VULNERABLE MISSION

MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2013): 68–80
I am indebted to John Walsh for the following explanation which greatly helped me on
this point: “When people routinely assume that the opposite of orality is literacy, they
are making only a superficial contrast. The real contrast is not oral vs. literate. It is oral
vs. analytical.” 13 In other words, an oral style is a story or narrative or holistic style of
thinking as opposed to a conceptual style that breaks everything down into pieces and
then connects the pieces. Oral thinkers apprehend whole ideas; analytical thinkers comprehend
them one piece at a time.
Again in very broad strokes, the preferred local thinking style is analytical in the West
and oral in the Global South, though oral thinking is growing quickly among younger
Westerners and analytical thinking is widespread among people with a lot of Western
education, regardless of their home culture. The aspect of this relevant to our discussion
is that the vast majority of mission today is undertaken by analytical thinkers working in
contexts where oral thinking is the preferred local style.
Let’s return then to the earlier comment about doing mission with “an oral approach
to life.” This hit me like a bombshell while I was giving some guest lectures in a Central
Asian seminary a few years ago. I was talking about Bosch’s overview of paradigms of
mission throughout church history 14 and the question was asked, “What is a paradigm?”
My on-the-spot attempts to answer did not shed any light for the questioner. In later reflection
I realized that a paradigm is a tool that an analytical thinker uses to compare two
or more systems. Non-analytical (oral) thinkers do not use that tool because they never
undertake that task. They simply do not look at their worlds that way.
Further, I realized that every lecture by a foreigner and every book in that seminary
library (except the biographies) was structured for analytical thinkers and was basically
lost on the oral ones. I understood why a Scottish faculty member at the school had said,
“We try to get them to answer the questions on an exam but often all they do is give
testimonies.” The entire seminary system was set up to turn oral thinkers into analytical
thinkers rather than to capitalize on their natural strengths as oral thinkers.
Whether that illustration was helpful or not, here is the abstract description of the problem.
Outside money is often used for mission methods such as building a seminary or
paying a salary for a church planting pastor, which are seen as the best or only means
to the desired goal, such as a strong church or a successful outreach plan. There may be
several Xs in a chain; for example, Bible schools (X 1 ) are seen as the means to theological
orthodoxy (X 2 ) and spiritual maturity of pastors (X 3 ), good study habits using good study
tools (X 4 ), and quality sermons (X 5 )—in order to reach the goal of mature believers and
a mature church.
But the vision of the “mature” church may have been flawed in the beginning because it
assumed that genuine disciples are analytical thinkers and their leaders must use analytical
methods to help them grow. Look at the financial implications of this ethnocentric assumption.
different kinds of logic. (My thanks to Missio Dei editor, Greg McKinzie, for these helpful references after the
conference.) Jim Harries speaks of the issue most often as “monistic/dualistic thinking.”
13 John Walsh, an astute practitioner of orality (http://christianstorytelling.com), explained this to me
in a memorable personal conversation in October 2011.
14 David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, American Society of Missiology
Series 16 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991).
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