by Sam Poe

Over this last year or so Marlene and I have had the privilege of working with a wonderful team of friends in Zimbabwe on a plan to plant churches there among people who are oral learners.

Oral learners are those who don’t learn through reading and writing. The printed page does not shape their thinking to any significant degree. Their cultural perspective is primarily oral and event-oriented. Among the world’s least evangelized people groups at least 70% of them are oral learners and communicators.

We are convinced that what we will learn from these pioneer efforts in Zimbabwe will have far reaching effect as we continue to reach out with the Gospel message to unreached people groups in other parts of the world.

What is Chronological Bible Storying?
Our strategy for sharing the Gospel and planting new churches among these folks who live in oral cultures is to use Chronological Bible Storying. CBS is a strategy to share the panorama of the Bible through telling key stories of the Bible in chronological order. In the process of telling these stories there is a strategy to evangelize, plant a church among them and train workers and leaders who will be capable of continuing in this work of bringing the Gospel to their own people as well as reaching out to others. Within this process an 'oral Bible' will be brought into the life of their community.

Telling the stories of the Bible chronologically linked together, rather than in isolated or unconnected ways, helps the hearers understand individual stories in the light of God’s Big Story. Oral learners describe people by telling stories about them. For these people to learn about God and Jesus they need to hear the stories that characterize them. They need to hear the stories that characterize God’s community, the church. Finally they must hear of the glorious finale of the history of this present age with Jesus coming again to gather his beloved Church to himself forever and ever. This is the most important story human ears could ever hear.

Mission and CBS
In order to effectively choose the story lists it is important it understand something of the worldview of those who are to be the recipients of these stories. We have been able to do some of this in Zimbabwe by asking key questions among the people within the culture where we will be planting a church in order to better understand where any particular points of resistance to the Gospel may lie within their worldview. Some examples of the questions asked are; “Where did the world come from?” “Where did the first people come from?” “Where do you go when you die?” “Does how a person lives their life affect where they go or what happens to them when they die?” “What is of greatest importance in your life?”

Their answers to these questions helped us select stories from the Bible that would counteract perspectives within their worldview that are not in harmony with God’s word. Stories are particularly good at changing a wrong understanding of life. It is stories that anchor people’s existing perspective on the world. Where a worldview perspective is misleading or deceptive the best thing Christians can do in order to displace that perspective is to tell better stories, and we have them! Our stories must provide biblical answers to the essential questions of life. The more biblical stories people know and can fit into a single comprehensive story of God’s saving work, the more completely they are able to embrace a biblical worldview.

We are working with a wonderful team of leaders, storywriters and storytellers in Zimbabwe. We have put together a story list that will be used in our evangelism track of stories. Already we are receiving wonderful reports of very positive responses among those who are now hearing the stories that have been prepared.

We are continuing to work on story lists for church planting and for training disciples and leaders in each of these situations. We are very desirous of much prayer support as we continue working with our dear friends in Zimbabwe.