“Many Sunday School teachers want a story and a colouring page, but we wanted a creative, Biblical session that engages children and gives them good foundations for understanding the Bible correctly for themselves,” explains SIM UK teacher Mike who, has served in the Middle East with his wife Vicky, for 18 years.
When the couple moved to a new church in 2013, they offered to help run the Sunday School with the help of some of the local church members and asked TnT if they could translate its ‘Mustard Seeds’
children’s activity sheets.
TnT Ministries’ range of faithful and creative Bible teaching material has been translated into 12 languages and is used all over the world.
“The material was both Biblical and creative and worked so well that the children became more than half the church attendance!” says Mike.
“There’s everything you need for a 30- to 60-minute lesson, including Bible preparation and teaching plan; games, discussion questions, crafts and worksheets,” he adds.
“We then saw the need to train more teachers, but not all those willing to help were able to use the teacher’s material in English, so we asked whether TnT would be willing to embark on a full translation of the Mustard Seeds curriculum.”
Since 2016, Mike helped with the translation and the result is a dedicated Arabic web portal of the Mustard Seeds curriculum that gives free access to lessons covering an age range of 18 months to 18 years.
“We’ve only a few remaining series to be translated and the next important step is to have someone dedicated to promoting this resource and training more Arabic-speaking churches how to use it,” explains Mike.
“Everyone who’s tried it loves it and we’d like to get funding to employ someone locally to visit churches, offering training and helping them make the most of the material.
“The feedback from our partner churches is that they felt fed and trained by using it, as well as it being an excellent resource for their Sunday School classes.
“The lessons are so easy to access and you can download the whole PDF to read on your device and then only print the resources you need for a particular lesson,” explains Mike.
“The big challenge ahead is to convince churches that this curriculum is worth the time it takes to prepare as it’s not a quick and easy resource, although it gets much quicker as you learn it.”
Rory Bell, TnT Director of Training, says: “The result of this collaborative project with SIM UK is a portal dedicated to providing affordable, user-friendly resources for the Arab-speaking world that are free to download. A subscription for English and other languages is required, but discounts are available upon request, especially for mission workers.”
Go to www.mustardseeds. net/arabic to register and for more information.
By Kerry Allan
Please pray
- For the Lord to provide funding for a worker to help train Arabic-speaking churches to use the Mustard Seeds curriculum.
- That the new resources will be widely used by churches across the Middle East.
- That they would provide the foundation for a new generation of gospel workers.