Tex Sample warned us.
For years the “progressive” seminary professor has been talking about the “oral culture” that characterized the “working class” of “Blue Collar” people. Reaching them, he rightly reasoned, would require the mainline to adapt to that “oral culture” that spoke the language of people who thought using Prayer Books, for example, was too much like the classrooms they never liked too much.
One of Sample’s complaints was that it always seemed “beneath” us too spend too much reaching out to “Blue Collar” people.
That could be because of our views of literacy. We became so enamored by literacy, reading, and education we really forgot why we originally were teaching people to read. Originally we taught people to read so that they could read the Holy Scriptures and come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ the Lord. There were other benefits to reading as we know, but as we lost confidence in the scriptures themselves we elevated literacy itself to the status of an ultimate good in and of itself apart from the knowledge of God. Soon we wanted people to read for its immediate utilitarian benefits without reference to God. And soon God was gone from the process entirely. The universities we created to train ministers stand as testimony to this apostasy and our own involvement as Professor Higgins in our own rendition of Pygmalion. Our theory about “Blue Collar” people was that if we took them in off the street, cleaned them up, and gave them some education, they’d leave their unsophisticated ways, learn to love books and High Culture, and become “like us”. Or if they didn’t become like us, they’d at least become more culturally tolerable worker bees.
In the process, we in the mainline stopped reaching the people with an “oral culture” and focused on the well washed yuppie class leaving the working class to whomever would have them…and too often that was the sects of questionable theology and the outright cults. We lost the perspective of 1 Corinthians 9:22 wherein Paul said: “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”
While there were people who still valued books and literacy and the mainline air of respectability, that might have been a viable, if self-serving, option.
But in the meantime the phenomenon of “oral culture” has migrated from the “Blue Collar” to the culture at large. Research indicates that 58% of college graduates never read another book after graduation unless they’re “forced” to do so for work or some other purpose. Most prefer to get their information through other means than reading. That means, world wide, 80% of the world’s population prefers orality over literacy as their way of learning. Call them “post moderns, call them the “iPod generation” or whatever, but they are no longer factory workers with dirty hands and hard, physically demanding jobs. They’re the college types who used to be ideal candidates for the mainline.
But these happy hunting grounds are no more. As one mainline mission mobilizer at a recent “Orality Conference” noted, “Literacy is the only way we do things!”
Given the present declines in the mainline, this ongoing failure to adapt to “oral culture” will only further the declines.
In the mainline we still have a resource that adapts easily to serve the “oral culture” … it’s called the Bible. And it’s stories - when told for what they are - the Living Word of the Living God - satisfy the Hungry Heart wherever they are told. If we will turn back from our own unbelief and accept the stories of the Bible as God’s Word again, we will have a message for this world wide oral culture whether that’s in the jungles of Africa or the urban jungles of America.
It’s no secret that mainline congregations who wish to survive must make drastic changes. Learning how to communicate to the “oral culture” all around us will be crucial to this effort and the transition really must begin now if we are to send out the Gospel to this generation.
Want to learn more? Read Making Disciples of Oral Learners
