Why is the Chronological Bible Storying strategy so relevant to oral cultures?

About four billion people on earth, that is two thirds of the world’s population, are ‘oral learners’ (those who are either illiterate or functionally illiterate). About 70% of the ‘unreached people groups’ (those who have never had opportunity to hear the Good News about Christ’s Salvation) are oral learners.

Oral learners have a different learning style to literate learners. Those who learn by reading have a tendency to isolate their teachings out of a story, or give detailed explanations of the various parts of a story, often boiling the story down into a statement of principle. Print makes this possible because words take on visual presence and therefore can be more easily separated out from each other. For an oral learner words are sounds without visual presence and only make sense when they are linked together in a sentence or paragraph associated with a life event or a story. For this reason they do not tend to quickly isolate ‘teachings’ or principles out of a story, but rather they encounter the story and enter into its world.

An oral learner will tend to carry what he knows in the form of remembered stories, proverbs or mental pictures of life events.

Jesus ministered to such a world. In the time of his ministry it is estimated that about 5% of the population of Israel could read. Aramaic was the common language spoken and there was not a lot of printed material in Aramaic. The Jewish scholars could read Hebrew and most of their written material was in Hebrew. When Jesus taught he used stories. In fact, when we begin to look closely at the teaching that was given by the early Christians in general, it is clear that Biblical Storytelling was normative.

By Sam Poe