Thoughts Established, New Works Committed… to New SLM Courses
By Ron Barnes
Source of Light has been blessed with resources that God had provided from within as well as from partner ministries. For decades we have created, reproduced, and translated these materials and they have been used by God to see millions of people saved and discipled.
Over the years, we have seen incredible usage and expansion of the materials globally, yet at the same time, some concerns had come up repeatedly. Artwork needed to be addressed, as much of it was outdated and seemed too monocultural, in that it looked like the characters were generally North American. Along with that, many of the illustrations and stories reflected their North American writers’ home culture, more so than the cultures they were usually going into. Over the years, some English terminology and American references were becoming harder to understand cross-culturally.
We also became increasingly concerned about assumptions that have been made in the past in some of the courses, that people understood things like Creation, the Bible, and other fairly basic Christian terminology. In the past, when many of these courses were written, these Christian words and concepts were widely understood in the United States, even among non-Christians. But in this day and age, we cannot make these same assumptions.
In January 2021, the SLM Literature Committee began to meet and pray and seek the Lord’s wisdom on all these concerns. The Lord made it clear to each of us it was time to expand into a new line of curriculum that would address each of these concerns, and it was also clear that God had begun to assemble a team that could bring it to pass. In fact, within days of this decision, God had provided the finances we anticipated it would take to recruit the necessary help for much of the technical aspects.
We diligently sought the wisdom of the Lord, the wisdom of our collective team, and sought the input and ideas of each of our Branches around the globe. After all, they are the primary motivation for creating any new courses. Each Branch has given good feedback that has helped us begin to frame the new courses.
As of this writing, the first phase of the children’s courses has been written and they are going through the various next stages.
The first stage is obviously the writing of the lessons, which follow the outline that the Literature Committee put together according to the core essential evangelistic and discipleship elements that must be covered through the 4-book, 16-lesson first stage of curriculum.
A-Cultural
Since one of the concerns about the courses was that they often included allusions or references particular to American culture, our goal was to make the courses not appear to clearly reflect or favor one particular culture.
We decided in order to do this, we needed veteran missionaries who had lived abroad extensively, since they are acutely aware of things that would not be understood or would require extra explanation. As the writing progressed, we asked two groups of people to evaluate the age appropriateness and the cultural understandability.
One such test, conducted on the lesson on creation, was in one of the younger children’s courses. It used the setting of a little girl named “Nia,” not an American name, “John,” a very universally used name, and a grandpa, as the main characters, with parents and a grandmother as the supporting cast. They lived next door to each other on a fairly non-descript farm with farm animals, including a grumpy old goat (who they discover later isn’t really grumpy after all, just pregnant).
We passed along this story to each of our Branches to evaluate as to its ability to be understood within each respective culture. The responses might have come across as initially discouraging. One American missionary said it sounded like her upbringing in the Midwest on a farm in the 50’s. Another described that it might be too much like their upbringing in Latin America. An Asian team member observed that it would seem that the story was written for their culture.
When some of the results came back to the committee, it raised some eyebrows. But I quickly pointed out that this was exactly the type of feedback we were hoping for. How was it that each respondent came to the conclusion it might be too much about their own country? They were all from different countries, yet reading the same exact story. I explained that creating a “black and white” or “skeleton” version of the story, their imagination filled in the extra details making it fit their context and culture.
This type of writing takes a lot more work than usual for our writers, but the end result will be far more effective. So far, the reviews and opinions have been overwhelmingly favorable as to the stories and lessons.
We also made the courses extremely systematic and thorough, building each lesson on the previous, making no assumption on what the reader may already know.
The next stage after each of our national Branches reviews the courses is to simultaneously begin to create the illustrations, the characters, the activity pages, and the follow-up questions and quizzes. This is as crucial a step as the writing. The artwork needs to draw readers to the material, and the activities, the questions, and the quizzes need to reinforce and solidify each lesson.
When all that is done, the courses will be formatted into easily printable formatting and sent on to be translated all around the world.
But this is just phase one. The next phases will include supplement courses and videos to further explain and deepen the students’ understanding of the material, get a clearer grasp of the Gospel, and be more deeply discipled.
Additional phases will include a deeply expanded curriculum for youth, and updated and expanded curriculum for adults, and some special courses created for a specific type of ministry and individual. Some examples include a wide variety of religious cults and sects, law enforcement and military, as well as a large group of existing SLM students, prisoners.
We have been long burdened for these unique testimonies we receive, from people in situations that would be foreign to many of us, but that are routine enough to these special groups to warrant their own curriculum.
A common concern we often hear from inmates, for example, is a fear of being paroled or set free. They fear life in the real world. They fear not having the strength on the outside that they seem to feel on the “inside.” They need to understand and believe the Word of God when it says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV).
We are excited that God has assembled a team to help us expand our ministry with new curriculum, and to address more specifically and deeply the needs of our millions of current and future students. But pray with us; it is a monumental task we have undertaken. Pray that God would continue to provide us with the financial resources necessary to continue, with the people resourced with the proper gifting, and that our thoughts will truly be established, as we continue to commit this work unto the Lord!
