Faith Today - July/August 2013

All-Canadian Bible Resource hits the net Reading the Bible and having a regular devotional time just got easier. Scripture union’s new bilingual interactive bible reading guide is now available online. Powered by the Canadian Bible Society, theStory (www. scriptureunion.ca) provides easy access to the chronological biblical narrative from the old and new Testaments.

Each installment also includes a reflection on the Bible passages, authored by a who’s who of Canadian Christian media personalities, church and Christian agency leaders.

The accompanying prayer is tailored to support the teaching and all are linked to social media. The guide’s features were developed to appeal to all denominations and a global audience, with an emphasis on the Canadian perspective.

theStory is a response to research findings that most Canadian Christian churchgoers, and many Canadians, are not reading the Bible.

And while theStory is designed to appeal to young adults, “Its delivery is cognizant of the world we live in, a more modern framework,” explains murray Lawson, Scripture union president.

The format, with software that
tracks a user’s frequency and date of
use, allows each site visitor to follow
the biblical narrative chronologically,
at their own pace. readers may choose
from several translations of the Bible.
theStory is a way to “bring the big-
ger community into the biblical story,
that is the story of the whole of human-
ity, and at the heart of it is the cross of
Jesus Christ,” says Lawson. “we are
characters in the ongoing story as are
the characters we read about in the
Scriptures today.”
users of theStory are encouraged
to respond to the writers and share ob-
servations with fellow readers in a blog
format. The entire bible can be read in
four to five years through theStory.

Future plans for theStory include separate versions for youth, children and families, a visual timeline, youth writers, additional languages and Christian visual art. Ft –Michele Zarins

New Proof That Child Sponsorship Really Works

Barry slauenwhite, president of Compassion Canada, with chil- dren at a Compassion project in Kisoro, southern uganda.

PHo To: ComPASSIon CAnAdA

If you sponsor a child through one of the many Christian organizations that offer that option, you might have been met with cynical stares from skeptical friends who doubted it made any difference.

Now, there’s proof it does.

Bruce Wydick, an economics professor at the University of San Francisco, had a graduate student interested in measuring the benefits of sponsorship. From those discussions emerged an important study in six countries that tracked the benefits experienced by adults who had been sponsored through Compassion as a child, one of the best-known Christian child sponsorship organizations.

“Although we do our own internal studies, I was shocked that this was the first independent group investigating the effectiveness of child sponsorship,” says Barry Slauenwhite, president of Compassion Canada.

If that aspect of the study was surprising, the actual results were just as important. Wydick, who has considerable experience testing the effectiveness of relief projects, was also surprised at what he found. “We are used to very modest results from other projects. However, the Compassion study revealed that there was a significant impact, something surprising and exciting coming from previous experiences,” explains Wydick.

The study, published in the April 2013
edition of the Journal of Political Economy,
demonstrates that child sponsorship, at
least a Compassion-style model (where the
funds support an individual child and not
the entire community),
The study tracked
a significantly higher
chance for a sponsored
child to complete high
school, attend uni-
versity and acquire a
white-collar job. Not
only did the sponsored
child benefit, there was
a spillover benefit for younger siblings,
even if they were never sponsored.

Slauenwhite is also pleased the study looks at those who are now adults, measuring the effectiveness of the program some years ago. “We have greatly improved our program and if the study was repeated with those children currently sponsored, we would expect even greater outcomes,” he says.

While all those interested in child sponsorship will be encouraged by these results, this study did not examine a community-centred model of child sponsorship. Ft