Utumishi Blog

Loots Lambrechts recently raised the issue of the orality movement.  Here are a few thoughts but please add your own below, particularly if you have experience in this area. I’m very aware of how little I have…

A few things are clearly true:

• around 5% of the world’s population is illiterate;
• perhaps 70% of the world population are functionally illiterate or at least much happier with oral than written/read communication;
• it is vitally important that unreached oral people groups hear the gospel;
• missionaries must seek to lay down their cultural preferences and to accommodate their communication style so that God’s Word can be heard clearly.

The question is whether ‘storying’ – that is selecting a number of Bible stories, crafting them to be heard well within a particular oral culture, and then telling or performing them (often in chronological sequence, i.e from Genesis onward) such that they can be reproduced and passed on – whether that is the best or only way to evangelise and disciple oral learners.

It must be said at this point that the orality / storying movement is diverse and often much more nuanced than its attackers allow. I’ll interact below mainly with the seminal Lausanne 2004 paper ‘Making Disciples of Oral Learners’ (called ‘MDOL’ below). The document is clearly full of a heart for Christ and the lost and full of good stuff. To dispel a few myths:

• MDOL is not against propositional truth statements (as some in the ‘emerging church’ are): “propositional beliefs are generated by and reflected in the core stories.”
• They talk of ‘crafting’ stories to be ‘sensitive to worldview’ but they seem to mean this mainly in terms of the communication form and style because they also talk about the importance of overturning untrue worldviews. There is an explicit and recurrent concern to counter syncretism and to check the oral Bible stories “to ensure biblical accuracy’”.
• Furthermore they don’t want to downgrade the importance of literacy and Bible translation: “We wish all peoples had the written translation of the Scripture in their heart language… A Bible translation program that begins with the oral presentation of the Bible through storying and continues with a translation and literacy program is the most comprehensive strategy for communicating the word of God in their heart language… We do not want our call for oral approaches to be seen as setting oral and literate approaches in opposition to one another. It is not a matter of “either-or,” but “both-and.”

Some strengths of the movement

• The great thing about the orality movement is the concern to convey the gospel and the Word of God as the chronological Bible story of God’s redemption work. There is huge power in this. I know a brother and his wife in Dar es Salaam who have welcomed many Muslim ‘Nicodemus’s into their home at night for 1-to-1 chronological Bible reading – going through the key Bible stories in about a dozen sessions – often leading to faith in the true God of Abraham.  And it is very helpful even in nominally Christian contexts.  Instead of many gospel outlines that are simply four or five abstract propositions to grasp and which give an individual-centred “How to save my soul” version of the gospel (which can easily lead to a “Ticket to heaven in my pocket” understanding of Christianity), the story method wants people to be gripped and changed by God’s story.  Rather than putting me or my problems or my behaviour at the centre it says, “Just listen to the story of God.”  Instead of confronting behaviour or beliefs it strikes at the deeper level of worldview.  This surely is the key not only for evangelism but also for discipleship – getting the Bible story deeper and deeper into us till it flows through our bloodstream.
• It is quite evident that the apostles and early church did not always open and directly expound the Scriptures in the course of evangelism – they very often do (Acts 2:14-36; 17:2; 28:23) but not always (Acts 10:36-43; 17:22-31). Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 and Paul’s sermon in Acts 13 quote some Scripture but also retell Bible stories in a rather free way. When you look at the way the NT authors quote the OT there’s often a certain freedom or paraphrasing going on (e.g. Matt. 2:23). John Dickson surely gives good advice when he recommends ‘gospel bites’ – responding to questions or challenges from non-Christians with a story about Jesus (e.g. sharing the story of the thief on the cross with someone who thinks Christianity is all about keeping the rules).

A few comments and questions

1. The Bible is already oral.  One of the big aims of the orality movement is to select between 100 and 200 Bible stories, rework them to make them more easily heard by the particular oral community and then compile them into an ‘oral Bible’.  This has the advantage of standardisation and stability – i.e. the stories don’t gradually change out of all recognition. But I think I’d want to say that the whole Bible is already an oral work for oral cultures.  Very large chunks (e.g. much of the Prophets, Deut., Jesus’ discourses) were originally spoken and only later written. The vast majority of the Bible is in forms usually thought of as ‘oral’ – narrative, proverb, song, poetry. The Scriptures are designed to be read out loud – think of the commands at Deut. 31:11-13 and 2 Tim. 3:13, the all-age Bible reading at Nehemiah 8, the instructions to read out the NT epistles (Col. 4:16; 1 Thess. 5:27; Rev. 1:3).  Increasingly, Bible commentators are recognising how many of the ‘literary’ features of the Bible – the repetitions, recapitulations, bookends, summaries, word plays, spiral or numbered structures – are oral features – designed to help the ear and the memory of an oral listener rather than the eye of a silent reader (even private reading in the ancient world would have been out loud – e.g. Acts 8:30). So it is questionable whether the Bible needs much re-working or ‘crafting’ to be heard in an oral culture.  While oral cultures obviously differ, they have much in common.  A friend working on Bible translation in Mozambique finds that the oral culture there is far better at hearing the Bible narratives and understanding the implicit message than Western culture. Other friends in Kenya, working with oral learners, are preparing discipleship materials using relatively short Bible stories with hardly any modification and finding that they are both meaningful to those hearing and ‘reproducible’ – i.e. can be memorised and retold – a key aim of the orality movement.  In fact the extent of allusion and free quotation throughout the Bible and the degree to which phrases from the Bible have entered into the English language is testimony to how memorable (‘reproducible’) this book is. A brother reminded me recently that we need to have more confidence in the clarity and power of God’s Word on its own – it is often fine just to read the Bible in church and let it speak for itself – to be devoted to the public reading of Scripture (but that’s a whole issue for another post).
2. Is the orality movement a challenge to expository preaching or a critique of bad preaching?  “Literate approaches rely on lists, outlines, word studies, apologetics and theological jargon… They use the printed page or expositional, analytical and logical presentations of God’s word…  Instead of using outlines, lists, steps and principles… oral learners “enter” the story and as they absorb sensory data they live the story in the present tense — seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling what the persons in the story are experiencing” (MDOL).  This seems to be a critique of the sort of preaching that reduces every story to three propositions (I fear that I have done that twice just in the last week!), that is Western-individualistic (just about relaying information to an individual), and is ‘bookish’ (heavy on jargon, boring historical detail, pretentious discussions of the Greek and Hebrew, abstract argument). But that is simply not good expository preaching. Let’s get away from this idea that expository preaching is a style – a wazungu, 3 point, academic form.  Hapana! Expository preaching is simply preaching that is driven by the text. If the text is a gripping story then faithfully preaching that text will mean re-telling it in a way that brings out all the twists and turns – that does let the hearer “enter into” the story and live it and feel the tension and emotions.  Expository preaching should be relational and corporate and concrete.  It should never be about steps and principles (I’ll leave that rant for another post too!) and using jargon is inexcusable (I realise I’ve probably done it a dozen times in this article) – we need to crucify our style. The text gives us the content but as for style we can jump up and down or shout or sing or whatever comes naturally to us and (more importantly) will get the message across to the hearers.  Which leads me to another question…
3. Is what the orality movement means by ‘storying’ not quite similar to good expository preaching just leaving out the primary text?  When I read stories in MDOL of pastors and missionaries taking on the role of village storyteller and communicating the Bible stories as vividly as possible with great sensitivity to the ears of the hearers – it sounds to me like the very best sort of narrative expository preaching. Isn’t that what happens in Nehemiah 8 – “the Levites helped the people understand… they gave the meaning” (v7-8). The only difference is that with storying you don’t have the opening of the Bible and reading it clearly (Neh. 8:3,5,8). As mentioned above, maybe that’s fine in first-contact evangelism but there are dangers if it becomes the regular pattern of a ministry or a church. Where is the authority? With the speaker or with God’s Word? How can you have Bereans checking out the message (Acts 17:11) if you haven’t first been reasoning from the Scriptures (Acts 17:2)? Is there a danger of a Medieval church where only the priest (or the pope) is allowed to handle the original Biblical text while the masses must rely on the reworked message that is served up to them? The issue here is that a reworked/crafted Bible story is not “pure”, free of “interpretative baggage” (MDOL) – it is an interpretation or exposition of the original text in the same way as a sermon (hence my point – aren’t they basically the same thing?). When you retell a story you are making interpretative decisions about what you think the emphasis is, what it’s teaching, how it fits into the big Bible story.  Anyone who has compared a few different children’s Bibles knows that it makes a big difference how you retell the story (is the feeding of the 5000 all about the little boy sharing his lunch?).  MDOL insists that the recrafted story should be carefully checked to ensure “accuracy” but who does this checking? Presumably an ‘expert’.  As mentioned above, MDOL does talk about bringing in Bible translation and literacy work after initial evangelism but as it talks later on about the value of oral Bibles in discipleship an leadership and discusses the increasing functional illiteracy in the West there is a bit of ambivalence on the question of whether bringing people to the text of the Bible itself and helping them read it for themselves is a priority.

I’ve got a bit more to say but this is already far too long so I’ll stop now.  Over to you – what do you think? Very open to correction and really appreciate any feedback on this…