Tell Me a Story

Orality: How the World Learns

Dennis Johnson, Joe Musser

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780781408073
• eBook ISBN: 9780781408189
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Two-Thirds of the world don't read. How can the church reach them?

Tell Me a Story is a profound call to the global church to use storytelling, or Orality, as a primary method for communicating Christ's gospel to the world. Dennis Johnson and Joe Musser outline compelling and practical strategies for reaching children and adults around the world whose primary way of learning is through hearing oral stories.

You will be inspired and equipped to make Orality, or story telling, a part of your ministry in your neighborhood, in your local church, and around the world.

Chapter One

SMALL BEGINNINGS

Some years ago I was home when the doorbell rang, and when I went to answer it, a US postal carrier was standing outside. He had a big grin. “Mr. Johnson, you wouldn’t remember me,” he began after introducing himself. “You were probably just six or seven years old when you accompanied your dad and mom to the Blackhawk Court Projects.”1

My mind went back to that time in our respective lives. I remembered how my dad took us with him every Sunday morning to the “projects,” to set up for a Sunday school outreach program for the tenants and their children. My job was to sweep the floor of the activities room and help set up and arrange the folding chairs before the service. My mom would play the tinny piano, and my dad would direct the kids in singing some Sunday school choruses and present a simple story-sermon designed for their ages.

Now, many years later, here was one of the products of that work who’d attended that little Sunday school. I shook his hand, and we reminisced about those days. He told me he was a Christ follower, as were his wife and children. He was all grown up and our new mail carrier.

The man continued his story: “I don’t know how I’d have turned out if it hadn’t been for the Blackhawk Sunday school. I still get emotional when I remember how your dad led me to make a decision to follow Jesus. I listened to the stories and songs, and even as a young kid, your dad helped me to understand that God loved me. If that hadn’t happened to me, I could have gone down a whole different path—like so many other kids in the projects—of crime, drugs, school dropouts, and the like. I just want to thank you for your dad and mom, and to let you know how much they mean to me.”

I was quite moved at his story, and we became instant friends.

After our visit I still recalled those days and the satisfaction of being a part of my parents’ mission of the Blackhawk Sunday school outreach of Elim Baptist Church. I felt grateful that even at age six or seven I was able to help out my mom and dad. The mail carrier’s experience in the Blackhawk Sunday school was a tangible illustration of how Bible stories and songs change lives. I saw it happen again and again. I watched other kids as they were specifically invited to the Sunday school services—to hear songs and stories about Jesus and happily soak up all that they saw and heard.

Without knowing it, I first experienced the concept of Orality during that assignment at the Sunday school outreach. We didn’t have printed materials to pass out. The kids didn’t bring Bibles from home to read from, and most were too young to read. What was taught and what was learned was strictly done by the effectiveness of the spoken word stories—with simple Flannelgraph cutouts that my folks prepared for the children.

Now fast-forward more than fifty years. Technology has raced by as if in light-years, compared to what we had then for communicating with the kids and the few adult parents who also sat in on the Sunday worship and Sunday school services at the housing project.

The Flannelgraph and piano were the most sophisticated teaching methods outside of the spoken words that my parents used. Yet what my parents did in that simple setting still wasn’t much different from what took place in the traditional churches across the city. High tech had not yet overwhelmed the churches.

Today, however, if you visit a contemporary church, you’ll likely encounter some or all of the following changes in communication methodology:

• Public-address sound amplification—an old technology with new wireless microphone transmission

• Lobby electronic devices or computers for giving directions

• Stage lighting

• Musical instruments with amplification

• Film and video projectors for the sanctuary and plasma TVs for the classrooms

• TV cameras for enlarging the image of people onstage or the platform

• Bible verses couched in art projected on a wall

• Television or film clips from TV shows or movies shown as sermon illustrations

• Pagers for anxious mothers to respond to their babies if necessary

• PowerPoint projections of sermon points and announcements

• Electronic tools for teens and adolescents (via texting, Twitter, etc.)

• Electronic “urgent” notifications for adults (by Blackberries, iPhones, etc.)

• Electronic signs or projected requests for you to turn off cell phones

• Church services streamed over the Internet

• Training of pastors and teachers via smartphone apps and social sites such as Facebook

You can probably add several more examples to that list showing how the use of modern technology can enhance the worship experience and in fact enhances communications more effectively and visually—however, they also illustrate how things have changed in the past fifty years. My point is that there are countless new high-tech gizmos that convince us we can’t live without them—even in church.

However, travel half a world away to Africa, India, or parts of many of the underdeveloped Asian nations where such high-tech proliferation is not as universal—yet—but it’s beginning to happen there, in the urban areas, though the rest of their country is still one or two generations behind where the US stood in the 1940s in having amenities and personal accumulation.

I can remember what America was like fifty years ago. It sounds unbelievable in the twenty-first century, but I knew kids in grade school who came from neighborhoods where they didn’t have running water in the house; they had a pump outside and carried water inside in a bucket.

They didn’t have indoor plumbing but rather an outhouse that might get tipped over around Halloween. Moms did the weekly laundry by heating water on the stove or with a small “doughnut heater” in a washtub.

For some who lived outside the city, they didn’t even have electricity—and used kerosene lamps or lanterns. Few of these families could afford a car and walked or took a bus—especially during WWII when gas and tires were rationed and hard for even affluent families to get.

Now, granted, a minority of families lived that kind of Spartan life in the 1940s. Our family was fortunate enough to have modern conveniences—but some of my childhood friends thought that people who had electricity, running water, indoor bathrooms, and a car were rich, though we never thought we were privileged or wealthy.

Ironically, even the kids that I thought were poor didn’t consider themselves poor. They would be considered “poverty level” families today.

People today in rural villages in India, Africa, Indonesia, and such third-world locales are at that place where those of the Greatest Generation and some Boomers were fifty to seventy-five years ago. These third-world peoples are merely waiting and hoping to move up in social advantage with time.

In my opinion, the greatest obstacle people in other emerging countries may face in their present condition isn’t necessarily poverty—although that’s surely a spirit-breaker. I think it’s not having any hope; they recognize their poverty and have been led to believe that there’s no way out of their condition. This is especially a widespread feeling in India, where Dalits (the lowest sub-caste or “untouchables”) are locked in a sorry state of existence simply as an accident of birth. The Hindu religion declares them lacking in full human status, and their dogma declares that they must serve as virtual slaves without basic human rights until they somehow find relief in another life, the “karma” of reincarnation.

While I deplore the terrible situations in which these Dalit people live, the same conditions are also in play in many other so-called third-world countries, so we can’t give up hope for them. When I look at their situations, I try to look for ways to ease their suffering, pain, and hardship.

Poverty, pain, and lack of educational knowledge and vocational training is ever present in countries I’ve visited. Yet now I have discovered some ways to help. When we go overseas, it’s to build a playground, provide food, hold a medical clinic, or teach kids and train adults to teach kids.

Samuel Goldwyn, the famous Hollywood film mogul, once said, “When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.” I don’t think I can recall anything else of significance that he ever said, but this statement always makes me smile, because it’s absolutely true. There’s nothing quite as rewarding to me than to look directly into a child’s eyes and watch them light up in response to acceptance, love, attention, and learning.

I’ve visited disadvantaged people in scores of countries where I’ve gone on personal trips, church mission trips, and business and political fact-finding missions overseas. Whether participating in aspects of a Sister City program (as I did when I was a Rockford alderman and mayoral candidate), or as a board member representing a Christian service agency, or as a CEO of a group of several regional corporations, we always made a point to spend time with the local people and help where we could.

My desire was to see how we and other Americans, a traditionally generous people, might help others or share ideas and mutual solutions to problems. Sometimes we’ve been able to provide higher education for a young man or woman who needs that learning to become a leader in his or her country to better help his or her fellow citizens.

One case in point: The formerly Communist country of Romania had long persecuted the Christian church, even going so far as to torture and imprison their pastors and lay leaders and even execute some of them. One of their favorite tactics to silence a church group was to bulldoze their churches. It’s only been about twenty years since their revolution that overturned Communism. That revolution, by the way, was begun by Christians taking a courageous stand against the tyrannical dictator Ceausescu. They were joined by students and sympathizers. Once Communism was overthrown, the iron fist against the church was partially unclenched. Church members and pastors now worship freely, and many can even get travel visas to leave the country.

One young man, the son of one of the Romanian Sunday school leaders, was eager to come to America. His father had lost his government teaching job in Romania for not renouncing his faith in Christ. My wife, Evie, and I felt led to bring the young man over to the US and pay for his education at Judson University, where he graduated number one in his class.

A man I know sponsored a student in India to get a seminary education and now supports the young man, who is now ordained as a pastor. The young man has started a church and school in northeast India. He’s making a huge difference winning “untouchable” Dalits in the outskirts of New Delhi.

There are literally thousands of Americans like us who seek to help the less fortunate of other countries become educated—and then to multiply their learning by sharing their knowledge with many throughout their own land.

I’m encouraged when I see another person act on these impulses to help others. The problem is, the world’s population continues to explode, and it’s hard to keep up with the demand for help. We could recruit thousands more Americans to sponsor young men and women for a college ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface-Major Points that Every Christian Ought to Know
• 1-Small Beginnings
• 2-Chernobyl-Is This What Hell Is Like
• 3-Rips in the Iron Curtain
• 4-Sister City Opens Wide Its Doors
• 5-"I'll Do It My Way"
• 6-Groups Love to Hear a Story Too
• 7-Belonging, Becoming-And Then, Behaving
• 8-What Works in "This Day and Age"
• 9-The Oral Majority
• 10-Discipling Kids through Simple Theater
• 11-Storytelling As Evangelism
• 12-Start at the Beginning-With Children
• 13-The Need to Help Children Get to Know God
• Insert
• 14-When Good Meets Evil
• 15-Churches in the Twenty-First Century
• 16-Vietnam 1993-Ho Chi Min City
• 17-Oliver North's Return
• 18-Making Friends with Former Enemies
• 19-Looking for an Off-Ramp at 90 MPH
• 20-China-Cracks in the Great Wall
• 21-Sarajevo-"This Hell Proves There Must Be a Heaven"
• 22-Different Worldviews-Part I
• 23-Different Worldviews-Part II
• 24-Different Worldviews-Part III
• 25-Keeping Your Life Together When Your World Is Falling Apart
• 26-Are We a Lost Generation
• 27-Teach Children about Heaven
• 28-The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization
• 29-Facing the Future
• Extras