Homeschool News & Views

Issue 21

May 11, 2007

In association with Pass It On Ministries

Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool News & Views, issue 21, for May 11, 2007.

The president of the Southern Baptist Convention has suggested that they set up a Baptist school system, making it available to students whether or not their families can pay tuition costs.

We have discussed previously here how resolutions were introduced into Southern Baptist annual meetings calling on all Baptist parents to get their children out of the public schools. These resolutions did not come close to passing. It was said that the main reason they failed was that the leaders of the denomination opposed them. It is normal for leaders of an institution to not want to change the status quo. Like the Pharisees at the time of Christ, they are afraid that if they change the status quo, the change might affect their position.

This time it is the president of the SBC who is calling for this change. That is a bold and aggressive new step forward toward evangelizing their own youth.

Almost all church buildings are empty almost all of the time. The town where our home school activities are located is Lebanon, Missouri, population about 13,000. There are 56 churches in Lebanon within a five mile range. 56 churches, yet in that town there are only two Christian schools.

That means that in that town of 13,000 people there are 54 churches which are mostly empty six days and five nights a week. 54 buildings, some with multiple stories with a large number of smaller rooms in addition to one or two main meeting areas, which are unused about 75% of the time.

One of those Christian schools is well established, in a fairly large Baptist church. It has been operating for a number of years, and I assume it will continue to do so. The other Christian school in town is with a small church and has only been open a couple of years, I believe. Therefore the likelihood of it continuing to operate in coming years is iffy.

I know of two other Christian schools in Lebanon which no longer operate. They were small schools, sponsored by small churches, and they did not continue to exist. In my experience, small Christian schools have trouble getting enough critical mass to operate. They use a curriculum like the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum. That is a workbook program, where each student works individually at his own level. That makes it easier to administrate for the teacher. They have all the grades together, each student doing his own work, and the teacher overseeing and helping as needed. Again that is a small school with maybe a couple or a few dozen students.

The problem is that the students often can’t afford to pay much tuition, and the teachers in these small schools basically have to donate their services. The schools I have been associated with have operated as long as they did only because a very small number of people made a very big sacrifice in working at the schools. That situation did not continue indefinitely and the schools shut down.

Those schools were associated with very small churches, so the churches had little resources to support the schools. It seems to me that small churches are more likely to start a school than a large church, even though a large church obviously has far more resources to put into a school, increasing its viability. However, a large church has a more established position in the community and therefore may be less likely to challenge the status quo.

So Lebanon, like many other towns, has a bunch of churches and only two Christian schools, which only involve a very small number of students in the area. Almost all the time, almost all those big church buildings are empty. The homeschoolers sometimes rent these church buildings for their co-op classes. These churches have a lot of rooms and the homeschoolers put 200 kids into their different classes. The Baptists say their churches are already in great position to open schools because they already have the facilities. However, it is obvious that almost all of these churches, with all of those buildings which are empty almost all of the time, are not inclined to support Christian education or they would already have done it. Even when the Christian homeschoolers rent church facilities for a few days a month, the churches are sometimes not eager to do so, and usually do not go out of their way to support the homeschoolers.

In addition to the two Christian schools in Lebanon, one church there has a very active ministry of supporting the Christian homeschoolers. This is one of the churches that used to have a small Christian school. When that was shut down, they then became involved in helping the local homeschoolers by allowing them extensive use of their church facilities without charge.

That church is Oasis Worship Center. For three years now we have used their gym every Monday evening during the school year for what has cleverly come to be called the Monday Night Thing. We did not intend to call it that, but that is what developed. This is a casual activity where the homeschoolers just show up to play basketball, volleyball and hang out together. We also have had 7 reel dances there this year, counting the one coming up in the last of May. There have also been a number of other activities held there, such as homeschool meetings, science fairs, spelling bees, and such. We take up an offering for the church at the dances, but the church offers the homeschoolers the use of those facilities without charge.

What a wonderful use of church facilities that is! Oasis Worship Center is not a large church in membership, but they get a large amount done. And they are talking about doing more, by adding a youth center beside the gym. We have reached the point where we have so many homeschoolers showing up on Monday nights that we are running out of room for them in the gym. Oasis Worship Center must have one of the most active Christian homeschool ministries in the state of Missouri, which itself is the Christian homeschooling capital of the nation and the world.

So there are two alternatives for churches in using their already existing facilities. One is to start a Christian school and the other is to make their church a center for homeschool support. Maybe some churches can take a lesson from Oasis Worship Center in that. Some churches try to have active youth programs in after school hours to counter what is happening in the public schools, but that is not working, nor will it ever work. The culture of the youth must be changed from anti-Christian to Christian, and to do that the youth have to be taken out of that anti-Christian culture in the public schools.

The president of the Southern Baptists realizes that, and now he has suggested that they get involved in using their churches to start schools. Plus he is suggesting that the local churches support the schools as they would a mission effort and sponsor the tuition for any students who can’t afford to pay it. What a revolutionary idea! In addition to trying to reach people in Sri Lanka, the church will try to reach children in the local families!

We were just talking with some folks the other day from the Lebanon area. They had a child who wanted to go to the larger Christian school there, but the tuition was more than they felt they could afford. They decided to put the child in a public school in a smaller town near Lebanon, but a member of the church stepped in, anonymously sponsored that youth, paying his tuition to the Christian school.

That’s basically what the Baptists are proposing, on a massive scale. They are saying that they want to create Christian public schools. Christian, in the sense that these schools will be run by the church; and public, in the sense that they will be open to the public at large, with Christian standards of behavior.

The Baptists are saying that the command to teach your children should be viewed with the same seriousness as the command not to steal. Many Christians and denominations today do not take the Bible literally, so the public schools will be their schools. But those who take the Bible seriously will be taking their children out of the left wing schools.

It definitely seems that there is a growing trend with the Southern Baptists in the direction of getting their children out of the public schools. They have 16 million members belonging to 42,000 churches in 1,200 local associations and 41 state conventions. Each congregation is autonomous, and the central convention only makes advisories, but that carries a certain influence with the members. At present, the overwhelming majority of SBC parents support the public schools.

A big problem is that a number of the pastors’ wives work in the public schools. They who should be leading into Christian education/youth evangelism are the ones who are most opposed to it. Plus a number of lay members are also public school employees. It’s been said that many of these Baptist public school teachers might be able to switch over to the Baptist schools. I am of the opinion that those people are the problem, not the solution. They teach in the public schools because their brand of Christianity fits there. I think that this corps of people will continue to be the mass of inertia to hold back the move among Christians toward Christian education.

Moreover, if they did begin to teach in the Christian schools, they would still think like public school teachers. They are state certified. When the government school system was first established in the US, the one point that was absolute was that the public school teachers be state certified. They said that if they taught the teachers what to teach, they would teach what they have been taught. Public school teachers have been taught to be public school teachers.

They are also used to a pay scale which conservative writer Ann Coulter says follows only behind doctors, lawyers and engineers on an hourly basis. It is often said that public school teachers are low paid, but that is just part of the propaganda to keep money flowing into the government system. If these people shift over to Christian schools, they would likely handicap the new schools with an unbearable overhead.

The most important quality – the most important quality -- for a teacher in Christian education is dedication to Christ. This is shown by self sacrifice and a willingness to swim upstream against the rushing flood. Obviously this is precisely what public school teachers are lacking.

This Baptist move toward Christian schools is part of the spiritual war going on, as was the Utah voucher law. Baptists also have those who are involved in getting parents to homeschool. I do not think setting up a whole nation of Christian schools will happen quickly among the Baptists. The most dedicated ones have already acted, who are a few pastors who have started Christian schools and a relatively small number of parents who have chosen to homeschool. The less dedicated will not suddenly become more so just because someone says they should.

At the same time that this movement toward Christian education is going on, the liberals are passing through Congress what is called hate crime legislation. This is a further attempt to force homosexuality/sodomy on America, and will legalize anti-Christian persecution. A Barna poll says that almost half of America’s Christians do not believe that the Bible condemns homosexuality. When that number begins to get over half, America will have tipped. It appears that this next generation of public school kids will be the ones who will turn America into Sodom.

This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers. God bless the Christian homeschoolers.