Strategy 4

A development program for communicating the New Testament with five levels

The goal of all communication of the Christian Scriptures is to facilitate people believing and their allowing the Holy Spirit to change their lives.  As the team communicates to oral societies by mobile devices, they must always keep in mind three basic guidelines:

1. They should be tailoring the communications to THE LISTENERS.  Their goal should not be to cause people to consider the Bible is holy because it is a book.  It is holy because it communicates God’s spoken messages.  They team is making learning easy for listeners, not making things easy for themselves.

2. They are only facilitators.  They help OTHER PEOPLE to communicate Jesus’ teaching to their people.  The person is mistaken who assumes that the producers are the only communicators.  The team’s success with any strategy must be nurtured by their training OTHER PEOPLE to communicate.  Of course, the Holy Spirit is the person who ultimately accomplished the change in each person and in each culture.

This strategy is designed to facilitate audio files that PROVIDE A FOUNDATION THAT THE LOCAL CHRISTIAN COMMUNICATORS CAN USE in evangelism and discipling.

3. The team must remember that almost everyone learns best from what they hear the message.  The audiences are oral learners.  The team must focus all their energies on communicating in the learning styles of the people.  From that, we recommend:

• Short communications—The listeners can internalize a single topic more easily than several topics.  A short learning is more deeply learned.  The team should not despise short units.  Oral learners can more easily retell short messages to others if the content is short and if it focuses on only one topic.  If the person tells someone what they heard in their own words, the telling clarifies the concept to the teller.  Further, the process of replication facilitates better retention.  It even aids acceptability to both the teller and his listeners.
• Focused communications—The learners should not be required to process non-focused information.
  • The team should postpone presenting information that is in the documents that validated the historicity of those documents, such as:  “In the time of Herod, king of Judea, there was…”
  • The learners should be able to hear the messages without having to puzzle over Jewish historical events, like “It was just before the Passover Feast…”
  • The learners should not need to think about Jewish controversies.  The details of Jewish customs are irrelevant to their responding to Jesus’ message.
• Germane communications—The messages should relate to evangelism and discipling.  The communication of the Scriptures should not be “churchy”.  The team must recognize that they are communicating Jesus’ message, not some traditions.  The team will do well guarding against the recordings not reminding the listeners of language often used in church.  It is important that the oral translation communicate to an audience 15-40 years of age.

We recommend some options for the first set of recordings.  The team can choose a set that they consider the most relevant to their audience.  See Graduated communications, First truths (Level 1) below.

• Appropriate communications for oral learners—We suggest that the recordings be heard at a rate slower than a native speaker speaks normally.  The rate of speed should be determined by experimentation.  This slower rate will help listeners to hear the sounds well and it will give the listeners the necessary mental time for them to internalize the content.
• Personal communications, simulated and facilitated—The most effective changes in the life of a human are facilitated by another human.  The messages that the team communicates will be effective in proportion to the listeners “feeling” that a real human is telling them the messages.  Further, those messages should facilitate the listeners talking to another human about the topic or about more messages.
• Graduated communications—The messages relate to the probable level of interest in the audience.
  It is important that the team presents the Scripture in learnable units.  They should recognize that the audience in any given community continually changes, especially when the people begin to respond to the messages.  They will do well to offer to listeners a graduated series to facilitate their learning.  In this strategy, we propose five levels.  The definition of the second level assumes that there will be a response to the presentations of the first.  Thus, we have suggested recordings in the second level that likely will communicate to the needs of those who respond to the messages of the first level.  The portions recommended for the third level should help those who have begun to follow the teachings of Jesus. 
  • First truths (Level 1)—These Scriptures are intended to encourage specific audiences.
  • Vital truths (Level 2)—These have been selected to communicate essential Christian doctrines.
  • Very important truths (Level 3)—This level continues to communicate to an audience that is un-evangelized and un-churched, but who has expressed their desire to learn Christian teaching.
  • Additional important truths (Level 4)—This level communicates to beginning believers to help them deepen their faith. 
  • Oral recordings of the whole documents of the New Testament (Level 5)—It is possible that the believers may never want all of the New Testament in audio.  The team should build their inventory as the people ask for it.