The designers of the curriculum say they’ve tried hard to respond to concerns from Sunday school teachers that the material needs to be easy to use and understand — the kind of lessons that volunteer teachers with busy schedules could teach without too much preparation and that would be simple to hand over to a substitute when the regular teacher was gone.
The decision to spend more on curriculum is touchy, because last fall the PC(USA) suspended publication of its much-heralded Covenant People curriculum, which took five years to develop and lost more than $2 million last year. But Sandra Moak Sorem, who leads Congregational Ministries Publishing, said the church has learned some hard lessons from that disappointment: that, while it was good material, Covenant People was too complicated for congregations to figure out how to use and order. “Some of its greatest strength became the Achilles heel” — there were so many choices built into the curriculum, meant to give flexibility, that people found it confusing and didn’t order at all, said Donald Campbell, director of the PC(USA)’s Congregational Ministries Division.
But Campbell said the new curriculum — to be called “We Believe,” and intended for preschoolers and elementary and high school students — is designed to be simple to use, quick to change if something’s not working, and focused on biblical literacy and the Reformed theological tradition.
The first of three challenges
In agreeing to fund the curriculum, the council has responded to the first of three “budget challenges” for 2003 on which John Detterick, the GAC’s executive director, has asked the council for guidance. The council is expected to vote Saturday on two other key measures: whether to provide $1 million to pay startup costs for a campaign that denominational leaders hope would, over the next five years, raise $40 million for international mission workers and church growth; and whether to spend $900,000 on employee salary raises. If all three were approved, the PC(USA) would face a $5.57 million budget shortfall next year — and Detterick and his team will have about three months to suggest what programs and jobs they’d recommend cutting to balance the budget in 2003.
In response to questions from some council members who wondered whether the price for the new curriculum — about $11 per student per quarter — might be too expensive for small churches to afford, Campbell said the “We Believe” curriculum is priced competitively with other materials on the market.
Campbell also is saying that Presbyterians need to make choices. He’s argued for more than a year now, for example, that the PC(USA) can’t expect its curriculum to break even — it has to consider developing curriculum to be a ministry of the church, and has to be willing to provide mission money to do that.
That’s what the council voted Friday to do with only a handful of dissenters — even though some members had voiced concern that curriculum publishing has continued to lose money even when the council has provided money before. “I’m very reluctant to approve something that will fill a warehouse” with unsold copies, said Donetta Wickstrom of Minnesota, who asked pointed questions about the costs involved. And Detterick said that, with $750,000 built into the budget for curriculum, Sorem and Campbell will have to work hard to make sure curriculum losses next year don’t exceed that amount.
In an interview, Campbell said Presbyterian congregations need to take the job of educating children seriously. He’s heard stories of some congregations that don’t buy any curriculum — they just copy the same pages of an old curriculum year after year. Some Sunday school teachers buy whatever’s in the local bookstore, with no input from the session. And some churches don’t buy any curriculum — saying “they don’t need a curriculum, they just want to talk to the kids, share their faith,” Campbell said.
But Campbell and Sorem said their research showed that Presbyterians do want material that teaches from the Reformed perspective. “This is a lot of money, this is a very big decision,” council member Gregg Neel of Indiana said before the vote. “We understand what we’re asking of you, we understand it’s very difficult.”
As council member Dwight White of Vermont put it: “It costs money to do good things, and I think we as Presbyterians cannot be without good curriculum.”
In other action Friday, the council:
– Received an update on financially stressed Mary Holmes College in West Point, Miss. A task force is being named to study the future of the school and to consider whether the school should continue receiving money from the Christmas Joy Offering. Duncan Ferguson, associate director of the PC(USA)’s Office of Higher Education, told GAC committees this week that he visited the school in January, and views it as “fragile” — it has about 275 students, $2 million in debts and probationary accreditation status. But “its staff and supporters are dedicated towards moving the college towards increased stability,” Ferguson wrote in a report to the council.
– Voted to elect Curtis A. Kearns Jr. to a third, four-year term as director of the denomination’s National Ministries Division. That recommendation must be confirmed by the General Assembly in June.
– Drew attention to a number of efforts involving interfaith communication — including a paper involving the relationship of Christians and Jews, written by a group of Jewish scholars, and another written by a group of Christians and Muslims, written after a decade of conversation facilitated by the World Council of Churches. It also approved a pilot project on Interfaith Listening, which would send out teams of people, including a Christian from a PC(USA) overseas partner and a Muslim with whom that partner church is in dialogue, for conversations with local congregations.
