EMQ » October–December 2018 » Volume 54 Issue 4
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder”]Worldview-based Storying: The Integration of Symbol, Story, and Ritual in the Orality Movement
By Tom Steffen
Orality Resources International, Richmond, VA, 2018
246 pages
ISBN: 78-0999280614
USD $25.00
Reviewed by Seth Bouchelle, who lives in the Bronx, and works with Global City Mission Initiative, a nonprofit that focuses on diverse immigrant populations in big cities around the world.
Missions strategy has undergone some titanic shifts over the last quarter century. Gone, to a large extent, are the days when the primary vocation of a missionary was in a single overseas context establishing and leading a local congregation. A central focus of many missionaries today is to use pedagogies which better empower indigenous believers to interpret and proclaim the gospel without the ongoing presence and oversight of foreign workers. In many missionary circles it is common be surrounded by strategic jargon related to these shifts: DBS (Discovery Bible Study), T4T (Training for Trainers), CBS (Chronological Bible Storying), etc. This experience can be overwhelming both for new missionaries, and those already in service who are discerning a change in their strategic focus. Fortunately, Tom Steffen’s new work is here to help provide some orientation.
Steffen focuses on what he calls the “evangelical Orality Movement” (54): that is, the transition toward evangelistic teaching styles which privilege cultures that value oral learning over written and storytelling over propositional argumentation. The first half of the book is essentially a survey of the origins of this movement and the manifold adaptations it has undergone. Steffen identifies the movement as beginning with the work of Trevor McIlwain of New Tribes Mission. His historical survey, starting with the first century church, traces the roots of different orality-based approaches to missions leading up to McIlwain’s seminal presentation at the South East Asian leadership meeting in 1981. Steffen then goes on to explore the development of McIlwain’s chronological storying method into the Firm Foundations series along with departures and alterations by evangelical missionaries around the world which have stemmed from McIlwain’s pedagogical principles. For missionary workers who have had interactions with the orality movement, Steffen’s work should provide a more thorough understanding of where many contemporary methods emerged from and the contextual reasoning behind their development.
The second part of Worldview Based Storying shifts away from biographical survey to the philosophical side of the orality movement. Here, Steffen explores the foundations of “storying:” analyzing the nature of symbol, narrative, and ritual and their relationship to worldview. Drawing heavily from his experience among the Ifugao in the Philippines, Steffen gives myriad insights into how missionaries, by attending to the values and communication styles of their context, can create and adapt the elements of storying to better reflect the culture and more effectively reach their cross-cultural neighbors with the good news about Jesus Christ.
In contrast to the first section, the second can feel quite academic. Steffen is clearly well versed in anthropology and ethnography. Lay readers hoping for a primer on contemporary missionary methods may find themselves overwhelmed by the use of scholastic jargon and the shift in tone and density of prose. For full-time missions students, however, they will discover in Steffen’s work a helpful resource that should challenge their thinking about teaching and contextualization in a way which hopefully brings their work closer to the incarnational nature of the God whose story they proclaim.
For Further Reading
Looney, Jared. Crossroads of the Nations: Diaspora, Globalization, and Evangelism. Portland, OR: Urban Loft Publishers, 2015.
Nabhan-Warren, Kristy. The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants, & Fourth Day Spirituality. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
