English Teaching and Evangelical Mission
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English Teaching and Evangelical Mission

The Case of Lighthouse School

Bill Johnston

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eBook - ePub

English Teaching and Evangelical Mission

The Case of Lighthouse School

Bill Johnston

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About This Book

Debates about the place of mission work in English Language Teaching continue to rage, and yet full-length studies of what really happens at the intersection of ELT and evangelical Christianity are rare. In this book, Johnston conducts a detailed ethnography of an evangelical language school in Poland, looking at its Bible-based curriculum, and analyzing interaction in classes for adults. He also explores the idea of 'relationship' in the context of the school and its mission activity, and more broadly the cultural encounter between North American evangelicalism and Polish Catholicism. The book comprises an in-depth examination of a key issue facing TEFL in the 21st century, and will be of interest to all practitioners and scholars in the field, whatever their position on this topic.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781783097098
1Introduction
There is something altogether fascinating about the idea of evangelical Christian missionaries operating a language school and teaching English to adults and children in present-day Poland. The most obvious question is: How can you ‘convert’ to Christianity a nation that accepted the Christian faith over a thousand years ago, and is known today for its allegiance to the Catholic Church? Following on the heels of this central puzzle, others soon occur to us: Are the missionaries ‘successful’? (We’ll leave aside for a moment the matter of how ‘success’ in missions is and can be judged, and by whom.) What do Polish Catholics think of efforts to win them over to the evangelical churches? After this, when we have had time to reflect a little more thoughtfully on the subject, more nuanced questions emerge: Why is Poland a particular target of evangelical missionary efforts in the first place (as it has been for some time)? Are all Poles in fact Catholics, in name, practice or belief? Do the missionaries indeed aim to ‘convert’ the Poles, or may the goal of their mission work be rather more subtle? And last but by no means least, what is English teaching doing in all of this? How is evangelical Christianity related to the global spread of the English language?
The present book is an attempt to address some of these questions, through a close look at the work of a single evangelical language school in Poland. Like the academic I am, I won’t promise straightforward answers to the questions raised above, for the simple reason that often, they will turn out not to be the right questions after all. It will transpire that things are far more complicated than they seem; I hope to show some of this complexity, on the way reflecting on why it is that we persistently find ourselves imagining situations of this kind as being more black-and-white than they are in reality.
Anyone picking up this book is likely to be asking another major question, one that I can answer right away (albeit unwillingly); let me do so while you’re still browsing the first page or so. The question is this: Who is the author? More specifically, where does he stand in terms of religious beliefs vis-à-vis the people he is studying? Well, as I hinted in the first sentence of this paragraph, I’m strongly opposed to identitarian writing of the ‘as a white middle-class heterosexual male’ variety. Yet, in the present case, I realize it may be hard for the reader to know how to interpret the text without a sense of who is writing, so here goes: I am an atheist. My interest in evangelical Christianity is as a complete outsider. I first became fully aware of the major evangelical presence in the field of English teaching as an outcome of my work on the moral dimensions of English language teaching (Johnston, 2003), and in particular my work on language teacher identity. My colleague Manka Varghese and I both found the matter compelling, and we conducted a study of evangelical Christian teachers in training in the US (Varghese & Johnston, 2007). This study, though deeply interesting to its authors, was limited in scope, and it was clear that the matter deserved a much more extensive inquiry. That was one of the germs of the present project.
I find evangelical Christians fascinating people to be around, partly because they are so profoundly different from me. Evangelicals see everything around them as being tied to God. Both good and bad things that happen in the world are directly related to the will of God, and specifically to their own relationship with God. For evangelical Christians, that relationship is the core of their existence; everything else flows from it, or should. As a key aspect of this central belief, evangelical Christians constantly look to the figure of Jesus Christ as a living example of how to lead one’s life; they regard the Bible as the Word of God, taking this quite literally in many cases; and they believe that every evangelical has a spiritual duty to bear witness to his or her faith. This duty often (though not always) involves attempts to contribute to the Great Commission, Christ’s last recorded instruction to his disciples, in which he commanded them: ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ (Matthew 28:19). (A different and widely used translation says, ‘make disciples of all the nations’.)
As an atheist, I believe none of these things. Yet, even as I write those words – ‘as an atheist’ – I am conscious that such a formulation implies that I’m bound by some doctrine which obliges me to believe or not believe certain things. This, however, is not the case – I believe what I believe not because someone else has decided that that’s what atheists have to believe, but rather because in my innermost being I find absolutely no shred of conviction that God exists, that the Bible is His word or that Jesus was His son. Since my own conviction comes from within, not from an outside authority, I must accept that evangelical Christians too believe what they believe not because their pastor or their parents told them so, but rather because deep within themselves they are convinced of the rightness of the way they see the world. This is the fundamental attitude of respect that I sought to bring to my study.
There is also another important reason why evangelical Christians are interesting to someone like me: As an atheist, I represent a very small minority both in my adopted home country of the US, and more widely in the world at large. Most people in the world believe in some form of divine being. Evangelical Christians, in particular, constitute a huge and ever-increasing percentage of the population, not just in North America but across Central and South America, Africa, Asia and also Europe. In a word, an interest in evangelical Christianity means an interest in a set of beliefs that are common to a significant portion of humanity.
A further personal motivation in pursuing the research that led to this book lay in the attitudes toward evangelical Christians that I encountered in those with whom I work. To put it plainly, such attitudes usually range between condescension and scorn, rarely straying beyond these boundaries. Let me give a small but telling example. At the beginning of each new academic year, the department where I used to work held an orientation and get-to-know-you session for new graduate students in our masters in teaching English to speakers of other languages (MATESOL) program. As part of this event, new students were asked to introduce themselves and say something about why they had entered the program. At one orientation session, a young man from Korea told us his name, then explained that three years previously he had come to know Jesus Christ as his personal lord and savior and that Jesus had pointed him in the direction of pursuing a master’s degree in his chosen field, that of English teaching. I glanced around at my colleagues and saw several of them rolling their eyes; afterward, they made deprecating comments about the student in question.
Such reactions are a staple in non-evangelical circles throughout North America; one need only look at how evangelicals are portrayed in the media. A recent Google search using the term ‘Crazy Christians’ yielded 6 million results. Of course, many evangelicals in the public eye do indeed set themselves up for satirical treatment (examples are so common I will forgo repeating any here). But, more than with any other self-identified group, I believe we fall into the trap of tarring all its members with the same brush of intolerance, extremism and ideological fanaticism. Few, if any, of the evangelicals I know can be classified this way; yet, as non-evangelicals, we continue to dismiss all evangelicals regardless. Indeed, no other religious group is treated with such cavalier contempt by supposedly open-minded liberals. Going back to the orientation session mentioned in the previous paragraph, my strong suspicion is that the reaction would have been very different if the student had expressed his spiritual convictions as a Buddhist, a Jew or a Muslim; even non-evangelical Christians, such as Catholics, would have gotten off lightly. Anti-evangelical reactions are so strong, so predictable and so formulaic that one cannot help asking the question: Why? What is it about evangelical Christianity that non-evangelicals in North America and elsewhere find so objectionable? My work on the project described here led me repeatedly back to this question, and I will address it in some detail later.
As with many large-scale projects, the present one was also set in motion by very specific things I read and heard. In particular, I found myself returning over and over again to comments made by Julian Edge and by Alastair Pennycook and Sophie Coutand-Marin in articles about evangelical Christians in TESOL. Edge (2003) expressed particular concern about the use of deception – the practice, endorsed by some missionaries and missionary organizations, of using English teaching as a convenient cover for mission work. Edge asked his readers – TESOL professionals – to imagine being on the receiving end of this practice:
Perhaps one way to understand the threat involved is to reverse the relationships. We need to imagine ourselves as constrained to encourage members of our community, perhaps send out our children (for as anyone involved in worldwide TEFL knows, both in the public and private sectors, the major growth area is in the teaching of English to ever-younger learners) to learn a language essential for their educational development and material well-being. We are required to do this in the knowledge that an unknown number of the teachers of that language are there with the express purpose of subverting our most deeply held beliefs and taking those people, those children, from us. They hope to do this at first surreptitiously, and then with the same discourse of ‘choice’ that those in power always like to affect when they take what they can, leaving the disadvantaged to put up with what they must (Mitchell, 1994). (Edge, 2003: 705)
Pennycook and Coutand-Marin (2004), in turn, express significant misgivings about several aspects of what they label somewhat facetiously ‘TEML’ – teaching English as a missionary language. Citing comments on a website run by a missionary organization entitled Christian Outreach International, they say that for this organization:

there appears to be no concern about viewing the increased demand for English as ‘a gold mine rich with mission opportunity’. Nor does the question of gaining students’ trust in order to preach the gospel appear to raise ethical questions about this pedagogy. According to missionaries’ testimonies, English classes are the most efficient way to attract people. Indeed, for some organisations, using ELT has become an identifiable ‘approach’ to missionary work. (Pennycook & Coutand-Marin, 2004: 340)
Pennycook and Coutand-Marin (2004: 348) also state that ‘Christian missionary work typically preys on the weak, using English to gain access to vulnerable non-Christians’. Finally, they criticize the noncritical nature of TEML, claiming:
[T]he moral project of TEML all too often lacks an adequate ethics. While religious thinking is supposed to encourage engagement with hard ethical questions, all too often it does little more than promote a prior moral absolutism. (Pennycook & Coutand-Marin, 2004: 351)
Both these quotations formed part of the rather acrimonious exchange that emerged in the early 2000s about the intersection of TESOL and evangelical mission work (see Chapter 3 for a more detailed account of this literature). In thinking about the quotations, two feelings struck me. One was embarrassment – as a scientist, I was discomfited that as a field we were making such generalizations with no empirical data to back them up. The second feeling was curiosity. Were these things actually true? Were evangelical Christian missionaries using English teaching as a platform for mission work; were they doing so covertly; and were they indeed ‘preying on the weak’? I decided rather quickly that the best way to redress my embarrassment was to go out and collect some data in the best way I knew how – by conducting an in-depth, data-based study. The present book is the result of these twin feelings of embarrassment and curiosity, and constitutes not just my response to the writers quoted above (and to their critics), but also, I hope, a contribution to the ongoing debate.
Another question that is bound to occur to the reader at the outset is: Why Poland? I should preface my answer to this question by saying that I believed strongly from the beginning that it was important to focus on a single setting for my study – that is, an ethnographic approach was called for. The encounter with faiths and cultures that mission work involves is so complex that I feel that any more superficial attempt to study it – via polls, or interviews alone, across numerous settings – would signally fail to capture the reality of any actual context. Only a painstaking look at the individuals and individual relationships involved could convey an accurate picture of at least part of the reality.
For me, Poland was an obvious choice. I lived in Poland for eight years in the 1980s and 1990s, and I often spend a month or more there every year. I speak fluent Polish (I am a translator of Polish literature), and have extensive knowledge of Polish culture and history. This knowledge would give me a head start in understanding the encounters in a language school from both sides.
But convenience alone is not a sufficient motivation for the choice of site, and I was initially leery of this option. I have always found Poland immensely interesting, but I was not sure whether it was an appropriate location for the study I had in mind. It was only after I discussed the idea with colleagues in religious studies that I became convinced that Poland is indeed an exceptionally interesting location for a study of evangelical mission work. In general, the evangelical focus on Europe is itself a notable phenomenon (see Chapter 2 for more details). What used to be ‘Eastern Europe’, in turn – that is, the former communist bloc – is interesting for its own reasons. And Poland in particular – the country that gave us Pope John Paul II and is widely regarded as one of the ‘most Catholic’ countries in the world – would seem to be, to put it mildly, a tough nut to crack for evangelical missionaries. For all these reasons, then, the case of Poland is a particularly compelling one.
I need to say very clearly from the outset that I am an applied linguist, not a theologian or a sociologist of religion. I have drawn on the literature of the latter two disciplines as well as that of other relevant fields (Slavic studies and Polish studies, anthropology, history, religious studies), but the center of my attention has been the language classroom – the place I know best, and the locus where the encounter I am writing about primarily took place. Where I write about religious belief, it is above all as an interested and relatively well-informed non-specialist, and, I hope, as a well-disposed or sympathetic non-believer. I’m not qualified to go into details about the niceties of religious dogma or practices, nor do I wish to do so. I write as someone committed to quality language teaching who is at the same time deeply interested in the identities and beliefs of language teachers, and how these impact classroom interaction and the quality of experience afforded to the learners. By the same token, it is my great hope that the present book will be accessible to those from outside my own discipline. I believe strongly that when examining religious and spiritual beliefs, and also educational practice, it is both possible and desirable to avoid unnecessary specialist terminology and to write in a way that any intelligent and interested reader can follow.
Simply put, my goal in the present study was to find out what a mission-based English language school looks like. I wanted to do an in-depth, relatively extensive study of a single school to capture the particularity of experience in one location. I was especially interested in understanding and conveying the perspectives of the participants, including teachers, students and others involved in the school. On the way, I found that much of what I was doing was learning what such a school does not look like – that is to say, dismantling my own preconceptions (many of which I was not initially aware of) and those of others I have spoken to about the project or whose work I have read. A perhaps inevitable side result of the research was a confrontation with my own religious and spiritual beliefs. But more of that later.
I was determined not to take an overly theoretical approach to the phenomena I was studying. At the same time, I was coming into the project with certain fairly obvious interests and theoretical preferences, and it was inevitable that these would color even the initial data collection. These entering perspectives included the question of identity; the processes of globalization and the view of the school’s work as representing the front line of the transglobal encounter; and discourse analysis, in particular discursive psychology, which suggests that a careful analysis of the ways that people talk can be a major source of understanding of their motivations, world views and relationships. Other theoretical perspectives – notably those coming from gender studies – emerged during the course of the study. But I have chosen not to structure the present report around a single theoretical framework, preferring instead to call upon different theories at different moments to help understand aspects of what I found. In this project in particular, I felt that it is the substantive facts of the case that are most interesting, and I did not want to lose sight of these by immersing myself too much in theory. This seemed particularly important because the present study, to the best of my knowledge the first of its kind, is very much exploratory in nature, and I would like to leave room for a range of theoretical approaches. I’ve chosen then to sketch out a few such possibilities without committing wholly to any one theoretical lens.
The book is structured as follows: After the present introductory chapter, Chapter 2 gives a brief ov...

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