Online Courses: Gateway to the World
By Ron Barnes
They didn’t have food, water, or electricity, but as I sat training pastors in a refugee camp in a remote area in Africa… a cell phone rang loudly. Initially, my conditioning of speaking in US churches while a cell phone rang made me a little disturbed. But my attention immediately turned to the uniqueness of the situation. It made me again realize how cell towers have made Internet available to a majority of the globe, even in the most remote areas.
In fact, Internet World Stats reports that as of June 2017, 51.7% of the world population uses the Internet and on every continent. That means its available to even more people and will continue to grow as time goes on.
This is precisely why Source of Light has been developing its printed courses into electronic delivery systems, online and through smart phone apps. The development process has taken time, primarily because our goal continues to do discipleship, not just distribution. Our goal in our online courses is that people will continue to have contact with the many disciplers in our network of churches, Associate Discipleship Schools and Branches around the globe. Creating the “back-end” of our courses is without a doubt as important as what the public will see.
In January 2018, Beta Testing started so we can begin to roll out and make available the courses in the first half of 2018. The website is slmcourses.com and soon apps will be made available that sync with the online platform for seamless discipleship and follow up of students around the globe.
By spring, all our English courses will be available. But our desire in the next two years is to have the courses available in English, Chinese, French, and Portuguese. We anticipate being able to have each language available for less than $3,000 a language, depending on if we can find willing volunteers to help offset those costs. If we were able to achieve uploading each of just those four languages, our courses would be available to 2.4 billion native speakers. Then, we can tackle the rest of the languages, translating more, and putting them online.
At the same time, we have already completed year one of our World Wide Bible Institute, and we hope to complete the last two years by the end of 2018. This is a significant need and at a vital time when small colleges are running into financial challenges forcing them to close or merge. These closures in the US make the need for solid Bible training bigger than ever. And with less than ten percent of all pastors worldwide having any formal Bible training whatsoever, this online training is crucial.
This is an exciting time in the ministry of SLM, but it is a ministry far bigger than us. We are just a dot on the map of ministry and we are going to need prayer…and help.
Disciplers—In order to give the individual attention each student needs, we need to employ the use of all our Branches, as well as our Associate Discipleship Schools. If you have an Associate School or are interested in starting one, maybe a purely Internet one, contact us using the information below.
Prayer—If you’ve ever had to do a presentation, show a video, get important work done, then you have had some sort of technical problem. If it can go wrong, it will. We have all experienced that. But this technology meets spiritual warfare and so there is bound to be glitches. We are praying that God would help our programming, IT, and development teams anticipate these possible issues and that the system would be set up with the least amount of issues.
Partners—As is the case in all our ministries, it will take financial partners to help make possible the courses in each of the four languages at $3,000 apiece. But also the finances to translate into new languages. One of the next languages we need to translate our courses into will be Arabic at the cost of $6,000. Finally, we believe we can finish the last two years of WWBI for $10,000.
To partner with us you may email me directly at: director@slmin.org, or call at: 706.342.0397. You can also write to us at: 1011 Mission Road, Madison, GA 30650 or give online at: sourceoflight.givingfuel.com/give, choose “other” and designate Arabic Translation, Online Courses, or WWBI Online Courses.
