Tag: education

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The Case for Christian Education

One of the more audacious positions of Providence Church (CREC) is that it does not speak adoringly of public education. Our Book of Memorials says the following:

“Government schools tend to be, by decree and design, explicitly godless, and therefore normally should not be considered a legitimate means of inculcating true faith, holy living, and a decidedly Christian worldview in the children of Christian parents. Therefore, we strongly encourage Christian parents to seek alternative ways of educating their children, whether by means of Christian schools or homeschooling. In cases, where Christian education is an impossibility, parents must be active and diligent in overseeing the education of their children.”

In my southern context, most evangelical churches have a host of children populating local public schools. And as I understand it, opposing public schools is not the sort of topic that grants pastors awards in local ceremonies.

Now, mind you, we are not speaking here of the responsibility to bear witness by some mature Christian adults who sense a calling to instruct and minister in that environment. Indeed, I know many who do great work in the public corridors. I bless them with every ounce of my being.

What we are arguing against is the intentionality of sending covenant children to learn under almost always ungodly curriculums. The responsibility God places upon parents to provide a Christian education is too abundant (Deut. 6, Eph. 6), which means that indoctrination is a means of grace to our children. We teach in order to inculcate a particular form of training for our local collection of arrows (Ps. 127-128); the kind that pastes on their foreheads all thoughts of Jesus applied to the earthly terrain of Mathematics and Moravian culture. You may say, “But education is neutral; we can just train them when they get home at night.” Well, I applaud your enthusiasm, but there are intellectual corpses all over the Red Sea of those who followed that logic.

Of course, no education is foolproof. Education A does not necessitate Godliness A. But Christian Education A offers a type of godliness in learning, logic, and leisure that benefits the cause of Christendom. Now, I have been advocating for this for over 15 years. Back then, it wasn’t that popular, but in our day, some have come to the obvious conclusion that such opposition to public education is the right one because the Democrats are eager to give transgender students the option of choosing their bathrooms and locker room and are enforcing mask mandates on little children. If this caused you to jump on the Christian education train now, I am grateful. Whether for pragmatic reasons or not, do it. And the hope is that pragmatism becomes dogma. Find your local Christian school or homeschool co-op in your town and go for it with every Herculian strength you have left.

In our congregation, we try to live out these principles by dedicating some money to help parents follow what we believe to be biblical and true about education. So, if parent A says, “Look, you all are speaking from a position of luxury. We can’t afford to put our children in a Christian school or to bring mom back home to homeschool,” we offer some economic encouragement to aid members to make that decision much simpler. But the one thing we wish to also do if you think this is still an impossibility is to help you –assuming you inquire–to look at your financial priorities on the table and analyze whether that iPhone 12 pro-max is really worth more than a semesters’ worth of books, or whether that middle-age crisis vehicle is really as important as a faithful education for your offspring.

Obviously, there are some nuances to this conversation and some exceptions, but the bottom line is that the longer you look at the exceptions and nuances, your answer will always be the same. But if you begin to look at the principle as the thing you pursue doggedly, the exceptions and nuances suddenly become lesser things than they were just a day or two ago.

And speaking of nuances, if a family desires to keep their kids in the public school system for whatever reason but still love our body enough to endure my occasional meanderings about the dangers of public schools, they are welcome to join our church as members, so long as they eagerly seek the well-being of the body and are not divisive. In my estimation, what we are after is not adherents of Christian education, but adherents of Christendom who believe Christ died to make us whole as students and servants of the kingdom. Christian education best serves that purpose.

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Against Public Education

One of the more audacious positions of Providence Church (CREC) is that it does not speak adoringly of public education. Our Book of Memorials says the following:

“Government schools tend to be, by decree and design, explicitly godless, and therefore normally should not be considered a legitimate means of inculcating true faith, holy living, and a decidedly Christian worldview in the children of Christian parents. Therefore, we strongly encourage Christian parents to seek alternative ways of educating their children, whether by means of Christian schools or homeschooling. In cases, where Christian education is an impossibility, parents must be active and diligent in overseeing the education of their children.”

In my southern context, most evangelical churches have a host of children populating local public schools. And as I understand it, opposing public schools is not the sort of topic that grants pastors awards in local ceremonies. Now, mind you, we are not speaking here of the responsibility to bear witness by some mature Christian adults who sense a calling to instruct and minister in that environment. Indeed I know many who do great work in the public corridors. I bless them with every ounce of my being.

What we are arguing against is the intentionality of sending covenant children to learn under almost-always ungodly curriculums. The responsibility God places upon parents to provide a Christian education is too abundant (Deut. 6, Eph. 6), which means that indoctrination is a means of grace to our children. We teach in order to inculcate a particular form of training for our local collection of arrows (Ps. 127-128); the kind that pastes on their foreheads all thoughts of Jesus applied to the earthly terrain of Mathematics and Moravian culture. You may say, “But education is neutral; we can just train them when they get home at night.” Well, I applaud your enthusiasm, but there are intellectual corpses all over the Red Sea of those who followed that logic.

Of course, no education is foolproof. Education A does not necessitate Godliness A. But Christian Education A offers a type of godliness in learning and memorization that benefits the cause of Christendom. Now, I have been advocating for this for over 15 years. Back then, it wasn’t that popular, but in our day, some have come to the obvious conclusion that such opposition to public education is the right one because the Democrats are eager to give transgender students the option of choosing their bathrooms and locker room. If this caused you to jump on the Christian education train now, I am grateful. Whether for pragmatic reasons or not, do it. Find your local Christian school or homeschool co-op in your town and go for it with every Herculian strength you have left.

In our congregation, we try to live out these principles by dedicating some money to help parents follow what we believe to be biblical and true about education. So, if parent A says, “Look, you all are speaking from a position of luxury. We can’t afford to put our children in a Christian school or to bring mom back home to homeschool,” we offer some economic encouragement to aid members to make that decision much simpler. But the one thing we wish to also do if you think this is still an impossibility is to help you –assuming you inquire–to look at your financial priorities on the table and analyze whether that iPhone 12 pro-max is really worth more than a semesters’ worth of books, or whether that middle-age crisis vehicle is really as important as a faithful education for your offspring.

Obviously, there are some nuances to this conversation and some exceptions, but the bottom line is that the longer you look at the exceptions and nuances, your answer will always be the same. But if you begin to look at the principle as the thing you pursue doggedly, then suddenly the exceptions and nuances become lesser things than they were just a day or two ago.

And speaking of nuances, if a family desires to keep their kids in the public school system for whatever reason, but still love our body enough to endure my occasional meanderings about the dangers of public schools, they are welcome to join our church as members, so long as they eagerly seek the well-being of the body and are not divisive. In my estimation, what we are after is not adherents of Christian education, but adherents of Christendom who believe Christ died to make us whole as students and servants of the kingdom. We happen to believe that Christian education best serves that purpose.

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Brief Notes on Children’s Education: On Boundaries

Developing a robust view of the world in our children demands boundaries. Therefore, defining these boundaries are crucial educational steps in the early stages of child-rearing.

The absence of boundaries generally produces confused children. We may call this “Enlightenment Parenting.” The children of the enlightenment will jump in the first puddle they find. Whether shallow or deep, they will learn to walk by sight rather than faith. But if they understand the purpose of boundaries, even expressing appreciation and love for them, children will walk in green pastures and be planted by the rivers of life growing into a greater knowledge of God’s world.

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The Evangelical, the Damning Statistics, and What To Do About It, Part I

The results are in and they don’t look good. Christianity Today reports on the Sex Lives of Unmarried Evangelicals. The two surveys offer differing numbers, but the conclusion is summarized in this manner:

Bible Reading? Evangelicals who infrequently read the Bible were 70 percent more likely to have been recently sexually active than frequent Bible readers.

Church Attendance? Evangelicals who attend church less than weekly were more than twice as likely to have been recently sexually active than weekly attenders.

Conversion? Of the sexually active singles, 92 percent had sex after becoming“born again.” That’s largely because the average age when evangelicals under 40 became “born again” was 8.

Evangelical statistics have a way of increasing our national Christian guilt, which is something that usually is already mighty high. Furthermore, the numbers usually paint a more pessimistic picture than what is actually taking place. My general principle when dealing with these statistics is to cut the percentage by a third. When the oft-cited “50% of Christian married couples end in divorce” statistic is referenced, this usually means about 35% of Christian married couples divorce. Those original statistics also included Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. A Non-Trinitarian marriage is anything but a Christian marriage.

But however you do the math, the numbers are still frightening. No one can deny that they reflect a weak evangelicalism. It is not that evangelical churches are fully entertainment driven without any substance, but that the substance they offer is not sustaining, and therefore leading our young generations to find pleasure is worldly entertainment. Part of this worldly entertainment is the casualness of the sex culture.

Since this is the case we have responded in the way we evangelical do best: we have over-reacted. We have bought into the “world is against us” slogan and we have acted upon it with zealous fury. We have sheltered our children to the point of stifling their rhetoric and making them miserable spokesmen for the Lordship of King Jesus. On the other hand, we have overly exposed them to the vastness of sexualized culture. By the age of ten they all have their Lady Gaga lyrics as accurately as a Puritan boy his catechism memorized.

What can evangelical churches do to provide a culture that despises impurity and treasures purity?

The remarkable response–according to the statistics– is by focusing on the simple means of grace of Church attendance, Prayer, and Bible reading one reduces dramatically the chances of engaging in fornication. I have stated many times that the evangelical problem is one of prioritization. And what does priority look like in the church? The damning news is that conversion is not enough. For many parents conversion serves as a perpetual moral babysitter. As long as words are spoken affirming the X,Y, and Z of Christian conversion then we are on our way to bringing up pure children. But conversion or its vocabulary are not enough! The evangelical culture has evangelized their children to death, and then they are left wondering where did we go wrong.

Here is a sample quoted above:

Evangelicals who infrequently read the Bible were 70 percent more likely to have been recently sexually active than frequent Bible readers.

Let’s say 50% of this is true. Without going into detail of what this “Bible-Reading” should look like–a worthy discussion to be had–in what ways are churches inculcating their children with the Sacred Scriptures? In other words, what are they doing to instill a desire in our children to drink deeply of the Biblical narrative? Have churches made the Bible so one-sided and narrowly explicated that our children long to escape to a different narrative of the world?

As we affirm Sola-Scriptura, let us also delve into the Scriptures in a transformative way. “Your word is life,” says Yahweh. And this alone is enough to make the point of the study. When one saturates himself in life, then he will find death-like practices abominable.

To echo N.T. Wright, let’s return to a simply Christian view of life. Our understanding of sexuality needs to be transformed by a new understanding of who we are in Christ. Our new creation life is a life that treasures sex in its right context. Further, it sees the life of another human being as sacred, and therefore violating that sacredness–which is what pre-marital sex is–is a violation of life; a profound misunderstanding of the Imago Dei.

The Scriptures and its reading will help us re-shape our view of ourselves and others, but it must be done in a context that perpetuates the reality that the new world brings a new light and this light is filled with redemptive and ethical consequences. Therefore, forsake the works of darkness and drink deeply of the words of life.

*An additional post on “How to read Bible” will soon follow.

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Evening of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty at Trinitas Christian School

Dr. George Grant exhorted and encouraged us this evening to conquer the world. This remarkably titanic vision, he argued, is actually grounded in the prayer our Lord taught us: “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” We need to start believing this prayer.

Grant sprinkled his optimistic talk with particular moments of history where darkness reigned, but yet God–in His mercy–provided and prepared men to embrace the challenge and plant seeds that would bear much fruit long after their deaths.

Among many contributing factors to the grim state of our culture, Pastor Grant argued that a pessimistic view of the world is very much guilty for what is transpiring in our midst. If we expect darkness, then why should darkness not prevail?

Grant’s magnificent rhetorical gifts coupled with his pastoral concerns and passion for the Church, and his loyalty to recover a Christ-centered education inculcated in us a robust vision for the world and the profound need to think futurely.

History has taught us much, but the knowledge of history without the formation of a future vision for Christendom is not the way forward. By embracing those true historical heroes, we have an inheritance that causes us to pursue and desire a world where truth, goodness, and beauty prevail and where Christ is all in all.

Here is my opening prayer for the evening:

Almighty and Gracious God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we give you thank for your tender mercies toward us.

We are grateful this evening  for the labors of Trinitas Christian School in these last fourteen years; for their commitment to training men and women to know biblical truth, and also to apply that truth in all areas of life. With Abraham Kuyper we affirm that “there is not one square inch that Christ has not claimed as His own.” We are thankful that You are the writer and master of history; nothing happens outside Your sovereign control. And this is why we commit this time unto you, for you have fashioned our ears to hear wisdom and our bodies to live by wisdom.

We thank you that in education You are forming us to be better lovers of truth and protector of that sacred inheritance given to us by our forefathers. With Chesterton, we affirm that “the true soldier fights because he loves what is behind him.” May our environment be bathed with the grace to know that we are not fighting for a vain cause, but for the future of our children and the glory of the Kingdom of God.

We pray for Pastor George Grant; that he might give us a greater vision for truth in our city, and that his words might cultivate in us hearts to desire truth for ourselves and our children.

May the truth of Your Word, the Goodness of your hands, and the Beauty of your majesty be with us now and forever more, through Jesus Christ, the world’s only Redeemer. Amen.