being a world changer

This afternoon as I've been looking through some discussion boards for class, getting a resource together for a writing assignment, and writing this blog, I'm also listening to IWU's broadcast of the World Changers ceremony where Kirk Cameron was inducted into the Society of World Changers last Wednesday. I was so glad I was able to go and listen to someone I believe is a great example of a world changer, who has, as he said during the convocation, stared down the barrel of a loaded question on national television and said what he felt and knew in his heart to be true no matter the consequence.

I thought more about the idea of being a world changer this past weekend as I attended my first ESL conference up in Chicago at Moody Bible Institute. I've been studying in a program that is very good at teaching me how to be a better teacher of ESOL, but I wanted to learn more about how to integrate my faith into my career. I was a bit nervous about attending the conference by myself, and spending my birthday with a bunch of strangers (yet brothers and sisters in Christ) was a little strange, but in retrospect, I wouldn't have had it any other way. So many people ask me what I'm going to do after I finish my MA program, and I always have this "uh uh.." moment with regards to the immediate future before I talk about what God has laid on my heart: church ministry and ESL. I caught a glimpse of it during my 4 months in Madrid, and I love the idea of bringing people into the church through something as practical and need-meeting as ESL. The leader of the last workshop I attended (we share the same birthday, coincidentally) is the ESL director at a church in Chicago, and she said something that struck me. In ESL ministry, we are offering a cool drink of English in the name of the Lord. That may seem kind of cheesy, but it really is the heart of an ESL ministry...meeting a practical need while ministering.

The plenary speaker shared about how to incorporate our faith into our curriculum, and as I study curriculum development for my MA, this is something I want to consider. That we should look ways to trigger empathy in our language lessons, using real events, real stories, real pictures in our examples to cause our students to care about real people. If we have engaged the students enough, all of a sudden the students care and have learned vocabulary in a new context of life and death, injustice, prejudice...possibly leading to even deeper discussions about faith. In the workshop about relationships and teaching refugees and immigrants, the speaker talked about entering into their world on their own terms or including them in our lives as a form of ministry. She then presented a list of ministry tensions that exist when working with immigrants and refugees:
- sharing in proclamation vs. action (holistic)
- stewarding opportunities vs. manipulating circumstances (open-handed)... perhaps masking a Bible study into an ESL class. She really stressed being open with the intentions of your class from the start. If you're going to offer Bible studies, say so from the start.
- participating in problem-solving vs. becoming the problem-solver (sustainable help)...don't force your opinions and beliefs and think you have the better way
- ministering to individuals vs. preserving family units (generational integrity)...not stepping on the family's toes, respecting the parents' roles and what you introduce to particularly the kids
- honoring home cultures vs. introducing American culture (identity development)

For me, it's all summed up in knowing how I want to be a world changer in my chosen field. I don't want to "wuss out", as Kirk Cameron put it, and be politically correct while compromising my faith, but I also want to be sensitive those around me, particularly as I work with immigrants and foreigners in my line of work. Finding that balance, straddling that line between the secular and the Christian world and being "in the world, not of it" is hard, but I suppose that's what our lives as Christians is, to a certain extent, supposed to be like.