Think this over…

In order to stir your thinking let us start with 12 statements and brief reflections:

1. “The state should educate our children and we should just take them to church?”: Unconsciously this is what most of us believe and practice.
2. “The state has always been responsible for the teaching our children, and has neutral aims?”: A common misnomer.
3. “Any good education must have at least 30 children, aged within 12 months of each other, full time, taught by teachers who don’t share the parents’ values and faith?”: Something which goes unquestioned due to how UK culture and economics have developed.
4. “Any good secondary education, must have around 1000 teenagers all together in one institution, moving from teacher to teacher?”: This is how cost-effective educational institutions have evolved using a factory model.
5. “These kind of environments prepare children well for the rest of normal life?”: This is the assumption of society, and not based in the reality of normal life but on pragmatism and focussing its people on qualifications, career and consumption. (When else are you only relating with people within 12 months of your age!)
6. “The mental health of our children is on the whole very good?”: It isn’t. Why?
7. “If Christian parents home educate or send their children to a small independent Christian school, where they are only taught by Christians, then they are damaging their children and they won’t engage in society and in mission?”: The research evidence shows the opposite.
8. “Each generation, more than 50% of the children of Christian parents stop following Jesus?”: This is not understood by much of the church.
9. “The average age a person makes their main step to become a Christian is 12-13 years old?”: True. The implications of this need to be grasped by parents and churches.
10. “Of the Christians in our churches today, the vast majority made the commitment before the age of 18?”: True. Some research even says 95%. The efforts on evangelism and discipleship should therefore be focussed where?
11. “80-90% of children from Christian homes, who have been home educated or who go to the new UK Christ-centred schools, persist as followers of Jesus Christ into adulthood?”: True!There is hope for Christian parents and Christ-centred churches who really value their children, see the issues, and respond.
12. “There are many Christian organisations providing resources and support for parents, schools and churches to help with the discipleship of children and their education”: Increasingly true. Praise God!

The Church and Education

Many Christians are reading their Bibles, and recognising that the scriptures teach us that parents and God’s people are those responsible for the teaching and discipling of our children. At no point does the Bible provide a pattern that expects us to believe that any nation state is to be primarily responsible for the education of children. Do you? In the UK, and across the world, parents and God’s people were always those who sought to train children, and only in the last century has this changed. When institutions such as universities were formed they were founded by the church and on the teachings of the Bible. What about our educational establishments today?

The Church has, until this recent era, taken much responsibility for the education of children with the purpose being understood as the glorifying of God and to support the discipleship of children, as commanded in the Great Commission. The desire to teach children to read, was initially to help them to know how to understand the most influential book in world history; the Bible. But now, the most foundational book for the values of Western society is being systematically removed from education settings under the misnomer of neutrality.

The Church through alongside the development of much of Western civilisation trained up the next generation of leaders, often through universities, who would understand that to fully grasp the purpose and value of the subjects studied they must learn how all things originate in a creator God, who has a purpose. The application of their knowledge, understanding and skills to every sphere of society and learning, enabled the students to learn from Christian teachers the wonderful purposes of God. He is the only one who will reveal true and life giving knowledge to human beings. From monastery to university, from church to school, Christians took the great commission seriously and discipled their children.

At a high point in the UK’s educational history, the Church of England had thousands of strongly connected churches and schools, where Christian faith was joyfully promoted and celebrated, with minimal influence of the British state. They were initially funded by the church and by donors, not the state. Does the one who pays the piper, call the tune? Today, what seems to be required to be promoted and celebrated in state funded schools, and even many so called ‘Christian’ schools, can be the opposite of the Bible’s teaching, as many are finding with the Relationships and Sexuality teaching being provided even to young children.

The Biblical Case For Christian Education

There is a strong case for every Christian parent, and every church to pray seriously about how they disciple their children. Who trains them 30 hours a week, 38 weeks a year? Will an hour a week on Sunday be enough to follow the Lord’s commands? Consider these verses:

• Matthew 19 v 14: ‘Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them’– How many of our children are currently being hindered from coming to Jesus?
• Ephesians 6 v 4: ‘Fathers… bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord’– Have many of us as parents and church leaders delegated too much instruction to unbelievers?
• Deuteronomy 6 v 7: ‘These things I teach you today… impress them on your children’ – How much investment of time and talent is being made in making such an impression today?
• Proverbs 22 v 6: ‘Train up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not turn from it’ – Are the children in your church turning away when they get to teenage years? Why is this?
• 1 Timothy 5 v 8: ‘Anyone who does not provide for his immediate family, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever’ – Are we really providing the education our own children need?

Right from the first classroom, the garden of Eden, to the instructions given to the people of Israel, to the teaching given by Christ to his ‘children’ (many of whom were teenage disciples) we see the Lord expects us to take responsibility for teaching the next generation. There is no expectation that you hand this over to the state. As Vodie Baucham Jr says, “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”

Judges 2 v 10, explains what happens when God’s people ‘forget’, and parents get too busy. “After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel.” (NIV) . Their children become steadily lost. The prosperous people proceed into depravity and distress. They don’t know their identity- who they are. Others invade their land and they succumb to the enemy destroyer without, and from their sinful desires within.

A New, but Old, Call to Teaching

Through our work, from Dundee to Devon, we are supporting those who want to start their own new independent Christian schools. Church leaders and parents are waking up to the rapid change in our schools, where Christians are being increasingly discriminated against.  Christians are planning for the future. Many parents have taken hold of the call to home educate their children, and we are privileged to work with those who are seeking to resource home educators and defend these freedoms, which have been lost in many parts of the world such as Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden. Some in state and older independent schools are seeking to hold the line with having a strong Christian presence in their state funded schools. They also need our prayers and support. Christians are getting involved with Christian organisations to influence schools and support parents.

However, unless we model again what a Christ-centred education, and a Christ-centred school, can be, then the revival needed to reverse the slide towards the secularisation and sexualisation of our sons and daughters, will not occur.

And so the call to the church to develop Christ-centred education is before us. These schools are and will be different. The research on the past pupils of new Christ-centred schools, which have been developed in the last 40 years, demonstrates that the children and young people have been encouraged into, not hindered from, meeting Jesus and wanting to follow him, as Christian teachers work with the parents.

These schools are determined to only employ Christian teachers. They stay small, with many ages interacting together, so they are much more a family of mums and dad and brothers and sisters, rather than a factory-like mass institution where you are neither known and only notionally noticed.

Although smaller, they are renowned for producing excellent academic results, and can often be much more flexible with subjects in the secondary years- not limiting pupils to whatever option boxes are provided to the current cohort. If you are a gifted linguist, why not study French and Spanish! Their curriculum is carefully prayed through, and planned to bring out the Christ-centred worldview, not isolating the Bible into a ‘religious’ sphere alone. Prayer and the word of God are equally relevant whatever subject is being covered. Not that a Bible verse needs to be squeezed into every lesson on trigonometry, but the purpose and attitude towards all subjects can be shaped from a Christian worldview. Christ-centred teachers can plan with this in view. They believe Colossians 2:3 that learning in relationship to Christ results in the discovery of all the “hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

Teachers

All teachers are relational communicators, whether good or bad. They communicate not just the knowledge of their subject but a sense of purpose and attitude towards learning itself and towards the child. How often can it be said that we have disliked a subject, because of the lack of relationship connection we had with the teacher. Some of us even began to think the subject didn’t like us! Assigning relational power to the ‘subject’! But when we liked the teacher, a flow of knowledge and understanding resulted from the relationship.

The communicative power of a relational connection between teacher and ‘sponge-like’ child cannot be underestimated. It means that teachers’ negative and godless attitudes towards individual subjects, the purpose of learning, or the value of the children themselves, can soak into our young impressionable students. Unbelief begetting unbelief. However, in Christ-centred Education, the teacher holds a Christian worldview, and this is caught by the children in their care, shaping their propensity towards a positive disposition to following Christ. Therefore, the education is not child-centred, but Christ-centred, and this results in sacrificial love, not selfish achievement. The character of the developing child is as important, if not more so, than the academic achievement. This Christian Education leads to secure, integrated young men and women who do not segregate their faith into a reduced, disintegrated, nominal Christianity of a ‘Sunday morning believer’; where Jesus is only understood to exist in the assembly.

Christian Education, whether through truly Christ-centred schools, or home education, shapes disciples in character and wisdom for the mission of God wherever He calls them to go; wherever on this sphere, and whatever sphere of work. It is thoroughly mission centred and mission critical. There is a new call to this kind of teaching, and to those who need to be a part of setting up such schools. Many are responding to this call.

Results

Such new independent Christian schools have parents who recognise the importance of their own investment in the children God has given them to steward. They invest time, energy and money, and the results are incredible. From the UK research, their peers as young adults in UK society are 18 times more likely to believe that “life is not worth living”. The mental health, the security, the sense of purpose, because of the training from parents, teachers and church together, causes them to also flourish academically as well as spiritually. The book ‘Swimming Against the Tide’, by Dr Sylvia Baker, wonderfully explores these results, and new research on the outcomes in past pupils is even more encouraging.

Far from being ghettos, isolated from their local communities, these schools are well regarded for engaging with and serving their local communities. When their young adults go on to college, sixth forms or other training, they are known for their maturity and quality of character. These greenhouses, have proven to suitably protect and nurture through the critical years of learning, training them to be sent out into God’s world with secure foundations in the Christian faith.

Want to know more?

We are providing resources and networking to stir this movement of people who recognise these issues, and want to take up the challenge before us. Dare we not?