What does an Oral Bible team do?

Each Oral Bible team is also a church planting team and is usually staffed by two near-culture believers that are trained and supervised to produce an initial set of evangelistic Bible stories for the Oral Bible in two years. Teams will receive an average of 20 weeks of training and consulting during the course of an Oral Bible project. A group of Oral Bible teams will meet every 4-6 months to receive the training they need for the next 4-6 months of project work. “Just in time” training allows several important things to happen:

Knowledge is given as field experience demands it.
Pastoral care is given in a secure environment.
Prompt completion of time sensitive Oral Bible production goals
The teams encourage and motivate reach other.

Every team has a clear sequence of activities but they also have many activities that go on simultaneously. Think of it as spiritual “multi tasking.”

They are purposeful in their relationships because every relationship is a ministry opportunity. When teams meet with a language coach, they seek to share their faith. As they are developing the Oral Bible with the help of local language speakers, they use Bible stories in ministry to other local language speakers. They encourage local language speakers to master the Bible stories and tell them to friends and family. This spreads the Gospel throughout the community. They model a Christian small group when discussing stories with local language speakers and implicitly transmit the essentials of Christian discipleship and leadership training.

Before people have even professed faith in Christ, they are already observing how Christian leaders conduct themselves. This provides a base for explicit leadership instruction that will come after people have trusted Christ.

While teams are producing an Oral Bible, they are very aware that their ultimate goal is greater than the compilation of an Oral Bible. The ultimate goal is to see local believers rapidly planting churches that grow exponentially from 2 churches to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 and so on. This is the beginning of an indigenously led church planting movement.

Teams will produce an Oral Bible and plant churches by being very intentional in how they relate to local people from the very beginning. Oral Bibles impart culturally relevant Bible stories that will be told and retold for generations and serve as a benchmark to preserve story accuracy. Once an Oral Bible is completed, other teams can be launched to do church planting using Oral Bibles.

Some teams may work exclusively on church planting for oppressed peoples such as women, the deaf, prisoners, and those infected with HIV. This is necessary because many times, stories will not pass from one demographic group to another even when they belong to the same people group and speak the same language.