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The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Preachers who have been trained to turn Jesus’ parables into logical, alliterated, three-point sermons are going to have to learn to take Paul’s epistles and present them as stories.

When we started working among the Kouya in the late 1980s, there was a clear expectation that we would develop and run a literacy campaign alongside our work in Bible translation. People would need to read and write Kouya. If they didn’t how would they ever be able to get to grips with the translated New Testament? There is an underlying assumption that literacy in the mother tongue is a worthwhile, indeed necessary, stage in the development of a community.

At that point, there was one recording of a gospel message in Kouya, but that was only available on cassette (listen below) and very few people had access to tape recorders. Literacy was the way to go.

Bahi Laurent on “the two masters”

Since those days, digital technology has made the distribution of audio and video material much easier and now there are a range digital productions available alongside the Kouya New Testament.

Today, it is not unusual for Bible translations to first publish in digital form – audio, video or text that can be shared on a mobile phone – before considering print production. In some cases, the text may never actually be printed on paper.

Now, this may have been no more than an interesting side-note on world mission if it were not for the Gutenberg Parenthesis.

The concept of a “Gutenberg Parenthesis” — formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark — offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period — Shakespeare’s — when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance.

What this hypothesis is suggesting is that we are living through a transition period where people are moving towards a preference for consuming information in an oral or visual form, rather than by reading. If you would like to know more about the concept, you can watch this video which will take a couple of hours. If you don’t have that time (and it’s important, so you should think about it) there is an edited transcript here.

The reason why this is so important is that a preference for literate learning, as opposed to oral learning, is more than simply a choice of one medium over another. There is evidence to suggest that oral learners process information very differently from their literate counterparts. Simply put, literate learners prefer to digest information in a logical sequenced manner, while oral preference learners have a preference for narrative (I explore some of the other differences here).

If the hypothesis is correct (and it certainly fits with my observations), our churches will increasingly be filled with people who are oral preference learners, rather than people who prefer to learn by reading. This means the common pastoral response of suggesting people read a book to answer a troubling question will become increasingly irrelevant (in passing, I think that has always been a mistake – we have unintentionally made Christianity a religion for the well educated and highly literate). However, suggesting that they listen to a podcast or watch a YouTube video may well not be the answer either. Much of the digital material that is out there has been developed with literate preference learners in mind and is not ideal for oral learners. I’d some up the challenge in this way.

Preachers who have been trained to turn Jesus’ parables into logical, alliterated, three-point sermons are going to have to learn to take Paul’s epistles and present them as stories.

OK, I may be overstating my case a little, but this captures the essence of the shift that we are living through. If we are to make disciples of the upcoming largely oral generation, we are going to need to think differently. We are faced with the sort of cultural and communication issues that missionaries have wrestled with for years. It’s not enough to express your message clearly to your own satisfaction, it has to engage with your hearer’s way of thinking too.

Preachers who have been trained to turn Jesus' parables into logical, alliterated, three-point sermons are going to have to learn to take Paul's epistles and present them as stories. Click To Tweet

This is one of those areas where I believe that the church in the UK has a great deal to learn from those who have been involved in world mission. There are vast amounts of resources on making disciples in oral cultures and it behoves people to make themselves aware of them. This is a great place to start and you can also find information here.

It's not enough to express your message clearly to your own satisfaction, it has to engage with your hearer's way of thinking too. Click To Tweet

This is a much bigger challenge than simply putting sermons on a podcast or a video channel. However, with big challenges come huge opportunities. The question is whether we will have the foresight and the creativity to grasp it.

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