Apparently, related trends are unfolding elsewhere in the world.

"Reading and writing are clearly dying arts," professor Jim Dator of the University of Hawaii said, "something which fewer in the world are doing." More important, he said, is the fact that reading and writing are something fewer and fewer people need to know how to do. "Most people in the world, even most of the literate people in the world in fact, do not get much of their ideas about the world from reading. They get them from watching television, going to the movies, listening to the radio, and other forms of audio-visual communication."38

Ravi Zacharias, a Christian apologist, agrees. "More and more we are knowing less and less about the printed tradition," he said. "The ability for abstract reasoning is diminishing in our time, because [people] come to their conclusions on the basis of images. Their capacity for abstract reasoning is gone." Zacharias concludes that we are now in a time where there is a "humiliation of the word" and an "exaltation of the image."39

In their book Church Next: Quantum Changes in Christian Ministry, Eddie Gibbs and Ian Coffey also conclude that people today are more influenced by audio and visual media than print media. "Theirs is a post-literacy culture for which sound and image have largely replaced the printed word," they claim. The two argue that "instancy" and intimacy are the distinguishing features of today's non-print media, and that seeing, not reading, is the basis for believing.40

Pritish Nandi, publisher and television news producer in India, recently wrote an article titled "Will Technology Usher in an Era of Illiteracy?" In it he said, "New technology will no longer divide the world into literate and illiterate people but will bring everyone together in a common platform where the ability to read and write will no longer matter. You will have a new world where people will need an entirely different kind of skills set to succeed."41

All of these examples are clear indications of a growing global emergence of secondary orality, or post-literacy as some call it. This phenomenon is causing us to think, communicate, process information, and make decisions more and more like oral peoples. The implications of this have ramifications not only on what we do in evangelism, discipleship, leader training and church planting, but also on how we do it! We must make adjustments in the way we communicate the message of the gospel, acknowledging that our goal, responsibility, and desire are to communicate truth in the most effective ways possible.

For many of us, it is becoming more and more evident that issues of secondary orality are reaching the very altars of our churches around the world. Christian researcher George Barna said that technology and the mass media have forever changed the ways in which we process information, saying that "the inability to systematically apply scriptural truth produces a spiritual superficiality or immaturity that is reflected in behaviour." He concludes that we must develop new forums and formats through which people will experience, understand, and serve God.42

Tommy Jones, author of Postmodern Youth Ministry, urges us to tell stories. "Narrative is becoming the primary means of telling beliefs. Since propositional logic has fallen on hard times, stories carry more weight in carrying truths - "abductive" reasoning. As opposed to deductive or inductive methods, when you tell a story, you 'abduct' listeners from their known worlds into another world."43

38 Jim Dator, "Families, Communities, and Futures," http://www.soc.hawaii. edu/future/dator/other/FCF.html

39 Ravi Zacharias, "Mind Games in a World of Images," audiotape.

40 Eddie Gibbs and Ian Coffey, Church Next: Quantum Changes in Christian Ministry (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2001), 127.

41 The International Indian, 9:4, (August 2001), 22.

42 George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church: A Blue Print for Survival (Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998).

43 Tommy Jones, Postmodern Youth Ministry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 27.