Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the CCDA podcast.
Speaker: My name is Sarah Callan.
Speaker: I am the communications coordinator at CCDA and I am your host for this episode.
Speaker: Today we will be discussing multilingualism, what it is, why it's important, and how we can move toward embracing multilingualism in our churches and organizations.
Speaker: But I'm not alone for this conversation.
Speaker: Thankfully, I have some very special guests joining me, Emmanuel Rikki Padilla and Dr. Itzel Midori.
Speaker: Rikki and Itzel, thank you so much for being here.
Speaker: Would you like to introduce yourselves?
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I'm a Spanish professor and chair of the Modern Languages Department at Biola University, where I teach second language and heritage language learners.
Speaker: So heritage learners, for those of you who might not be familiar with the term, are students who have a familial connection and
Speaker: or community tied to the minoritized language, in my context, Spanish.
Speaker: So typically these are students who grew up speaking Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, et cetera, at home, but may not have received any formal instruction in
Speaker: in the language.
Speaker: And I'm actually a heritage learner myself.
Speaker: So I was born and raised in Los Angeles to parents, to Mexican parents.
Speaker: I grew up speaking Spanish at home and in my community, but I didn't receive any formal instruction in the language until I was in high school.
Speaker: And I am also the mother of two beautiful kids, Chito and Camila, who my husband and I are raising to be trilingual in Spanish, English, and Italian.
Speaker: trilingual.
Speaker: What a flex.
Speaker: Sarah, CCDA, thanks for having us.
Speaker: My name is Emanuel Enrique Padilla.
Speaker: If you've heard me say this before, forgive me, but
Speaker: My family didn't know English at the time and thought that the best translation for Enrique was Ricky.
Speaker: And I've been Ricky ever since because my dad and I share the same first name.
Speaker: And so I've always gone by the bad translation of my middle name.
Speaker: If it were translated correctly, it would have been Henry.
Speaker: Don't call me Henry.
Speaker: No one's ever done that.
Speaker: But
Speaker: I am president of World Outspoken, an organization that started in 2018.
Speaker: We exist to provide resources and offer training related to questions of cultural change.
Speaker: Our first organizations that we were serving were migrant churches where the pastors were from their country of origin, primarily Spanish speaking, and they were retiring.
Speaker: And the pastors that were stepping into the roles of leadership in those congregations were pastors that were born in the U.S.,
Speaker: and had their sort of cultural influences, their theological influences, their orientations and concerns oriented toward questions that emerged from this context rather than a country of origin.
Speaker: And that was creating some pretty significant conflicts between the incoming pastor and the existing culture of the congregation.
Speaker: And so, World Out Spoken started doing that kind of work.
Speaker: We've been doing it ever since.
Speaker: And one of the things that it's a joy that we get to do
Speaker: Because we have to have scholars and residents that represent the communities that we've been serving, the congregations that we have been training and offering resources to.
Speaker: And Dr. Ameduri is one of those scholars that has been a huge help to us when we've been navigating questions of language.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Thank you both for being here today and even just raising this topic as something that we should be talking about.
Speaker: So to start off the conversation, can you guys just let us know what is multilingualism?
Speaker: Yeah, great question.
Speaker: Well, in simple terms, it is the ability to communicate in more than one language.
Speaker: And I want to add that this is actually a very common global phenomenon with more than half of the population speaking more than one language.
Speaker: Unfortunately, despite the fact that here in the States we're known as a nation of immigrants, only 21% of the U.S. population is multilingual.
Speaker: That is because as a country, we do a very poor job at maintaining languages.
Speaker: So there is a running joke that goes, what do you call someone who knows two languages?
Speaker: Bilingual.
Speaker: What do you call someone who knows three languages?
Speaker: Trilingual.
Speaker: And what do you call someone who only knows one language?
Speaker: American.
Speaker: Itzel is trying her bits on us here.
Speaker: She's going to go Saturday Night Live after this.
Speaker: This is a running joke.
Speaker: It's not my joke.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So in fact, and this is sad, right?
Speaker: We are known as the graveyard of languages.
Speaker: So a place where languages come to die.
Speaker: That is really helpful.
Speaker: And your joke.
Speaker: Not my joke.
Speaker: Not my joke, but the joke.
Speaker: The joke that you shared that you take no ownership of.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was really good.
Speaker: So, okay, so we here in America don't experience the multilingualism that is experienced in a lot of other countries.
Speaker: So can you share a little bit about maybe the history of language here in the U.S. and how that informs where we find ourselves today?
Speaker: Yeah, totally.
Speaker: So if we continue with the metaphor of the graveyard, I will say that in many instances, the death of these languages doesn't occur by natural causes.
Speaker: So languages have been violently taken away from people in the name of mostly American nationalism.
Speaker: Throughout history, there have been many people in power that believe that to be a true American, one must look a certain way, behave in a particular manner, and speak only one language, English, right?
Speaker: In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt said, we only have room for one language in this country, and it is English.
Speaker: This was a reaction to the growing influx of European immigrants whose languages were viewed as a threat to the American identity.
Speaker: And we see this throughout history.
Speaker: The English-only movement always emerges with anti-immigrant rhetoric, and we know that this is not a coincidence, of course.
Speaker: To give another example, in 1980, Miami-Dade County, Florida enacted a county ordinance designating English as the official language of local government.
Speaker: This took place after 125,000 Cuban immigrants arrived in South Florida.
Speaker: There was nothing benign about this ordinance.
Speaker: It wasn't coincidental.
Speaker: It was enacted for one purpose, and that was to exclude Spanish speakers, right?
Speaker: To give another example, in 1998, California, and now we're talking about states that have a high population of bilingual speakers, right?
Speaker: So California is
Speaker: in 1998 passed the infamous Proposition 227 that would eliminate bilingual education.
Speaker: Despite the fact that California has one of the most abundant populations of non-native English speakers, it took almost 20 years for Proposition 227 to be repealed.
Speaker: Again, we see this, and it was a reaction to the influx of immigrant students in the public school system.
Speaker: And instead of viewing their languages as an asset, they were perceived as a threat to the English language and to quote-unquote Americanism.
Speaker: In fact, when I was in elementary school in the 90s, my mother was told by one of my teachers that she shouldn't speak to me in Spanish.
Speaker: Now, this advice was completely absurd, right?
Speaker: My mom's native tongue is Spanish.
Speaker: And at the time, she knew very little English.
Speaker: So if she would have heeded that advice, she would basically not be able to talk to me.
Speaker: Our relationship would have suffered a great deal, right?
Speaker: Second, my mom was a teacher in Mexico.
Speaker: So she had tons of Spanish workbooks and books that she had me read and writing activities.
Speaker: And we know that these are all transferable skills.
Speaker: So in fact, my mom's help with Spanish and helping me read and write was going to, and it did eventually reinforce my English.
Speaker: Imagine if I didn't speak Spanish now.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, for one, I wouldn't be a Spanish professor, of course, but also I wouldn't be able to communicate with my family in Mexico, with the many Spanish speakers that I encounter here in the States and around the world.
Speaker: I wouldn't be able to pass the beautiful gift of bilingualism to my children.
Speaker: I will be disconnected from my community.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: When languages are buried, whole generations suffer.
Speaker: There's a rupture in that.
Speaker: Yes, yes, definitely.
Speaker: I don't want to bombard you with examples.
Speaker: We have a lot of them, but I'm going to give you just one more example.
Speaker: In Blackwell, which is a segregated school in Texas that was designated for children of Mexican ancestry, a symbolic burial, going back to the graveyard metaphor, a burial of the Spanish language was performed.
Speaker: And it was called the Burial of Mr. Spanish.
Speaker: And students were asked to write notes of their favorite Spanish words in
Speaker: I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional.
Speaker: That were then inserted in cigar boxes and buried at the base of the American flag.
Speaker: It was as if to achieve true American-ness, students had to literally bury parts of their identity.
Speaker: And of course, there's hundreds of accounts of how students were physically punished at school all over the country for speaking Spanish.
Speaker: Unfortunately, the English-only ideology tends to be very attractive to certain segments of the population, particularly those that are anti-immigrant.
Speaker: And we saw that just a few weeks ago, Trump designated English the official language of the United States.
Speaker: In its nearly 250-year history, the U.S. had never had an official language at the federal level.
Speaker: And there is absolutely no benefit in designating English the official language of the U.S., right?
Speaker: It's meant to exclude people.
Speaker: However, for many of us, this wasn't surprising.
Speaker: Trump has often criticized politicians who use Spanish, stating that only English should be used in the U.S., and has gone so far as to say that there is a language invasion, as he calls it, happening.
Speaker: Here's the thing, though, that these are unfounded fears, fears that are grounded in ideologies of racism.
Speaker: God gave us this amazing ability to learn multiple languages.
Speaker: We don't have to lose our home languages, those languages that connect us to our ancestors and to our communities to learn English.
Speaker: For each sister.
Speaker: I just want to add the kinds of ruptures that Itzel is talking about, they get exported from the U.S. And so, for instance, when the U.S. took over possession of Puerto Rico in 1898,
Speaker: They did designate English as the language of the island, of the archipelago, I should say.
Speaker: And it wasn't until the 1950s when Puerto Ricans had really had enough of that, that that was removed.
Speaker: And Spanish became a formal option for folks in school systems and in legal systems.
Speaker: And so the U.S. has had a propensity to export this monolingualism that our government perceives to be
Speaker: the best solution to integrating diverse peoples, right?
Speaker: It's worth stressing what he said, that this is an expression of a kind of nationalism, a kind of imperialism, right?
Speaker: This is built from a belief that assumes some things that are quite false and actually quite unnatural.
Speaker: That there's a whole segment of the globe where this is not normal, right?
Speaker: And so I just think that that's worth stressing, especially for us that are in the CCDA community.
Speaker: we often are doing work around issues of race and racism in the CCDA community.
Speaker: But for reasons of pragmatism, we've chosen a language, right?
Speaker: Or if some of us are church folks, if we're pastors in the CCDA community, right?
Speaker: Our CCD work, right?
Speaker: It often hinges on a specific language, often English, or some version of kind of pragmatic translation, right?
Speaker: So in-ear translation, if you're doing a Sunday sermon,
Speaker: or having services in two different languages.
Speaker: But those very practical ways of getting around this often don't address the histories that shape the kind of racial hierarchies that now are cemented in our communities, right?
Speaker: And so for the CCDA, it's really interesting to me that while we are very committed to addressing and confronting issues of race and racism, language is often
Speaker: kind of tertiary or very practically addressed.
Speaker: And the questions around multilingualism often don't come up or emerge outside of practical concerns.
Speaker: The history that it said just showed us, just taught us, right?
Speaker: Suggests that as part of our CCD, as part of our community development work,
Speaker: It's actually quite Christian to also think about multilingualism and speaking in multiple tongues.
Speaker: So that's all I wanted to stress as we thought about some of these questions of race and the history that got us all the way to the point where President Trump would exert the kind of influence that he has to make English the formal language of the land.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you both so much for sharing all of that and giving us a peek into the history of monolingualism here in the U.S. So, Ricky, as you said, this should be something that is important to us at CCDA who are caring for people and working for the flourishing of our communities and neighborhoods.
Speaker: But this still might be like a new concept to some of the people listening.
Speaker: So can you share a little bit more about what multilingualism can look like in the church instead of monolingualism?
Speaker: Yeah, so I'll speak to the theological pieces.
Speaker: I think it's worth noting that Itzel can also give us some kind of the practical insights as well.
Speaker: But
Speaker: But, you know, I'm going to borrow an example from someone that we all know and love in the CCDA community, Sandra Maria Van Obstel, right?
Speaker: In her book, The Next Worship, she tells the story so you can also read it there, right?
Speaker: But I'll also share some examples from my own communities as well.
Speaker: Itzel has already talked about the ruptures and alienations that come up, right?
Speaker: The ways in which forcing people toward a kind of monolingualism can break
Speaker: significant breaks, generational breaks, community breaks, breaks that can really negatively and even to some degree traumatically hurt people, right?
Speaker: So I think that has been clearly stated.
Speaker: But there are other ways in which the kind of racial hierarchy around languages can really shape congregations.
Speaker: So to draw the example that Sandra talks about in her book, a suburban Anglo church that primarily sings in English in the worship service might hear Middle Eastern languages.
Speaker: And because of the ways those languages get portrayed and imagined in the news cycle, they might fill in all kinds of images, but the kinds of people that speak those languages, right?
Speaker: So for a church to choose to sing, for instance, a worship song in Urdu or Arabic, in one of these Middle Eastern languages that most of the suburban community around them would fill in certain images with, right?
Speaker: To sing those worship songs and to say they're actually practicing siblings,
Speaker: on that side of the world, Christian things that we are singing in solidarity with.
Speaker: Speaking of solidarity in these moments and these times is really important when it comes to questions of the Middle East, right?
Speaker: But to sing that way is an act of discipleship.
Speaker: It's a way of re-narrating that language for the congregation, right?
Speaker: For people to start to hear the language and have very different kinds of images come up to their minds.
Speaker: So it's an act of discipleship as much as it's an act of resistance, right?
Speaker: as much as it is a declaration that actually these languages should not be demonized, nor should the people that speak them.
Speaker: And so those are some of the practical concerns.
Speaker: Again, like I said before, as part of the CCDA philosophy, right, we often address issues of race.
Speaker: Language is a key component of those issues.
Speaker: The racial hierarchies that we're working to resist assume something about language too,
Speaker: not just about phenotype, right?
Speaker: The way that people look, not just about physical differences or even cultural or ethnic ones.
Speaker: Language is also a part of that.
Speaker: And that's why it's important that we think about language even when we are in spaces that feel more homogenous or more single language in their output, right?
Speaker: Even in suburban places where we're only addressing English speakers, there might be good reason to sing in other languages or good reason to encourage people.
Speaker: to speak more than one language.
Speaker: It's it.
Speaker: I don't know if you wanted to add to that or if I've missed something in sharing that.
Speaker: I wanted to talk a bit about my Latino students and my SPAN 100 and 200 classes.
Speaker: So these are classes that are for beginner Spanish students who don't
Speaker: don't know the language, they're learning, you know, the basics.
Speaker: And many Latino, we know that in the States, 30% of Latinos don't speak Spanish.
Speaker: So of course, along with my white, Asian, and other students, I have some Latino students in my SPAN 100 class, and they come in, those students, with usually a lot of shame.
Speaker: Like, I look a certain way, I have this last name, but I don't speak Spanish.
Speaker: And please don't expect me to, right?
Speaker: Because
Speaker: Many times in society, they are expected to know the language.
Speaker: And they carry that shame with them, not understanding the histories of
Speaker: that might've contributed to the fact that their language was lost, right?
Speaker: And many times I encourage them to have these conversations with their family members and they find out, yes, that their grandma was punished at school for speaking Spanish.
Speaker: And so in order to protect the children and grandchildren, these families decided not to teach Spanish to their children and other languages as well.
Speaker: The other part, Ricky, was how egocentric we are in our nationalist views, right?
Speaker: And how instead of seeing languages and people from diverse parts of the world as real opportunities, assets, we view them as threats, right?
Speaker: We think that they have much that they can learn from us, but that we have nothing to learn from them.
Speaker: This lack of humility.
Speaker: That's a really good point.
Speaker: And so this is very relevant for the church, you know, as we are serving people, caring for people.
Speaker: Humility is such a central part of the Christian life.
Speaker: And so I'm curious, though, because you mentioned that
Speaker: America is kind of unique in our monolingualism.
Speaker: So what does this look like in other countries?
Speaker: Do you have examples of multilingualism practices in other countries that embrace these other languages and these other cultures?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker: And before answering that, I want to stress that first we have to start by addressing and combating these harmful linguistic ideologies, right?
Speaker: That we might hold subconsciously.
Speaker: We need to recognize that multilingualism is not a threat to unity, but a bridge that helps us achieve true unity as one beautiful, right?
Speaker: Diverse, multilingual body.
Speaker: Jesus himself was multilingual.
Speaker: We need to normalize multilingualism and understand that it's very common human experience.
Speaker: It's not exceptional.
Speaker: It's not different.
Speaker: It's not odd.
Speaker: And that it is not only a skill or a resume booster, but an integral part of our identities.
Speaker: And so once we've done that work of acknowledging those ideologies, of recognizing the history, I think that we can move forward in good faith.
Speaker: Well, what's happening in other countries, you've asked, right?
Speaker: Let's talk a bit about Papua New Guinea, which is the most linguistically diverse country in the world.
Speaker: So 840 languages are spoken there in a population of 11 million people.
Speaker: So for comparison, the U.S. ranks fifth amongst most linguistically diverse countries with 340 languages and 340 million residents.
Speaker: In Papua New Guinea and other countries, multilingualism is widely embraced in churches as part of religious practices.
Speaker: It's just normal.
Speaker: It's normalized, right?
Speaker: Worship, community engagement.
Speaker: So this looks like having multilingual worship music, preaching in multiple languages, code switching between different languages.
Speaker: So for those who are familiar with the term code switching, I'm talking about Spanglish, for example, right, in our context.
Speaker: They've just normalized the use of more than one language in all church affairs.
Speaker: And recently I gave a presentation about this very subject to a group of colleagues and students.
Speaker: And one of the students present there was from Indonesia.
Speaker: And Indonesia actually happens to be the second most linguistically diverse country in the world.
Speaker: And he seemed puzzled.
Speaker: It seems so obvious to him, right?
Speaker: And even the questions that the audience was asking, he was so confused.
Speaker: His life.
Speaker: He probably lived that joke, right?
Speaker: Oh, this monolingualism, these Americans, his life is an example of that joke.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes, indeed.
Speaker: He said, you know, he perceived my multilingualism in society and in churches as normal.
Speaker: Like, this is so normal.
Speaker: Yeah, you guys are way behind.
Speaker: What are you talking about?
Speaker: You know, again, I want to stress this is normal.
Speaker: This is not abnormal.
Speaker: These ideologies are important.
Speaker: And understanding that different languages are not disruptive to our unity.
Speaker: They actually help.
Speaker: in achieving true biblical unity.
Speaker: It's that picture in Revelation of everyone worshiping in their own tongue.
Speaker: It's not divided, but we are united together, even though it looks different from person to person.
Speaker: That's such a beautiful image.
Speaker: Hey, Sarah, if I might add to that image, I was in Spain some 15 years ago, and I went to a church that was a Brazilian diaspora church.
Speaker: And so a big chunk of the service was in Portuguese, but parts of it were in Spanish and parts of it were also in English.
Speaker: I bring that up because one of the assumptions of that service was that everyone was in the practice of learning a language.
Speaker: So I bring that up because in our church practice here in the U.S., we don't often think of church community as
Speaker: as a space or place where language formation is part of the practice.
Speaker: For instance, I experienced this in the U.S. accidentally.
Speaker: I'm Puerto Rican.
Speaker: I went to a Pentecostal church growing up that was primarily Puerto Ricans.
Speaker: And it was actually the church space that helped Spanish to survive in me, right?
Speaker: As schools were still operating out of that Barry Mr. Spanish mindset that Dr. Ameduri earlier raised,
Speaker: As schools were sort of forcing language out of a certain body of people while also encouraging a very different body of people to learn that same language, right?
Speaker: White students should learn a second language.
Speaker: Brown students should get rid of that language, right?
Speaker: While that was happening in school, church actually helped to keep the language alive.
Speaker: Most diaspora churches, like the one that I grew up with, don't often think out loud about that aspect of church experience.
Speaker: And yet it is an important aspect, right?
Speaker: The church community can, in fact, participate.
Speaker: Like that Brazilian church that I went to, the Brazilian Diaspora Church in Spain, the church community can actually be an implicit language teacher, right?
Speaker: So every time that that service, when they brought up English, it was a way of
Speaker: teaching some English, right?
Speaker: Maybe teaching an English song or a phrase that would get repeated in the church.
Speaker: And so one of the kind of practical things that happens beyond the regular experiences here in the U.S. is that churches become language instruction spaces.
Speaker: And I just want to add a comment, piggybacking on what you said, Ricky, that, you know, when Latinos speak Spanish, it's perceived as a threat to the country, right?
Speaker: But when white people speak Spanish, it's considered an asset.
Speaker: So when I share about these histories, often my white students are confused, like,
Speaker: What?
Speaker: Like, I was encouraged to learn Spanish, right?
Speaker: And then we hear from our Latino students and their experience was completely different given these histories.
Speaker: That's so helpful to have that history named so that we can acknowledge it and better understand where we find ourselves today and then inform how we can move forward.
Speaker: So there could be some people listening to this conversation that might be thinking, okay, that sounds great.
Speaker: Multilingualism, that sounds great.
Speaker: But it also might feel a little overwhelming if we have just existed in this monolinguistic space.
Speaker: So kind of how do you combat that feeling of overwhelm or anxiety that might come when trying to create a more multilingual space?
Speaker: Yeah, so before Itzel, who's the language expert here between us, right, before she lays some groundwork for how people might say those things, it's worth noting two things.
Speaker: I just want to say two brief things about that.
Speaker: First, because churches have made language a kind of practical concern, we often don't think of church discipleship as a way of naming the kinds of histories and ideologies that we've already discussed, right?
Speaker: Henry Harris Jessup, one of the most famous U.S. missionaries to leave the U.S.,
Speaker: one time here in Chicago said, there's been no greater mission given to any other part of the church than the mission that God has given to the English-speaking part of the church, right?
Speaker: In other words, we are the leads in all of this, right?
Speaker: So churches need to do more than think of this as just a practical concern because the church has been involved in establishing the kind of language hierarchy that we've been talking about.
Speaker: So that's the first thing.
Speaker: The second thing,
Speaker: the very fact that our palms get sweaty and our anxieties go up when we say something like, when Dr. Meduri and I say something like, churches can be places of language learning and churches should be encouraging people to practice languages they don't yet know or control very flexibly.
Speaker: Whenever you say that and someone goes, oh my gosh, that's
Speaker: You're asking too much.
Speaker: That's too overwhelming.
Speaker: We don't have the structures.
Speaker: We are not ready.
Speaker: That would take too long.
Speaker: All those anxieties that come up, the very fact that those things come up, it implicitly suggests something about the history that's been shaping that person, right?
Speaker: To say, you've actually been shaped such that you actually think that it is more normal to struggle learning a language and that that is an impossibility.
Speaker: Then the idea that you can actually speak more than one language and that you can spend a life learning more than one language, gaining a few useful phrases here and there, that you don't feel uncomfortable when you can only speak a handful of phrases in a language, that that actually is kind of like, hey, I've got the gift to do that this far, right?
Speaker: That we don't enjoy or delight in language learning, but that our palms get sweaty, that we stutter, that
Speaker: that we gain an anxiety, that we're too uncomfortable to biff it, right, to stutter or say something wrong.
Speaker: There's something about the malformation of the U.S. at play when that comes up for us as Christians trying to navigate this in church.
Speaker: And to speak from my area of expertise, the theology of all of this, right, it's worth noting that
Speaker: Pentecostal Spanish speakers in the US and in Puerto Rico, they actually, when reading things like Acts 2, for instance, they found Acts 2 to be especially liberative to non-English speakers.
Speaker: So within churches and denominations that assume the language hierarchy, that assume that English was preeminent over all of the things, Spanish speakers within those denominations that had a charismatic or Pentecostal bend
Speaker: started to see in what happened in Acts 2, in the fact that when the Holy Spirit descended, the apostles and everyone else present stepped out onto the streets and they were sharing the message of the gospel.
Speaker: And those that were around that were in un-pilgrimage in Jerusalem heard the message in their tongue, is what Acts 2 says.
Speaker: It's not that they understood all of a sudden the classic Hebrew that might have been spoken by the apostles.
Speaker: It was actually the other way around, right?
Speaker: The apostles spoke and they heard it in their tongue, Acts 2 says.
Speaker: For Pentecostals, think, for instance, 1933, the revival that happened in Puerto Rico.
Speaker: They read something like that and go, actually, we have the right to speak our tongue.
Speaker: And in 1933, as part of that revival, they started creating a hymnal that was specific to the Puerto Rican Spanish being spoken, to the histories and contexts that shape them, right?
Speaker: to speak to hurricanes and hell crises that had affected Puerto Rico in 1932 and the years prior.
Speaker: The theology bit is as important as the ideology bit, right?
Speaker: To say, actually, there's something in our Christian tradition that prompts us, that invites us to be the kind of neighbors that will speak the tongue of the other.
Speaker: And for Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, this gave them a kind of liberative self-determination, the kind of agency that said,
Speaker: We can speak our own tongue, and that is actually good.
Speaker: And speaking the tongue of the other is actually part of the Christian practice of hospitality.
Speaker: Okay, I'm done preaching.
Speaker: I'm sure that there's some kind of practical groundwork that people are going to want to know.
Speaker: No, that's great.
Speaker: I don't want to dismiss the fact that learning a new language is an arduous task, right?
Speaker: I just want to acknowledge that it takes time, but it also helps us flex our cognitive muscle for one.
Speaker: Void aging, is that what you're saying?
Speaker: Void aging?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: It also helps us practice humility, right?
Speaker: Compassion.
Speaker: We become more empathetic listeners.
Speaker: So ironically, a lot of the people that criticize immigrants for not learning English in the time that they think they should, they're monolinguals.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They haven't experienced learning another language.
Speaker: And so they don't realize that it takes time and it takes effort and a lot of practice.
Speaker: And so when we enter that space of learning another language, we realize that it doesn't occur overnight.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We realize that we can be considered also legitimate speakers of a language without speaking as a native speaker.
Speaker: Can I give a quick example of that?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: The kind of humility that you're describing?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You know, a lot of churches will do the in-ear translation thing as a kind of practical way of getting around translation.
Speaker: And there are very good reasons why churches have moved in that direction.
Speaker: I don't want to dismiss some of the economics around that and some of the challenges that come up when churches are trying to practice in a multilingual space.
Speaker: But one of the things that we've encouraged that world that spoke in
Speaker: is to do what, I don't have a better word for it, we've called it dynamic inversions, right?
Speaker: Where you literally flip it.
Speaker: And you have a Sunday where actually the least dominant language is the one that's dominant on stage, where everything is sung in Spanish, preached in Spanish.
Speaker: I'm using Spanish because that's the language of our context, right?
Speaker: And the people with the things in their ears are the ones that are the English speakers, right?
Speaker: And all of a sudden, they are experiencing the kind of discomfort of having the thing in their ears signal that they're not the ones that speak the language from the stage.
Speaker: They're experiencing the kind of awkwardness of having to hear one language in one ear while having to focus on another to understand what's happening, right?
Speaker: So that's some of the humility from a practical kind of discipleship perspective that churches can practice as a community that kind of gives an example of that.
Speaker: To offer a practical example or an idea of what can be implemented in churches, I had students, so at university context, I had students pair up with people that were learning English.
Speaker: So my students were learning Spanish.
Speaker: Their conversation partners were learning English.
Speaker: And so for 15 minutes, for the first 15 minutes, they would speak exclusively in Spanish.
Speaker: For the next 15 minutes, exclusively in English.
Speaker: And that helped, of course, to develop their skills, but it also put them in positions both of power in some ways and powerlessness, right?
Speaker: Where they felt very comfortable speaking their native tongue.
Speaker: And then right after they felt the discomfort that the other person felt right before, right?
Speaker: And
Speaker: Ultimately, we learn languages to be in community with one another, right?
Speaker: We learn languages in community.
Speaker: So any opportunity we can have to foster these spaces, whether it's movie nights, also getting people comfortable with just hearing other languages, moving them away from this attitude that it's threatening me or my country in some way.
Speaker: normalizing them listening and hearing to other languages is important.
Speaker: So I call this language exchange partners, where we give a language and we take a language.
Speaker: Churches can do that in testimony nights, right?
Speaker: They can have people sit down for a small group and share their testimonies in the language that they least control.
Speaker: Or, you know, that exact activity can be practiced in a church setting.
Speaker: Sorry, it's a
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: No, no, that's great.
Speaker: And guess what?
Speaker: It's not only instrumental.
Speaker: It's not really like, OK, I'm just talking to this person to learn this language.
Speaker: I'm also connecting.
Speaker: I'm also connecting with that person, pursuing shalom.
Speaker: And I love how much of that touches on, like you've said, humility and empathy and all of these
Speaker: things that are so instrumental to not only the Christian walk, but to us as CCDA practitioners who are working in our communities.
Speaker: And I think another piece of all of this, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I am not the expert, but it sounds like all of this
Speaker: It takes a long time.
Speaker: This is not something that's going to happen overnight, just like you don't learn a language overnight.
Speaker: This process of going from monolingualism to multilingualism is going to take time, just like CCDA work takes time.
Speaker: In the CCDA communities, we talk about being in a community for a long time, for the long haul, right?
Speaker: And language is a part of that.
Speaker: No one should expect what Itzel and I are describing, the kind of multilingualism we're advocating for, to happen quickly.
Speaker: In fact, we've had people who have sought services from World Outspoken assume that it would happen quickly and get somewhat frustrated when they come up to the realization that this is not going to happen fast, that this needs to be a part of the long-term discipleship vision that the churches take up.
Speaker: When you learn a new language, you'll learn a new way of speaking about things of God, of your relationship.
Speaker: Perhaps certain phrases might be socially acceptable in English that are not in Spanish and vice versa, right?
Speaker: So we have to be aware of all these nuances.
Speaker: And it is not as easy as, well, I'll just use Google Translate to communicate and connect with others.
Speaker: So it takes a lot of time to learn a new language.
Speaker: We have to be benevolent listeners as well.
Speaker: We have to be empathetic, humble, compassionate, and realize that we miss a great opportunity when we bury these languages.
Speaker: Many immigrants have the great gift of being able to pass on the languages not only to their children and grandchildren, but to their neighbors as well.
Speaker: And if we would focus on how beautiful that is instead of, again, viewing them as threats, I think that we could do a much better job at maintaining and increasing the number of people that are raised as multilingual speakers.
Speaker: Before we wrap, I want to remind folks, some folks might be listening to this that were present at our workshop at the last CCDA conference.
Speaker: And we had a brother pastor from a church.
Speaker: I don't remember his name.
Speaker: Forgive me.
Speaker: But he raised his hand.
Speaker: He was like, this is not possible in my church.
Speaker: There's just no way.
Speaker: I'm never going to get up in front and preach a sermon fully in another language.
Speaker: That's just not going to happen.
Speaker: I struggle with language learning.
Speaker: Something like that was what he said.
Speaker: And I want to give a quick shout out to the senior pastor at my church, Eric Rivera.
Speaker: He's Puerto Rican, a couple generations into being born here in Chicago, so Spanish is not native to him in the ways that it might have been to previous generations, right?
Speaker: And something I love that Eric has done is he's committed to saying things like the big idea of his sermon in Spanish and in English, right?
Speaker: A couple key phrases that he repeats over several Sundays so that they get comfortable for him.
Speaker: Even those things are gains toward the vision we are describing that is a long-term discipleship vision, right?
Speaker: And so we're certainly not saying that even in 10 years, in 15 years, that a pastor, it would be delightful if a pastor could, in that time, take serious learning of another language, make room for it, take some kind of formal education, do some kind of immersion.
Speaker: Those things would be all amazing if pastors can do it.
Speaker: But some pastors won't be able to.
Speaker: So some pastors might only get as far as a kind of working knowledge of the language and the capacity to go up there and integrate the language into their sermons.
Speaker: Those things are testifying to the kinds of belonging to the other that I think Acts 2 invites us to, right?
Speaker: And so there are other glimpses of that.
Speaker: And I would also encourage the use of fluid language practices.
Speaker: So things like Spanglish, which I would say is my native language.
Speaker: If I could have it my way, I would always speak Spanglish in every way and context.
Speaker: And some people are like, whoa, like respect Spanish, right?
Speaker: Or respect English by only speaking.
Speaker: Like languages don't have feelings.
Speaker: We don't have to respect.
Speaker: We have to respect the people that speak those languages.
Speaker: And so many times those Spanglishes, the Kanglish, they're how people speak in our communities.
Speaker: And that should also be embraced and celebrated and modeled for us.
Speaker: Yeah, I love that.
Speaker: That's so great.
Speaker: So you guys have given us so much information to digest.
Speaker: We got the history of multilingualism, the theology behind why we should care about it, and some practical tools that people can start to apply to their churches, to their organizations.
Speaker: Are there any other
Speaker: tools or any other, like if somebody is listening to this and they want to take a next step, is there any other kind of thoughts or tools or steps that you think somebody can take who might just be starting out on this journey?
Speaker: Two things I'd say you can add as well.
Speaker: The first is we do have a, one of the things that World of Spoken offers is online courses that are short, they're contextual, meaning they address specific contexts that the questions emerge from.
Speaker: And we do have one specifically on the kinds of multilingualism that we're advocating for.
Speaker: The course can be found at learn.worldoutspoken.com.
Speaker: The course is titled Lingua Franca.
Speaker: So very easy, I'm sure, that we can add the link of that to the show notes and those kinds of things.
Speaker: But learn.worldoutspoken.com, you'll find a course that gives you even more practical tools, some exercises to practice at your church, some ways that you might start heading toward
Speaker: the kinds of discipleship that integrates language questions into the formation of your believers.
Speaker: So that's the first thing, the kind of practical thing.
Speaker: The second thing I want to say is for those pastors that are thinking, I just need to hire an associate pastor that speaks that language of that, you know, that other group that we're trying to read.
Speaker: I never want to discourage having pastors on staff that can support people.
Speaker: But I do want to discourage the rush to that, right?
Speaker: The speed to which we want to do those kinds of things.
Speaker: We at World Outspoken have been trying to convince, from a practical economic perspective, instead of hiring another pastor, split that salary that you would have paid that pastor and get two
Speaker: part-time staffers at the church that are language instructors in the two languages that, you know, are the kind of question in terms of just the two leading ones, right?
Speaker: So if it's Spanish and English, okay, have an English language instructor that's working part-time at the church offering classes in English to the Spanish speakers, that is still a benefit to them, right?
Speaker: And then have a Spanish language instructor at the church that is helping people think and practice Spanish, right?
Speaker: That's a very practical economic decision a church can take.
Speaker: before they rush to let's just get a pastor who speaks that language.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I want to stress again, the importance of uncovering those language ideologies, right?
Speaker: That have guided our thinking.
Speaker: So without those conversations, people might not be motivated.
Speaker: It takes a lot of work to learn a new language.
Speaker: People might not be motivated.
Speaker: People might not see the value of it.
Speaker: People might still view multilingualism as a threat.
Speaker: to give you a personal example, my son was about 10 years old when he told me that he didn't want to learn Spanish because he was an American.
Speaker: Those are his exact words.
Speaker: I don't want to learn Spanish.
Speaker: I'm an American.
Speaker: I don't want to speak Spanish.
Speaker: I'm an American.
Speaker: And, you know, that was offensive to me initially.
Speaker: Like, what do you mean?
Speaker: I'm a Spanish professor.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: I told them like, el español te da de comer, like Spanish feeds you.
Speaker: What are you talking about?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In quite literal ways.
Speaker: But I had to take a step back.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because where did this 10 year old, where did he absorb, from where did he absorb these ideologies?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I made very intentional moves to see, to help him see the value of knowing Spanish, to help him understand that to be considered a quote unquote American does not mean to be
Speaker: monolingual in the English language.
Speaker: And ultimately, that would fragment him not speaking Spanish would fragment his relationships with family members and people abroad.
Speaker: So it's very important to do that work where we're uncovering and we're helping people uncover those ideologies.
Speaker: That is so helpful.
Speaker: Those are practical steps that we can take
Speaker: Now.
Speaker: That's incredible.
Speaker: So thank you so much for sharing all of that breadth of information with us.
Speaker: And before we go, I just I want to ask one more question for both of you.
Speaker: So how do you see the CCD philosophy at work in your community?
Speaker: And
Speaker: Here's my curveball that I'm going to throw you guys.
Speaker: This is a podcast talking about multilingualism, and we've done most of it in English.
Speaker: So if you feel comfortable or would like, feel free to answer the question in English or Spanish or Spanglish.
Speaker: But how have you seen the CCD philosophy at work in your community?
Speaker: Pues, she made it a little tricky for us by saying, okay, it needs to be en los dos lenguajes.
Speaker: You don't have to, but I'm just giving you the opportunity.
Speaker: I think it's fair.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: I like the curveball.
Speaker: It's always good to keep a curveball in a podcast as the host, right?
Speaker: You hide that until you're ready, right?
Speaker: It's a clever move.
Speaker: It's a clever move.
Speaker: No, creo que ya lo dije.
Speaker: I think I've already said it on some level.
Speaker: Les recuerdo que parte de la filosofía del CCDA, part of the philosophy at the CCDA, is relocation, right?
Speaker: Llegar a un lugar y permanecer en ese lugar por un largo periodo, come to a place and to be at that place for the long haul, right?
Speaker: And I think for CCD practitioners,
Speaker: it becomes immensely important to apply that long-form vision to questions of race generally, but questions of language specifically, right?
Speaker: So that we don't think we're going to overcome those ideologies that Itzel has named and those histories we've been discussing overnight.
Speaker: Esto se tarda y es una lucha y es parte de nuestra resistencia día a día a día over many days.
Speaker: Tener el entendimiento that people are not empty vessels, right?
Speaker: Y que las personas no son nuestros discípulos, son discípulos de Cristo, como dijo el reverendo Justo González.
Speaker: And so it's not only what we're bringing or offering, no, but it's truly about being in community.
Speaker: with one another, right?
Speaker: And putting ourselves in positions where we might represent the majority language, but I'm going to speak in minoritized languages, even here in the U.S., right?
Speaker: Where I have the privilege of I might only speak English.
Speaker: Muy intencionalmente ahora, I'm going to take that step y adoptar el lenguaje de nuestro prójimo.
Speaker: Thank you so much for sharing that.
Speaker: Sorry to put you on the spot.
Speaker: Oh, Sarah, wait, wait, wait.
Speaker: You don't get away with it by yourself.
Speaker: You got to say some things in Spanish too now.
Speaker: Lo siento.
Speaker: No habla español.
Speaker: I'm learning very slowly.
Speaker: It is actually one of my goals of 2025 to finally learn Spanish.
Speaker: That was not the language that I took in high school.
Speaker: And so that is one of my goals for 2025, even before we started talking about having this conversation on the podcast.
Speaker: So we'll talk at the conference and hopefully I will be able to actually speak some Spanish phrases.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I'll see you in Grand Rapids.
Speaker: And it takes a lot of courage, I want to say.
Speaker: It takes a lot of courage to learn Spanish, to learn another language, especially as an adult, right?
Speaker: I started learning Italian as an adult and I wanted to tell people, I promise I'm smart.
Speaker: I just don't sound smart in this language.
Speaker: So that again, the humility and just, you know, courage and love to be able to speak to people
Speaker: to a community of speakers that doesn't represent your community or where you're not truly comfortable in.
Speaker: If people are wanting to connect with you more on this topic or more of your work, is there anywhere that they can go to find more?
Speaker: We will include the link to that World Outspoken course in the show notes, but is there any other way that people can connect with you and your work?
Speaker: Folks can check out World Outspoken on social media, at least the millennial social medias.
Speaker: I'm not on TikTok and neither is World Outspoken, sadly.
Speaker: Yeah, you can follow World Outspoken on social media.
Speaker: You can always contact us using the contact us page on our website, worldoutspoken.com.
Speaker: World as in globe, outspoken as in someone who's got something to say.com.
Speaker: Those are the easiest ways.
Speaker: We are constantly doing workshops and trainings around this issue.
Speaker: So you can be kind of following Itzel and I on social media as well.
Speaker: where we'll sort of share where we are, what we're up to.
Speaker: And so those are the easiest ways.
Speaker: If people want to get more resources from us, I encourage them to contact us.
Speaker: We would love to support you as you head toward the vision we've been describing.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: And all of those links are in the show notes of this episode.
Speaker: So be sure to follow World Outspoken for more just awesome content and training and practical tools that you can apply to your context.
Speaker: So thank you so much for listening to the CCDA podcast.
Speaker: Ricky and Itzel, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.
Speaker: It was so rich, informative.
Speaker: Thank you for being here.
Speaker: Thanks for having us.
Speaker: If you'd like to learn more about CCDA and get involved, check out the show notes of this episode.
Speaker: Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker: This episode is produced by me, Sarah Callen, in association with Christina Fore.
Speaker: We will be back soon with another episode featuring CCD practitioners who are committed to seeing people and communities experience God's shalom.
Speaker: We'll see you then.
