75th Anniversary - New Tribes Lessons printed

Cuban Believers delighted to receive the New Tribes Mission Bible lessons

New Tribes Mission visuals being displayed

The first time that Samuel Adams visited our partners in India he was taken to a children’s meeting. After he was seated at the front the children crowded into the hall until there was no space left – the aisle was full – they even sat on the ground all around his feet. He was amazed to see a children’s meeting conducted without any visual aids at all. There were no pictures to hold the children’s attention and help the teachers explain the lessons. After he came home he talked with Ernie about the need to print some Bible Lessons for the Teachers to use. Ernie agreed and asked Samuel to look into what type of lessons RMA could print – it was quickly realised that for RMA to print children’s Bible Lessons that this would cost a lot of extra money and there was no extra finance available – so they agreed to pray that the Lord would supply this need.

A few months later – one morning Ernie came to Samuel with a letter addressed to him. Ernie in his typical form said “Open it and see if there is any money inside”. When Samuel opened the letter he was speechless as there was a cheque with one of the largest gifts ever received. With the cheque was a little note – “please use this for printing children’s literature.”

Many ideas were discussed as to how to proceed – one of those suggestions was to approach New Tribes Mission for permission to use their lessons – Creation to Christ. Samuel was advised to contact a leader of NTM in USA to ask permission to use their material. He wrote an email and waited a couple of days for a reply. Three days later a man appeared at the door and asked to speak to Samuel – it was the leader from NTM who was visiting Northern Ireland. Samuel explained the project and the man agreed immediately to give permission for RMA to use their lessons.

The idea that developed was to print a large page with a colour picture for each lesson and then print the basic Bible Lesson on the reverse side of the picture – hence keeping picture and text together. Creation to Christ lessons consisted of 50 lessons but we were able to combine some lessons so we ended up with 20 lessons from the Old Testament and 20 lessons from the New Testament concentrating on the life of Christ.

The original editors who had written the NTM lessons worked with us in order to develop a Teacher’s guide to assist those using the lessons. The 40 pictures with text and a teacher’s guide were then put into a grip seal plastic bag. During the following years hundreds of thousands of these sets of lessons were printed in English and in many other languages – and distributed to Sunday school teachers. These lessons proved to be very popular and were the beginning of RMA printing children’s booklets and lessons for distribution throughout the world.

New Tribes Mission lessons being used as a Bible study guide.