Priority of kingdom education includes starting Christian schools

In the preschool years those parents faithfully take the growing toddler to Sunday School, encourage him to play and learn alongside other children at Vacation Bible School, and videotape his first choir presentation. Each night one of them reads a simplified Bible story and listens as he offers a prayer thanking God for the day’s blessings.

In the protected world that revolves around their home and church, the young parents confidently keep the pledge they made five years earlier. As they take the next step toward formal education, the choices are more complex. The once common assumption that most every five or six-year olds will move from being at home for most of the day to spending half of their waking hours in a school building has changed.

Many Christian parents are re-evaluating the path that best prepares their children to know Christ and serve him throughout their lives. Some will continue to find public schools to be a viable educational option that offers academic challenge and reinforcement of worthy character qualities in their children. Many godly teachers influence the next generation through their commitment to train young minds.

A growing number of parents continue the educational process by homeschooling their children, utilizing a wide range of curriculum choices and cooperative education with likeminded parents. Government surveys placed the number of homeschoolers at 850,000 in 1999, although experts say it could be twice that many.Educational testing results indicate that home-educated children typically surpass the scores of students in other types of schools, earning the attention of college recruiters.

A third alternative is found in the private and Christian educational institutions that make up one-fourth of the nation’s schools, attracting 11 percent of the student population. Private school enrollment has risen 10.6 percent in the last decade – keeping pace with growth rate for public schools. Seventy-five percent of that growth can be attributed to the astounding 46 percent increase in conservative Christian schools, according to Council for American Private Education’s biennial private school survey drawn from U.S. Census Bureau studies.

Christian leaders are challenging churches to establish these schools as a way of achieving the Great Commission, while parents find such schools to be an educational option that upholds their own values. Academics, discipline, a more positive environment, and smaller student-teacher ratios in Christian schools are characteristics that appeal to parents as they seek to fulfill those commitments made when their children were born.

Texan Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, issued a call as president of the Southern Baptist Convention for SBC churches to plant new schools to develop young disciples through education. As members of the SBC Executive Committee gathered in Nashville for their fall meeting, Graham applied the denominational emphasis known as Empowering Kingdom Growth to the educational context.

“I think it’s time that Southern Baptist churches and associations and groups of churches look more seriously at establishing kingdom schools, Christian schools,” Graham said. He told the Florida Baptist Witness that Christian education must start earlier than at the college and seminary level. He urged Southern Baptists to train up a new generation of leaders “who understand their faith, who are able to communicate their faith and to live their faith in whatever their career or calling.”

Prestonwood Academy draws 1,059 students to its Plano campus situated next to the church Graham pastors. He is well aware of the “many wonderful public school teachers and coaches” and doesn’t see kingdom schools as a reaction to public schools. Instead, the choice of public education, Christian education or homeschooling should be a “matter of prayer” for each parent “as it fits the need and the place in life for that child,” he said.

“The world is too much with us and so, while we are not trying to cocoon our children, we don’t want to put our children in a position to fail. I think Christian schools put children in a position to succeed spiritually.”

The director of Christian school resources for LifeWay believes the church is losing its most valuable asset, its children. Drawing on research by George Barna, Glen Schultz told a New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary audience that only seven to eight percent of people identifying themselves as Christian today are biblical in their understanding of life. He looks to the generation now sitting in America’s classrooms to decide whether society is headed for either spiritual revival or moral anarchy.

Schultz said the education children are receiving in many classrooms might contribute to their failure in achieving the Great Commission of the church. “We’re betraying our children,” he said. “”We’ve prepared our kids to go to college and get a good job. We’re not preparing them to think and act from a biblical perspective.”

Research suggests that 70 percent of the teenagers attending a church youth group will stop attending church within two years of high school graduation, he said, half of them never coming back. He cites the way in which Christians have allowed their children to be educated as the problem.

“The end result of all education is a worldview,” Schultz said. “That worldview is either man-centered or God-centered. We tell our kids to love the Lord, get good grades and do well in school. Many schools teach things like evolution, directly refuting our biblical view, yet we tell them to get good grades, and therefore they end up believing these philosophies.”

Waiting until kids go off to a Christian college is too late, Schultz argued. “By the time a child reaches age 18, that child already has formed a general worldview upon which he will build the rest of his character and life,” he said. “Children are God’s homework assignment to parents,” he added. “When I’m through training my child, I’m handing Christ an arrow to use on the spiritual battleground.”