The Southern Baptist publisher plans to restrict its budget by at least $25 million through reducing staff and salaries.

LifeWay Christian Resources, the publishing entity of the Southern Baptist Convention, has announced it will cut roughly 10 percent of its operating budget through staff reductions, a hiring freeze, and salary cuts.

The move comes after five consecutive weeks of steep revenue decline in the wake of the coronavirus and the expectation that sales may not rebound anytime soon.

The Nashville-based Christian publisher said revenue is down 24 percent compared with the same period last year, largely due to a sharp drop in bulk orders from churches for resources such as Sunday school curricula, Bible study materials, and Vacation Bible School curricula.

It’s not clear yet if SBC churches or other churches that buy LifeWay materials will hold VBS or camp programming this year.

LifeWay’s budget for this fiscal year is $281.3 million. It said it planned to cut between $25 million and $30 million from its budget.

The announcement is just the first indication of the financial blow many US churches and denominational agencies are facing as a result of the COVID-19 shutdowns—a blow that could reshape the religious landscape for decades to come.

“LifeWay stands to lose tens of millions of dollars of revenue that the organization would normally generate over the summer months from camps, events, VBS, and ongoing curriculum sales,” said Ben Mandrell, LifeWay’s CEO, in a news release. “LifeWay is mitigating these losses as much as possible through various expense reduction plans, including staff reductions and cuts in non-employee expenses.”

LifeWay said members of its executive leadership team will give up one month’s salary beginning in May. It did not say how it would achieve a staff reduction, ...

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An alternative college admissions test, used by some Christian schools, draws a record 50,000 students.

The Classic Learning Test (CLT), a niche college entrance exam aspiring to bring a sense of virtue to standardized tests, saw a 1,000 percent increase in registrations over its short history when the SAT and ACT canceled testing for the remainder of the school year due to COVID-19.

“Because we are able to administer the test remotely, we’re kind of the only game in town,” said Jeremy Tate, who created the CLT four years ago amid a renaissance in Classical education, including among Christians.

At its first administration in June 2016, 47 students took the CLT. With the bump in registration, 50,000 students will take its suite of tests—the CLT, and the CLT-8 and CLT-10, designed for lower grades—during the 2019-2020 academic year. That’s more than double last year’s total.

Though not a Christian company, CLT references figures including John Henry Newman and C. S. Lewis in its promotional materials and stresses the moral, formational dimension to education. The exam has been popular among classical Christian schools, which educate over 40,000 students in the US, and homeschoolers, who make up about 40 percent of CLT test-takers.

So far, 178 colleges and universities in the US accept the exam, mostly Catholic and Protestant schools. For other institutions, the CLT can serve as a supplemental assessment.

The College Board and ACT Inc., the companies that administer the SAT and ACT, respectively, have canceled or postponed in-person testing until the fall, leading many colleges to make the admissions exams an optional part of their applications. In 2018, around 2 million students took the SAT and 1.9 million took the ACT.

While some registrants may turn to the CLT this year for the convenience ...

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The company will also put in place a leave without pay program for the months of May, June and July

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Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund on Friday said it is making every effort to ensure an orderly and equitable exit to all investors affected by closure of six debt schemes, a day after it was asked by regulator sebi to focus on returning investors' money at the earliest.

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