Hearing and listening or reading or both?

So you have found out that spoken information is as important to your community as written information. So what do you do about it? How does it affect your mission, outreach, and your engagement with Scripture?

So, you have asked some questions, you have done some research, you have observed what different people do. You have found that reading books or magazines is maybe not so popular, but people like listening to stories or just talking. Does this have an effect on how you prioritize your activities? Yes it does.

You may be asking yourself why you are reading this and not listening to it. This is because spoken English can be different from written English. You might not like the accent, and it might sound very fast. However, if you hear something in your own language or dialect it often connects at a much deeper level. 

If you already have written Scriptures in your language, this also explains why it may not be enough just to take them and convert them into an audio form. Experts in orality will be able to explain why this is so. On the ‘craft2tell’ website they explain it very well. 

“A spoken story is different from memorizing a piece of written text. For a text to become a naturally told story that is easy to remember it can sometimes be necessary to summarize some parts, to add some implicit information, or to repeat something that had been said before.

Also, natural sounding stories in some languages may contain extra repetition, include rhetorical questions for the listeners, or may actually be presented in song form. For this reason our stories are “crafted”, rather than translated line by line.

The crafted Biblical stories aim to be faithful to the message of the Scripture portion they are based on. They may however at times leave out some details or sub-points, to make the story shorter or easier to understand. Sometimes some additional background information is included, if it is considered needed to help listeners understand the story better.”

Do I need dedicated help? Yes you do.

The good news is that there are ministries all over the world who can come alongside and help. In the table below you can find out more about people and organizations that can help you in this journey we often call orality. There are experts you can connect with and further materials to look at.