Nick, I am all for oral story telling. Get the grannies telling Bible stories, get the Dads and Moms telling their kids Bible stories, use interactive engaging ways of Bible story telling, read large sections of Scripture out loud in the worship service, use worship songs with lots of Bible content, and whatever other ways you can to get the Bible to people in all forms.

I would in no way regard oral Bible teaching or story telling as inferior to reading the Bible or being less powerful than reading. Before the printing press, the Scriptures were not easy to come by for the common person. The NT epistles were read to the congregations, not photocopied for everyone to have a personal copy. However, if believers had been able to get a copy, I imagine that most of them would have wanted one. And it is simply not true that the Chinese church exploded under communism "exploded without any Bibles at all". Granted they didn't have a lot but they had some and the few they did have were highly treasured (and that's because they loved God's word not because some white missionary indoctrinated them in a formalistic ritual of exalting a book for the sake of tradition)

However, we are not in the era before the printing press and the people we are working with are not illiterate for the most part. Some are not great readers, granted. And many don't do a lot of pleasure reading. But a number do. I was shocked when two neighborhood ladies said they'd read Harry Potter. Nothing about them made me think that they liked reading. But they do.

The Word of God is powerful when it is read, heard, sung, prayed, or whatever. Let's not underestimate the need for good engaging oral teaching and story telling but also let's not underestimate the power of people reading God's Word written down in the Bible. I have yet to meet any Thai believers who read the Bible daily in a dead ritualistic sense out of duty. If people don't get anything out of Bible reading, they usually just stop doing it. I think there is little danger of Bible reading turned into a formalistic dead ritual here in the Thai context. The greater danger is the Daily Bread which, like eating a lot of candy, tastes good going down but doesn't do much for your overall health.

The clarity of Scripture was an essential principle of the Reformation and if we don't promote Bible reading (or listening on CD/MP3), then we deny people an important source of spiritual food and unwittingly promote the idea that they need to go to the pastor/missionary/Bible teacher all the time in order to be fed spiritually.