Determining Curriculum (part three; interview with Lifeway Publishing)

Interview with LifeWay Publishing

LifeWay is described on their website as being, “Established in Nashville, Tenn., in 1891, LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention is one of the world’s largest providers of Christian products and services, including Bibles, church literature, books, music, audio and video recordings, church supplies and Internet services through lifeway.com. The company also owns and operates 131 LifeWay Christian Stores throughout the United States, as well as two of the largest Christian conference centers in the country. Through its publishing division, B&H Publishing Group, LifeWay has produced one of the most accurate and readable Bible translations ever—the Holman Christian Standard Bible. LifeWay is a religious nonprofit organization that receives no funding from the denomination, and reinvests income above operating expenses in mission work and other ministries around the world.”[1]

While significantly larger than Spiritual Formation Ministries, the approach to determining what should be taught to children and then published as curriculum was very similar. The process through which two companies went was very similar as well. To determine the process of curriculum development the researcher interviewed Landry Holmes.[2]

He is the Director of Children’s Ministry Publishing with the LifeWay Corporation. When interviewed, Holmes admitted that at the beginning of their recent Children’s Sunday School curriculum development process, LifeWay did not have a specific list of principles to be taught or Bible stories to be covered. An ad hoc team from the Children’s Ministry Department was gathered together with some of them being specialists and some administrators.

They were collected from within and without of their corporation to answer the question of what to teach. They sat in a conference room and began to determine what should be taught and published through their Sunday School materials. The result of their meeting was a document entitled, “Levels of Biblical Learning.”[3] It is their belief that “certain stories are so important that they must appear frequently in childhood so that the child will understand not only the facts of the story but the biblical principles that it communicates.”[4]

LifeWay, like Dale, (see article two) seeks to take children through a certain pathway of learning various doctrinal concepts and principles. LifeWay’s website states, “At LifeWay we have been working hard for several years to develop a ministry tool that can provide milestones for us and churches in guiding boys and girls to grow spiritually.

The question we have been pondering relates to the pathway to reach these goals. We call this path Levels of Biblical Learning.”[5] Their curriculum seeks to coordinate all of their children’s ministry age levels by using the same ten content areas.

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[1] “Levels of Biblical Learning” 2003, www.lifeway.com/lwc/mainpage/0,1701,M%253D200724,00.html (accessed November 13, 2006).

[2] The information for this section was obtained through a personal interview with Landry Holmes on November 13, 2006.

[3] This document can be found at www.lifeway.com/lwc/files/lwcF_kids_levels_biblical_learning.pdf

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.