Helping Baptist churches embrace the nations 

2:19 is a charity that helps churches use English conversation classes and cafe initiatives to reach, welcome and share the gospel with speakers of other languages.

CEO David Baldwin highlights three Baptist churches it has worked with - and details of a forthcoming forum for those interested in finding out more

 
What or who are ‘the nations’ exactly?

It’s the Six Nations tournament at the moment and rugby fans all know exactly which those six nations are. As I began writing ahead of the weekend's games, the top three nations in the table were Ireland, England and Scotland. We’ll circle back around to those three northern hemisphere ‘giants’ in a moment.

When we read the Bible, most of us instinctively think of ‘the nations’ as the other nations, out there, distant from us, the peoples needing the gospel, the beneficiaries of our missionary endeavours etc. Maybe that hasn’t been a bad place to start, especially since William Carey’s “Enquiry” shook the western church from its lethargy in 1792 and kick-started the modern missionary movement.[1]

But that’s also quite a Eurocentric point of standpoint for viewing the world and before adopting it we certainly need to see that we ‘home nations’ were among the distant and needy nations envisaged in the Bible. As the gospel was primed to spread throughout the world, we were to be among the beneficiaries … and praise God for those who did bring the gospel to our pagan lands.

My Ethiopian friends, when mocking me for my ethnocentricity[2] would remind me that; ‘Ethiopia occurs more than fifty times in the Bible!’ and then follow up with ‘And how often is Britain mentioned?’ Well, if the UK does feature in scripture it has to be among ‘the distant islands’ still waiting for God’s envoys to bring the glad tidings of the Lord’s fame and glory (Isaiah 66:19).

And so back to the three nations, England, Ireland and Scotland, and to local Baptist churches enjoying the gospel there and seeking to be a blessing to yet more nations in turn. For the 2:19 Teach to Reach team this is what gets us out of bed on a Monday morning – helping local churches embrace those nations. 

Let’s zoom in on three urban centres and catch a glimpse of what the Lord is doing in Aberdeen, Scotland, where a church is still in its planning stage, then Belfast, Northern Ireland, where an ESL ministry has started quite recently, then Reading, England, where we’ll visit a well-established ESL outreach. Maybe your local church is somewhere on this spectrum?


Vijay Pillai is the senior pastor at Aberdeen Christian Fellowship, affiliated to the Baptist Union of Scotland. The church has strong global vision and supports at least eight mission ventures both financially and in prayer. Increasingly aware of people from other nations coming to their city, the church is considering the best way to serve those living among them.

Pastor Vijay has recently seen some of the 2:19 Teach to Reach materials designed to help churches teach both ESL and the Bible’s big story line.

He comments:

I've received the books. At first glance, they really look like outstanding teaching material. The materials really are of the highest quality. I can see how they would make terrific evangelistic tools too. I love the way it's also located in the 'Big Story' of what God is doing in his creation. I love its explicitly Christian and Bible focus.

 
2:19 Teach to Reach also produces materials designed to help churches survey their local community, compare it with their church demographics and decide the most appropriate ministry to get started with as they engage the nations locally. 2:19 staff are also available to advise churches as they wrestle with start-up issues.

Vijay’s enquiry below is often the question on church leaders’ minds as they contemplate their local contexts:
 

I spoke to the coordinator of the local outreach of our church if we might have perhaps someone from 2:19 come up and advise/train us on how we might reach out to the large refugee community here in Aberdeen through EFL. He was very keen to do so. Is that something 2:19 does? We could try and invite local churches to be involved with that too, if there was some kind of training. Anyway, just a thought.

 
Whilst we can’t get everywhere in the UK physically, we are able to offer advice, one to one zoom consultations, online webinar training, articles and newsletter with best practice tips and an annual “ESL and Outreach Forum” alongside our printed materials. In fact, Vijay will be our keynote speaker at the upcoming Forum in Birmingham on 17 May, He’ll be speaking about the importance of storytelling (click here or see flyer below for more details).
 


From Aberdeen to Belfast. Kerry Fee heads a team running “Majestic English” at Windsor Baptist Church.[3] They’ve only been going since Easter 2023 but they already have a dedicated team of 28 church volunteers! Yes, you heard that right! Around 18 each Friday morning, sometimes with 1:2 or even 1:1 teacher/helper to ESL learner ratio!

‘The church has really embraced the ministry!’ Kerry said. Well that’s great news, and 2:19 always encourages churches only to invest in ESL type ministries when everyone, starting with the leadership, is on board.

Conversely, we’d always discourage those trying to run such ministries on the peripheries of church life, or as lone rangers, for various reasons, both pragmatic and ecclesiological.

It sounds like Windsor Baptist doesn’t need any help, doesn’t it! But I asked Kerry how 2:19 has been able to support them. ‘Three things really,’ she said:

Firstly, the great help given at the beginning of our café ministry. The iCaf pilot pack got us started and the “Utter Wisdom” book of proverbs provided us with supplementary topic ideas from Easter through Summer.

Secondly, as the ministry proved popular and numbers increased, 2:19 staff gave us really good advice about possible next steps, especially moving to a two level ESL conversation class format (Beginners and Intermediate).

And a few of the team were able to come to the 2:19 training given at the Welcome Churches conference (Newtonabbey, 30 September).

Thirdly, the excellent teaching materials. The “So Lord, Speak” books provide a really good model, which we hope to pick up again in the future.

 

Finally, from Belfast to Berkshire.

Helen Yuille now heads up the Carey Baptist Church “Bridges” English conversation classes, which have been running in Reading since 2008. Helen writes:

We are open two mornings a week and currently have six different English classes over the two days, from Beginner to Upper Intermediate level.  We also provide a creche for students’ young children. 20+ volunteers from our church and other local churches teach, assist in class, look after the children and provide refreshments.

We have around 100 adult learners on our books, with 25-40 attending on any one day.  The learners are from many different countries including Albania, China, Hong Kong, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa and Spanish-speaking countries in Central and South America.

Over the years, 2:19 has been an excellent source of inspiration, training (both in teaching skills and cross-cultural awareness) and resources to help us in our work. I very much appreciate the 2:19 ethos of providing the best English teaching that we can; not just using English as a pretext to get people into church. At the same time taking every opportunity to show God’s love and reach out to people with the good news of Jesus which is for all nations.

Helen goes on to talk about exactly how the team move from ESL teaching to sharing the gospel:

We offer an 'Easy English Bible lessons' as an optional extra. The ideas and material for this are mainly from the ‘So, Lord, Speak’ books published by 2:19 and we use the EasyEnglish translation of the Bible (available for free online) which is a fantastic resource. Each lesson is based on a ‘little story’ from the Bible – for example, this week we will talk about weddings in different cultures, hear the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana and think about the world’s problems and how Jesus can and will fix things we can’t fix.

This approach proved very popular with the students, so having completed the year we started again from the beginning in September. Some students come purely to learn more English, some come because they know nothing about Christianity and are curious, and others are excited to see how the bits of the Bible they know fit into one big picture.

‘What goes around, comes around’, goes the old saying, and it’s so good to hear about local Baptist churches in Britain, having received the gospel with joy, so keen to share that joy with friends from yet more nations arriving in their neighbourhoods. We love being a very small catalyst for that.

Come along to the Forum on 17 May and hear more about how we might help your church.




 

2:19 Teach to Reach is a charity named around the Bible verse Ephesians 2:19, where Paul insists the Gentiles are not foreigners and strangers but full citizens and members of God’s household, alongside existing Jewish believers: twonineteen.org.uk


David Baldwin is the CEO 2:19 Teach to Reach and Global Missions Director, Oak Hill College 

 

1. For more on Carey’s “Enquiry” see this BMS World Mission feature
2. Perhaps ‘ethnocentrism’ is a better term, but I like to include their awareness of my idiosyncratic eccentricity too!
3. So-named after the old Majestic cinema that is now home to the church