Orality and the Mission of God

Yesterday I suggested that there is a big move toward an oral tradition based on a number of anecdotal trends. These included the immediacy of the internet and blocker claims that the majority of users had a 90 second concentration span. Given that the internet is a written medium this is indicative of a non-functional literacy issue where people chose to skim rather than read in depth.
The second issue was that there are still unnumbered groups of pre-literate people in the world now. These people function adequately within their culture and educate their children without the use of any written material. The culture is not inferior to literate societies like the 1st World, they just have different priorities.
I grew up in an age when we were taught to memorize scripture by rote almost as if there was an intrinsic value in being able to quote the verses of the Bible at the drop of a hat. Often we may have been able to quote the verses but equally as often we may not have been able to open the Bible and go directly to the verse in point. Just as often we may have been able to quote a scripture without being able to tell another what it meant or why it was significant.
I heard during the Cape Town Congress into World Evangelism of a strategy that is starting to take off among the Bibleless peoples of Africa, as I recall. The plan is to send two believers from neighbouring groups, ones with similar linguistic styles, plus a “missionary” who equips the two with Bible stories and they relay these stories to the people they are there to minister to.
Without saying “ho hum” I applaud the measure but remember that Rachel Saint went with one other white woman and a believing member of the Waodani tribe who “slaughtered” her brother and four other missionaries in 1958. The story continues, just with a new emphasis.
This strategy has global impact for the spread of the good news. It is applicable to almost every subculture on the world including the “Urban World” of the advanced countries. Some will remember the film and book “Peace Child” about Don Richardson’s experience in New Guinea, a tribe who valued treachery and revenge above all else.
The Peace Child was the youngest child of the warring tribe’s chief this child was surrendered to the chief of the other tribe as a surety of peace as long as the child lived and so for this people Jesus became the Peace Child between them and God.
This example of lateral thinking is the new future in telling the Good News Narrative. We must, if we are to become relevant to the hurting peoples around us, develop our own narratives for change that are sourced from the Bible, true to the Bible, and appropriate to our audience. Again from Cape Town I seem to recall a discussion about telling Paul’s Letters in context. This takes some detailed knowledge of the correlation between the Acts of the Apostles and Paul writing to a particular church. It is not teaching from the letter but applying the letter contents to the context in the history of the early Church.
I feel that this is a strategy, that, applied with love, will soften hearts toward Father and we owe it to Him to use our intelligence to apply Bible truth in an environment that gives scant, if any credence, to the Bible as God’s Word and the Church as His community.