Bible-Based Curriculum at Lighthouse School

It was the term ‘Bible-based curriculum’, more than anything else, that first drew me to Lighthouse School. Once the first contact was made and I got to know Sydney and Taryn, I discovered many other reasons why this school was a fascinating place to do my research. The initial impulse, however, came from my curiosity about what a Bible-based curriculum might look like and how it would play out in an adult classroom in Poland. This chapter and the next set out what I found in this regard.

As mentioned earlier, the idea of employing Bible-based teaching in the school originated in the first instance not from Sydney and Taryn themselves but from Mariusz, the Polish evangelical preacher who first invited them to open a school in the small town of D. (see Chapter 4). It was Mariusz who first suggested that they use ‘Bible-based material’, as Taryn explained to me. In fact, Taryn went so far as to say, ‘I don’t think either of us would have been interested in the invitation if that hadn’t been part of the invitation... it was, there’s something more attractive to us personally because of our own relationship with God’s word; so that was part of the allure’.

Taryn and Sydney, then, were immediately attracted to the idea of using materials based on the Bible. Initially, they believed that they would be able to use already available materials, and had no intention of creating their own. They began by surveying what was on the market. Much of what was there constituted Bible study in simplified English with no pedagogical language support. As outlined in the preceding chapter, they used materials produced by Literacy and Evangelical International (LEI).