A thundering four-color press at a sprawling printing facility located in west Salt Lake City has been running hundreds of thousands of pages per hour, 24 hours a day, six days a week preparing the 2008 curriculum of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Once printed — in languages as diverse as Burmese, Spanish, Cambodian and English — the pages are collated and assembled by high-speed machines into books and manuals, as well as many other types of printed materials.
The Printing Center prints and distributes material such as Church magazines and hymnbooks, but the majority of the printing is lesson material used in classes during Latter-day Saint Sunday worship services.
“Curriculum, the instructional material of the Church, is used throughout the world to teach over 13 million members from as young as 18 months to adults the principles of the gospel,” explains David Frischknecht, managing director of the Curriculum Department. “The languages may be different, but the lessons are the same. A Church class in Chicago learns from the same content a Church class in Chile is using.”
Most of the Church curriculum materials are used during Sunday services. Over 27,000 congregations across the globe hold a three-hour worship service broken up into three smaller segments of about one hour each.
First, Church members and visitors attend sacrament meeting — analogous to communion in other Christian churches — where the bishop over the ward — a lay clergy position — selects people from the congregation to give sermons and prayers. Included in this worship meeting is the sacrament of bread and water — a representation of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Following the sacrament meeting, teenagers and adults attend Sunday School — a class similar to Christian Bible study. While a variety of classes are offered during this time slot, most members attend a scripture study class with lesson manuals written to teach doctrines from the Holy Bible, the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants.
This past year, Church members worldwide studied from the New Testament. In 2008 the scripture focus will be the Book of Mormon.
Optional classes can be offered depending on the needs of the Church members in the individual ward. Lesson manuals are available for gospel principles, temple preparation, family history and marriage relations.
Following Sunday School, classes are divided by gender. While men attend priesthood and women attend Relief Society, they both take their lessons from the same book. This year’s curriculum was the teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, the 12th president of the Church. In 2008, the study material will be from the teachings of Joseph Smith, the first president of the Church.
Teenagers attend Young Men and Young Women, with a curriculum designed specifically to help them understand who Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are and what their relationship with them should be. Lessons are intended to teach teens how to make positive personal choices and behave in a way that complements the gospel principles.
While adults and teens study from scriptures and manuals in their age-appropriate classes, children from the ages of 18 months to 11 attend Primary — a program designed specifically for children which presents the gospel in its simplest form. Lessons are also scripturally based and incorporate music and visual imagery to hold the attention of the children.
On average it takes the Curriculum Department one and a half years to plan and write a lesson manual. All material is correlated to scripture and the teachings of the prophets.
If the lesson material needs to be translated from English into one of the 170 languages currently used by the Church, the process can take months more. Factoring in printing and distribution, a non-English manual can take a total of two and a half years to produce.
To print these materials in a timely manner, the Church operates printing? centers in a number of countries outside the United States. These centers work with local printers as coordinated through the Printing Center in Salt Lake City.
When the Church was officially organized in 1830 and during the Church's early history, virtually the only teaching materials available to members were the Bible and newly published copies of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants.
As membership grew, the amount of curriculum materials expanded. The Church's different organizations — for men, women, teenagers and children — became responsible for developing and printing their own materials.
When Church growth began accelerating in the early 1960s, Church leadership recognized the need to correlate the various curricula; so, committees were established to bring together the materials.
The system was modified over the years until the Curriculum Department was organized in 1978.
A milestone for the Church was reached in 1997, when the first lesson manual was placed online, making it available in an electronic format. Today, all Church curriculum material can be accessed on the Church’s Web site.