Does John Piper overplay literacy and diminish the glorious power of sermon-centered missions

in oral cultures? It's a pushback from a podcast listener named Miles.

Pastor John, my wife and I have our lives on the trajectory towards doing Bible translations

as a career, so I am in no way suggesting that I think the Bible is unimportant. Well,

when I think historically of the practice of believers prior to the advent of the printing

press and when I think globally about the millions of believers who don't currently

have the Bible in a language that they can understand, it seems that our American evangelical

ideal of Christian discipleship might be too dependent on assumptions about literacy

and access to cheap copies of the Bible. There was a video of you, Pastor John, on Facebook

on April 19th, and you said, quote, you don't have a chance against the devil unless you know

how to read and understand God's word. This statement was obviously not intending to convey

that people without access to scripture are hopeless, but I think it reflects to some degree

what I'm getting at here. Literacy is obviously a good thing, but have we made it a test of

genuine faith and obedience? Pastor John, what would you say to Miles? Well, I am really glad for

this question, especially to correct either a misunderstanding of what I said or to correct a

misstatement of what I said. I mean, I made a mistake, not anybody else. The whole issue of

orality in missions has been an issue for me for about 20 years or so, and I'm really glad to say

some clarifying things about it. So first, let's, let's make some missiological observations

and then some biblical observations. It's a plain and important fact that there are several

thousand languages in the world that do not have complete Bible translations in them.

The exact number right now is not important for the point I'm making. Just the fact that there are

any is the point that I'm making. Those languages have real people who speak them,

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