Multicultural Church Stories

Outreach through English classes

For 4 years Saturday morning English classes have been running at Footscray Baptist. Mostly attended by Chinese people, the group currently sees 60-80 people coming each week. The people are inspiring, exciting and the classes are challenging and rewarding. Some travel for more than an hour to get there, so if you ask ‘is it really working?’ the answer is ‘absolutely yes!’

Some of the visitors are old, and do not have much courage to learn English, they have been here for 20 years and do not speak fluently. Others are eager to catch up and are learning Advanced English. The Saturday classes are not all about hard work, during the break there is often a group practicing Tai Chi in the yard, while others have a cuppa and practice their conversational English.

The English classes began in 1996 when Sue Stokes, Andrea McAdam and Trudy Davis realized that their suburb of North Melbourne was becoming home to many people recently arrived from China. A Chinese newspaper session was started, which led to morning teas, and eventually English classes. As word spread, more than 100 students were coming to class on a Saturday morning, and when the overflow at community rooms became too much, the group moved to Footscray’s building.

Optional activities are frequently run after class, including bible studies, church services and Alpha courses, with exciting results. Many teachers and students have been baptized through this outreach!

Sue Stokes has coordinated the classes for 10 years, and comments “it’s not as hard as you might imagine to establish a community English class but it’s not a short term project and there are financial costs. However, we consider a program reaching 70 people a week is a worthwhile financial investment. We’ve found our English classes immensely satisfying and we’ve made a large number of Chinese friends. We still don’t speak Chinese but our students have learned an impressive amount of English”.

Sue loves coordinating this program, and her advice to anyone who wanted to begin English classes was this: ‘Look around and see who lives in your area. Start a class. But I suggest you don’t advertise in the local ethnic paper – you may be overwhelmed with the response’!

Meewon Yang

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