EMQ » July–September 2022 » Volume 58 Issue 3
Oral Bible Storying
Jesus was a master storyteller. Oral Bible storying follows his example and makes scripture accessible in more languages to more communities around the world.
By A. Steven Evans
“Jesus always used stories and illustrations like these when speaking to the crowds. In fact, he never spoke to them without using such parables.” (Matthew 13:34, NLT)
In the now classic book on communication and global evangelization, authors Engel and Norton ask in its title the provocative question, “What’s gone wrong with the harvest?”[1] Essential to effective gospel communication, they argue, is an understanding of what is good communication.
In Matthew 9:37 Jesus tells us the harvest is plentiful, but the labors are few. “So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.” (Matthew 9:38, NLT) Engels and Norton suggest that oftentimes, however, laborers go out with harvest equipment that has “lost its cutting blades.”[2]
Jesus – the Master Storyteller
Matthew 13:34 says that Jesus always used stories and illustrations when speaking to the crowds. In fact, it says he never spoke to them without using stories. This verse implies that good gospel communication involves telling stories, at least for Jesus anyway, with an application for us as well.
“Jesus was the master storyteller,” said Rick Warren. “He’d say, ‘Hey, did you hear the one about…’ and then tell a parable to teach a truth. In fact, the Bible shows that storytelling was Jesus’ favorite technique when speaking to the crowd … Somehow we forget that the Bible is essentially a book of God-inspired stories! That’s how God has chosen to communicate his Word to human beings.”[3]
The Bible is essentially a book of God-inspired stories!
Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, said that Jesus throws simple brief stories into our ordinary lives, and we think, “What is this doing here?” They appear so commonplace, he said, so insignificant. However, Jesus’ stories are unpretentious. He said that more often than not, one or another of them lodges unnoticed in our consciousness. Then unexpectedly it releases insights, creates new perspectives, and shifts the ground beneath us, so that we find ourselves reeling and reaching out for support. “When the story is allowed to complete its work, the sole support we find ourselves grabbing onto is God.”[4]
Jesus was once asked by one of his friends why he told stories. He responded that he told stories “to create readiness, to nudge people toward receptive insight.” His stories, besides inviting us into a larger world than we presently inhabit, pull us into it as participants. They are not stories that entertain, that let us sit back on the bench watching the action. We become the action. These stories don’t tell us something new. They involve us in what has been sitting right in front of us for years but that we hadn’t noticed, hadn’t thought was important, hadn’t considered to be connected to us and our lives.
And then suddenly we do notice. The story wakes us up to what is there, and has always been there. Without leaving the world we work and sleep and play in daily, we find ourselves in a far larger world. We embrace connections and meanings and significance in our lives far beyond what our employers and teachers, our parents and children, our friends and neighbors, and all the so-called experts and celebrities have told us for so long.
But Jesus not only told stories. He is the story. The stories he told are trailheads into the story he lived and lives. Any one of the stories he told can bring any one of us into the Story itself.[5]
Biblical Illiteracy
The organization Train Bible Teachers says what we have is an issue of biblical literacy, or more accurately put, biblical illiteracy. “Bible illiterate teachers produce Bible illiterate students,” it said.[6] As well, the same can be said of preachers and pastors: Bible illiterate preachers and pastors produce Bible illiterate disciples and church members; and Bible illiterate disciples and church members produce Bible illiterate and unhealthy churches. It is a systemic thing – a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. Bible content is needed at the heart of all that is done in the missionary task – from evangelism and discipleship to healthy church planting and leadership development.
“Pastors and churches too busy – or too distracted – to make biblical knowledge a central aim of ministry will produce believers who simply do not know enough to be faithful disciples,” said Albert Mohler. “We will not believe more than we know, and we will not live higher than our beliefs. The many fronts of Christian compromise in this generation can be directly traced to biblical illiteracy in the pews and the absence of biblical preaching and teaching in our homes and churches.” He continued, “Churches must recover the centrality and urgency of biblical teaching and preaching. This generation must get deadly serious about the problem of biblical illiteracy.”[7]
The issue of Bible illiteracy is often exacerbated around the world by low levels of formal education. One Baptist convention in Africa reports that many of its pastoral candidates only have a seventh grade-level education, and it is the same for many of its older leaders having come out of a decades-long civil war. The older leaders are Bible illiterate and the new candidates will struggle with formal methods of theological education to gain Bible literacy.[8]
Scriptures for Bibleless Peoples
Throw into this mix the issue of Bibleless peoples around the world. These are language communities in need of Bible translations, those with no Scripture at all and no active translation project. Bibleless peoples comprise about a quarter of the world’s languages and millions of people who still wait for the good news of Jesus Christ in a language and form they clearly understand.[9] 2021 statistics released by the Wycliffe Global Alliance, show that of the 7,359 known languages in the world today, there are 2,002 languages without any Scripture at all.[10]
Efforts of these organizations seek to not only provide Scripture to these Bibleless peoples but also reach them with the gospel. More than one quarter of the world’s population has never heard the name of Jesus. They have never experienced God’s love in their own languages; they are unreached. But people need more than to simply hear about Jesus; they need to get to know him through God’s Word, too.[11]
Missionaries of IMB straddle these two worlds as well – a desire that all peoples have access to God’s Word in their own languages by way of appropriate communication forms and the desire to use His Word in reaching the unreached peoples of the world and nurturing a healthy church among them.
Oral Bible Storying
Five years ago, my wife and I moved from our IMB assignment in London to Kinshasa, DRC, to take on an orality and Bible storying catalyst role for the IMB’s Congo Basin region. Shortly after, I shared a message on the concept of orality and Bible storying at a Sunday morning service of Kinshasa’s International Church.
In the congregation was Angi Williams-Ngumbu, Congo Basin field partnership facilitator for Seed Company. “You preached about how telling Bible stories in the mother tongue was a great idea,” Williams-Ngumbu later said to me, “and I thought, ‘We need to talk.’”[12] The result of that day was a strategic intersection of missions and a type of oral Bible translation for both organizations. This partnership has seen five completed Oral Bible Storying (OBS) projects touching 48 languages and people groups.
“These projects are good because they accomplish the strategic missionary tasks of evangelism, discipleship, leadership development and church planting,” said Jay Shafto, an IMB missionary in the DRC who works in concert with these OBS projects, along with me. “We have decided to make orality projects the centerpiece of our strategy. The length of the projects allows us to have enough time with the participants to bring them to a new understanding of the Word of God and how it can impact lives. All of our strategic goals – evangelism, discipleship, leadership development, pastoral training and church planting – are most effectively done using Bible stories in long-term projects like Oral Bible Storying.”[13]
In addition to facilitating missions work, these OBS projects help fulfill other IMB priorities as well: God’s Word for all peoples in appropriate forms; addressing oral cultures; strategic partnerships; and training, equipping, and mentoring local partners in the missionary task.
Such projects are a win for Seed Company as well. Williams-Ngumbu said:
OBS projects are a good idea on several levels. They accomplish immediate impact, compared with traditional, written translation projects, with many people hearing the Word of God in the target language as soon as the first workshop. In the Congo Basin region, the language communities have responded extremely well to hearing Bible stories in their own language, starting many storying groups and new churches. They are also great for translation in that they allow the project members to learn translation principles long before they start putting anything down in writing. They learn to test the stories in different ways at each stage of the process and can test key terms before publishing them in writing. We have combined the orality workshops with language development workshops, which has been a great combination. It allows for immediate impact of God’s Word while also allowing the orthography to be developed and tested before a potential written translation starts.[14]
IMB Joins Forces with Bible Translation Agencies
Grant Lovejoy, director of orality strategies for IMB, said that IMB has been actively involved in the production and use of Bible stories in missions since the late 1980s. This is due to “the prevalence of orality around the world, and in particular among unevangelized and bibleless people groups.” He said that IMB missionaries stress “the need to communicate the gospel in mother tongues in the same ways those communities used their language, which was primarily or exclusively oral.”[15]
Lovejoy said, “There has been very encouraging progress in finding … ways to produce high-quality panoramas of biblical stories in oral form that are effective in leading people to faith in Christ and the formation of multiplying fellowship groups or … churches.”[16] There has now been a growing partnership between IMB and various Bible translation agencies in joining forces to produce high quality and biblically-accurate stories for bibleless peoples. Missionaries of the IMB believe that working together with such organizations as Seed Company in long-term OBS projects helps both organizations achieve their goals and purposes.
Termed “products of First Scripture projects” by Seed Company, oral Bible narratives penetrated the communities of 48 people groups of both the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Republic of Congo (Congo) resulting in a staggering number of conversions, baptisms, and new church starts. Utilizing the combined forces of individual IMB orality and Bible storying trainers and consultants, Seed Company personnel, IMB training teams consisting of both missionary and African personnel, trainers and consultants serving with SIL and organizations in the Wycliffe Global Alliance, and Congolese Bible translators, five projects were launched in DRC and Congo during a period of three years. The five projects touched a total of 48 languages, representing five geographic regions of the two countries.
Working with Multiple Languages to Increase Impact
One may wonder how so many languages can be addressed by relatively so few projects. A basic premise of OBS is to work with multiple language teams that share a common language of understanding and have a geographic affinity. During workshops, teams meet jointly for half a day then break up into their individual teams to process and apply what they learned in their respective mother tongues. Thus, each team develops a set of Bible stories unique to its language and people group.
Over a span of two to three years, each team produces a language-specific set of biblically accurate stories developed around a redemptive theme relating to its people containing 30 to 45 stories or more. Between workshops, team participants test and use their stories in community utilizing a Scripture-in-use or Scripture impact approach. This includes evangelism, starting Bible storying groups, church planting, discipleship, and telling stories in churches, schools, and community. The teams report the number of tellings, conversions, new groups started, new church starts, baptisms, etc. By the end of each project, a set of archival quality recordings of the stories is made for each language team.
“The different language groups create a positive competition that encourages every group to do better,” Shafto said. “By working with the same participants over an 18-month to 24-month period, we are able to encourage life change as they learn how to use Bible stories in their ministries. The importance of this long-term investment in a few from each people group is critical to the sustainability and multiplication of oral approaches among their people.” He added, “The large numbers of people who heard the gospel and made decisions for Christ was beyond my expectation. In Mbandaka alone there were 30,000-plus hearings and 1,100 baptisms. We are saw similar response in Kikwit.”[17]
Seni Zoungrana is a trainer and consultant for IMB’s StoryTogether program in Francophone Africa and served as a trainer for the Kindu project. He said, “The goal was to help everyone be able to transmit the Word of God painlessly through narrative presentations of the Bible. The project accomplished that. The successes recorded in this project were they understood the importance of telling Bible stories, and all the teams were able to successfully work under pressure. They also learned how to craft a good story, how to test a story, and how to tell it creatively and accurately. They know how to use stories for evangelism, discipleship, and for the healing of the soul. They also learned how to train others in this methodology.”[18]
Roger Nzongo, a pastor and Bible translator in DRC, was a trainer/consultant in three of the five OBS projects. He facilitated the project in Gemena. “A lot of people are illiterate, [and] cannot read or write,” Nzongo said. “In addition, African culture is oral; even the literate are oral communicators. These projects are good because utilizing oral methods facilitates understanding of God’s Word. It is simple. People retain and use these stories as easily as they do cultural stories. There is a discovery process with God’s Word that enriches everyone who participates in it, and they make personal application to their lives.”[19]
Unbelievable Results
Scripture-in-use and Scripture impact was a high priority for these projects. Built into the workshops was evangelism training, as well as coaching on how to develop small groups. Between workshops, language team participants were encouraged to tell and test the stories in community and to start story groups. The desire was to see God’s Word transform lives and transform communities. During workshops, reports and testimonies are given about how it went. It was thrilling to hear how God’s Word touched one life here and another life there, how one group was started here and another group there. When detailed statistical reports were given, however, the figures presented were almost unbelievable. In fact, when I started hearing such reports, I stressed that numbers needed to be verifiable and not just random figures pulled out of thin air. Participants assured me the numbers were correct.
Here are final figures for the five projects:
- Those who heard gospel presentations via Bible stories: 304,038
- Decisions for Christ: 43,570
- Baptisms: 3,947
- New groups started: 1,002
- New churches planted: 466
“If you want to see God working in your ministry,” Zoungrana said, “if you want to see God acting in your church, your community, there where you are serving God, I invite you to use orality.”
He continued, “I am going to tell you a truth. The classical method – meaning giving a theme, writing the references, preparing everything with an introduction, development, conclusion – is not for us in Africa. I am not saying it is not good, it just is not for us. Orality is the best method. So, I invite you to use orality.”
Zoungrana explained, “First off, orality allows visual contact with people – face to face. Orality creates a relationship between the listener and the one who is speaking. Orality gives birth to a trust between the two people who are sharing the story experience. Orality allows the person to see the character of God, to know that he is love, that man sinned. It brings him to recognize that he needs to ask for forgiveness. Orality brings people to understand that.”[20]
A. Steve Evans (tellhisstory@pobox.com) has served as a missionary with the IMB for over 40 years, specifically working in areas of communication strategy and oral cultures. His focus is on oral Bible strategies for bibleless peoples and on healthy church formation through oral strategies. He and his wife Carla currently live in Angola, concentrating on that country, as well as São Tomé & Principe and Equatorial Guinea.
NOTES
[1] James F. Engel and Wilbert Norton, What’s Gone Wrong With the Harvest?: A Communication Strategy for the Church and World Evangelism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1974).
[2] Engel and Norton, What’s Gone Wrong?, covers.
[3] Rick Warren, “Jesus Told Stories to Make a Point,” Pastor.com, February 15, 2011, https://pastors.com/jesus-told-stories-to-make-a-point/.
[4] Eugene H. Peterson, Stories of Jesus, (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1999), 8.
[5] Peterson, Stories of Jesus, 9.
[6] “Bible Illiterate Teachers Produce Bible Illiterate Students,” Train Bible Teachers Blog, July 8, 2011, accessed February 15, 2021, https://trainbibleteachers.com/blog/bible-illiterate.htm .
[7] Albert Mohler, “The Scandal of Bible Illiteracy: It’s Our Problem,” January 20, 2016, accessed February 15, 2021, https://albertmohler.com/2016/01/20/the-scandal-of-biblical-illiteracy-its-our-problem-4.
[8] Brian Harrell, personal email to author, February 19, 2021.
[9] “How Do I Pray for Bibleless People?” Wycliffe Bible Translators USA, accessed February 15, 2022, https://www.wycliffe.org/prayer/how-do-i-pray-for-bibleless-people.
[10] “2021 Scripture Access Statistics,” Wycliffe Global Alliance, accessed February 15, 2022, https://www.wycliffe.net/resources/statistics.
[11] “How Do I Pray for Bibleless People?” Wycliffe Bible Translators USA, accessed February 15, 2022, https://www.wycliffe.org/prayer/how-do-i-pray-for-bibleless-people.
[12] Angi Williams-Ngubu, personal email to author, October 28, 2020.
[13] Jay Shafto, personal email to author, September 4, 2020.
[14] Angi Williams-Ngubu, personal email to author, October 28, 2020.
[15] Grant Lovejoy, “Orality, Bible Translation, and Scripture Engagement,” (presentation, Bible Translation Conference, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics and SIL, International, Dallas, Texas, 2009), 3.
[16] Lovejoy, “Orality,” 12.
[17] Jay Shafto, personal email to author, September 4, 2020.
[18] Seni Zoungrana, personal email to author, September 7, 2020, translated from French by author.
[19] Roger Nzongo, personal email to author, September 19, 2020, translated from French by author.
[20] Seni Zoungrana, personal email to author, September 7, 2020, translated from French by author.
EMQ, Volume 58, Issue 3. Copyright © 2022 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
