Language Hospitality Course
Throughout scripture, God’s people are called to express loving welcome. Biblical hospitality is a long-standing Christian practice that is foundational to our identity as a community of believers. Expressing hospitality to one’s neighbors is a means by which congregations worship God, connect with one another, and serve their communities. Hospitality is a means of living and communicating God’s love within the Body and with the world at large. Linguistic diversity presents challenge and opportunity when communicating welcome and engaging in meaningful acts of reciprocal hospitality.
The Language Hospitality Course is designed to guide TESOL professionals and volunteers alongside church leaders to collaboratively explore means for cultivating belonging and connection in multilingual communities. Co-participants will build upon a foundation of Biblical hospitality and one another’s expertise as they explore topics in language, learning, and leadership. Participants will be guided to conduct a needs analysis of their community context, develop a language hospitality project to implement in their community, and become part of the language hospitality story.
FAQs
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This course is designed for co-participants. Teams of two will work together to design a language hospitality project for their context. We recommend co-participant teams be comprised of language teachers and ministry leaders.
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We are inviting co-participants into a collaborative learning community. We will explore together. What is the role of a monolingual church in a multilingual community? What if congregations thrived by responding to a call to love neighbors with intentional inclusion of linguistically diverse neighbors? How might faith-infused flexibility enable the body of Christ to move in new ways into a movement of gospel-inspired unity in the presence of diversity? What if God has already placed resources within the body for just such a movement and all that is needed is intentional activation, collaboration, and support? The heart of the language hospitality course will engage these questions.
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Class sessions will meet via Zoom every other week from January to April. Participants will receive continued coaching from May-December as they implement their language hospitality projects.
Registration for the upcoming course will be open from October to January.
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The cost of the course is $110. Some scholarships are available. Contact Kristyn Kidney for an application.
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If you are interested in taking the course, please contact us. Use the “Connect” page from the menu at the top of the page.
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After you have registered, you can login at the top right corner of this page. After that you can click here to access the course. You will continue to have access to course material even after completing the course. So be sure to save your login information and bookmark the course page.
The story we hope to tell on the other side of this project is the story of thriving multilingual congregations. We hope to tell the story of congregations resourced with principles and engaged in practices of language hospitality reflective of our call to love our neighbor. Our neighbors are increasingly multilingual. We are eager to tell the story of churches that are living out their call to love neighbors through intentional expressions of multilingual belonging. We invite you to come be part of this story.