Small communities, a long way from anywhere
Christian families in rural Pakistan are often a handful of households in a village of hundreds. There may be no church building, no pastor living nearby, and no Christian school within reach. Children grow up knowing they are Christian without ever having been taught what that means.
In those places a Sunday School is not one activity among several. It is the entire Christian education a child will receive.
It starts in somebody’s home
A village work almost always begins the same way: a believer opens their courtyard, the children come, and a class starts before there is any building. This is exactly how the churches have been planted — home gatherings that grew into congregations, in Dina in Jhelum district, in Seowal in Sialkot, and elsewhere. The children’s class is very often the first thing that meets, and the reason the parents come.
You can read more about that work at Church Planting in Pakistan.
What the village teacher is up against
No printed material and no money to buy any. Frequently no electricity, so nothing that needs a screen. Children across a very wide range of ages in one group. Parents who cannot read and so cannot help. And the teacher is usually a young believer with no training at all, doing their honest best.
This is precisely who the free curriculum was written for. Every lesson can be opened on a phone with very little data and taught the same afternoon, and every memory verse is given in Roman Urdu so a teacher can read it aloud to children who do not read English.
A Bible of their own
A village child who is given a Bible does not stop learning when the class ends, and neither does the household. Through Urdu Bibles the ministry has given more than 50,000 illustrated children’s Bibles to Christian schools and Sunday Schools, part of more than 150,000 Urdu Bibles distributed since 2009.
Please pray for the village teachers, who are often very young and entirely alone in the work, and for the children who have no other teaching all week.