The ladies gathered on the lawn for their weekly sewing session. They were in a mountain village about forty kilometres from the shores of Lake Malawi. Usually, as the ladies sewed, they sang. I was visiting the house next door as the ladies began to sing. Because I like music, I enjoyed listening to their singing as I talked with my friends. After a while I heard a tune that was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it. I listened harder, concentrating on the music rather than my hosts. Then it hit me! The words and tune I was hearing were the same ones I had heard at a Yao music workshop two weeks before and forty kilometres away! In one day, the group developed fourteen Scripture songs focused on essential stories of God's word. In two weeks the song had travelled across the lake and up the mountain to a village forty kilometres away from where the workshop was held! In their own language they were singing:

"In the beginning God created, and it was good!
It was good!
In the beginning God created, and it was good!
It was good!
It was good!
It was good!
It was good!
It was good!
In the beginning God created, and it was good!"

The song went on to tell about God creating the world, then man. "He made you, He made me," they sang. Finally the song ended:

"It was good!
It was good!
It was good!
It was good!
All that he had made--yes, it was good!" 14

An example of how members of an oral culture naturally relate to oral forms of Scripture as their own comes from an experience of Herbert Klem, doing an academic research project involving various test groups:

One evening I came to a study which was crowded out with visitors. I could tell many of the visitors were Muslim elders from the very community where I was told so often that people felt too old to become Christians. I did not want all those visitors spoiling the structure of my test group, so I politely asked the visitors to leave these Christian test lessons. The wise old elder had a twinkle in his eye as he gently and politely suggested that they were having a wonderful time hearing God speak to them, and that perhaps I should be the one to leave. I did not know what to do. I was thrilled to have a Muslim man in a Bible study, and he was an elder leader, but I did not want to spoil the structure of my test. When I asked him politely to leave a second time, he grinned and challenged me to a true test of ownership of the singing Bible tapes. The one who could sing the least of the tape from memory would leave, and the one who could sing the most could stay. That was the indigenous method of proving cultural ownership.

Because of the tonal intricacies of singing oral art in that language, he knew he had me beat cold -- no contest! The group cheered and proclaimed him the owner of the tape. He boasted that only a wise Yoruba man could compose and sing this kind of poetry; insiders loved it and outsiders could admire from a small distance.

The elder had been warmly attracted to the text because it had been identified with his culture, employing art forms that marked it as his cultural property, even though it was played on a tape recorder supplied by a meddling foreigner. He was pleased with the form of the message, but he was also bonding with God's Word from the book of Hebrews. He was no longer telling me this was "foreign religion" but was defending his right to hear the Scripture. Best of all, the whole group loved the entire event. 15

14 This account is from Steve Evans.

15 Herbert Klem, "Dependence on Literacy Strategy: Taking a Hard Second Look," International Journal of Frontier Missions 12:2 (April--June, 1995) 63-64