WEST SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — An Iraqi woman said she first learned about Jesus when a man came to her village twice a week to teach the children Bible stories.

Decades later, she was learning English by reading the Bible with Linda Rungee, a Let’s Start Talking volunteer from Savannah, Georgia, who spends a few weeks each year at the West Springfield Church of Christ.

Janet Lallathin, Rungee’s friend and LST partner from Barnesville, Ohio, teared up as the two repeated the woman’s story.

“That touches my heart,” said Lallathin, dabbing her eyes. “He planted a seed that wasn’t watered for 30 years.”

Rungee and Lallathin are but one of the many teams who come to West Springfield, a city of 28,000 about 90 miles west of Boston, to teach conversational English classes.

Others come from Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Florida and Texas. Let’s Start Talking calls its students readers because most of each one-hour lesson is spent reading Bible stories and discussing them with the volunteer teacher.

Team members stay in modest rooms on the second floor of the Massachusetts church’s quaint but creaky white frame building, built in 1881 as Mittineague Congregational Church and reconfigured through the years.

The sanctuary’s rose windows still splash colors on West Springfield’s Sunday services and those of an Iglesia de Cristo that’s a bit larger and a group of Nepali Christians. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous chapters and a group of homeschoolers use the basement community room for regular meetings.

Volunteers share a microwave, a mini-fridge and a closet-sized bathroom in the stairwell. Minister Gareth Flanary recently replaced the faucet and installed a new toilet.

Flanary keeps it all running.

And he fixes things.

“But I don’t do the yard,” he said, chuckling.

The work is hard, ‘but a good hard’

Down the hall in the children’s classroom, teams work with immigrant readers all day and for a couple more hours after the dinner break, five days a week.

It’s hard, “but a good hard,” Rungee said.

“It’s not hard like when we worked other jobs,” added Lallathin, who spent her career as a hospital pharmacist and still attends the St. Clairsville Church of Christ in Ohio. Rungee retired from Savannah College of Art and Design, where she was registrar. She attends the Parkway Church of Christ there.

The pair had to negotiate with Flanary for the two-hour dinner break.

“Two hours is barely enough,” Rungee insisted in her quintessential Georgia drawl.

The friends could not be more different. Rungee epitomizes the Southern belle with an iron will, which she exercised for more than three decades in the Army Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. When she’s not volunteering, she’s on a cruise.

Lallathin drives everywhere, doesn’t like to fly or cruise and appears every bit the practical Midwesterner, except she can’t talk about her refugee readers without tearing up.

They both love their students and love Flanary, who Rungee calls a “one-man show.” He would hate that description, but he’s out at the moment, fixing something or teaching an ESL class at the public library.

When the library classes began in October, he welcomed the opportunity with eagerness and trepidation. LST classes focus on conversation. These English as a second language classes focus on grammar, structure and vocabulary.

Some students come to the library to learn the language and to the church to practice conversation skills. One woman, named Nadine, came to the church for the first time that week, wearing her hijab.

Students describe Flanary as patient. The LST volunteers describe him as generous.

“He never turns anybody away,” Lallathin said. “He pays for a babysitter for kids, pays for cabs if they don’t have a way back, or he picks them up. He does everything for everybody.”

How it all began

Flanary had no idea what awaited the small church on June 1, 2011, when an EF3 tornado hit West Springfield. Two residents died. The loss of homes, belongings — hope — devastated hundreds. Many immigrants and refugees lived in the worst-hit part of town.

The minister was sitting in his living room watching the news when he got a call from Churches of Christ Disaster Relief.

“They asked, ‘Do you want us to help?’ I said sure,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

The first truck of many arrived just a couple days later, bringing water and supplies. Members turned the auditorium into a relief center.

Flanary visited shelters in schools, prayed with people and let them know that supplies were available at the church. Soon, FEMA and MEMA — the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency — were involved and asked Flanary to take the lead in setting up a long-term recovery entity to be run by townspeople.

Raising Hope Together soon had a Main Street office, staff and a collaborative outreach of social service organizations, many of them faith-based.

Because so many victims were immigrants, the need for English training was apparent.

“I saw a huge need but didn’t know how to launch that kind of effort,” the minister said.

So he drove to Tulsa, Oklahoma, introduced himself to LST director Leslie Altrock and began bringing volunteers to West Springfield.

A leader in community outreach

West Springfield sits just across the Connecticut River from the much larger Springfield, Mass.

The two cities have welcomed immigrants for decades, in part because West Springfield is home to Lutheran Social Services, a resettlement agency. Across the river, Jewish Family Services and Catholic Charities also have long invested in resettling refugees from all over the world.

Many immigrants are religious when they arrive, so learning English through Bible reading appeals to them.

The Russian population exploded after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thirty years later, the largest evangelical church in the area is a Russian Baptist church with more than 1,000 members.

With increased immigration from Ukraine, many more churches have sprung up, Flanary said. Most Ukrainians coming to the area are Baptist or Pentecostal.

One woman, a student in library and church classes, taught theology in a Pentecostal seminary in Ukraine. Now she gives art classes for immigrant children and struggles to speak English as well as her 7-year-old son.

Others served by the West Springfield ministry just last year came from the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Haiti, Mexico, Moldova, Nicaragua, South Africa and Turkey.

About an hour south in Manchester, Connecticut, the largest Church of Christ in New England also has a program to teach English as a second language that has included readers from Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Columbia, Ecuador, Iraq, Peru, Puerto Rico and the Republic of Georgia. Flanary helped the Connecticut church begin its program in 2018.

Mary Brown, who retired after a career in adult education, coordinates the ministry there. Her husband, Charlie, serves as an elder. She recruits volunteers among the congregation’s 200-plus members. She has 19 volunteers and 12 readers, but a sign just went back up at the building to attract more.

The sign has generated new readers before and led to at least two baptisms.

“One was one of my readers from Russia,” Brown said. “I invited her to a ladies’ progressive dinner. She came and was just sitting there like, ‘Why would these people give out free food?’ She asked me, ‘Do you think I could come to your church?’”

Living out the Gospel of Christ

As in Manchester, the ministry in West Springfield has led to baptisms, but Flanary says the LST program is different from other outreaches.

“The first question I always get is, ‘How many people have you baptized?’ — and of course we’ve had baptisms,” the minister explained. “But to some, that’s the litmus test of whether something is valid — not serving the community or building relationships. I think that’s unfortunate because I really do feel like our mission is to share, display and live out the Gospel of Christ.

“People making responses to the Gospel is up to God,” he stressed. “And the heart of that person.”

Flanary baptized Kadir Cerkez three years ago in the Connecticut River. His LST teacher, Mary Stephens from the University Church of Christ in Canyon, Texas, flew back to Massachusetts for the baptism.

“My house was close to here, and I came to know about this church when I came to it,” Cerkez said, struggling through the conversation with the help of the Google Translate app, which he also uses on Sunday mornings to help him understand the preaching.

Cerkez drives for Uber. But his passion is to begin a congregation of Turkish Christians.

“I am currently giving Christianity lessons to three Turks,” the soft-spoken Turk explained.

Flanary helped him obtain materials written in Turkish from former missionary Andrew Brinley.

“Many Turkish readers have more receptivity to Jesus than you’d think,” Flanary said. “They are political or economic Muslims but not necessarily religious. Thus, Kadir’s dream of having a Turkish church here is a realistic possibility.”

God’s mission of reconciliation

Flanary’s ruddy features match his Irish name, but the Kentucky native grew up a Midwest preacher’s kid.

“Dad was always a missionary-minded guy,” Flanary said.

And the trait runs through him, too. He met and married his wife, Debbie, at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, where he earned a degree in biblical languages.  She grew up in Pennsylvania, so they moved there after graduation, then to Manchester, Conn., Chicopee, Mass., and Glen Rock, Pa.

West Springfield Church of Christ, Upper Church Street, West Springfield, MA, USA

In 2009 they moved to West Springfield. He seems now to know everyone in town. Every server at Memos, a popular lunch spot, called him by name, and he asked about their families.

Alabama transplants, most of them in the military, started the West Springfield church in 1969. By the mid-1980s, it grew to about 140 and had elders. But assorted conflicts and the departure of some members to the Boston Movement, which later became known as the International Church of Christ, dissipated numbers.

“A lot of young families left,” Flanary said.

More left during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, Sunday attendance is about 30, and half of those are children, several from the same Ghanaian family.

About a dozen individuals and churches regularly support the congregation and provide about half of Flanary’s salary. He raises the rest each year. With no elders, leadership — servant leadership — falls to Flanary.

The work is all consuming, and he’s tired, but at 63 not quite ready to retire. His wife will likely retire from the U.S. Postal Service before he does.

The church is small, but the work is big, so it’s a tough decision.

In Flanary’s mind, being small is no excuse to be idle.

“I would like people to see what a small congregation can do with the help of others if you really have a mind to reach out to your community,” Flanary said.

“If that’s your mission as God’s instrument of reconciliation to the world, then we need to do everything we can to be a part of that. To excuse the church because it’s too small, I would never want to use that excuse.”

This piece originally appeared at The Christian Chronicle.

Cheryl Mann Bacon is a Christian Chronicle correspondent who served for 20 years as chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Abilene Christian University. In retirement, she is enjoying freelance writing and consulting, especially with churches. Contact her at cheryl@christianchronicle.org.