The soft-spoken South Sudanese pastor sits at a table in a Salt Lake City living room on a Monday morning, talking about reconciliation.

A woman, Margaret Duku explains, had stopped attending Christ for the Nations Christian Church, made up mostly of refugees from South Sudan, because two others had offended her. So Duku arranged for the three to meet, hash out the problem and offer apologies all around.

“If you are a door blocking people from coming to God,” Duku told them, “it’s not good.”

The women cried. They hugged. They said a prayer of mutual forgiveness.

It was all part of a homework assignment Duku got in her peer-learning class, where students explore Christian teaching and scriptures, then go into their communities to put their principles into practice.

The weekly class, “Caring for God’s People,” is sponsored by The Vine Institute, the latest incarnation of the Salt Lake Theological Seminary, whose mission continues to be Christian leadership training.

But unlike the seminary, Vine focuses less on theology and clergy accreditation and more on developing practical skills for lay leaders, especially in refugee and immigrant communities.

After the seminary ceased operations in 2008, a few staffers “prayed and thought about whether it was time to dissolve the corporation and celebrate what God had done for 25 years,” recalls Tom McClenahan, Vine’s executive director, “or whether there was something left to do with the seminary’s library, resources and experience.”

The remaining staffers, including McClenahan, David Rowe and Liz Micka, became aware of the “changing face” of Utah’s Christian community, particularly pockets of believers from many countries.

Most of them met in homes, apartment complex recreation rooms or church buildings late in the afternoon or evening when no one else was around, McClenahan says. “They are not very visible, but there are lots of them.”

Pastors and lay leaders in these ethnic congregations often have little pastoral training and even fewer interactions with other Christians, so McClenahan and the others decided to offer their expertise to these newcomers and to help them become advocates for their people.

“We want to walk alongside them, to learn their best practices and help adapt them to their [new] cultural situation,” he says. “We want to help them become aware of how those in other cultures deal with the same issues.”

Once the remaining seminary staffers decided that God wanted them to minister to these populations, the next challenge was to find a curriculum that would serve their needs and bridge cultural boundaries.

They found one that started in Kenya and is now used in more than 50 nations.

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How it works » Each weekly class tackles a Christian principle, including guidance, healing, comfort, dealing with crises, healing and “visiting in Christ’s name.”