To facilitate a truly global conversation, we ask Christian leaders from around the world to respond to the Global Conversation’s lead articles. These points of view do not necessarily represent the Lausanne Movement. They are designed to stimulate discussion from all points of the compass and from different segments of the Christian community. Please add your perspective by posting a comment so that we can learn and grow together in the unity of the Spirit.

A response to Mark Snowden’s article: “Are we training our pastors wrong?”

I deeply affirm Mark Snowden for a fantastic article that very helpfully connects pastors training, disciplemaking and orality.

My lingering question is, “How does one promote oral methodologies within cultures that often prefer or at least expect literate methods?”

In 2009 we were introducing oral methods for training Alur pastors in rural northwestern Uganda. The pastors we worked with had limited education, were predominately oral preference learners, and we naturally assumed storytelling would be a stirring success. While good things did happen, we were surprised when the pastors began asking for worksheets and notes from each story. This did not make sense; they were oral learners asking for literate materials.

We began realizing though, that while the pastors were oral preference learners, they lived in a culture that prized literacy. This did not seem to originate from within the Alur culture but from modern expectation. Regardless of its origin or motivation, the pastors wanted something written down. Literacy had cultural value. Storytelling did not.

I was confronted with this again during a pastors training in South Sudan. While trying to introduce the concept of Bible storying, one pastor interjected, “When are you going to teach our people to read?” I was frustrated as I was trying to explain that reading is not a requirement to understand truth within the narratives of Scripture. In fact, I was trying to offer an alternative that would give them and their congregations access to the Word of God. What the Sudanese pastors internalized though was actually regression instead of modern progress. Tell stories? “That is what our grandparents used to do.”

How do we handle this delicate tension?

In Luke 10, a presumably highly literate teacher of the law questioned Jesus about eternal life. Jesus asked him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” Jesus did not answer with a parable or story. He engaged the educated man right in his own context – in how he, a lawyer, read the Law. When the man responded perfectly, Jesus invited him, “Do this and you will live.”

The man was not satisfied. He needed something more than propositional principles. Thus, Jesus told the beloved Good Samaritan story, not to an oral learner but to presumably a highly literate lawyer.  It was within a narrative that the principles the lawyer knew in his head met real life application in his heart. Jesus knew his audience and used a combination of literate and oral methodologies to engage the man’s heart. I submit in Jesus’ example we find a pattern for integrating literate and oral methodologies.

Traditionally, the church has predominately assumed literate strategies in missions.  Oral methodologies are now gaining attention. The difficult question before all of us committed to making disciples is not how do we replace one with the other. Rather, it is “How do we, following in Jesus’ footsteps, engage people’s hearts by integrating the strengths of both?”

Billy Coppedge and his wife, Joanna, serve as missionaries in East Africa with World Gospel Mission. Currently living in Arua, Uganda with their four daughters, they are working alongside several African denominations. Specifically they are involved in pastoral training. The last few years have been an exciting albeit challenging journey for them of transitioning from using highly literate methods exclusively to discovering and implementing oral methodologies in their training strategies. Feel free to contact Billy at [email protected].