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Before Ephesians 2:8-9 heralded my salvation, it was a tongue twister.

It was 1992. We were in northwest Poland, an hour's drive south from the Baltic Sea.

"For it is by grace you have been saved," said a redheaded Californian, looking at me intently.

"For it is by grace you have been saved," I repeated after the missionary who was my conversational English teacher. He was the best deal in town (the lessons were free, under one condition: we use the Bible as our textbook).

"Through faith," he continued. Ah, th, the great bugaboo of all Poles learning English.

I gave it a try: "Tru fait."

"No—through, through," my English teacher said. "Look here." He stuck out his tongue demonstratively. "Through."

"Fru fayf." I couldn't get myself to repeat the vulgar gesture.

"Through, through, through!" he said, spitting.

"Tru."

After a few more lessons, I dropped my inhibitions and learned how to pronounce th—as in "through faith," "God so loved the world," and "there is one God and one mediator."

Sometime between "tru" and "through," I was born again.

When Tom Scovel—one of the world's top teachers of English teachers, linguistics professor at the politically correct San Francisco State University, and a committed Christian—says that "learning a new language is, in many ways, like being born again linguistically," it resonates with me.

I was one of many young Poles wooed by God in the world's most popular and powerful language. Eager to wake from a communism-induced malaise, my generation (born in the 1970s) studied English hungrily. Soon after the Iron Curtain lifted in 1989, we abandoned the foreign, yet eerily familiar, Russian language (mandatory classes attempted to indoctrinate us with readings that idolized Lenin and Stalin). Instead, we took up the tongue, it seemed, of Liberty herself: the sensuous, many-idiomed, supple English.

Along with countless numbers of learners worldwide, I was in for a surprise: many of our teachers from English-speaking countries were believers in Christ. The words they taught us led to the Word. The Word took on flesh, and dwelt among us. The English-speaking Jesus, not democracy, turned out to be our salvation.

"In the '70s, no one thought of going to teach English in Central and Eastern Europe or Russia or China," says Alan Seaman, associate professor of the TESOL [Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages] program at Wheaton College. Today, these are the regions with the most need for teachers. It's so obvious it's a cliché: An increasing number of people worldwide need English to travel, conduct international business, educate themselves, and find jobs.

English is what Esperanto, a language created by Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof, was meant to be. Born in the eastern part of Poland that at the time had been seized by Russia, Zamenhof hoped that the universal language would assuage the ethnic tensions among the Russians, Poles, Jews, and Germans. Today the beautiful, Latin-based Esperanto (meaning "one who hopes") has 100,000 speakers worldwide. But English is the global language. It's the mother tongue of about 377 million people. Statistics on the elusive number of speakers of English as a second and foreign language range between 400 million and 1.1 billion.

Teaching English may well be the 21st century's most promising way to take the gospel to the world. It's the globalized world's equivalent of a cup of water for the thirsty. Teaching English "allows the ministers of incarnation to become part of the culture in a way that makes sense for a foreigner," Seaman says. Start an evangelical church in Poland, and no one will come. Start an English school, and you'll make many friends.

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December 9 2002, Vol. 46, No. 13