In this paper we examine discourse and interaction during Saturday morning religious instruction classes in a Gitano (Spanish Romani) evangelist church. The focus is on adults as literacy mediators for the children in the process of learning ways to use and interpret the Bible. The analysis centres on two aspects: (1) the forms of textuality that are developed around the Bible, and (2) the role that the adult's gender or institutional position play in the forms of interactions and authority relations that are established with the children and the texts. These results should help revise conceptions of Gitano culture as exclusively oral and they also illustrate how the social, institutional and interactional orders of learning and discourse are interrelated in a non-formal religious setting. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures, and 3 notes.)