Almost every evangelical missionary and teacher I have ever spoken to has emphasized ‘relationship building’ as the primary goal of their work. Most have learned to talk with extreme caution about ‘conversion’, and many claim that conversion is in fact not their aim. Rather, they seek to build relationships that mirror the personal relationship with Jesus Christ that they hope to enable for others. Alvin, a pastor with a large Baptist mission in N., described the mission’s purpose as finding different ways to ‘make relationships with people’. Dan, a pastor and one of the leaders of the Mennonite mission in the small town of K. near Warsaw, explained that the mission had decided to focus on English teaching because ‘we felt like that was a good way to build relationships with people’. Throughout the country, I heard similar language from those involved in mission programs.

Lighthouse School was no exception. Virtually every aspect of the school’s work was oriented toward the making, sustaining and strengthening of relationships among the teachers of the school, their learners and the broader community. In the present chapter, I explore some aspects of this process, in particular how it appeared from the perspectives of the various actors, and how it manifested itself in the classroom and elsewhere in the school and beyond. I will pay particular attention to relations between evangelicals and non-evangelicals in the school, focusing especially on one adult learner, Ania, and her involvement with the school; I will tell the story of a tragic personal loss that Ania suffered, and explain how this tragedy was dealt with in the school.

At the same time, relation as conceptualized in the context of evangelical mission work does not fit neatly into prior theoretical understandings of friendship. An ancillary goal of this chapter, then, is to reflect on what ‘relation’ actually means in this setting.

It is worth remembering also that a concept closely related to that of relationship is community, which might simplistically and somewhat misleadingly be defined as a network of relations.