I wanted to share a special experience we had recently. In our last ward, Keryn became good friends with a sister who served for a few years on the curriculum writing committee of the Church. I'd asked this sister to let us come over for a Family Home Evening and hear about the experience. She immediately consented, but it had been a long time and we just hadn't gotten around to it. A couple of weeks ago we finally got together. (It only took us two and a half years!) She shared with us a few of the experiences that she had in working on a couple of projects she was involved with.
She got to work on improving the footnotes for foreign language editions of the Bible. She also got to work on some of the Priesthood/RS manuals that we use, including the current one for Spencer W. Kimball. The project to create these manuals of Teachings of the Presidents of the Church was President Hinckley's idea and it had two goals. The primary goal was to create a library of books that the Saints could have in their homes with the teachings of the gospel. The secondary goal was to create manuals that could be used for the Relief Society and Priesthood lessons.
We told this sister how meaningful lesson 2, "
Tragedy or Destiny," from the Spencer W. Kimball manual was to us when we first read it in December, around the time Gideon was born. She told us a little about the person who put that lesson together. Most of the topics were assigned to curriculum writers, but this sister had specially requested to get to work on that lesson. Her attention and sensitivity to the subject certainly came through for us.
I was surprised to learn how many drafts most of the lessons went through. It appears that many of the lessons went through multiple drafts. For some particularly difficult lessons, the committee arranged for a room in the Salt Lake temple where they met to discuss and work over the material.
Each lesson is worked over by a committee of church members who serve on a curriculum committee as their church calling (as opposed to it being their employment.) The work of the curriculum committees are overseen by a member of the Seventy who must approve everything that goes out of the committee. The lessons must also be approved by the correlation department of the church. After the editing and correlation departments of the church approve the lessons, they are approved by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the 12.
Approval at each step is far from automatic. The lessons are continually bounced back to the curriculum committee for further refinement. This sister said it was really weird to get a draft of something she had prepared come back with hand written notes from several apostles.
Knowing all the work that goes into these lessons, she said it was difficult to watch people make so little use of the lesson manuals sometimes. After our talk, I'm particularly looking forward to lesson 10 about dealing with the Adversary (
Fortifying Ourselves against Evil Influences) and lesson 22 about the 1978 revelation that lifted the ban on blacks having the priesthood (
Revelation: “A Continuous Melody and a Thunderous Appeal”).