“How do we take God’s word out in a world where people are reading less and less?” is a question Graydon Colville, the International Director of Global Recordings, thinks we should be asking.

At the Bookends: learning and sharing faith in a YouTube world conference last weekend, Colville and a panel of serious thinkers teased out some answers.

“We persist in our literacy-based way of communicating. In fact that’s unsuitable for 75 per cent of the world’s population,” Colville told Bookends.

Sponsored by Bible Agencies Australia, whose members are Bible Society Australia, Global Recordings Network, Wycliffe, Scripture Union, Bible League, CWCI, Pocket Testament League, Bookends was all about how to share the gospel in a changing literacy culture.

The “illiterate” portion of the world’s population includes those whose language has not yet been written down, those who haven’t been taught to read, including those who might have been taught to read, but don’t function as literate, and a growing group in the West who are classed as having “secondary orality”.

Those with secondary orality depend on literate culture, but instead of reading the news, for example, will get most of their day-to-day information visually.

These people live in a world by means of “orality”, rather than literacy, hence the YouTube reference in the conference title.

“In the US, research shows a high proportion of university graduates will never read a serious book after graduation,” Colville said.

In the Anglosphere (US, Canada, UK and Australia, up to half the population are in the “basic” literacy category.

“The word illiterate has become a pejorative term. We have an automatic sense that people who are illiterate are not intelligent. But being illiterate does not say anything about a person’s intelligence or their ability to learn.”

Colville recounted a famous missionary story to make his point: “In Ethiopia before the Communist revolution, the church prepared for what was coming by identifying key passages of Scripture.

“They were taught in a local chanting style recorded and distributed with hand-wound (clockwork) playback devices.

“It was found that the illiterate village women who listened to the recordings time and time again knew more scripture than their pastors.”

Another speaker who works in a Communist country where sporadic persecution takes place told the story of how Bibles, Christian books and CDs could lead to arrests. The answer was to memorize Bible stories, “hiding God’s Word in the heart”.

There is a challenge for a book-soaked church in a world of oral communicators.

“A highly developed literacy thinker thinks differently from an oral communicator,” Colville argues. “Literacy causes people to think in logical terms (propositions and bullet points) rather than experience. If we think everyone thinks as we do, and teach on that basis we will have problems. How do we find ways of communicating that sticks in people’s hearts and minds?”

The irony of writing a newspaper report about an oral communication conference comes into play, because many presenters demonstrated their point by telling Bible stories, demonstrating the techniques that the “orality movement” advocates.

Calvin Chong of Singapore Bible College urges seminaries to take account of “Secondary Orality” in education materials. Our Christian default setting is book-centred, but colleges need to prepare pastors for people outside that culture.

He reminded Bookends of the term the “Gutenberg parenthesis”: we have had 500 years of a dominant literate culture which in the west is challenged by the rise of the new visual media.

Borrowing from the New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, he described stages of the move towards a global culture. “Globalisation 3.0 describes a world shrunk by the Internet,” he said.

Iconography

His presentation was notable for the use of icons. Not the ones you see in Orthodox churches, but the emergent visual language of simplified signs.

“The Bookend organisers said ‘Maybe you Pentecostal churches are using orality techniques instinctively?’” Kevin Hovey of Alpha Crucis College told his seminar.

Having been a missionary in PNG, he recalled struggling against the idea of, in effect, making literacy a prerequisite for church membership.

Yet Hovey is sure that orality has been key to the explosive growth of Pentecostal churches across the world.

“Accessibility, memorability, mobility and applicability are marks of a well-implemented orality.

“Orality means accessibility—most people can hear a story. Orality also allows for fast-paced styles of working.

“I am not sure that the leadership at Hillsong know how to spell ‘orality’,” he said cheekily, “but because of their Pentecostal stance, the use of story and other orality techniques get used. Hillsong has added to the modern Pentecostal preaching giving people points they can take home.”

Pentecostalism carries orality in its DNA.

Paul Eckert of the Bible Society has learned to be a better story teller by becoming a better listener. He’s been listening to the Pitjantjatjara people of Australia for decades.

“One of the things I have noticed is that women have a particular Storytelling style,” he said. “Women tell stories with a stick, drawing on the ground, placing leaves and other things in position using their other hand.

“I wish I had taken more notice of storytelling early on rather than rushing into working on printed books.

“The Pit people love the way that Jesus did his theology in stories. In the so-called dream time there is a series of stories from which they draw important life principles. This is how they do theology. It is not just a story. Their stories are there for life.”