Free Curriculum to Teach Children About Genesis

It seems almost everyone wants something free, right? Now, if you were offered a free curriculum to teach children about Genesis, would you jump at it? After all, we need to be educating young people about the authority of God’s Word, correct?

Well, there is now a free curriculum for you to consider. And it’s designed to teach children about Genesis. To help you in your decision-making about getting this curriculum, I’ll give you some samples of what it teaches.

Now, before you read these samples (and I really urge you to look at the quotes below), consider the biblical example of the Christians at Berea who “searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11).

OK, now read the following excerpts from this new Genesis curriculum:

“During the sixth day God creates land animals, including man—Day Six began about the time the first land animals appear in the fossil record, about 250 million years ago . . . God created the land dwelling creatures on this day . . . .”

“Man is clearly the ruler of earth, even though many animals are larger. God gave man the ability to think, enabling him to rule the earth . . . . Before the creation of Adam, there were other human-like animals, such as Neanderthal and Australopithecus . . . . Evolutionists point to them as an evolutionary path from ape to man . . . .”

“From a Christian perspective, they were not ‘in the image of God’ as Adam was. In other words, they did not have an eternal soul, capable of choosing eternal life with God . . . . Just how ‘human-like’ they were is debatable, and there will always be an argument surrounding their position in God’s creation . . . .”

“Man and animals are given plants to eat. This is often misinterpreted by young-earth creationists . . . . Young-earth creationists claim there was no death before Adam’s sin. They claim that only plants could be eaten based on Genesis 1:29-30 . . . . First, look back at Genesis 1:28. Man was instructed to subdue the earth (and its animals) . . . .”

“It is clear from the fossil record that there was much death before Adam . . . . Day Six ends with the statement ‘very good.’ Young earth proponents say it could not be ‘very good’ if there was death before Adam . . . . Death is a natural process of God’s created world, therefore God created death . . . .”

So, now would you want this free curriculum to teach your children? Absolutely not!

Twisted Scripture

I hope you will be like the Bereans. AiG supporters would realize that whoever wrote this curriculum accepts fallible man’s ideas concerning evolution and millions of years and, as a result, twists and contorts the Scriptures to justify an acceptance of man’s pagan religion.

My purpose in my letter to you is not to go in-depth and critique these blatant reinterpretations of Scripture. I’m sure you can recognize the problems. But I do want to point out an increasing and related problem I see all over the church.

Satan is very clever. However, he still uses the same tactic: to work from within the church to lead generations of people away from the truth of God’s Word and the gospel.

Truly we are in a spiritual battle—not just with the world, but also within much of the church.

The attacks on Christianity from the secular world are obvious. But the church has many wolves in sheep’s clothing (as God’s Word warns us it would). And as God raises up ministries like Answers in Genesis to battle with the pagan religion of this day (evolution/millions of years) that leads people away from God’s Word, Satan is actively recruiting people within the church to try to combat what we’re trying to accomplish.

Truly we are in a spiritual battle—not just with the world, but also within much of the church.

By the way, the compromising web-based curriculum I’ve mentioned is offered free in the name of Christianity. And it has an agenda for parents to teach children in a certain way about the Bible. But this website has a name that is obviously designed to mimic (and even be confused with) Answers in Genesis: it’s called Answers in Creation!

Remember our book Already Gone? In that publication we presented the detailed research into why two-thirds of our young people are leaving the church by college age. The major reasons came down to:

1. Young people being taught to compromise Genesis with evolution and millions of years; respondents saw this as hypocrisy within the church.
2. Churches and parents not teaching children apologetics—not teaching them how to defend the Christian faith against the secular attacks of our day.

Sadly, free curricula like the new one referred to above, if used by families and churches, will lead to more young people walking away from the church.

Back to Teaching the Bible

At Answers in Genesis, we are so burdened about such sad developments that we stepped out in faith a year ago to produce our own high-quality Bible curriculum for kindergarten through adult. Titled the Answers Bible Curriculum, it is an entirely integrated curriculum for Sunday school so the entire family (no matter the age) can discuss the material when they get home (i.e., children and parents cover the same topics—but at a different level).

We are using professional illustrators to produce a captivating curriculum to teach the entire Bible in three years. The curriculum is also very evangelistic and will teach biblical authority and apologetics. There is nothing like it on the market.

We had already been hearing from parents, pastors, Sunday school teachers, and others across the nation (and from around the world) pleading for us to create such a curriculum. God willing, it will be available beginning the fall of 2012.

But to produce a curriculum like this is an expensive undertaking! It requires hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and produce. But once it is available, our ministry model shows it will pay for itself—as well as the annual updates needed to continue to revise it.

This same thing happened with AiG’s now very popular vacation Bible school (VBS) program. It took a lot of resources to produce the first VBS curriculum, but now it pays for itself—and the ongoing sales enable us to continue to improve it. It is now even more effective in reaching children with the truth of God’s Word and the gospel.

Yes, churches will need to purchase the Answers Bible Curriculum. It is not a web-based curriculum like the free one referred to above. But it is a high-quality curriculum that will honor God’s Word and help steer generations to the “door” of the “Ark of Salvation,” the Lord Jesus Christ.

The curriculum is well underway—but we need your financial support to get it to the next step. (The upfront costs are around $500,000, which is way below what most publishers would require.) Would you please consider sending a donation today to help us produce a vital resource for churches—one that understands and explains the challenging times in which we live? Answers Bible Curriculum will potentially reach millions of souls in this current and future generations with the uncompromised truth of God’s Word, beginning in Genesis.

Thank you for standing with us to impact future generations for Christ!