Read All About It? 67% of People are Non-Literate Oral Learners

The Challenges Print Evangelism Ministries Face In Meeting The Needs Of Oral Cultures

By Avery Willis and James Greenelsh

What do you think Mr. Guttenberg?

The year was 1488. A young boy accidentally left a wooden shape dripping with dye on a piece of parchment overnight. In the morning he discovered an image remaining after removing the wood. It was an “aha moment” that led to the invention of the printing press. That one insight changed the world we live in. The boys name, Johann Guttenberg. His idea lit the fuse on a literacy revolution that supercharged the field of knowledge. The bible finally came within reach of the common man. Christianity in Europe flourished. For over 500 years since then the Church in western societies has trumpeted the superiority of literacy.

I had thought for so long that the Guttenberg revolution was a worldwide phenomenon. I grew up thinking that literacy was the one thing the world needed to level the playing field for everyone.

Then one day, I made an alarming discovery: 500 years after the invention of the printing press—only 33% of the world are truly literate.

That single fact stopped me dead in my tracks. A banner headline. Extra. Extra. Read all about it:

Approximately 67% of the people of the world are non-literate oral learners.

If you printed that headline in every newspaper in every country of the world, in every language known to man and you threw it on the coffee table of every home on earth— close to four billion people couldn’t read it.

That should get our attention.

Let me ask you, if you had a business and you found that 67% of your target audience were non-literate oral learners, you can bet you’d tailor your business plan, dedicate your work force, and allocate a huge portion of your operating budget especially to reach them. That’s just smart business.

The world of missions is just now waking up to the fact that Oral learners are at the center of the firestorm to complete the Great Commission. The bull’s eye. Imagine. Four billion oral learners in the cross-hairs of redemptive history at the beginning of the 21st century. What are you, your church and your mission agencies doing to hit the bullseye?

If the term “oral learner” is unfamiliar to you let me offer a simple definition. By oral learners we mean those people who learn best and whose lives are most likely to be transformed when information comes to them through oral, not literate, means. Oral learners transmit their beliefs, heritage, values by means of stories, drama, songs, and proverbs.. They have built their customs, culture, and social fabric around storytelling.

What does this mean for us as we endeavor to fulfill the Great Commission?

We must start asking questions like these. How in the world do we share the Word of God with people who can’t. don’t or read? Who don’t write? Who may not even have a written language? HOW?

Listen to this story from a young Christian leader in Bihar, India. His name is Bihari Mukhiya.

I come from village culture. I want to tell you what it is like there. Most of the people in the villages are non-literate they have never been to school they have never read any books. Village people take interest in stories in music and in drama. In the village in the evening time people meet in the street, tell stories and sing village songs. They learn lessons from these stories and they put them into practice in their lives. They never read a book; they never have been to school. They are not literate, but they listen and then they learn.

I come from a Hindu family. In my childhood I used to join in Hindu customs. I listened to many Hindu stories. But when I reached sixth standard in the school I had a chance to hear the stories of Jesus. I had never heard such stories. I had been taught that there were many gods. But through the stories of Jesus I came to understand that Jesus is the true God. I committed my life to the Lord and began to tell people about Jesus.

After some time I went to Bible college to learn the word of God. There I was taught a literate western style of education. When I came back from the college I used the same western methods to preach the gospel but nobody accepted Christ. I was very discouraged and I was thinking I would leave the ministry. Then, I got the opportunity to learn how to communicate with oral cultures through training provided by Scriptures In Use. I learned how to share my faith and plant churches among non-literate people. I was influenced by the teaching and returned to the mission field and started using the same storying method. So many people believed in Jesus Christ through this method.

I witnessed so many souls coming to Christ by telling stories from the Bible. So many souls are being saved. I am now training many missions workers throughout Bihar. The training is going well, every month many people are accepting Jesus Christ. Each month 500 to 600 people are taking baptism and 50 new churches are being planted every month. Through the cooperation of several ministries, a church planting movement is taking place throughout Bihar.

Brace yourself for this headline: An estimated 90% of the world’s Christian workers present the gospel and do discipleship using highly literate communication styles. 90%. Throw that up against the 67% who are oral learners and what do you have? A strategic problem.

Let me put it this way. We can try all day long to install software on a Macintosh computer but if the software is Windows only PC, we’re out-a-luck. We can know that our customers need software. We can spend big bucks on designing great software. Our investors may be excited about the software. But it all means nothing if when we go to install it on our customers computer. We find out that two-thirds of them are using an incompatible operating system!

Oral learners do not have a literate operating system. They need different software. That’s what this young leader in India discovered. That one single insight should rock our world as it did his. It should stun Christian leadership. It should change our mission strategies for sharing faith, training leaders, and planting churches. It should radically change the focus of our Christian stewardship.

How do we fulfill the Great Commission among oral learners? We change our approach as Bihari Mukhiya did. He simply learned to use the stories of the Bible to communicate in a way that functionally illiterate people relate to and understand. That’s it. So obvious. So brutally simple.

He put away his printed books and tracts. He stopped communicating abstact theological ideas that he’d learned in Bible school. He started
telling the stories of the Bible. Straight forward. He used these oral stories to cross natural bridges into the lives of his listeners. He used stories from the Bible to bring forth truths that challenge the worldview of the people in his culture. Then he watched the Holy Spirit speak through these stories. You can’t argue with the results.

The fact that we, as literate, print oriented, missionaries from the west, have missed this oral storying method for so long may be one of the single most serious tactical mistakes we have made in the last 200 years! I grieve over all the time, energy and funding that I have personally directed toward print evangelism mission endeavors that missed the mark for oral learners.

I finally got the picture. Literacy software does not fit two-thirds of the world’s population. Until we wake up to that fact, we will continue to expend manpower and resources in less fruitful endeavors, with inadequate tools, and methodology. The result? We miss our audience. We missing our opportunity to effectively share the stories of faith among oral cultures.

The development of oral strategies is not meant to detract from print evangelism or Bible translation. In fact, the opposite is true. The most comprehensive strategy for communicating the word of God in the heart language of an oral culture should start with an oral approach that leads to translation and literacy. The problem is, too often we get the cart before the horse. Or worse yet, we forget the horse completely. Without the horse. That cart isn’t going anywhere.

I’m convinced that if we take the unique needs of the oral learner to heart and if we make them a leading priority in shaping our all mission strategies we will make monumental progress in completing the Great Commission.

We urgently need ministries willing to rethink what they are doing. Ministries willing to create new tools, new methodologies, new approaches that put the needs of oral learners first.

In doing so God will enable us to harness the greatest force on earth for spreading the gospel and multiplying the church—the power of His stories reproduced by word of mouth over and over again among each unique oral culture of the world in culturally sensitive ways.

We need a movement of cross cultural Bible story experts who have the skill to train people to engage unreached oral learners with a complete set of Bible stories in the local language that are tailored to transform their unique worldview. It’s cost effective, reproducible and grass roots accessible.

It is the goal of the International Orality Network to influence the Body of Christ to disciple all oral learners. We envision nothing less than a worldview specific, word-of-mouth-Bible storying revolution in the mother tongue of each oral culture of the world.

This is our greatest hope for fulfilling the great commission among 4 billion people who have yet to hear the Story. It’s a simple insight with world shaking possibilities.

What do you think, Mr. Guttenberg?

"This article appeared in the October 2006 issue of Lausanne World Pulse, www.lausanneworldpulse.com, P.O. Box 794, Wheaton, IL 60189, USA."