Conclusions

From the time of the Gutenberg Bible, Christianity "has walked on literate feet." Christians have led the literacy movement because of desiring to read the Bible for themselves. Yet Christians increasingly are concerned that hundreds of years have passed without a comprehensive global Kingdom advance. In 2,000 years since Christ's Great Commission, only about 10% of all peoples are evangelical followers of Jesus.

Effective discipling of oral learners allows them to embrace biblical patterns of Christian life and belief and utilize communication forms that are familiar within the culture. Of necessity, discipling oral learners involves communicating the unchanging message of Scripture into varied and ever-changing cultures in worldview-sensitive ways. It means discipling in ways designed to avoid creating dependency on the discipler. It means setting the oral disciples free to evangelize, disciple, plant churches and train leaders in a never-ceasing pattern. Only then will the message be able to reach to "the uttermost parts of the earth."

So what shall we do with this fresh insight to communicate with oral learners? This is an issue for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) and the entire Christian world to investigate, embrace, propagate and utilize in finishing the task of reaching the unreached peoples of the world. Here are proposed actions:

1. The LCWE to highlight this issue as essential for the evangelization of the world, especially the unreached people groups.
2. The LCWE endorse a "Lausanne Task Force on Making Disciples of Oral Learners" to explore and implement all practical means to advance the cause of making disciples of oral learners worldwide.
3. The LCWE and others to publish material to permeate the missions world with information about oral strategies.
4. Churches and other Christian organizations to develop and implement methods, communications, and strategies such as:
1. Local churches becoming advocates for specific unreached people groups and promoting an engagement with those people groups by using worldview-specific oral methodologies.
2. Seminaries providing curricula to train pastors and missionaries in oral methodologies.
3. Local churches around the world utilizing oral methodologies to disciple their own members as a way of avoiding syncretism.
4. Mission agencies developing strategies for their missionaries and partners to use among oral learners.
5. Regional networks hosting conferences in strategic locations around the world for awareness building about oral methodologies.
6. Regional partnerships and agencies providing training in strategic locations to train local leaders and missionaries in implementing oral strategies among the unreached.
7. Regional partnerships and agencies developing a network of trainers to train other trainers in oral methodologies.
8. Churches and agencies recording and distributing Bible stories for evangelization, discipling, and leader training.
9. Broadcast networks and agencies broadcasting chronological Bible stories and recordings of a discipleship group in a house church setting, including dialogue reflecting culturally appropriate ways of processing the story and interacting with it.
10. Funding organizations making resources available for oral methodologies to be implemented with the thousands of language groups, people groups, and segments of societies that are still unreached.

With the insights gleaned from research and collaboration, Christians have the opportunity to reach in our generation the billions of unreached people in the world headed to a Christless eternity. Following the example of Jesus' own witness through parables and proverbs, we can communicate the gospel orally in a way that these unreached people can understand, respond to, and reproduce. Let us therefore go forth embracing oral communicators as partners-together making disciples of all peoples to the glory of God!