I began this study with certain questions, and indeed concerns, about the ways in which English teaching is being used for the purposes of mission work by evangelical Christian organizations. The study constituted a small way of gathering empirical data that can help to address these questions and find at least partial answers. Along the way, other questions that I did not anticipate arose and needed to be asked. Last, all along I have been touching on the matter of how my findings can be framed in conceptual terms, and what this might mean for future research. This concluding chapter will summarize the findings and look forward to future research and how it might be framed.

Concerns about the Use of English Teaching for Mission Work

Covertness? Coercion? Conversion?

The study described here was a small and intimate one. What it gained in looking in detail at the lives of relatively few participants, it lost in its capacity for generalizing. Of course, as has already been pointed out, qualitative studies like ethnographies are never intended to be generalizable. Their aim is primarily to explore the texture of a particular setting, and to try to understand it better. That was always my goal in the work described here.

Yet it is also true that the initial impulse to conduct this study arose from a desire to seek answers to some of the questions that had been raised generally about the use of English teaching in evangelical mission work. How do the findings of the study – what I observed at Lighthouse School – relate to those questions? Was the mission operation covert at Lighthouse School? Was coercion involved? Were the participants vulnerable?

In the case of Lighthouse, it cannot be said that the school's operations were covert. It's true that a certain amount of fudging went on.