Spirit, soul and body
A Sunday School in Pakistan cannot only be a Bible lesson. A child who arrives hungry does not hear the lesson. A child who has never held a pencil cannot read the verse. A child whose family is bonded to a brick kiln may not be allowed to come at all.
So the work is shaped the way Maranatha Christian High School is shaped, and the way the whole of Good Samaritan Ministries is shaped: the whole child, not one part of them. Spirit, soul and body. Praise the LORD, He never asked us to choose between feeding a child and teaching them.
Spirit
The Gospel, taught plainly and in the language the child speaks at home. Bible stories told without softening them. Memory verses a child still knows a year later. Songs they sing walking home. This is the centre of it, and everything else exists to make it possible.
Soul
The mind and the heart. Many of the children in these classes are the first in their family who will read. Sunday School is often where a child first learns to hold a book, first speaks in front of other people, first hears that they were made on purpose and are worth something. For children who are told the opposite six days a week, that is not a small thing.
Body
What the family is actually facing. Whether the children have eaten. Whether a widow has any income. Whether a family is bonded to a kiln and cannot leave. The ministry has always worked here too, through Bible distribution, food relief, support for widows, a sewing school, and the rescue of families held in debt slavery.
Where the work happens
The same Gospel, taught in three very different places.
In the city church
A Sunday School inside a congregation, meeting every week, with teachers the children know by name. This is where the work began, and where teachers are trained. Read about the city church work.
At the brick kilns
Families bonded by debt, working the kilns, their children working beside them. Reaching these children means going to them and winning the trust of the family first. Read about the brick kiln work.
In the villages
Small Christian communities far from any church building, where a Sunday School may be the only Christian teaching a child ever receives. Read about the village work.
Why it multiplies
None of this scales through buildings. It scales through people. A trained teacher reaches a new class of children every single year for as long as they serve, and the children in that class grow up to teach. That is why teacher training is free and will stay free, and why the whole curriculum is given away rather than sold.
It is also why the ministry has spent seventeen years putting Scripture into people’s hands: more than 150,000 free Urdu Bibles since 2009, and more than 50,000 illustrated children’s Bibles given to Christian schools and Sunday Schools. A child with a Bible of their own does not stop learning when the class ends.