Photo Credit: Calvin Chuang

The Adventist Encounter Curriculum is a Bible curriculum that was collaboratively developed by The Australian Union Conference (AUC) and the New Zealand Pacific Union Conference (NZPUC), and is now making its way on to the global stage.

Already in use in the UK,  April of this year saw The North American Division of Seventh-Day Adventists (NAD) visit Australia and New Zealand to observe the Encounter Curriculum and Character in Action in use at Adventist schools.

Nina Atcheson is the Secondary Curriculum Officer at Adventist Schools Australia and part of the team who developed Encounter. She also wrote most of the secondary units.  In 2013, she travelled to Providence, RI (USA), where she spent three days teaching the framework and philosophy that are central to the curriculum to a small group of teachers, union officials, and the NAD Director of Secondary Education, Dennis Plubell. When asked if she ever thought the curriculum would have been picked up on the global stage she replied, “Not really, no, but it is amazing to see how God leads and guides. I would write with a specific class in mind from my experience… I prayerfully just opened up for the Lord to lead and inspire.”

“The whole team has felt that God has been blessing this [Encounter] from its inception and every step since,” Nina says. She will travel to San Diego, CA (USA) in early June with Lanelle Cobbin, Curriculum Specialist of NZPUC.  Lanelle is responsible for the transformational training framework of the curriculum. They will be training more teachers on the framework and philosophy of the program. Over the past year, the NAD has been piloting the curriculum in five secondary schools and will be piloting for one more year in both primary and secondary schools before making the curriculum available to all Adventist schools in the Division.

The Adventist Encounter Curriculum has been rolling out into primary and secondary schools in Australia and New Zealand since 2009 and is now being implemented in all of our Adventist schools. The primary goal of Encounter is to provide an environment where students can grow spiritually.  In a previous interview Georgie Winzenreid (Primary Curriculum Officer, Adventist Schools Australia) said, “We want them to not just know about God in their heads but know about Him in their hearts.” Those who worked on the development of the curriculum wanted to ensure that it was relevant to students at different stages of their spiritual journeys as well as challenging them to experience God in real and relevant ways.

Daryl Murdoch was commissioned in 2008 with the responsibility of developing a new Bible curriculum. Daryl says, “There was an urgent need for a biblical Bible studies program. Something new and fresh.” Since that time, he has been the one driving the project, assembling the team who developed the curriculum and has been in negotiations with the UK and the US.  When asked how he thought the Adventist Encounter Curriculum would progress he stated, “This has put Australia and New Zealand at the forefront of Adventist education development. We think it’s going to be a program which will give young people the opportunity to develop a really strong, deep Christian world view.”