Communicating Jesus’ way (William Carey Library, 1998) looks at how Jesus communicated his message to his disciples and to his community. Jesus employed the communication style of his culture to great effect and we can do the same.
Kraft looks at three types of communication to discover which style of teaching is the most life changing for the audience. Firstly there is monolog as in a sermon, then dialog as in a group discussion and then life involvement as in the three years Jesus spent with his disciples. The most life changing of these was life involvement. However even Jesus was only able to do this with 12 men. Likewise in the discussion mode of teaching we can really only impact at most about 25 people. So in our modern society we tend to use the monolog even though it is the least impacting on people’s lives. Kraft then looks at how we can take monolog communication and make it more impacting by learning from the other styles of communication.
Kraft also looks at how God communicates with his people and points out the enormous lengths God went to in order to connect with people. He took all the initiative, went out his way to establish and restore a relationship with people. God has modelled how to communicate and we can learn much by studying God’s methods.
