Orality Part 2: When strategy needs to change

I interview Don Barger, Director of Innovation for the IMB

Last week I wrote about the rise in video, today’s king among orality options for doing ministry. That same day I met with Don Barger and learned that he had recently written a book on this topic. I particularly liked his story at the end, about a missionary who had a strategy… even though that strategy did not take into account how people in his context were consuming information. Today’s post is the transcript for that discussion. You can also view it (or just listen to it) - your choice.

By the way… next week I am the Missio Nexus conferences (Mission Leaders Conference and Church Missions Leader Conference) and will not be posting.

Transcript - Slightly edited by the Teditor here at TedQuarters (that means it is a little rough).

Ted Esler: Well, thank you for joining us here on this recording, I have Don Barger, who is the Director of Innovation for the International Mission Board at Southern Baptist Convention and I don't know Don well, but we got that call a week ago and I thought, well, we've got to do something a little bit more here on this new book you have out unreadable.

Another book you probably won't read, so non thanks for taking a few minutes to be with us. The first thing I would just think that's kind of a bit of a paradox here is the book is about our reality and why reading the standard reading approaches don't work.

And then you write a book.

Don Barger: So, that isn't lost on us and I think that the reality is we live in an age where people like to get books. We did about 250 interviews all around the world in large cities, pretty much every part of the world was represented and sat down with people.
Believers, non believers. Missionary types. Non missionary types and just talk to them and our main question was how do you get information that shapes who you are and what you believe now?

We didn't come out and ask it that way. We just asked, “Tell us about who you are. Tell us about what you do.” Grant Lovejoy and I researched all this and we were trying to come up with a book about urban communication. We realized what we kind of already knew was that people don't like to read, and I know that some of you right now are going, “But I love to read.” OK, you are the anomaly. I promise you, most people get their information from YouTube or from other people, like talking to other people.

So, we felt like we wanted to write the book, but we also recognize a lot of people like to get books and they love to receive books. They love to put books on their bookshelf and they may peruse the book and they may open it up and say, “Oh, look at this, there's a chapter on this. Let me look at that chapter.”
But a lot of books that are written are not read cover to cover. If you don't believe me, go to London, ride the the train, and watch what people are doing. They don't have books in their hands. They have phones in their hands and they're not reading books. They are usually on phones, or playing video games, or they're chatting. They're watching YouTube videos and other stuff. I am painting with a big picture here’ There are exceptions to this, but if you're wanting to reach the masses, you need to be where they are, and I would say that the town square today is a digital town square.

So we wrote the book hoping to have a conversation with people about the book, recognizing that some people would love to read the book and other people may look at a chapter and read it. We also did something crazy. At the end of every chapter was like a QR code and if you scan the QR code, a video will come up and explain that chapter to you.

Ted Esler: I think the first thing that, especially a lot of leaders, have to get over is lamenting the fact that people aren't reading books. I have had this conversation with numerous leaders and the first thing is always, “Ohh man, but they should be reading.” And, I'm and I'm that way too. We have to get over that.

I was at a meeting last week with somebody that lives in Cairo and I noticed they were sitting there in the meeting and they kept holding their phone up to their ear. I've observed that outside the US, when people send text messages, they record their voice and they're sending an audio clip. They're not typing in a text message. I don't think I've ever seen an American do that. I mean, like never. But when you go overseas, you see it everywhere. So obviously this is also somewhat conditioned on where your context is.

Would you agree with that?

Don Barger: Absolutely.

When I say they don't read it's not that people can't read. Obviously, people in large major cities literacy is widespread. But I do think what you're describing is right.
But people prefer to listen. Maybe there's some text messages, but they are short text messages.

I lived overseas for 24 years and you have never lived until you get on a group chat with, you know, 40 other soccer parents and the text messages that go back and forth are all audio. Your phone is blowing up and it's inefficient because I can't just scroll. I have got to listen to all of these audio messages from 40 other parents. But you're right. I think that is uniquely overseas. Here in the US it's still primarily sending short form text messages.

Ted Esler: In the book you write that reading is the least effective way to get information to urbanites. Could you just expand on that a little bit for us?

Don Barger: Well, I so we interviewed a ton of people and I'll use one example and you've already touched on it. We interviewed this man who was from South Asia, highly educated, grew up in Germany with a German education, then came to the United States, did an undergrad in a master's degree, and has gone back to South Asia. His job is translating books from the US from a certain Christian publishing house into that other language. I am trying not to out him, or his country, but he shared that he was frustrated that he's translating all these books and he can't even get pastors to read. They are they're educated, but they hate reading.

And then, over lunch, he confessed to me. “Well, I really hate reading as well. I mean, I'm just doing this because I feel like Christians should read. They should learn to love to read.”

And so when I say that it's ineffective, what we have found is people much prefer personalization, whether it being in person or digitally talking to someone that is the way that information spreads rapidly. Podcast are extremely helpful to spread information, videos, video sharing of viral videos.

If you just think of our own culture and just think about the United States and go back to COVID, how did information disseminate across the across the United States and across the world? It was primarily through social media. It was not through books, although books were written about this really quickly, it wasn't through books. It wasn't even through journals or newspaper articles. If they existed, or magazines. People would come up with a meme. People would come up with a short video, they would share those, and that would go viral.

So if you're wanting to disseminate information, that is probably more efficient than writing books. If you have someone who wants to be discipled, then we should think how do these people typically get information? How does this person typically receive information? How does person typically learn new information? If those questions are not reading 400 page books, then we probably shouldn't assume that discipleship is going to happen, which we just say we should not assume that discipleship happens through books. That's better person to person and through some other types of resources. I could talk forever about this, but I'm going to resist urge not to.

Ted Esler: OK, well at at some point, aren't you bumping up a little bit against kind of a worldview about the Bible in about how we think? Evangelicals are about reading the Scriptures, and I'm even thinking about didactic preaching.

Don Barger: Yeah, and so I would not say that people don't need to read Scripture, and we need to continue doing Bible translation. I think that those are important and I think that people do learn to read Scripture and learn to meditate on scripture. But at the same time, the way that if you think about the typical sermon of a three points in a poem for 25 minutes over, you know, once a week, it's probably not the best way to disseminate information. It is certainly not where discipleship is happening. It's not where leadership training is happening. It's not typically not where evangelism is happening. It is important. It's a part of it, but it if we're counting on that to solve all of all of those other issues, we're probably missing the mark. So it is small groups with people talking to people. People are finding information online.

We tell stories in the book. The book is full of testimonials type stories of people we met. If people are getting their information, if I'm living in the Middle East and I've got a question about religion, I probably am going to go immediately to the Internet and search for that. And so just do that. Like, go in to a certain culture in Google or go to YouTube, because YouTube is the primary search engine for many, many places in the world, and just search for who has God or what is Christianity or what do evangelicals believe and see what comes up?

And this is where you need to be investing time and energy to make sure there's good resources that people are finding. Because sometimes they're finding the prosperity Gospel, or the Mormons are all over this, Jehovah's Witnesses are all over this, so we should be seeding good content in those same places. It doesn't replace reading the Bible, or  meditating on Scripture, but it does point us to where people are really getting information.

Ted Esler: 
You talk about four ways that people tend to get information. Trusted friends. Testimonies, conversations and questions, and the final one is texting and phone conversations. I mean when I read through those, I just think well that's, that's me.

If I wanted to buy a new car, I call people. I ask, “What do you think of this?” or “What do you think of that?” I look on the Internet, it's the same thing.

Don Barger:

And it's not always been like that. can remember looking for a car. One of my first cars, I pulled Consumer Reports and would go and read about it and devour all that information. I remember my first car was a 1965 Mustang and I loved that car, but let me just tell you I learned to work on cars because having a 1965 Mustang and I did everything for change out the starter to breaks to all sorts of the carburetor (I got over my head on that one) and I how I did that was a Haynes or a Chilton’s manual I got at the store. I bought a book and the book explained to me, “How do you change the starter?”
Nobody does that today or nobody I know does that today. When I need to do something on my car, of I'm brave enough to try it, I immediately go to YouTube and put in the model and I say, “Hey, how do I change the filter?” The interior AC filter on this car and it comes up with 25 videos of walking step by step. So that's what we've become accustomed to. We don't read about how to do that.

I know some of you are listening to this and getting really uneasy and wanting to argue with me. And that's fine. I encourage you to continue to be the person who readsd.  I read a lot. How I got in touch with Ted was reading his book for a class that I'm teaching on AI and innovation. So it it doesn't mean you can't read, it's just means that we're going to make our message one that is received by and understood by the masses we have to figure out how the masses like to get information.

Ted Esler:  In your book, you talk about monolingualist and monocultural cities. What do you mean by that? Cause I think we most of us see cities as melting pots of different cultures.

Don Barger: In the book we talk about different types of cities around the world and I I think that there are most cities to a degree are very, very much melting pot. Without getting too far into the weeds, I would say that there are some cities like, say, a London that is really, I mean, it's really a global city. I mean, there are other cities where, well, if you take Miami, you can live in Miami and speak Spanish and really live and work really well in that city.

Don Barger: If you move to Birmingham, AL and you only speak Spanish, you are going to struggle. You can find Spanish speakers in Birmingham. I live in Richmond, VA right now. You can find Spanish people, Spanish speaking people here in Richmond, but you're going to have a very limited ability to integrate with the rest of society if you only speak a language that is not the majority language. There are cities, though, where you can go and speak only that language and flourish and do quite well in those cities.

That chapter talks about if you are crafting your message, you need to know if you in a monolingual city, monocultural city doesn't mean that there's not other people there, but those are so dominant in those cultures in those cities that you really need to assimilate much more rapidly than in other cities.

So if you're in a city that where assimilation is not a big deal, then your message can be. In Miami you probably you should have a Spanish emphasis in the work that you're doing, but if you're in Birmingham, there are some people who only speak Spanish, but most of your work probably is going to be in English. I'm oversimplifying a really complicated I thing, but I we talk about 3 different types of cities to help figure out as you are designing ministry. In the book there's a media strategy canvas of how you're going to use Media, what role does that play in engaging with the city? And so it will impact on the different languages and how you do content and which language you use

Ted Esler:  What do you mean when write about something called “third places” and why are they important in urban settings?

Don Barger: So this isn’t ours. This is a concept that's that's out there. There are other places that people go to. It could be work. It could be home, but then there are other places.
Maybe it's a gym, maybe it is a coffee shop. These are places that people go to that are outside of those other two, the home and the the office, and you encounter people there.

So having a daughter who is a big cheer leading person and doing competitive cheer, that is certainly a third place for a lot of parents who do dance or baseball or softball. You are meeting people in those environments that you normally would not rub shoulders with. This is really oversimplification of a pretty complicated concept.

Ted Esler:  I actually have more questions here, but let's land this a little. If you were to convince your audience about how important it is that they rethink strategies of communication, what would you say to them about how widespread this is in our world today?

Don Barger: So there is a story in the book, again, I'm not going to say where, because I really don't want it to  embarrass someone, but we were interviewing for the book. We were interviewing a national, a person who had migrated to a large city in Europe, and he came from North Africa.

We spent some time with the missionary talking to the missionary about all the work they're doing. They're doing a really good job with really tough people to reach and he was so excited to introduce us to a national partner that he was working with and this guy was great, we sat down, and visited with him.

He grew up in North Africa, came to this city and then spent time in the US studying found a lady in the US married her and they've gone back to this, this European city where they are ministering.

I asked him to describe, “How do you meet people? Tell me, how do you share the gospel with people who are coming?”

And he said, “Well in our city where we are, there's a port and people were coming constantly from the North Africa. And so I just go down to the court port and I play my guitar and I sing songs in my heart language and people hear those and there are attracted. And I'm thinking, wow, that's pretty cool and people will come up.

“And so then what do you do? Do you share with them?”

He said, “Why I give them a Bible.”

And I said, “Yeah, but what else do you do?”

He replied, “We attract them and then we give them a copy of the scripture and then they are off, and they keep going.”

So what I didn't share with you is before I got into asking, “How do you do evangelism?” I ask, “How do your people get information that shapes who you are and what you believe?”

And his response was, “ I will tell you how they don't get information. They don't get it from reading because most of the people in my group don't read, and many maybe, maybe the majority cannot read.”

So he had said earlier that the people don't read, they cannot read, they don't like reading, even if they can. And then his response to, “What is your evangelism model”
 was, “I give him a Bible.”

I asked him about that. “Why do you give them a Bible if they can't read?” He says, “Well, yeah, most of them don't read it and they can't read it. I just really think it's important that they all have a copy of God's word.”

I'm in favor of disseminating God's word to everyone, everywhere, but part of me wanted to say, “Well, why don't you just give him a copy of the Bible, and the cheapest version you can get, maybe it's not even in your language, because it's going to be accessible to him in the same way.”

This is the strategy question that sometimes our teams are our church. Planters are not thinking about. Is our strategy actually reflective of how people get information or is it just this is what we do. This is the strategy that we've been given. We give them a copy of God's word, and God's word will not come back void and I struggle with that. It's not the best strategy.

Maybe the best thing is that we could get people reading this book is just having people question, “How do my people get information and why are we not disseminating Christian information in the same way that they like to get information?” If it's a YouTube video, why are we not sending YouTube videos so?

Ted Esler:  That's a great story, and I do think when I look at the way I'm communicating these days, it's certainly not reflective of this big change. And I'm asking myself, what do I have to different?

Again, the name of the book is “Unreadable, Another Book You Probably Won't Read.” and you can get on Kindle Unlimited.

Don Barger: Yeah, it's free on Kindle Unlimited. We marked it like 2.99. It's the cheapest you're actually allowed to sell it for, and if you wanted to print version or a hard copy there, it is kind of expensive is not because we make any money off of it. It's because it is full color and Kindle or Amazon does not print those for cheap. So we've tried to keep the cost as cheap as cheap as we can.

Ted Esler:  Well, John, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. And I just would suggest listeners go out there and really think about how you're communicating.
It is really important.

Don Barger: I agree. Thanks.