Ministry In An Oral Culture

This book will help pastors educated in the literate culture of academia bridge the cultural gap between them and those in their congregations who verbalize their faith in proverbs and stories. Indeed, recent studies have shown that a large number of Americans, including many in the churches, are not functionally literate. Tex Sample says they live and work in an oral culture.

Millions hear the oral gospel. Building Bridges to Oral Cultures narrates with chronological and adventurous detail, an extraordinary journey that began for Jim and Carla Bowman in the early 80s with a passion to share the Good News with a handful of the least-reached, indigenous groups in Mexico. Over the course of thirty years, their travels led to breakthrough discoveries and innovation in remote communities of traditional oral learners around the world. With time and God’s guiding hand, a new comprehensive, oral communications model emerged. Effective bridges to oral cultures were developed and tested. Without eradicating cultures, speakers of the local languages are embracing the local oral arts to communicate God’s Word and are reaching the lost for Him across the globe.

"... explores the historical, cultural, and practical considerations necessary to develop a training program for biblically faithful indigenous leaders in animistic oral cultures."--back cover.

This book engages with a widespread contemporary dilemma--how do we do theology in a context where the cultures of the people are oral and not literate? The nations of the South Pacific, from their missionary beginnings, inherited an approach to theology that was dominated by Western cultural categories. The global movement of contextualization began to impact upon Pacific churches in the 1960s, and challenged this inherited approach. Significant changes have resulted, but the dilemma has remained. The dominant approach is still one that is defined by and better suited to literate cultures. The consequence is that theology remains an alien enterprise, distant from the life of the local churches, and distant from the hearts and minds of the indigenous people. In facing the dilemma, this book exposes the fundamental differences between primary oral cultures and primary literate cultures, and identifies the key factors that lie at the heart of the theological problem. By addressing each of these in turn, the author then paves the way ahead. He offers a methodology for theology that is rooted within the oral cultural context of the South Pacific . . . and potentially in any context where oral cultures are the norm. The consequences for theology and for theological education are profound.

This book offers a unique interpretation of Africa’s legacy to the world and the worldwide African Diaspora through bringing to light the sociocultural contributions of the Songhoy people and the cosmopolitan empire they established in West Africa.

The primary aim of this book is to explore the contradiction between widely shared beliefs in the USA about racial inclusiveness and equal opportunity for all and the fact that most churches are racially homogeneous and do not include people with disabilities. To address the problem Mary McClintock Fulkerson explores the practices of an interracial church (United Methodist) that includes people with disabilities. The analysis focuses on those activities which create opportunities for people to experience those who are `different' as equal in ways that diminish both obliviousness to the other and fear of the other. In contrast with theology's typical focus on the beliefs of Christians, this project offers a theory of practices and place that foregrounds the instinctual reactions and communications that shape all groups. The effect is to broaden the academic field of theology through the benefits of ethnographic research and postmodern place theory.

Clay offers practical, step-by-step insights into implementing the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in a way that is faithful to the rite and respectful of rural culture. Anyone who ministers in a rural or small-town catechumenate will find this book a valuable aid.

An expert in the field of pastoral care, John Patton demonstrates that pastoral care is a ministry of the church. He focuses on the community of faith as an authorizer and source of care and upon the relationship between the pastor and a caring community. Patton identifies and compares three paradigms of pastoral care: the classical, the clinical pastoral, and the communal contextual. This third paradigm emphasizes the caring community and the various contexts for care rather than focusing on pastoral care as the work of the ordained pastor.