There is something altogether fascinating about the idea of evangelical Christian missionaries operating a language school and teaching English to adults and children in present-day Poland. The most obvious question is: How can you ‘convert’ to Christianity a nation that accepted the Christian faith over a thousand years ago, and is known today for its allegiance to the Catholic Church? Following on the heels of this central puzzle, others soon occur to us: Are the missionaries ‘successful’? (We’ll leave aside for a moment the matter of how ‘success’ in missions is and can be judged, and by whom.) What do Polish Catholics think of efforts to win them over to the evangelical churches? After this, when we have had time to reflect a little more thoughtfully on the subject, more nuanced questions emerge: Why is Poland a particular target of evangelical missionary efforts in the first place (as it has been for some time)? Are all Poles in fact Catholics, in name, practice or belief? Do the missionaries indeed aim to ‘convert’ the Poles, or may the goal of their mission work be rather more subtle? And last but by no means least, what is English teaching doing in all of this? How is evangelical Christianity related to the global spread of the English language?

The present book is an attempt to address some of these questions, through a close look at the work of a single evangelical language school in Poland. Like the academic I am, I won’t promise straightforward answers to the questions raised above, for the simple reason that often, they will turn out not to be the right questions after all. It will transpire that things are far more complicated than they seem; I hope to show some of this complexity, on the way reflecting on why it is that we persistently find ourselves imagining situations of this kind as being more black-and-white than they are in reality.