In India, Pastor Dinanath explained that he spent over two years in a Bible College. When he returned home, the congregation could not understand his sermons and there was little fruit; converting the lost was hard work. After a Bible Storying workshop, he changed what was taught to him in order to use Bible Storying methods, preaching in the local language, and incorporated traditional music in worship. In six years he led his church to baptize 1,350 and start 75 churches (Making Disciples of Oral Learners, 3).
Was Pastor Dinanath taught the wrong way? I don’t think so. A highly literate approach isn’t bad in all cases and shouldn’t be discarded. But I must ask if there is a way to train pastors like him to be more effective. Wouldn’t an oral approach serve my brother better?
Jesus typically used a parable when speaking with the crowds (Mark 4:32-34). Churches have come to expect their pastors to research the text and know how to run a church. As Pastor Dinanath discovered, the typical training approach often requires taking pastors out of societal settings, sometimes for years at a stretch. When they receive training apart from their community, they begin to alter their communication patterns. One pastor that I interviewed in Panama said that in the 13 years he had pastored that he had never conducted the Lord’s Supper. He had learned to use pre-formed wafers while in seminary. Since he couldn’t afford these wafers, he didn’t think he could observe the ordinance. That is the typical response from oral learners who are concrete thinkers learning in an abstract method.
The literate worldview often creeps in from the outside, too. In some cases, highly literate pastors who make frequent mission trips to visit pastors offer literate worldview training that is not very transferable to the local context. The newly trained pastor stumbles when trying to implement what he thought was taught and often attributes lack of obedience from his church members to hardness of heart or spiritual immaturity. He is led to believe that if one approach works in one place, it should work equally as well in his own context.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a waste of time. Pastors in training must work hard at their studies. The literate methods that are used for advancement require hours of scriptural analysis, copious reading assignments, detailed documentation, attending lectures, learning biblical languages, conducting textual research, passing examinations, participating in supervised internships, and many other disciplines. Although pastor training is changing in some places in the world, the typical pastor training approaches are usually based on a literate worldview at the expense of the decidedly more oral worldview of the people among whom the pastor is called to minister. The literacy-based training shifts a local pastor’s learning style just enough to cause them to lose relevance with the learning preference of their own church members.
UNDERSTANDING THE TIMES: At least 65-70% of the adults in our world must be considered oral learners because they have no literacy or limited literacy skills (Grant Lovejoy, “The Extent of Orality,” IMB, p. 11). An oral learning preference often includes larger percentages. And the word “preference” is the key because while there are people who can’t read, there are also those who won’t or don’t read. It is easy to point to literacy statistics as the only indicator for the need to take an oral approach to pastor training, but God wired each of us for stories, so other indicators can be identified. When my wife and I taught a Bible study for college age young adults for three years, we soon learned that although they were highly literate, they were often burned out on reading and ached for Bible study that fostered interactivity like Bible Storying sessions. But college students may not be as literate as they seem as in America only one out of three college graduates are proficient readers of continuous paragraphs. (National Assessment of Adult Literacy Survey, U.S. Dept. of Education, 2003).
Many of the world’s educational systems rely upon rote memorization in classrooms where only the teacher has books and students rarely take books home. Educational attainment of at least eight years is required to be considered a functional literate. Then those who read must do so daily or they will regress. Much of what people learn around the world is through what Walter Ong labeled as “secondary orality.” They know things because they heard or saw them on some audiovisual medium such as radio or handheld players. It might have begun in print, but is communicated orally (Orality & Literacy, 3).
Finally, oral approaches are needed among some people so that they can hear God’s Word in their own vernacular. Wycliffe Bible Translators reported in 2010 that there were only 457 translations of the Bible, so those speaking the remaining 6,343 languages (not including dialects) were using trade language Scriptures and not their heart language. Verbatim audio scriptures are being recorded each year. They stand as a plumb line for accuracy by those engaging people groups with Bible Storying methods.
SPIRITUAL GROWTH: Can spiritual maturity be achieved in a one-way lecture-based environment? School teachers grimace at the thought of teaching children in a large classroom in which one lesson is expected to apply to everyone. Speaking without listening is not communication if it lacks a feedback loop. Just as each student has a unique learning level, each follower of Jesus has a spiritual growth story. How can a preacher know what is being caught no matter how deep theologically he may expound upon the Word? The words are there, but is it caught?
Spiritual growth can come through instruction from pastors, interactions with godly church members, and through the reliance upon Scripture either in printed, storied, or verbatim media formats. Ultimately, spiritual growth comes from the Holy Spirit. Pastors that insist on controlling biblical theology and becoming the sole authority on communicating God’s truths run the risk of interfering with God’s work in their midst. Jesus knew this would be a concern for the disciples and instructed them.
When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth . . . He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you (John 16:13a–14 NIV).
As the late Avery Willis and I asked in our book, what makes truth stick? How do you communicate Velcro truths in a Teflon world? Hearts and minds are coated by learning preferences that just don’t match up with what pastors are trying to do in sermons. Avery, who taught seminary students how to preach, even went so far to say that “trying to make disciples through preaching is like spraying milk over a nursery full of screaming babies just hoping some of it falls into their mouths” (Truth That Sticks, 87). Yet, spiritual growth will come through paying attention to individuals who mature from being dead in their sins to a spiritual infant, a spiritual child, a spiritual young adult, and then a spiritually-reproducing parent. Disciplers need to listen and pay attention to the progression of spiritual maturity. This requires constant interaction and intentionality.
RELEVANCE: While I was attending a Purpose Driven Church workshop in 2005, I heard Rick Warren tell attendees to place greeters at their church doors that represented the kind of person that they wanted their church to attract. If that’s 90 year-old men, then that’s okay. Now, who do you think that literacy-oriented pastors attract? Two studies released in 2011, one by the University of Nebraska and the other by the American Sociological Association, showed that whites in America with high school educations declined in their frequency of church attendance, while those with college degrees were the most frequent attenders today.
The church has attracted those who are like them with their literate worldview preference. In a media study that I conducted in Southern Baptist-related churches throughout the Americas in the mid-1990s, the questionnaires revealed that Baptists were more likely to attract those with the highest education in the country, which in many places is usually a high school education. Yet, that was certainly not representative of the entire population around them. Churches were attracting those who were like them (“Americas Media Study,” IMB, 1996).
Almost everything that most pastors typically are taught to do supports a literate worldview. Projected scripture, reading verses from all over the Bible, using fill-in-the-blank handouts, summarizing biblical narratives, conducting word studies, and exegeting texts create a non-reproducible environment by church members. There is a disconnect from the general population by literate worldview pastors who rarely attract people other than those who are like themselves. In my experience, few feel that their members have matured to the point that they could be turned loose with important things like teaching a class or starting a new church. The prevalent assumption is that the pastor must become the elite authority and few others leaders, if any, can qualify.
Training that relies on the literate approach produces pastors that cannot easily pass along what they have learned. They often become irrelevant. Meanwhile, I have heard complaints from the most highly educated pastors as I have traveled the globe that church members are just not witnessing as they should. The truth is that pastors have not been equipped with a model that is reproducible outside their stained glass windows. Instead, all the rank and file church members can do is put in a good word for Jesus or invite people to church to hear the pastor or experience the music. No wonder so many churches have turned worship services into a show!
So the ways of learning, thinking, and communicating that are second nature to most homiletics professors are dependent on high levels of literacy. We have had literacy skills so long that we forget what it was like before we acquired them. So we seldom recognize the literateness of our homiletical methods. We expect our students to use these skills in preparing and presenting sermons, perhaps unwittingly to the detriment of their listeners.
– Grant Lovejoy, “‘But I Did Such Good Exposition’: Literate Preachers Confront Orality.” Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society 1 (December 2001): 22-32.
A pastor’s ability to explain the Bible to others is highly valued in training schools. However, is telling every detail of a passage the equivalent of a shotgun blast hoping some pellets strike their mark? There is a need for pastors to learn how to exegete Scripture and then lead their flock in active discovery. Some pastor training schools teach inductive Bible study and coaching. These skills are valuable in guiding followers of Jesus to “self-feed.” Small groups that don’t lecture, but ask powerful open-ended questions that get people to think and interact with the text bring results that best equip believers when they need to apply it outside of the church context. Exegesis is not wrong, but it depends on who says it. If believers do the exegesis as the Holy Spirit leads them, then the pastor can do a better job of making disciples like Jesus did.
MAKING DISCIPLES: Discipling often is a means to build up individuals into maturity in Christ. Making disciples like Jesus did means getting personally involved by walking with disciples outside formal training times, using stories to let learners vicariously catch a biblical truth, coach believers as they begin discipling others to make corrections or reinforce them, supporting them by making some tweaks as necessary, but then fully authenticating their actions by empowering them to work unaided. Pastors can be taught to make disciples like Jesus did, but it will require a major shift in disciplemaking efforts. MAWL is an acronym for Model, Assist, Watch, and Leave. Pastoral training that keeps students on the move like Jesus did will mean that one day there will be a branching, a leaving, as new groups are formed. This may mean that the church has a new mature disciplemaker, or it could mean that the church sends out missionaries and church planters (Truth That Sticks, 129-134).
However, most pastors are trained to value the individual without giving thought to how they can pass along what they have learned—and that’s the rub. Disciplemaking requires pastors to have an unwavering commitment to making disciples in obedience to the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). In New Testament times, Timothy pastored the church at Ephesus. Paul told Timothy the essential part of pastoring was being able to raise up those who could pass it along to others; disciplemaking.
And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2:2 NIV)
The “entrusting” part required that “reliable men” be equipped so that they could pass it along. And how can we continue to be satisfied making converts when the command of Jesus goes further into disciplemaking?
There is a horrible phrase I picked up recently. It makes my skin crawl and might wake you up in the middle of the night with cold sweats: institutional discipleship. Ouch. Are we just training people to run a church? The command of Christ is to become change agents in a lost world! Nobody gets a bye. Everyone is in the game who is a follower of Jesus. The pastor’s role then is about raising up and sending out disciples.
It’s the responsibility of every church to make disciples. I also believe that the Word tells us that it is the job of every pastor to develop a system that will equip and enable all of the people in the church to be in the relational process for discipleship. – Jim Putman, pastor, Real Life Ministries, Post Falls, Idaho (Real Life Discipleship, 35)
As Jesus said, it is impossible that new wine can go into old wineskins without bursting them asunder (Matthew 9:17, Mark 2:22, Luke 5:37). Starting with new pastors and church members who can become pastors is important. However, if existing pastors become hungry enough to ask for help, then orality is the way to go as the new standard for disciplemaking efforts. Will these pastors ask, “What is it going to take to reach my community, my people, all people to faith in Christ?”
When Jesus sent out His twelve disciples, He did not say, “Now go find another disciple-maker to follow.” He sent them together, usually in groups of two, working together in accountable relationships. They were mature, not perfect. It is the same for us. (Real Life Discipleship, 148)
The good news is that the DNA of how Jesus taught, made disciples, and empowered them for disciplemaking in the first century can be caught today. A growing band of those who are literate have taken on the responsibility for studying and passing this methodology along to oral preference learners. Today, more than 500 churches, parachurch organizations, and denominational groups are members of the International Orality Network (www.oralbible.org).
BIBLE STORYING: Biblical ignorance is rampant in our churches. Pastors often talk about the Bible story rather than telling it. Most Bible narratives only take about three minutes to tell, so why not use them? The index in Reese Chronological Bible adds up to 500 to 700 Bible stories comprising 70% of the Bible (Bethany House, 1977). Church members have been trained by pastors to tolerate the Bible passages being read in order to hear their pastor’s own thoughts he discovered in hours devoted to sermon development. Before summarizing a Bible story, one pastor in my hearing said, “I don’t want to bore you with the details of this Bible story….” Yet this same preacher told a detailed joke and a longish life story that served his purpose.
Rather than establish the authority of God’s Word, some pastors unwittingly establish their own authority at the Bible’s expense. Personality cults flourish that generate a consumer mentality among church-goers. While the pastor is expected to do most everything, the church members watch from the sidelines. Few churches evaluate the quality while celebrating the quantity of their members. Encouraging small group leaders to not just teach the lesson but make disciples becomes a priority. Celebrations must erupt over disciples reproducing the process done with them in the lives of others.
DEEP CHANGE: This blog has attempted to raise the issues that are largely missing in most literacy-based pastor training programs.
- Systemic changes in education mean taking the training to the pastors that can prioritize disciplemaking.
- Teaching pastors how to preach needs to change to encompass the oral learning preferences of most people.
- Pastors should be teamed up with an accountability coach who can make their worship experiences to be more interactive, communicate in the heart language of their people, and lift up God’s Word over their own.
- Pastors must know how to develop different expectations of their members, raising the bar for disciplemaking by learning how to coach, support, and empower. Why not place every new member on one of several mission teams? And what if that team was their small group? Why not model church multiplication within the life of the church?
Pastors should believe that Bible Storying is incredibly reproducible and value it for reproducibility. A tremendous opportunity exists for Bible colleges, seminaries, and others engaging pastors. Training must incorporate orality methods that pastors can experience so that they can understand firsthand the power of the Holy Spirit to be at work through the Bible conveyed in oral form and in the heart language of the people. And pastors must be taught to help their leaders to be relational, supportive, transparent, and hold members accountable for spiritual growth.
Praise God that some pastor training is underway that addresses orality. Stephen Stringer, for one, shared how he met Pemba, who had acted upon the orality-based pastor training and went into the mountains along with her brother. In a few short weeks, they made disciples that started six new churches (Orality Breakouts, 68).
The following list is not meant to be exhaustive, but representative of significant contributions being made to train pastors in Bible Storying methods:
Snowden Ministries International provides Bible Storying training in workshops and disciple-making story sets for church planters, church leaders, new believers, year-long Bible studies, 8-session topical studies, volunteer mission trip training, weekly family devotions, and more. For a listing email [email protected].
Pastors can earn a Masters of Arts in Intercultural Studies that focuses on Bible Storying at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (http://college.sebts.edu).
A four-day Bible Storying course and a semester-long course, is conducted at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (www.swbts.edu/catalog).
Great Commission Initiatives provides a full week of storying training as part of its three-week phases (www.pantataethne.org).
The International Orality Network has a theological component available for helping you develop a new paradigm of pastor training (www.oralbible.org).
And, of course, how may I help you?
Several Christian leaders have been asked to continue the conversation by responding to this lead article. Read their responses and share your own thoughts:
A Bible College Principal responds - Nat Schluter
A Pastor responds - Chris Regas
A Missionary Responds - Billy Coppedge
Mark Snowden ([email protected]) has trained thousands of pastors and church leaders in Bible Storying workshops around the world. He co-authored Truth That Sticks (NavPress 2010) with the late Avery T. Willis, Jr. Mark is an ordained minister of the Gospel and has 30 years of experience in missions, including developing an oral Bible for a predominately Muslim unreached people group.
Special Blog to the Issachar Initiative, February 25, 2012