Strategy

A strategy for presenting orally 
the Christian Scripture in audio-media

There are four steps in the process of oral communication between humans 

• The speaker presents the content of the message.  In a live interaction between a speaker and one or more listeners, the speaker communicates through shaping sounds with his mouth, throat and nose.  He or she supports the sounds with body language and sometimes visual materials.
   
• The listener understands the message through hearing the sounds, interpreting their general significance and thinking about the implications of such a message.
   
• The listener evaluates whether the message is valid.  Children generally accept anything spoken by an adult as valid.  As people grow older, they learn that some messages are not valid.  Thus, in every audience, some will be inclined, to varying degrees to believe, while others will be resistant to believing, to varying degrees.
   
• The listener finally accepts or rejects the message as valid for himself or herself.

There are several issues that a team must recognize as they present orally God’s message

Issue 1 in their presenting audio Scripture—They must recognize that audio recordings of the scriptures are communicating to an entirely different audience from those who read books.

Many people are willing to accept oral translation as a step in developing a natural printed translation.  There are software programs for facilitating that goal.  We propose that TODAY’S oral listeners should be the audience of focus, with printed Scriptures as an eventual option for the few who might read them.

Issue 2 in their presenting audio Scripture—The team must recognize that storying or audio recordings of the scriptures can communicate to their entire language group, whereas a printed translation is likely to be read by only a few people.

Even the United Nations educational program is recognizing that no more that 15% of any language group will read to learn.  With the every increasing use of cellphones and television, fewer and fewer literate people are reading printed material. The translation team should focus their attention on TODAY’S oral listeners and communicate in their learning styles.

Issue 3 in their presenting audio Scripture—They must recognize that they are communicating a message.

They must recognize that their audience is NOT interested in knowing the book in which God’s message was preserved.  As long as the team holds to the opinion that the oral communication of God’s message is proper only when it resembles a printed version, the team will be shackling the message by the forms of that version.

When the team gets to the level of producing audio recordings of whole documents, they still will be communicating the message of the documents, not the documents.

Issue 4 in their presenting audio Scripture—The team must recognize that an oral or audio communication of the scriptures is not a book.  Neither does it resemble a book.  If they suppose that their telling a story is like reading aloud a book, they will unconscientiously assume that their translation should resemble a book.  If they suppose that their making audio recordings is like making little books, they will assume that those recordings should resemble little books.

We Christians have had the New Testament as a canon for so long, we regard it as a single document.  However, it is many documents that have been printed together.  We have developed an elaborate system of titles, introductions, chapter and verse divisions, section headings, cross-references, footnotes and special notes.  These are tremendously helpful to readers.  They are the indexes with which readers can return to a specific sentence or they can search for a sentence that someone has told them that it exists.  However, most of those devices are irrelevant or useless to oral learners.  We who wish to communicate the Scripture effectively to oral learners must develop a whole new system of indexing.

By the same token, an oral presentation that effectively helps listeners to modify their worldview will be shaped by the principles that the team knows about the learning styles of those listeners.  The team should not suppose that they are making the New Testament more attractive by telling stories from it.  A video should not be making a book more attractive.  It should communicate well the message of the book.