Educational Choice
A Word from Dr. David Rountree, Our Founding Pastor
The choice of my wife’s wedding ring was costly but she has had it on display ever since I put it on her finger. I wish I had spent more. Making the choice to wed as a bride or a groom is costly, but the sacrifice enables us to gloriously reflect Christ’s wedding to his church, bear children for Christ, and rule over a home and a people and an enterprise for the rest of our lives. I never regret sacrificial choices of time and money for my marriage. I wish I could do more. Educating our children according to God’s commands is no different. There is no regret for the great and costly, good and essential choice we make to rightly educate our kids. This choice pays immeasurable, life-changing, God-glorifying dividends for generations!
Our ultimate hope is in God to take care of our kids, but we must choose to be faithful to his commands to train up our children as he directed. Such education requires Christian educators who have the freedom, equipping, and spiritual motivation to bring the word of God to bear upon every discipline of life. Such laborers are few.
The latest survey on American worldviews shows that although seven out of ten Americans consider themselves to be Christian (70%), just 6% possess a biblical worldview (American Worldview Inventory 2020, by George Barna, Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University). Are we to expect ill-equipped home-school parents, private Christian schools, and co-ops or those institutions blatantly opposed to a biblical worldview to turn this around? American adults with a biblical worldview have declined by 50% over the past twenty-five years. The slippage into Gomorrah is easily observed. Without the tools of a biblical worldview, our precious children are “easy prey” for the one seeking to devour their souls through humanistic, anti-Christian thinking. From the same survey referenced above, sadly, only 2% of the young adults in America (18 to 29 years old) possess a biblical worldview. This does not reflect a generation that has been adequately trained. The Barna Group defined a biblical worldview as belief in the following:
• absolute moral truth exists
• the Bible is completely inerrant
• Satan is a real being, not symbolic
• a person cannot earn his way to heaven through good works
• Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth
• God is the supreme Creator of the heavens and the earth and reigns over the whole universe
Dr. John Seel, headmaster of The Cambridge School of Dallas, makes this significant statement, “A Christian is free to participate in all types of educational institutions—Christian and secular, but he is not free to be patterned by those that do not make biblical truth central.” He refers to Romans 12:2 as partial support for this principle. As a Christian parent I am responsible to nurture a Christian mind and imagination in my children. When God warns, “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the springs of life” (Prov.4:23), his warning is an educational warning. Education is not morally or spiritually neutral. It is always perspectival—leading us either toward or away from God and his will. Thus, we do not want our children taught and shaped from 10 to 40 hours a week by educators who are not taking every thought captive to the will and word of Christ (2 Cor.10:5). The goal in educating our children must be the maturity to stand on their own in society and “see to it that no one takes them captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ” (Col. 2:8). What educational choices truly assist parents in the Christian nurture and admonition of our children the way God’s word requires?
When we place our children under non-biblical worldview teaching for their educational training, we force upon them and us, “double-study” to be faithful to Christ. Our kids must both study from the secular perspective to make the grade, but then also study through extra research and dialogue with us and other believers to gain a Christian perspective. There are very few high school or college age students and parents of these students who have the tools, spiritual motivation, discipline and perseverance to do this “double-study.” This is the reason children are falling away from the faith: Education is dangerous (see Ps. 1:1-6; 11:3; 14:1; 144:11-12; Prov. 1:8-9; 3:5-6; 9:10; 13:13,20; 22:6; 2 Cor. 6:14-18; Heb. 5:14; 1 Tim. 4:7-8; Col. 2:3-8; Deut. 6:1-7). We must not lean to our own understanding but be directed by the word of God alone.
Martin Luther, speaking in A.D. 1537 came to this conclusion, “I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place their child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the word of God must become corrupt.”