Are we seeing a global, cut-price Christian publishing network being inadvertently birthed out of a former missionary's home in a sleepy South Coast town?
The story begins when Grahame and Patty Scarratt, who were missionaries in South America during the 1980s and 90s, found it was cheaper to republish Moore College's Preliminary Theological Certificate (PTC) courses in South America than post them.
Less than four years after they set up a publishing company in South Coast ‘retirement’, Grahame and Patty Scarrett are now welcoming new CMS missionary Peter Sholl " and his wife Sarah " as he becomes the inaugural Mexico-based director of MOCLAM (Moore College in Latin America) in order to further the organisation’s aim of training Christian leaders across Latin America.
It’s a gospel-hearted vision: this ministry facilitates the republication in Spanish of key theological resources from English-speaking evangelicalism and sells them at a cost low enough that thousands of ordinary Latin Americans have seen their lives ‘transformed by God through the living out of His Word’.
"It's all the Lord's doing. None of it was planned. We didn't know what we were doing," Patty Scarratt told Sydneyanglicans.net after husband Grahame and herself spoke about the rapid growth of the company at a missionary session at CMS Summer School in Katoomba yesterday.
Currently the Scarratts work nine months out of their busy home office in Kiama and three months in Latin America.
"It's truly an international company," says Mrs Scarratt, explaining that the company is registered in Australia where typesetting also occurs; the translations are done by Mexicans and Cubans, while the books are printed in Colombia and stored and distributed from Florida.
“Work is exploding”
Now the next phase of the ministry begins.
Former rector of St Matthew's, Ashbury, the Rev Peter Sholl(pictured) says he feels "seriously like a guinea pig' acknowledging it's a radical and experimental endeavour for both CMS and Moore College.
The Sholls will help establish the new publishing HQ in the wealthy "first world' Mexican city of Monterrey, which Mr Sholl says has the same population as Sydney but with better infrastructure and "tech access'.
After a year of Spanish language study, he expects to take a lead role in management and running the business.
"The work is exploding," says Sarah Sholl. "We are not going to [Mexico in order to] replace the Scarratts and they are collapsing under the weight of their work. There is so much work for us to do… we need more workers. So please consider coming."
Around 1,500 Latin Americans are currently studying Moore College's Preliminary Theological Certificate.
A slim majority are Anglicans in Chile who deal directly with Moore College, but there are also more than 500 Mexican and Cuban students co-ordinated by MOCLAM as well as the organisation’s many smaller study groups stretched across the hemisphere from Argentina to Puerto Rico.
In fact there are more than 1,500 Cuban Baptists alone on a waiting list to do the course, while the Anglican Diocese of Fort Worth has just adopted the PTC for its very large Spanish-speaking congregations.
With more than 40 million Spanish-speakers, the United States is a key growth market says Mr Scarratt.
Meanwhile IFES in Latin America has also just adopted the PTC as its training course, with a group of four students in Venezuela pioneering MOCLAM's new web-based Online Learning Environment (OLE) system.
Indeed the scale of growth is so rapid across the Americas that there are hopes that a future CMS missionary couple will be appointed to oversee the work for South America, so the Sholls can concentrate on Mexico and Central America.
The range of titles published by MOCLAM is also growing.
The first books published in Spanish were the PTC texts such as Graeme Goldsworthy's Gospel and Kingdom and Vaughan Roberts’ God's Big Picture.
More recently they have republished Matthias Media's Sunday School program Teaching Little Ones as well as their tract Two Ways to Live.
While at the request of some Latin American churches they also translated and published Ray Galea's critique of Roman Catholicism Nothing in my hand I bring.
UK evangelist Rico Tice has also just asked MOCLAM to translate and publish his Evangelism Explained course for South Americans.
Moore College's global perspective
Gary Nelson, head of Moore College External Studies, told Sydneyanglicans.net that the Spanish-speaking world was already a "very significant' part of his work, and that he soon expects English-language students to be a minority.
At present more than 20 percent of Moore College's Preliminary Theological Certificate (PTC) students are Spanish speakers from Latin America.
In raw numbers, 4000 students take their exams in English, while 3000 take them in other languages.
"The appointment of Peter Sholl is a significant step in the co-operation between CMS and Moore College," Mr Nelson says. "If this model works then we will duplicate it in other parts of the world."
Possibilities for duplicating the model exist in those countries where Moore College runs PTC as intensives, such as in Nigeria or India, as well as for the French-speaking world.
However Mr Nelson says further expansion is most likely to occur in East Africa for Swahili speakers.
