in Asian, African, and Latin American countries. Currently, Terry publishes a Bible Storying Newsletter and has written several books on the methodology.

Chronological Bible Storying, biblical storytelling, Bible telling, and orality, as well as reports of local use by mission teams and mission agencies. What began in recent times as a rediscovery of the e!ectiveness of Chronological Bible Teaching evolved through a development process into a powerful, e!ective methodology for witness to the unevangelized oral communicator societies using their preferred means of learning.

The Worldwide Spread of Bible Storying: A Look at Where We’ve Been 41

What has driven the development of the Bible story methodology is a reproducible missiological strategy on one hand and a deliberate sensitivity to the listener’s spiritual worldview that informs story selection and how stories are taught and used by listeners on the other.

In the early days of my ministry career, “orality” was not a known term. During the development of a people-powered, reproducible witnessing methodology suitable for uneducated peoples living in rural, tribal cultures, the term "orality" was implied but not yet defined. Although in the background in early uses of Bible stories, the term was given a major focus when Dr. Avery Willis saw the potential for discipling the unevangelized peoples of both the oral and literate world. The events surrounding Table 71 at the Lausanne 2000 Amsterdam meeting, where major mission and translation agencies committed to finishing the task to engage

all unreached peoples, also gave a significant impetus to the term "orality”.

EARLY HISTORICAL USE OF BIBLE STORIESOrality was not considered a major factor in the early historical instances of telling Bible stories. There is evidence that Moravian missionaries were using Bible stories as a method of evangelizing in the Caribbean.While in Copenhagen in 1731, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf met a slave from the Danish West Indies and invited him to Herrnhut. Accepting the invitation, this slave visited Herrnhut and spoke concerning the need for the gospel among his fellow slaves. The church in Herrnhut picked up the burden, and one year later, two Moravians became the first missionaries to the slaves in the West Indies.i

42 Orality Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2012 J.O. Terry

Another historical account recalls that Count Zinzendorf wrote that the missionaries were not to let themselves “be blinded by reason as if people had to, in order, first learn to believe in God, after that Jesus. It is wrong because that God exists is obvious to them. They must be instructed of the Son; there is salvation in no other.” Talk about Jesus and this will lead naturally to a discussion of God and to the whole unfolding narrative of the history of salvation.ii

“Second,” instructed Zinzendorf, “you must go straight to the point and tell them about the life and death of Christ.” This proved necessary as a few individuals had gone to pagan cultures and had tried in vain to teach theology or to begin with truths of God.iii

A German mission superintendent wrote this of the value and use of Bible stories among the peoples of Nias Island, Indonesia, during the late 1800s:

We are told of the people of Nias that the Bible stories of the Old and New Testaments always made the deepest impression, and imparted a knowledge of God. Sometimes

the story of Abraham, sometimes that of Jacob, reflects their own experience…“The flood and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah always made an extraordinary impression as examples of God’s penal righteousness.” It was the same with the stories of the patriarchs, of Joseph’s fate, and finally the story of the Saviour….“The simple biblical Gospel...fits into the hearts of the children and adults of this primitive people as a screw fits into the nut.”—“they grasped with a childlike vividness the stories of creation, the fall, Jesus’ birth, His miracles, and especially His su!erings.”iv

G. F. Vicedom, a former missionary in Papua New Guinea, wrote an account of group conversion around 1900 and how missionary Christian Keysser used Bible stories:

Part of this teaching consisted of about forty stories from the Old and New Testaments. Candidates were required to learn these by heart, in order to ensure that those illiterate people should have a basic understanding of the Word of God. In connection with these stories Keysser used to


discuss with the candidates all the customs of the Papuan life and the old religion…. For the Papuan hearers, and I believe for others, too, the Bible stories which they learned prove their value in three ways. They tell men what God does for them in a quite definite situation, and what he requires of them. They explain more fully the relationship in which men stand to God. They make plain the response of God to the action of men. In this way they make it easier for the seeker after God to reach the decision which is required of him. Many of the people of the Bible became for the Papuans patterns of the way in which they themselves are expected to behave.v

The first real emphasis on orality came from an account by Hans Rudi Weber, a Swiss missionary to the Celebes Islands of Indonesia, following his service there in the early 1950s. Weber reminded readers that we cannot ignore the ways of communication familiar to those who are illiterate.

For these individuals, the most common method of communication is that of storytelling. Good storytelling

can transmit realities to those who are illiterate because, through their imagination, they are able to visualize the words they hear. Weber recalled that if you asked someone who is illiterate to describe another person, he or she would likely tell you a story about that person.

Weber further warned that merely telling stories to those who are illiterate may not firmly anchor the stories in their mind. It is therefore advisable to also provide active participative processes to help fix in the mind of those who are illiterate the story they have heard.vi So from his experiences, Weber introduced us to the world of oral learners, providing encouragement to teach as oral learners will learn.

I have exchanged correspondence with Dr. Weber who, even in his retirement, continued to teach the role and value of Bible stories for reaching the non-literate. This was my introduction to orality.

A book that told of early use of Bible stories to evangelize the Choco people of Panama came from Jacob Loewen. The chapter “Bible Stories: Method and Matrix”vii introduced me to a practical model of using Bible


stories that explained the value of worldview to inform the story selection.

The concept was brought to Panama by a set of Bible stories being used in Chile. The r e s u l t i n g t w e n t y -four stories selected for the Choco were told resulting in a report of a whole village coming to Christ after hearing the stories. In the 1950s, New Tribes missionary Glenn Prunty had told the stories. Loewen helped me to locate Prunty’s widow, who verified that was what happened. The missionaries there explained that the narrative form permitted them to meet the cultural relevance in both form and content and at the same time permitted avoiding a number of theological problems that would have hindered comprehension.viii

RECENT HISTORYI deliberately began with the early background to illustrate that a form of Bible storytelling had already been in use prior to the rediscovery and popularization of Chronological Bible Teaching

and later Bible storying format that has continued to spread widely among missionaries and among the peoples with whom they work. It is surely an a"rmation of the Lord’s blessing

to make his word accessible, understandable, relational, and memorable for all

peoples, whether non-literate, oral preference learners, or

literates lacking scripture in their heart language. The

following recounts what God has been doing with storytelling around the world in and through di!erent mission agencies and people.

SOUTHEAST ASIAFast forward to the 1970s when New Tribes missionary Trevor McIlwain faced a di"cult task of leading partially-evangelized Palawan Islanders to understand salvation. McIlwain realized that he needed to begin teaching in Genesis and continue chronologically through the Old Testament to give a firm foundation for the gospel.

When McIlwain shared his experience with other missionaries, they began telling and teaching Bible stories and including participative learning activities to help listeners to

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understand, relate to, and apply the teaching. McIlwain has shared his own experience in the first three volumes of Building on Firm Foundations.ix

Reports began to come from other New Tribes missionaries. This one is from Dale Palmer:

To go back a little bit in time, we New Tribes missionaries found a small group of Bisorio people in 1977….They were very keen for some missionaries to come work with them. The Kennell and Walker families moved in and began learning the language and culture of the Bisorio tribe. After several years they were able to present the biblical story, from Genesis

to Christ’s ascension, to the 60 or so people….

Some of these Bisorio believers talked to their relatives who live farther back in the mountains. These believers came back telling ….about the people who live in the headwaters of the April River tributary….

During the five weeks at Sabibi, Bob and George were able to teach the “old, old story” some 55 times, while the Bisorio believers shared and re-taught the stories at night around the fires. So these dear ones who had come out of the mountains were hearing for the first time, in their Bisorio tongue, that there is a God who knows all


things, who made all things, who has all power, that He is holy and will not tolerate sin. As they heard all these stories, the conviction of sin began to weigh heavily upon di!erent ones. As they heard of Jesus’ death on the cross and how he rose from the grave, the spark of faith was kindled in their hearts and one by one the darkness began to subside as God, by the Holy Spirit, revealed to them the Lord Jesus Christ, the Light of the world, through the teaching of God’s Word.Several said they had walked three and four days because they wanted to hear about this “God talk.”x

The account told of one man who walked three days with his wife and eight children. He said, “I wouldn’t walk that far to a tribal dance, I’m too old for that, but I wanted to hear this God talk.…I believe Jesus died for my sins, that’s what I believe.”

Other New Tribes reports came in the form of video re-enactments of Chronological Bible Teaching and storytelling among the Mouk people of Papua, New Guinea, where the Bible stories were coupled with literacy. In

the second of the “Ee-Taow!” videos, the Mouk believers were challenged to take the Bible stories to neighboring villages that had come to ask for the light they saw in the eyes of the Mouk believers.xi

Former New Tribes missionary Tom Ste!en related his own experiences among the Antipolo/Amduntug Ifugao in the Philippines. Ste!en told of his discovery that his people responded far better to the Bible stories than to simply teaching from the stories. Ste!en had begun with the Chronological Teaching model:

After several weeks of teaching lessons about God from a topical study approach, I made a startling discovery. I noticed the Ifugao’s interest level jumped dramatically when I inadvertently added an Old Testament story….Changing teaching styles resulted in increased comprehension, instant evangelists and a new appreciation of the e!ectiveness of stories in evangelism.xii

Ste!en also noted the value of participation among oral learners when he asked key individuals to review the discussion for latecomers.


John Wilson stressed the importance of participatory learning for oral communicators. He also reminded those working with oral learners to be repetitive and receptor-oriented, while being mindful of the limitations of oral learners.xiii

This brings us back to the Philippines and two successful story sets used, one on the islands of Luzon and one on Mindanao. Dell and Sue Schultze worked among the Ilongot peoples who were a storytelling culture. Their God and Manxiv story set utilized the chronological organization of thirty-five key stories sensitive to the local worldview. These were accompanied by participation-based dialogue learning activities. This story set was later translated into English for sharing with other missionaries. The last correspondence with the Schultzes indicated the stories were still in use after more than twenty years.

At least one translation of these stories into Indonesian as Sampaika Cerita Kesalamatan was used in ministry to a women’s sewing group in Bandung.xv Other story sets focusing on the prophets were in early use among the Sundanese and in children’s Bible stories conducted in kampongs

in the Bandung area. When confronted by a mother about the stories she was teaching, a Bible story leader replied, “If you wish, I will come and tell you and your friends the same stories, and then you can decide.”

Another story set that has found widespread use on Mindanao was compiled by Bryan and Diane Thomas in the Cebuano language. Based on a fifty-four story sets of lessons, it has found use among tribals and as the basic story set taught to trainees at the Asian Rural Life Development Center. The stories were translated into English by Je! and Regina Palmer and published as Chronological Storytelling: Telling the Bible Storyxvi and most popularly known as 54 Bible Stories. These stories were taught to evangelists in Eastern Java and Bali, Indonesia, where an Australian missionary in Surabaya began using the Bible stories in witness to factory workers living in dormitories.

Another missionary couple working among literate o"ce workers south of Manila compiled a Keystone Evangelism Manual which is sensitive to Filipino cultural issues and provides a Bible story track to


faith in Christ.xvii They were already using Bible storying in numerous barrio locations in the provinces south of Manila.

A couple working on Mindanao was able to gain access to local schools to teach moral education using Bible s t o r i e s . S c h o o l authorities valued the t e a c h i n g that was continued until the c o u p l e retired.

Also on Mindanao, a Filipino Bible storying trainer by the name of Johani G. was teaching 103 Bible stories to young tribal trainees in an out-of-school course that included tribal evangelism, agriculture, and community health. At the conclusion of each training session, an oral exam was given by pointing to one of the representative story pictures on the wall and having a trainee tell that story and

continuing with following stories until another trainee was selected. It was later reported that revival was breaking out in many of the tribal churches when the young

leaders returned home.

A missionary who was trained in Chronological Bible Storying at the Asian Rural Life Development Center then took the training to Cambodia, where he began training a group of pastors. The training was later coupled with clean water projects to give villagers drinkable water.

The stories were also used in literacy programs. One older couple came to teach medical English to doctors at the hospital in Phnom Penh. They lived on a road leading to a monastery. Monks walked past their gate often; one day, one of the monks asked if the couple would teach the group English. The wife compiled a chronological set of 133 one-paragraph Bible stories


and began her English teaching. The monks asked for a copy of the stories and soon began distributing them in thirteen other monasteries.

Another report tells of teaching seventy-two stories from the creation to Paul’s journeys. One woman, Ming Soka, learned each story detail by detail. “I help them store it in their hearts because there they cannot lose it and no one can take it away,” she says. Ming Soka feels called to bring this same experience to others who are struggling in their faith.

In Myanmar, Bible storying was first used for theological education among tribal workers who needed the panoramic story of redemption. One couple who heard the story of Jesus feeding the multitude decided to have a friendship gathering of some Buddhist friends so they could witness to them. But many more came than anticipated. The guests soon realized there was not enough food for everyone. But the couple had faith and believed that if Jesus could feed a multitude that they too could feed this group with his help. So they prayed, thanking God for the opportunity and food and began to serve. Not only did the food

not run out, but there was food remaining that could be given to neighbors. What happened in the miracle was not lost on the Buddhists who wanted to know more about this Jesus.

Back in the Philippines another couple, Dan and Cara Wood, who worked among urban tribal businessmen on Mindanao, began using Chronological Bible Storying in their Mobile Out-of-School Training (MOST) for youth. During one training, a pastor (who also taught air-conditioning repair) did storying with/to over one hundred students.

Several interesting stories have also come from Northeastern Thailand. One missionary had the Bible stories recorded on audiocassettes which she played for the people and then left copies behind. One woman told her that she really liked the stories from the “machine” best because it always told the stories the same way!

With another group of Hmong people, this missionary told the story of Adam and Eve and the temptation, using pictures that depicted the serpent in the tree. After the story, one of the elders


said, “Now I understand. You see, we knew from old stories that at one time the serpent was very beautiful and had legs. But something bad happened and the serpent was punished and from then on had to crawl like a worm. Now we know what happened.” Although not the exact point of the story, in this way the story resonated with their worldview and was a point of interest and relationship.

AFRICANot all Bible storying as a methodology was intentional. Vincent Donovan, a Catholic missionary among the Masai, was sent to instruct the people in the practice of their faith. He had encountered various di"culties in finding a common ground for his teaching. However, in time he discovered the Masai love stories. He recounted:

When some of those early, bible-less churches used to gather for liturgy, the leaders often asked those assembled to recite or recall all the important stories and events in the life of Jesus. When they all had contributed what they knew and remembered, they had the equivalent of a gospel for

that liturgy…For the illiterate Masai, no other method could better serve our purpose. I would try to convey to them what I knew from the written gospels and simply ask them to recount afterwards what they remembered of the stories and sayings of Jesus.xviii

Another report came from Senegal in West Africa. New Tribes missionary Dubby Rodda wrote an article for SEEDBED journal describing his use of Chronological Bible Teaching among Muslims. He introduced a comparative worldview between local listeners and Christ’s


disciples, a list of doctrines necessary for salvation, and a multi-tier set of stories from must-tell to those to tell if opportunity permitted.xix

Bible storying training was brought to West Africa in 1990, 1991, and again in 1992. A couple working among the Jula people in Burkina Faso were given copies of God and Man and sent out to teach the stories and lessons. An invitation came after almost two years of enduring a wide-spread famine. Six of the women indicated a desire to follow Jesus. Among the thirty men, there were no decisions. With a heavy heart, the missionaries prepared to say good-bye before home leave. As they did so, the spokesman for the men stood beside the road with his hoe over his shoulder and when the missionary saw him and stopped to say good-bye, the old leader threw down his hoe and embraced the missionary. “I’ve been waiting for you here because I knew you would come today, and I wanted to speak to you privately,” he said. “I had to tell you. I’ve been going over all of

those stories you’ve been telling us. I’ve read some of them myself. I had to tell you, I have seen the truth. The truth is Jesus!”

Tears filled his eyes. “I cannot tell my people now. If I do, they will chase me from the village. But I think by harvest time they will have seen the change in me, and I can tell them then. But I knew I had to tell you, and to say thank you.”xx

In The Gambia, a missionary couple walked the length of the Gambia River telling Bible stories. Local people began asking for audiocassettes of the stories. A couple trained in Bible storying at Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth returned to Senegal and developed story sets in Wolof. These included bilingual sets to use in teaching English as a Second Language.


In Niger, a Bible storying training went alongside of a village receiving a latrine installation and hygiene classes. The door was opened the first time for many to hear the gospel. Recently, Dale Fisher (StoryRunners) and a team returned from Niger. Dale shared:

By the end of this training, each person knew how to learn a story and lead a group. Each story group is reproducible, meaning that the group can divide again and again and still be led by anyone who has been participating in the group. Literacy is not required. The stories they learn and discuss are good for evangelism, discipleship, and leadership training.

The strategy for growing the story groups at the Hausa Bible School calls for the teachers to meet each weekend to develop the story they will use to lead the student story groups on Monday morning. The teachers and students live on campus so it’s a great situation. After the Monday morning story groups, the students will then spend the afternoon at the market which is only a ten-minute walk….The students will tell

the stories to anyone who is interested and invite them to join a weekly story group that they will lead.xxi

Recently, South Africa Bible storying was also introduced among the Zulus. Kurt Jarvis of CBS4Kids held training for children’s workers among the Zulus. The story sets for children have been translated into Zulu. Meanwhile, Bible storying training has continued in Ivory Coast, Kenya, and soon in Honduras.

SOUTH ASIABack in Asia a request came from Pakistan for training among Baloch and Punjabi leaders. At the conclusion of one session, an elder Punjabi man sang the story of Jonah. An interesting experience happened to me while teaching Marwari people in that country. Each day, we taught multiple stories to the group and at night they would retell the stories and select one to dramatize. That day, we had the story of the flood and the group wanted to dramatize it that night. I was chosen to be one of the people who died in the flood.

After the flood came and I died, old Noah sent out a raven that pecked on the dead bodies but did


not return. Noah later sent out a young lady who was the dove. She circled but could not find a place to rest, so returned to the Ark. Noah sent the dove out again, and this time she flew out the door into the night and returned with a freshly picked leaf in her beak. Noah was pleased, opened the Ark, and led the family out and prepared a sacrifice. Then, Noah held up a picture of the r a i n b o w and the drama was finished.

As we discussed the story, N o a h reminded me that I had not told the story correc t ly that day. In an attempt to simplify the story for these mostly non-literate people, I had left out the birds. So Noah informed me of my error and explained that in their culture “white pigeons” (doves) were good omen birds and black birds were bad omens of things to come. So naturally, when Noah saw the good omen, he knew that God’s judgment had ended. It was a lesson in worldview and storycrafting for me!

At the Women’s Christian Hospital in Shikarpur, Pakistan, many local women deliver their babies. The hospital sta! wanted training in Bible storying to use during the short stay in the hospital and to be continued when the outpatient team went to visit the new mothers in the villages. Among those trained was the man who drove the

women home. One of the nurses later told me that the driver had learned enough to gather men in the villages and tell them Bible stories while the nurses shared stories with the women inside.

A worker among the Jat Sikhs in north India reported that she had trained her local team to tell stories in their own venues. When it came time for home leave, she


figured that all the work would come to a halt until she returned. After arriving in the U.S, word came from the team that they were carrying on the teaching just as they had done while the missionary was there. Later, an audiocassette series was recorded with stories and music to blend with their culture.

In Orissa, India, Bible storying brought the Bible to oral leaders and the people in their spoken language until a translation of the Bible was completed. Kui tribal leaders were then trained to tell the Bible stories while assisting local farmers in planting a bamboo cash crop.

In Bangladesh, Bible storying was first introduced to some of the Koch tribal groups along a river north of Dhaka. In one training session in Feni, on the east side, a group of agricultural and community health workers were learning the stories. On the last day, the Passion and resurrection stories of Jesus were being reviewed, and three men arrived and sat to hear the stories.

When the training was finished, the men shared that they had come from a place with six hundred families. Someone had

come for a brief visit and told them about Jesus. Somehow these men had heard about the training from the Jesus stories. They were asking for someone to come and tell them. At the time, it was in an area where foreigners were not allowed so one of the men in the training session said, “I’ll go!”

At another training session in that same city, all the trainees were required to tell at least one Bible story. The adults had finished and we were about to close with prayer when a young girl who had been present for the whole week stood up and said, “I haven’t told my story yet.” We gave her permission not knowing what to expect. This young lady searched through the teaching pictures, found the story of Jesus feeding the multitude and proceeded to tell one of the most accurate Bible stories of the week.

At another training session, a non-literate young woman sat all week listening to the stories. In the evenings when the trainees practiced retelling the stories, this young lady usually had one of the best. As the participants were preparing to depart on the final day, she said, “When I get back to


my village I am going to tell the people all I have heard this week.”

In a small mud-and-thatch church in the hills, another young man nervously but successfully told the story of Adam and Eve. When he finished, we asked where he had learned to do this. As it turned out, he had learned from a pastor who was in one of the training sessions two years before.

In Nepal, the Bible storying concept was not as well received by the literate pastors who preferred to preach and teach as they had learned from other westerners. However, among the less educated the response was very di!erent. During a Bible storying training session in far West Nepal, stories about baptism were told and one of the men said that he wanted to be baptized like the people in the stories. Because it was the dry season and there was little water in the rivers, we had to drive several miles up a river bed to find a pothole deep enough. The man was baptized in that ice cold water and leaped up rejoicing.

In nearby Bhutan, with its limited access, the introduction of Bible storying came during the King’s birthday celebration, when people were free to attend

a Bible conference. For the better part of a week, there was discipleship teaching and an opportunity to tell Bible stories both to affirm believers and to open the hearts of those who were seekers. The last story I had opportunity to share was a compiled story of Peter beginning with his first introduction to Jesus and moving through his epistles where he talked about persevering in the face of persecution—a very appropriate theme for the local people.

The evangelical community in Karnataka State of South India banded together several years ago to use the Storying Training for Trainers (ST4T) method to equip congregations in existing house churches to learn Bible stories so members could share the stories with neighbors and the community. A goal of fifty thousand new house churches was set by the year 2025. When I was there several years ago, around five thousand new churches had already been planted.

During my two-week stay, I was privileged to share the creation-to-Christ story in more than a dozen churches and venues. After leaving one town, the people followed our team to the next town, where


the crowd was then too big for the building. A shamyana or tent was quickly erected, and here we taught the stories. One account given to me of this time was about an elderly non-literate pastor who had to have children read the Bible stories to him over and over until he learned them. The pastor would then recite the stories several times until his congregation also learned the stories and could repeat them back to the pastor. He would then send the people out to share the stories with their neighbors.

I could have easily filled this article with stories and reports from India shared by Paul Mark (pseudonym used here for security reasons). Several times a week, pastors Paul had trained would share how the stories brought healing, forgiveness of sin, and encouragement to many non-believers. Many of these people would, as a result, take baptism and attend church. If you are not currently a subscriber to Stories from Storytellers, I recommend doing so.xxii

SOUTH AMERICAIn Brazil, missionary Christy Brawner developed a short set of evangelistic and discipleship story lessons from the Book

of Matthew. When I asked her why she chose Matthew, she responded that many have New Testaments and that Matthew is easy to find. To date, Christy has shared these stories over seven hundred times the favelas (slum areas) on the hillsides on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro!

Another missionary, Jack Day, found that even though many young Brazilian pastors were literate, they learned and performed better using Bible stories. Jack was unaware of the growing use of Bible stories in other parts of the world. The Holy Spirit was raising awareness in many places simultaneously.

In Suriname, a couple working among the Aukaner people saw a good response when they introduced Bible stories. One e set of stories on the theme “Do not fear,” was later broadcast daily in the local language when a radio station was established. One Aukaner artists drew illustrations of the stories and when the people saw the pictures, they exclaimed, “That is us!” By making the pictures relational, it reduced the foreignness of the message.

In Colombia, Bible storying training was taken to two


indigenous, interior peoples. In Peru, Bible translators helped workers to p r e p a r e stories for the Ashenika people of the Amazon Basin. In Buenos Aires, after a Bible storying training session, one woman of Indian heritage decided to return to India to teach stories of God’s love to the outcaste peoples. Today, she teaches women and children in this area.

In Bolivia, a former missionary told the story of how the Aymara people were ashamed to speak their own heart language. As a result, Bible stories were being taught in Spanish. One group decided to begin learning the stories in their seldom-used Aymara language. As the group struggled to put a story into Aymara, one illiterate woman who had never said a word began telling the story in Aymara. She knew the whole story. It was a reminder that heart languages are the real path to reaching someone for Jesus.xxiii

Central America and CaribbeanIn Haiti, Bible storying had been introduced before the 2010 earthquake. One of the first

believers was a voodoo priestess. That first group later became a

church and a set of Bible story songs was recorded

in Haitian Creole.

In Guatemala, Bible storying is used among the Nicodemus

People—business people who come to study at night. Several projects have been underway to bring sets of Bible stories to the Mayan indigenous peoples. One early project was for the Todos Santos Mam, among whom non-literacy is 90%. The stories were recorded in Todo Santos Mam on audiocassettes.

Bible storying is also being used among the indigenous peoples around Oaxaca.

Cleve Turner in Honduras reported that an Introduction to Storying conference was held among pastors to help them understand how they can reach out to oral learners.

In Costa Rica, Bible storying was taken to those who are deaf and live an isolated life. Pastor Jerry Seale was visiting in San Jose and happened upon a crowd of deaf people and began negotiating his way into their conversations. Someone said, “Tell us a good


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story in your signs!” Seale signed the Joseph story since many of their stories are about poor working conditions in San Jose.

EUROPEIn France, a missionary formerly serving in the Middle East was now teaching survival French to women from many West and North African countries. She began to use Bible storying in her teaching and through this touched not only many of those women but caught the attention of European missionaries who wanted training. Europeans who received training now serve in various Central Asian and West African countries and report good response from the Bible stories.

EAST ASIAAn interesting report from a missionary who was attempting to use Bible storying in English conversation classes came from Japan. When the fast pace of going from story to story proved too much for the students, he adapted the approach using only the birth to death story of Moses. By studying only one person and


his story, the young people were better able to track the story. One student shared, “I didn’t know the Bible could be so interesting!”

In Mainland China, I was asked to meet with a group of Chinese young people to share Bible stories. One young itinerant evangelist asked for my set of teaching pictures to use when he told the stories. A young woman said that her family needed to hear these stories. In Taiwan, Bible stories have been used among elderly women in rest homes. A young woman asked about stories that mentioned ancestors, dying, and death to use with her parents to bring them to faith in Jesus.

These are but a few of the stories others have shared with me. There are many more.


BIBLE STORYING WITH LITERATESBible stories are not just for children and Bible storying is not just for those who are illiterate. In fact, in many countries, when someone begins to tell stories, listeners gather. And one should not be ashamed to tell the Bible stories in the presence of those who are literate. For example, while in India, I visited a member of Congress and several of his lawyer friends. I was asked to speak to the group, so I told several Bible stories. The group was spellbound and the host later shared that he would like to hear more.

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Michael Novelli has published the book

Shaped by the Storyxxiv especially for use among

literate youths. There is a simple overview of Bible

storying methodology, but the real value of the book

is the many testimonies from youth leaders of how

Bible storying has caught the interest of their literate youth.

The growth of orality and Bible storying and teaching has been extraordinary over the past few decades. God is indeed using this movement to draw many to Himself. We can’t wait to see what the next ten to twenty years has in store!

EndnotesiAugust Gottlieb Spangenberg, The Life of Nicolas Lewis Count Zinzendorf, London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1838.

iiChristian History, Vol 1, No. 1, Box 540, Worcester, PA 19490, 1893 (pp 26).

iiiChristian History, Vol 1, No. 1, Box 540, Worcester, PA 19490, 1893. (pp 3).

ivJohannes G. Warneck, The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism, Baker Book House, 1954. p. 231

vG. F. Vicedom, Church and People in New Guinea, World Christian Handbooks, No. 38 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1961.

viHans Rudi Weber, The Communication of the Gospel to Illiterates, SCM Press Ltd., 1954

viiJacob Loewen, Culture and Human Values: Christian Intervention in Anthropological Perspective, William Carey Library, 1975.

viiiOp cit. page 376.

ixTrevor McIlwain, Building on Firm Foundations, New Tribes Mission, 1988 and following.

xR. Dale Palmer, a report dated January, 1987.

xi“Ee-Taow!” The Next Chapter, New Tribes Mission, Sanford, FL, 1989.

xiiTom A. Ste!en, Passing the Baton: Church Planting that Empowers, Center for Organizational & Ministry Development, La Habra: 1993.

xiiiJohn D. Wilson, “What It Takes to Reach People in Oral Cultures,”

Evangelical Missions Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2, April, 1991, pp. 154-158.

xivDell and Sue Schultze, God and Man, New Tribes Mission and CSM Publications, Manila, 1984.

xvDell & Rachel Schultze, Sampaikan Cerita Keselamatan, Lembaga Literatur Baptis, 1994.

xviBryan and Diane Thomas, Chronological Storytelling, New Tribes Mission and CSM Publications, Manila, 1991.

xviiPhil and Retha Brewster, Keystone Evangelism Manual, CSM Publications, 2001, Manila.

xviiiVincent J. Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1978. pp 76, 97.

xixDavid (Dubby) Rodda, “Sharing the Gospel with Muslims: A Chronological Approach.” SEEDBED, Vol. VII, No. 4, pp 51-58 (1992), a journal of Arab World Ministries.

xxLaNette Thompson, Diaradugu Diary, copies available from [email protected]. 1993.

xxiDale & Beth Fisher, StoryRunners, [email protected].

xxiiPaul Mark, Stories from Storytellers, [email protected].

xxiiiAmanda Dimperio, “A Case for Heart Language,” February 10, 2003.

xxivMichael Novelli, Shaped by the Story: Helping Students Encounter God in a New Way, Zondervan, 2008.


62

The Two Journeys of Shanti and Jasmineby Tricia Stringer

Tricia Stringer’s passion is for all believers to be equipped to e!ectively share their faith, disciple others, and plant churches using Bible storying. She and her family have lived and ministered in France, Benin, and South Asia for the past thirteen years.

Shanti and Jasmine come from very di!erent backgrounds,

but both belong to the Information Technology (IT) community in the country where we work. Shanti was a ‘born Christian’ who grew up going to church and whose entire extended family had been going to church for generations. When she was a teenager, Shanti understood what it meant to choose to follow Jesus instead of being ‘born into’ the faith, and she made a conscious decision to follow him wholeheartedly.

Jasmine, on the other hand, was born a Hindu and grew up going to Hindu temples with her extended family. This had been the family practice for generations. As a teenager, several people helped Jasmine come to believe that there was only one God, and that his name was Jesus. Jasmine now follows only Jesus, but the rest of her family has not yet made that decision. Both Jasmine and Shanti are highly educated IT professionals and fluent in English.

The Two Journeys of Shanti and Jasmine 63

When I met Jasmine and Shanti, they were friends who loved Jesus and wanted to serve him. They knew Jesus had commanded them to tell people about him, but they weren’t sure how to do it. So they hit the streets of our city, passing out tracts and talking to people in parks and major shopping areas. What wonderful intentions and beautiful hearts! Unfortunately, it didn’t work for them.

A NEW WAY OF SHARING THE GOSPELThey decided they needed help so I facilitated a one-day training in how to tell their stories and how to use the story of the demon-possessed man (see Mark 5:1-20) as an initial hook to sharing the gospel.

They soon realized that sharing stories could be an effective evangelism strategy and began coming regularly to our house for a weekly “satsang”, or “meeting of truth”, where we worship in a culturally-appropriate way and, of course, tell stories.

JASMINE’S JOURNEYJasmine began to see that we were systematically telling a set of stories with a theme and purpose for evangelism and discipleship and decided she should begin telling her non-believing family the stories. She deeply appreciated the last question we asked each week: “To whom will you tell this story this week?”

The story set began in a non-threatening way with the story of David: his beautiful relationship with God, how he broke it, and how it was restored after he repented. As Jasmine told a story each week to her mother, father, and brother at home, she began to see that they were interested; they listened to her in a way they hadn’t before. It was as if Jasmine had found a new freedom—she had something valuable to say to her non-believing community.

64 Orality Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2012 Tricia Stringer

The story set continued to the stories of Daniel’s life. One night, Jasmine shared, “My parents are starting to understand that they should worship only the creator God, and no other. I didn’t even have to tell them—they are just getting it from the stories!”

Then another b r e a k t h r o u g h came. I told the story from Daniel 7 about the One coming in the clouds who looked like a “son of man”, and the Ancient of Days giving him all authority, and all nations bowing before him. Jasmine exclaimed, “I finally got it! The Trinity! I now know how to explain it!” She explained that this proved to her that Jesus was fully God and fully man, because he looked like a man (that’s how Daniel recognized him), and he was given authority and the right to be worshiped—a right only given to God himself.

Indeed, the story is a clear picture of two of the three Persons of the Trinity in one place at one time. There are other stories that can

be used to explain the Trinity, but this is the one with which Jasmine identified.

I would never have chosen this story to teach this concept, but thankfully I wasn’t trying

to control her learning experience. If I had been, I might have paraded past her many stories that meant nothing to her, frustrating both of us. Instead, she had experienced the power of a special story which opened up a new world of understanding for her.

She soon found new freedom to share with

not only her parents, but with her colleagues and friends. She began to systematically tell the stories to a friend, and in the cab on the way to her o"ce in the mornings. One day, she traveled three hours one way to a temple with her friend just so she could tell her the stories! Jasmine occasionally even calls me late at night to practice a story before she tells it to her two aunts —her newest storying group–who own salons. One morning each week, Jasmine gathers the families together and tells them a story.

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SHANTI’S JOURNEYShanti hasn’t been so easy to convince; in fact, I’m not sure that she will use stories for the rest of her life. However, even Shanti would say that stories have opened her eyes to new concepts and have helped her to study her Bible better. Stories have even challenged some of her long-held misconceptions.

Shanti first came to the Sunday night storying group thinking that she already knew too much about the Bible to actually glean anything from a simple story. She was convinced she would be bored. However, she continued attending and took part in the training on how to tell her own story and pair it with the story of the demon-possessed man.

Shanti thought it was a good idea to use simple, non-churchy words in the stories. For example, when she heard that she could say “having a right/good relationship with God” in place of “righteous”, she came to a deeper understanding of the

meanings of these words that she had heard all her life. She also began to understand that some words, like “baptism”,” were actually understood di!erently in her culture than the way they were meant to be understood in the Bible. For the first time she began using other terms to accurately portray what really happens when someone is baptized.

But Shanti still hesitated to tell other people stories. Then

her turn came to teach children’s Sunday school at church. She was presenting on the Holy Spirit and decided to tell the story of Pentecost.

She practiced her story and the seven simple questions that came after with me. When she told the story, the children loved it so much that many shared it with their parents. Because the children seemed to really grasp the concept of the Holy Spirit, Shanti felt she perhaps could tell stories! She began bringing friends to the storying group who she thought would benefit from the non-traditional church setting.

Then the crisis came. I told her the story in John 9 of the man born blind. I asked the normal

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questions, but at the second question---“What bothered you about this story?”---she began to giggle nervously. She answered, “This story has always bothered me. It doesn’t fit my theology.” As we talked, it became clear that she believed that all physical ailments and bad things that happened to a person are the direct result of sin and unbelief. This story, however, was clear that this man’s blindness was not the result of sin, but so that “the power of God could be seen in him”. The story, questions, and resulting discussion forced her to face a problem in her theology that she had never before been forced to confront.

Her thinking didn’t change that night; however, she did go home considering what we had discussed. In the following weeks she heard other stories that also confronted her belief (e.g., David and Bathsheba’s baby dying even after they were forgiven; Daniel’s persecution). These weren’t new stories to her, but she was experiencing them in a new way as she learned to tell and discuss them. Each time, however, she avoided discussing her questionable theology.

She was soon, however, forced to live out the story. Even though she felt like she had been obeying God, something ‘bad’ happened to her. How has this happened? she wondered. I reminded her of John 9.

A few weeks later, we told the story again in the larger storying group. During the discussion, Shanti said, “This story used to bother me, because I didn’t agree with it. But now, after what happened to me, I’m changing my beliefs about why bad things happen to people.” It took a year and a half of story after story for Shanti to come to this conclusion. Some people say that’s too long. The fact is, Shanti’s entire worldview is changing, and it will take time as she experiences life alongside the stories taking root in her heart. Today, every time she’s tempted to go back to her old way of thinking, a story will pop into her head that will remind her of Truth.

Shanti and I continue to meet every week. Recently, studying the Bible had become a little di"cult for her, and she found herself failing asleep while reading. I suggested she craft a story for each section she reads as part of her quiet time, and then telling


that story to herself throughout the week. At first, this seemed silly to her. Now, she is coming every week with a new story that she has crafted. Shanti has finally incorporated storying into her life.

EXPERIENCING THE BIBLE I remember someone snickering three years ago when we said we were moving to the IT part of town to story with IT professionals. People would comment, “Why them? They’re literate. They want answers, studies, an in-depth study on the original languages, and tables and charts.” This was true about some people. Some did want a study that gave them all the answers. Some wanted to go back to the original Hebrew and Greek text. Some wanted fill-in-the-blank worksheets and textbooks.

But some wanted freedom to experience and live out the story themselves without getting all the answer in one sitting. They wanted to live it out until the answer came through the experiences themselves. Those who were willing to try storying received something they never could have received through a workbook.

I’m reminded of the story of the blind man in the Gospel of John. The man was asked to explain how it came to be that he was healed of the blindness he had from birth. He didn’t know; all he had was his experience: “All I know is that once I was blind, but now I see.” Rejected from his place of worship, Jesus found him and asked, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

The Son of Man was a story the blind man had heard all his life, and now he wanted to experience it. “Show him to me,” he said. Jesus replied, “I AM he,” and the man fell down and worshiped him.

Once the blind man met the Son of Man, an entirely new depth of worship was revealed to him. As Jasmine and Shanti met with Jesus through these stories, they’ve begun to experience him in new ways as well. Slowly but steadily, their worldviews have been expanding and deepening as they apply each story to their own lives.

I am amazed at how far they have come and the things they are now willing to do.

I’m amazed at the ease in which they retell stories after hearing them only once.


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I’m amazed at the deep truths and personal doubts that they’re willing to explore during the discussion times.

I’m amazed at how sometimes they both speak up at the same time when asked who will tell the story the following week.

I’m amazed at the friends they’ve known for so long, with whom they’ve only shared superficially until they began telling stories.

The theology they have learned along the way is what the Holy Spirit has deemed necessary for them to learn at this time in their


lives. They are now capable of learning a story and asking the Holy Spirit to teach them through

the story. So even better

than them learning a set

of theological p r i n c i p l e s ,

they’ve learned how to extract

good theology from the word of God, and to live it out.

My relationship with these two women is changing. Soon, I will move to another country. But I’m confident that they have the tools to continue on this journey to a deeper relationship with Jesus.

70

One Thousand Orphans Tell God’s Storyby Marlene LeFever

Marlene LeFever is Vice President of Educational Development for David C. Cook Global Mission. She developed the orality unit mentioned in this article. For a free copy and to receive updates on this orphan initiative, email her at [email protected].

“By the end of the month, you’ll be able to do

something most pastors can’t do!” The auntie smiled at her club of forty orphans meeting outside a home in the foothills of the Himalayas. They were meeting three times a week for what the children called their “Jesus Fun Club.”

“You’ll be able to tell the whole big, exciting, amazing story of the Bible!”

This woman—and dozens of Christian workers like her—spent the month of December 2011 in India, showing children that the Bible is not a book of unrelated stories. Instead, it’s one beautiful story of a Heavenly Father’s love. During that Christmas month, over one thousand orphans in dozens of India’s eighteen thousand Christian orphanages learned that their Heavenly Father moved heaven and earth to prove his love for them.

The twelve lessons, given three a week for four weeks, followed

a familiar pattern to people involved in the orality movement. First, the auntie (a respectful title for the club leader) would tell or read the story. The big redemption story is part of David C. Cook’s Global Mission club project for orphans and other children at risk. The story began with the Creation, followed by the Fall, life outside the Garden, the great flood, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, and the parts

One Thousand Orphans Tell God’s Story 71

they played in the redemption story. Then Jesus, our Redeemer, came. He lived, died, and rose again for us. Finally, the children learned the great, glorious end of the story: they would have a real home with their Father God forever. After each day’s portion of the story, the children divided into pairs and told the story to each other. “You forgot the part about God’s promise to Noah,” Afreen grinned as she corrected her partner. “I think the rainbow is the prettiest part!”

At this point, the children had heard or told the story portion three times. Next, they discussed it. They were encouraged to think more deeply than simply giving fill-in-the-blank answers. In the segment about Noah, they

answered these questions:

do you know that God wanted to save the other people, too?

the door. Why is that important to the story?

from this story?

Each child had a personal story that brought him or her to the orphanage. Those stories were filled with pain and danger.

One child’s father hung his mother.

One girl’s mother had leprosy, and although the girl was healthy, she will always be viewed in her society as untouchable. She will only marry if she marries another healthy child of a leper.

72 Orality Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2012 Marlene LeFever

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Another child was HIV-positive, although he didn’t know it yet. His father was dead, and his mother dying.

A young teen was left by her mother with the promise that in a week she would return to the orphanage to bring her home. That was seven years ago.

Their own stories made God’s special story of love precious to them. They learned the Bible’s promise that no matter how hard things are, these children will always have a Father God. They are not alone. “I used to want to kill my father because he killed my mother,” Preetham admitted. “Now, the big Bible story showed me that God forgave me. I won’t kill my father when I grow up. Instead I’ll find him, and tell him that God forgives him, and I do, too.”

After the children heard the story and discussed it, they read the story in their Action Bibles, a comic-book-style Bible that covers most of the stories in scripture. Using The Action Bible breaks with a strict orality pattern. Because most of these children will have a better future

if they can master English, The Action Bible was used to help them learn the language. Their eyes moved back and forth

from the words to the pictures, confirming

what they heard and read, and enlarging their

vocabulary.

The auntie was almost finished with the day’s

part of the big Bible story. “I want you to tell today’s

story to one other person before we meet again. It can

be someone who is in this club, or it can be someone

who isn’t here. Tell it over and over so you’ll never forget what your real Father has done for all his children.”

Ayesha came up to the auntie after the club ended. “I can tell the whole story perfectly,” she announced. “All the parts we’ve learned so far! Want to hear me?” Auntie knew she would miss her bus and have to wait an hour to catch the next one. She smiled and sat down. “I’d love to, Ayesha.” As Ayesha started to tell the most wonderful story ever told, the other children settled down close to the auntie and listened one more time.

One Thousand Orphans Tell God’s Story 73

74

Mind the Gap: Bhutan as a Case Study by Steve Evans

Steve Evans is a communications specialist and cultural researcher since 1982. He studied at Howard Payne University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and East Tennessee State University. He is the 2008 recipient of the prestigious Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling and has published extensively on the topic of Orality. He lives in London.

“Mind the gap” is an expression in Great

Britain to warn passengers of the dangerous gap between the railway or metro platform and the train stopped on the tracks. A mis-step could wreak havoc! So it is in the world of orality. There are many gaps in our understanding of this world and a mis-step could wreak havoc if we are trying to e!ectively reach this world.

The Buddhist nation of Bhutan, nestled in the Himalayan Mountains, is facing a severe socio-cultural crisis as conflicting forms of communication bombard its peoples. The gap is ever widening, and quickly. Some in Bhutan advocate for the power of story to help alleviate the problem.

Dasho Kinley Dorji, former chief editor of Bhutan’s Kuensel News Corp, feels his country is going through di"cult times and is on the road to a complete destruction

of the country’s v a l u e s systems. O n e way to c o m b a t this, he believes, is to c r e a t e s t o r i e s c a l l i n g attention to the situation and ensure that those stories are shared and heard.

His creative non-fiction short story, “Pretty Woman”, portrays how the 1999 introduction of television to Bhutan thrust the country into dramatic and painful change. The story tells how, over a period of seven years, a young boy and a young woman collide with forces much greater than themselves, their community, and even their country. She is the prettiest girl

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Mind the Gap: Bhutan as a Case Study 75

around—strong, sun-darkened, and hard working, with a face as round as the moon and a singing voice that enchants all the men. He is a young boy, growing up in a volatile climate of change, confused by what he observes.

“The story invites important questions,” Dorji explains. “Are the side e!ects of development taking a toll that is more powerful than the e!ects of mainstream development? This is symbolized by the immediate excitement over television that far exceeds the advantages of electricity as a source of power for utilities.” (Electricity comes to the story’s setting in 2003.) “In a country where there are now an estimated 50,000 television sets compared with 14,000 computers, television becomes a major status symbol and dominates the altar in the altar room” Dorji continues.

In seven years, the country’s hero is no longer the king; instead, the heroes are the athletic superstars and Bollywood film actors. Likewise, the beautiful image of the hard-working village girl is replaced by singing and dancing Bollywood stars and bikini-clad Pepsi models. The end of “Pretty Woman” is poignant and bittersweet:

Aum Thrimi looks into the distance. “They are so pretty, the girls. They are so thin. They are so fair. They smell so nice.” She looks at Kuenley, a gangly 5’9” boy, standing with his hands in his pockets.

She turns and looks out the window again. “Better study hard, Kuenley. Otherwise, you’ll have to live in the village. You have to work all day in the sun. You have to walk everywhere with no shoes. You have to carry manure on your back and smell of cow dung. In the village, you will quickly become ugly. We

76 Orality Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2012 Steve Evans

have no choice because we are already old and ugly.”

Kuenley says nothing. He does not know what to say. Thrimi is 27 years old. She has not changed. But the world had changed.

“This story is Bhutan’s story,” Dorji shares. “The metamorphosis of a rural society is documented through the eyes, and the confusion of a Bhutanese youth who personifies a generation in transition. There are no subtleties because the experience is not subtle.”

Mind the Gap: Bhutan as a Case Study 77

The message that comes through as the community feels the impact of globalization is that there is an urgent need to put on the brakes before it is too late to do anything about it.

Bhutan is a country crying for help and believes in the power of story to help them.

and your work or ministry?

Share your thoughts with me at [email protected].

78

Let’s Do the Twist: Learning the Dance of Telling Interesting Bible Storiesby Janet Stahl

Janet Stahl serves as the Orality Coordinator for The Seed Company. She has an MA in Bilingual and Multicultural Education from the SIT in Brattleboro, VT, and has worked with her husband Jim in Vanuatu from 1991-2006. They are working with communities in PNG and Asia to establish Bible storytelling programs.

Recently, a colleague from a partner organization

commented that he appreciated how much attention we give in our training of telling ‘interesting’ stories.

We had just finished leading a two-week workshop for several mother-tongue storytelling teams. During this time, the teams crafted, tested, and worked with a Bible scholar to check the accuracy of their stories. By the end of the workshop, each of the teams had learned to tell four or five Bible stories. They committed to both share these in their communities and train others to tell the stories.

My husband, Jim, and I have developed an approach for training local teams to tell Bible stories in their languages where there are no translated scriptures. We teach several techniques for helping storytellers improve

their skills in sharing interesting Bible stories. We organize our workshops into short sessions, during which team members practice telling their own traditional or personal stories to each other. Each member observes how to use body language and voice to add impact to their stories. These lively sessions help

Let’s Do the Twist: Learning the Dance of Telling Interesting Bible Stories 79

build community as well as give the story-crafters opportunities to practice and improve their skills.

The next part of the process is a group discussion of the main literary aspects of the story. Team members discuss the characters, setting, and plot of the story. The group also identifies the ‘twist’ of a story—the u n e x p e c t e d event, or the p r o b l e m or conflict that needs resolution. The twist is the part of the story that makes it interesting. For example, the parable of the Prodigal Son would be far less captivating if the father waited for the son to reach the house and then stood in heavy silence, expecting the son to explain his return. In the Cain and Abel story, people often remark that they are surprised by God’s merciful treatment of Cain. Instead of God demanding a life for a life, God punishes Cain and then protects his life.

When we discover the twists of the stories in a large group discussion, the results are often excitingly varied. This is because we all experience the stories through our own lenses shaped by our experiences and the cultural norms and values of our communities.

For some groups, the

twist in the M a t t h e w

nativity story is that Joseph did

not take revenge or demand

retribution from Mary’s family

when he learned she was pregnant.

For others, the twist is Joseph listening

to the angel’s message and his willingness to accept the role as guardian/ father to Mary’s baby. For still others, the twist is God’s intricate plan for his son’s birth, which involves sending his angel to each key player in the event.

Once the story-crafters articulate the twist of the story for themselves, we encourage them to practice what they can do with their body language and voice to make the twist come alive. While

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80 Orality Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2012 Janet Stahl

practicing the stories, they discover more of the richness of the stories and can recall more details.

As we develop our ability as storytellers, we often feel the tension between telling a story accurately and telling it so that our audience is captivated. We want our audience to feel the impact of the story and to recall the stories accurately (though not necessarily with all the details).

However, most people are not interested in memorizing the stories. Likewise, most of us do not find it compelling to listen to a person reciting Bible stories. So in

Let’s Do the Twist: Learning the Dance of Telling Interesting Bible Stories 81

our approach, we put much e!ort into learning to tell the stories with passion and confidence so that the images we are sharing are vivid. It is our hope that people will then happily listen to the story several times and remember more of the detail with each retelling.

I know I prefer to listen to a well-told story with all the mystery and surprise rather than a simplified version that I can recite afterward. What about you?

For more information about the process we have developed, please email me at [email protected].

82

Important Points to Remember when Storytellingby J.O. Terry

Before missionary appointment, J.O. Terry served as a radio program producer for the Baptist Radio-TV Commission in the U.S. Appointed to the Philippines as a media missionary in 1968, Terry initially served that country as radio program producer, and later as media consultant for the Asia-Pacific Region Baptist missions. During 1984, Terry transferred to Singapore to be closer to South Asian countries and local radio, film, and audio cassette projects. In late 1987, he was introduced to Chronological Bible Teaching and the following year began studying the developing Chronological Bible Storying while learning to tell and teach the Bible stories to mostly non-literate village peoples in South and Southeast Asia. Until leaving for retirement in 2003 Terry taught hundreds of Bible Storying sessions and taught Bible Storying methodology in Asian, African, and Latin American countries.

Currently, Terry publishes a Bible Storying Newsletter and

has written several books on the methodology.

As a Bible storying trainer, I approach the subject

of mistakes carefully. For missionaries, mistakes can lead to broken relationships, misunderstanding, and error in teaching. At the Asian Rural Life Foundation training center in the Philippines, the motto is: “We want to be the first to fail in order to learn, so you will not need to fail.” Failure for Bible storyers often results from

falling into various traps that the missionary and non-missionary worker will want to avoid if at all possible. Below are some of the lessons I and others have learned over the years.

1. Your interpretation of a story or expositional teaching from the Bible story is not as important or powerful as the story itself. This does not mean that neither

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Important Points to Remember when Storytelling 83

interpretation nor exposition should be used. With pastors whom I have trained, I have provided scripture-based interpretations (letting scripture interpret scripture) and exposition as they were able to handle. But for the average listener, I have learned to trust the stories and to let the discovery activities be su"cient.

2. Knowledge of local cultural and spiritual worldviews is vital. Fortunately, none of my ga!es were serious enough to break relationships. But I soon found that certain stories which were sensitive to worldviews really caught the attention of the listeners. This was how the story sets for women began to succeed. During my early days of storying, I learned that stories that worked well in the animistic cultural Christian worldview of the Philippines did not work as well with those of other Asian religions. Again, when local worldviews were taken into consideration, the stories began having greater impact.

When I taught many stories, I noted that trainees selected certain stories for their use as these related intuitively to their people’s worldview.

3. Test stories or items in stories that may hinder a

receptive hearing. Some stories need to be contextualized or

adapted in order to prevent initial rejection

of the stories because of social or cultural

taboos. This is because the listeners either did not

understand first century culture or who Jesus was. Over the years, I have learned to carefully listen to what the oral learners did to stories when they retold them. The allowed me to see what they kept or changed in telling the story.

4. Adequately prepare listeners for stories. For example, with the story of the prodigal son, the storyteller may get a response he or she did not expect: the father is the culprit in the story because he gave everything to his two sons. The older son is now head of the household; therefore, the father should

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have consulted the older son before welcoming the younger son back into the family. Another example is the story of Esau and Jacob. In a listeners’ culture, the second twin born is evil and should not live. Yet God blesses the “evil” twin over the firstborn.

5. Simplify stories. Since I had to work mostly through interpreters, I learned to simplify stories and be very careful about using names instead of pronouns in stories, especially those found in the four Gospels, which contain a good amount of dialogue. This way, my interpreters could correctly follow who said what to whom.

6. Be patient. I learned to not assume anything, and to be very patient as even my interpreters sorted out story details. On one occasion, I was a bit exasperated because my interpreter kept asking for scripture references in order to see what his Bible said. When I challenged him to mark his Bible with

passages we frequently used, he informed me that his people did not mark in holy books! I taught from a well-annotated chain reference Bible, but realized that, at times, I needed to have a clean copy in case someone wanted to see my Bible. I also had to learn patience if an interpreter wanted to back up and correct an earlier mistake they made. This usually happened the first several times I worked with a new interpreter.

7. Oral learners are people just like us. In the early days of


Bible storying, I believed what had been shared with me about oral learners: that they had a marvelous capacity to hear something once and remember it forever. I soon learned that was not true and had to learn the patience of retelling and repeating as often as needed, first to get the original understanding, then to correct or refresh stories that had drifted culturally, or were simply fading from lack of being exercised by telling often.

8. Oral learners have a very practical memory system. They learn best what they consider to be practical information that either explains gaps in their knowledge or that is directly related to their everyday lives. While oral-learner pastors may ask theological questions, the average listener will be more concerned about matters relevant to his or her daily life. In most cases, then, the post-story discussion needs to be simple and not too heavily laden with facts since oral learners have to remember the facts as lists—a di"cult task. Oral learners

can tire easily if discussions are overly detailed and long.

9. It takes time before understanding is reached. Among some listeners, discussion is initially di"cult because listeners have not yet heard enough story to begin to see the connection and direction of the stories. As the number of stories continues, there usually comes a tipping point, during which the stories begin to make sense and the larger picture begins to emerge. Never force discussion of the stories before the listeners are ready to talk.

10. Tell Bible stories to the larger group if possible. If an individual is led to make a decision alone without the consent of his or her community, there is often hostility. Gather the larger community if possible to hear the stories as a group–this way they can be led as a group to the same invitation. That said, it is not uncommon for individuals to be present at Bible storying sessions and respond to the stories and then take the stories back to their people, or be the


gateway to invite the Bible storyer to come and share the stories.

11. Never go it alone in planning, selecting, and preparing stories for telling without bathing each step in prayer for wisdom, guidance, and patience.

Here are two more points to consider:

may only be told at a certain time and in a certain place. Several apocryphal stories have circulated about how missionaries have attempted to tell their stories without regard to knowing where sacred or true stories were to be told.

whom I have trained have had di"culty getting their elders to listen. They were viewed as too young to teach their elders. We often got around this by giving the young storyers a set of teaching pictures that gave them credibility and a status that set them up as worthy to tell and teach their elders. On the other hand I also learned that giving pictures to all those being trained was expensive and

limited the scope of the training due to the need to import large numbers of picture sets. My using pictures conveyed the message that the trainees needed to use pictures as well. On more than one occasion a former trainee reported that he had not told any stories since training because he did not have any pictures.

I’ll end with a personal account. For several years, a Tamil driver took me to the places where we were teaching the Bible stories. The driver was literate but had no formal theological training. One day, after being away for some time, I discovered that he had taught his wife and children to tell the Bible stories; the family then told their neighbors and planted a church.

After an absence of ten years I met him again. He was now pastoring a church that met in his home and still telling the Bible stories in his preaching and outreach. If I had it to do over, I would spend even more time training pastors and others who were willing to learn the stories, who lived among the people, and who caught the vision to tell the stories of Jesus until he returns.


RESOURCESThe following first appeared in the book Orality Breakouts published by ION/Lausanne. The condensed list of selected books, journals, and websites have been updated to include the most current information (all URL links were last accessed 10 July 2012 UTC+1).

BOOKSAdeney, Miriam. Daughters of Islam: Building Bridges with Muslim Women. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002.

_____. Kingdom Without Borders: The Untold Story of Global Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009.

Bailey, Kenneth E. Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke. Combined edition. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983.

Barrett, David. Our Globe and How to Reach It. Birmingham, AL: New Hope, 1990.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Chiang, Samuel and Steve Evans, eds., Orality Breakouts: Using Heart Language to Transform Hearts. International Orality Network and the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, 2010.

Crouch, Andy. Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008.

DeNeui, Paul H., ed. Communicating Christ Through Story and Song: Orality in Buddhist Contexts Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2008.

Dillon, Christine. Telling the Gospel Through Story: Evangelism that Keeps Hearers Wanting More. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012.

Donovan, Vincent J. Christianity Rediscovered. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978.

Engel, James. How Can I Get Them to Listen? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1977.

Finnegan, Ruth. The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa. Oxford, UK: James Curry Ltd, 2007.

Ford, Leighton. The Power of Story. Rediscovering the Oldest, Most Natural Way to Reach People for Christ. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1994.

88 Orality Journal, Volume 1, Number 1, 2012 Resources

Resources 89

Fortunato, Frank with Paul Neeley and Carol Brinneman. All the World Is Singing: Glorifying God through the Worship Music of the Nations. Tyrone, GA/Bucks, UK: Authentic, 2006.

Hayes, Tom. Jump Point: How Network Culture Is Revolutionizing Business. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.

Hesselgrave, David. Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1978.

Hiebert, Paul. Anthropological Insights for Missionaries. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985.

_____. Cultural Anthropology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1976.

_____. Transforming Worldviews. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2008.

Hipps, Shane. Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009.

_____. The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, The Gospel, and Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005.

Hirsh, Alan with Darryn Altclass. The Forgotten Ways Handbook: a Practical Guide for Developing Missional Churches. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009.

Hubbard, Douglas W. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

Klem, Herbert. Oral Communication of Scripture. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1982.

Koehler, Paul F. Telling God’s Story with Power: Biblical Storytelling in Oral Cultures. Pasadena, CA: William Cary Library, 2010.

Krabill, James R., The Hymnody of the Harrist Church among the Dida of South-Central Ivory Coast, 1913-1949 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995).

Krabill, James R., Frank Fortunato, Brian Schrag, Paul Neeley, and Robin Harris. Ethnodoxology Handbook: Worship and Mission for the Global Church. Pasadena, CA: William Cary Library, 2012.

Levitin, Daniel J. The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. New York: Penguin Group (USA), 2008.


Loewen, Jacob A. Culture and Human Values. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1975.

Lovejoy, Grant, ed. “Making Disciples of Oral Learners.” Lausanne Occasional Paper, no. 54 (Bangalore: Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization and International Orality Network, 2005). http://oralbible.com/workspace/resources/docs/Making_Disciples_of_Oral_Learners-1264691848.pdf.

Moon, W. Jay. Integrative Discipleship: Multi-cultural and Multi-generational Pedagogies for Worldview Transformation. ASM series. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012.

_____. Ordinary Missionary: A Narrative Approach to Introducing World Missions. Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2012.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Newbigin, Lesslie. Foolishness to the Greeks. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1986.

Nicholls, Kathleen. Asian Arts and Christian Hope. New Delhi: Select Books, 1983.

Nida, Eugene. Customs and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1954. Reprint, Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library 1975.

_______. Message and Mission: The Communication of the Christian Faith. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.

Ong, W.J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

Putman, Jim. Church Is a Team Sport: A Championship Strategy for Doing Ministry Together. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2009.

______. Real-Life Discipleship: Building Churches that Makes Disciples. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2010.

Putman, Jim and Brandon Guindon and Avery T Willis Jr, and Bill Krause. Real-Life Discipleship Training Manual: Equipping Disciples Who Make Disciples. Colorado Spring, CO: NavPress, 2010

Richardson, Don. Eternity in Their Hearts. Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1984.

Roper, Don. “What is Group Media?” WACC Journal. London: World Association of Christian Communication, 1983.

Resources 91

Sanchez, Daniel R., J.O. Terry and Lanette W. Thompson. Bible Storying for Church Planting. Fort Worth, Texas: Church Starting Network, 2008.

Schrag, Brian and Paul Neeley, eds. All the World Will Worship: Helps for Developing Indigenous Hymns. 3rd ed. Duncanville, TX: EthnoDoxology Publications, 2007.

Schrag, Brian. “Why Local Arts are Central to Mission.” International Journal of Frontier Missiology 24, no. 4 (2007): 199-202.

Shaw, Daniel. Transculturation. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1988.

So, Damon. Jesus Revelation of His Father: A Narrative-Conceptual Study of the Trinity with special reference to Karl Barth Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006. _______. The Forgotten Jesus and the Trinity You Never Knew. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2010

Soggard, Viggo. Applying Christian Communication. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1986.

_____. Media in Church and Mission. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1993.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

Steffen, Tom A. Reconnecting God’s Story to Ministry: Crosscultural Storytelling at Home and Abroad. Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Media, 2005.

Sprenger, Marilee. Learning and Memory: The Brain in Action. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 1999.

Tsering, Marku. Sharing Christ in the Tibetan Buddhist World. Upper Darby, PA: Tibet Press, 1988.

Walk Thru The Bible. Story Thru The Bible: An Interactive Way to Connect with God’s Word. Colorado Sprints, CO: NavPress, 2011.

Werner, Dietrich; David Esterline; Namsoon Kang; and Joshua Raja, Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity. Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2010.


Wiher, Hannes. Shame and Guilt: A Key to Cross-Cultural Ministry. Germany: Culture and Science Publication, 2003.

Willis, Avery T. Jr., and Matt Willis. Learning to Soar: How to Grow through Transitions and Trials. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2009.

Willis, Avery T. Jr., and Mark Snowden. Truth That Sticks: How to Communicate Velcro Truth in a Teflon World. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2010.

Woodberry, Dudley J. From Seed to Fruit: Global Trends, Fruitful Practices, and Emerging Issues among Muslims. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2008 and 2011.

Wright, Christopher J.W. and Jonathan Lamb, eds. Understanding and Using the Bible. London, UK: SPCK Publishing, 2009.

Wright, N. T. The New Testament and the People of God. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1992.

PERIODICALS AND JOURNALS“Arts in Mission.” Connections, Journal of the WEA Mission Commission 9 no.2 and 3, 2010. Special Double issue. http://www.weaconnections.com/Back-issues/Arts-in-Mission.aspx

“Redeeming the Arts: The Restoration of the Arts to God’s Creational Intention.” Lausanne Occasional Paper, no. 46. http://www.lausanne.org/documents/2004forum/LOP46_IG17.pdf.

Brown, Rick. “Communicating E!ectively to Non-Readers.” International Journal of Frontier Missions 21 no. 4, p. 173-178.

_____. “Communicating God’s Message in an Oral Culture.” International Journal of Frontier Missions, 21 no. 3, p. 122-128.

Chiang, Samuel E. “The Oral Reality: Reaching and Discipling Oral Learners.” Congress Handbook. Tokyo 2010: p. 128—126. http://www.tokyo2010.org/resources/Handbook.pdf.

_____. “Oral Communicators and the Gospel.” Connections, Journal of the WEA Mission Commission 8 no. 2, p.34.

_____. “Strategic Options for Back To Jerusalem.” Connections, Journal of the WEA Mission Commission 8 no. 3, p. 30-33. http://www.weaconnections.com/Back-issues/China.aspx

Resources 93

Evans, Steve. “Matters of the Heart: Orality, Story and Cultural Transformation—The Critical Role of Storytelling in A!ecting Worldview.” Missiology (April 2010).

_____. “The Impact of Cultural Folklore on National Values: A Preliminary Study with a Focus on Bhutan.” Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies 6 no. 1 (Jan. – Apr. 2010).

_____. Using the Bible in Oral Cultures, Understanding and Using the Bible edited by Christopher J. W. Wright, and Jonathan Lamb. London, UK: SPCK Publishing, 2009.

Green, Ron. “The Oral Story Bible: A Breakthrough Strategy in Oral Scripture Translation”. Congress Handbook. Tokyo 2010: p. 137—141. http://www.tokyo2010.org/resources/Handbook.pdf

Lovejoy,Grant. “The Extent of Orality,” Dharma Deepika: A South Asian Journal of Missiological Research 25 (June 2007): p. 24-34; republished online in the Journal of Baptist Theology and Ministry 5 (Spring 2008): p. 121-134.

International Journal of Frontier Missions special issue on Reaching Non-Literate Peoples (Volume 12:3, 1995). Available for download at http://www.ijfm.orgArticles Include: Dependence on Literacy Strategy, Herb V. Klem The Crucial Role of Oral-Scripture, Gilbert Ansre The Emergence of Audio-Scripture in Church and Mission, Viggo Sogaard Audio-Communications and the Progress of the Gospel, Allan Starling Was Jesus a Zairian?, Paul D. Dyer The Role of the O.T. in Evangelism, Don Pederson Storying the Storybook to Tribals, Tom A. Ste!en

Moon, W. Jay. “Rituals and Symbols in Community Development.” Missiology: An International Review XXXX no. 2 (April 2012): p. 141-153.

_______. “Holistic Discipleship: Integrating Community Development in the Discipleship Process.” Evangelical Missions Quarterly (2012) 48 no. 1: p. 16-22.

_______. “Understanding Oral Learners.” Teaching Theology and Religion (2012) 15 no. 1: p. 29-39.

Noss, Philip A. ‘The Oral Story and Bible Translation,’ The Bible Translator 27 (1981): p. 301-318.

“Orality.” Missiology: An International Review XXXVIII no. 2 (April 2010). http://www.asmweb.org/content/home


Prior, Randall. “Orality: Not-So-Silent Issue in Mission Theology”. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 35, no. 3 (July 2011): p. 143—147. http://www.internationalbulletin.org/system/files/2011-03-143-prior.html

Ste!en, Tom A. ‘A Narrative Approach to Communicating the Bible, Part 1,’ Christian Education Journal 24 (1994): p. 86-97.

_______. ‘A Narrative Approach to Communicating the Bible, Part 2,’ Christian Education Journal 24 (1994): p. 98-109.

_______. ‘Paradigm Changes for E!ective Evangelism,’ Evangelism: A Lausanne Cooperating Periodical 9 (1994): p. 136-140.

Ste!en, Tom A. and Tom and J.O. Terry. ‘The Sweeping Story of Scripture Taught Through Time,’ Missiology: An International Review 35 (2007): p. 315-335.

The following selected websites are grouped for specific interests within the subject of orality:

PRAYING AND INFORMINGhttp://www.ethne.net/http://www.finishingthetask.comhttp://www.imb.org/globalresearch/http://www.peoplegroups.orghttp://thecall.com

STRATEGY AND INFORMATIONALhttp://conversation.lausanne.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oralityhttp://www.echothestory.com/ http://www.heartstories.infohttp://www.internationaloralitynetwork.comhttp://www.mislinks.org/index.php?cID=836http://www.oralstrategies.orghttp://orvillejenkins.com/orality/index.html http://www.scripture-engagement.org/http://www.themissionexchange.org/downloads/eXcelerate09.pdf

MUSIC AND ARTS“Sounds of Global Worship”—the YouTube Channel for Heart Sounds International: www.YouTube.com/user/HSIOM

GIAL World Arts courses: http://www.gial.edu/dpt-langdev/world-arts.html

Resources 95

Heart Sounds International (HSI) http://www.heart-sounds.org

International Council of Ethnodoxologists (ICE) http://www.worldofworship.org

TRAINING, CURRICULUM, AND DEPLOYING TEAMS WITH A FOCUS ON THE UNREACHEDhttp://208.109.43.65/http://www.cbstorying.orghttp://www.churchstarting.net/biblestorying/Books.htmhttp://www.e3partners.org/oralityhttp://www.fjseries.org/low/home.html http://www.freedomtolead.net/http://nextgen4god.com/http://www.OneStory.orghttp://www.simplythestory.comhttp://www.siutraining.orghttp://www.storyrunners.com http://www.visualstorybible.orghttp://www.water.cchttp://www.Wycli!eOneStory.info

STORY SETS FOR STORYTELLINGhttp://www.oralstrategies.orghttp://www.st4t.orghttp://www.ywamonestory.org

FOCUSING ON WOMENhttp://www.projecthannah.org/about/http://www.siutraining.org

CHURCH-PLANTING RESOURCEShttp://www.churchplantingmovements.com/http://www.miaoupg.com/ http://www.siutraining.org

MEDIA STRATEGIES AND CONTENT DISTRIBUTIONhttp://www.faithcomesbyhearing.com/pastors-support-materialshttp://www.davarpartners.com/www.T4Global.orgwww.twr.org

INDIGENOUS MEDIA STRATEGIES AND TOOLSwww.createinternational.comwww.indigitech.net


SECONDARY ORAL LEARNERS AND DISCIPLESHIPhttp://bible4children.org/http://www.cbs4kids.orghttp://www.christianstorytelling.comhttp://crupressgreen.com/the-essentials/http://www.churchstarting.net/biblestorying/http://www.combarriers.com/CommunicationStyleshttp://www.dna-21.orghttp://www.echothestory.comhttp://www.globalshortfilmnetwork.comhttp://www.ntmbooks.com/chronological_teachinghttp://www.reallifeministries.comhttp://www.simplythestory.orghttp://www.story4all.com/http://www.storyseminary.com/http://www.truthsticks.orghttp://www.walkthru.org

All professors are granted standing permission to reproduce any portion of this journal without securing prior permission.

SEVEN DISCIPLINES OF ORALITY: A Holistic Model

MEDIADeliver

ARTSPackage

LITERACYUnderstand

NETWORKSRelate

MEMORYRetain

LANGUAGEReceive

Orality-FramedCONTENT

CULTUREInterpret

Courtesy of Global Impact Mission as is published in Missiology April 2010. Dr. Chuck Madinger leads Global Impact Mission and serves on the International Orality Network’s Leadership Team facilitating the Research Task Force.

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