Ladin Exploration Team

Team Size:  4 to 8 students
Gender: No preference

Description:
This team will be focusing on Ladin speakers in the Dolomites region of Italy (particularly South Tirol). This is a very independent project. Those who require a great deal of direct supervision or instruction should not consider this assignment.

This Team is what we call an “Exploration” project. Exploration projects are designed to send teams into the homelands of indigenous, minority language people groups of Europe in areas where Linguæ Christi does not currently have ministry but desires to explore for future engagement. These teams will (1) chronicle and research, (2) network with local believers, particularly Ladin speakers, (3) document (through video and photography), (4) engage people through spiritual conversation, and (5) prayerwalk and narrative map these areas. These teams cross streams with several areas of ministry focus: research, networking, media, missional, and prayer. Using these broad categories, the following are some aspects of the assignment:

Research
This exploration team will research and collect data both academically and anecdotally regarding (1) the language, (2) the people, who speak the language, (3) the area of the language group, (4) religious expression available in the language, and (5) narrative mapping of the area for the purposes of mission strategy development.

Networking
This exploration team will attempt to find Evangelical Churches and/or individual believers, who are Ladin speakers as a primary concern. In addition, the team will try to network with Evangelical believers from Churches, which are primarily Italian or German speaking, but who might be open to consider being a part of a specific ministry to plant Ladin-speaking Evangelical Churches. 

Media
This team will document everything they experience through audio-visual media (video, photo and audio recordings). The focus of the media documentation would be (1) the area of focus, (2) any opportunity to display the presence and use of the language, and (3) the people who speak the target minority language.

Prayer
This team will regularly engage in prayerwalking in the areas of exploration, specially praying for persons of peace, contact areas, and opportunities for ministry among the language group in question.

Missional Engagement
As the team learns, documents and prays for the minority people group in question, they will use these opportunities and new friendships with speakers for the sake of spiritual conversations and missional engagement.

LANGUAGE REQUIREMENTS (before arrival on-field): English and at least Conversational Italian or German