Creating a New “Public” School System

A Challenge for the Body of Christ

by Edward E. Gamble                                                                              Vol. XXI, No. 2, February 2008

What do these numbers represent: ½ ; ...88; ...52; ...70; ...30? The SBC growth rate is around ½%. Youth leave our churches at the rate of 88% within a few years of high school graduation. Fifty-two percent of teens believe Jesus was a sinner. Seventy percent of America's youngest adults, ages 18-29, believe that homosexuals should be allowed to marry. Most tragic of all, only 30% of today's born-again parents mentioned leading their child to Christ as a critical result of their parenting. Just as vital signs tell a doctor about your body's health, so these numbers tell us about the health of the Body of Christ. Sadly, these signs are anything but vital, indicating a critically ill body, one that is not performing the role Jesus commanded, "Go and make disciples".

Why is the influence of the Body of Christ declining in our culture when Jesus promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against us? Why is Christianity constantly on the defense in so many of today's cultural battles? Why do successive generations seem more and more removed from truth, viewing church as increasingly irrelevant?

A growing number of pastors, lay leaders and parents believe these statistics are the inevitable result of giving our children a secular education (e.g. Judges 2:7-15). God's Word clearly teaches that the education of children is a sacred task, not a secular one (Deut 6:4-8, Ps 78: 1- 7, Prov 22:6). Jesus himself strongly emphasized this principle when He said, "Let the children come to me and don't forbid them" (Matt 14: 19), and "Can the blind lead the blind... when a student is fully trained he will be like his teacher" (Luke 6:39-40). The Apostle Paul voiced his concern about the dangers of secular, humanistic teaching. "Be careful that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit based on human tradition and not based on Christ" (CoI2:8).

What kind of education do Southern Baptist children receive today? Nearly 90% of America's children attend schools, which by law must be completely secular. There they spend 16,000 hours over 13 years; about the same amount of time Jesus took to train his disciples. Making matters worse, pastors report very little discipleship going on in Christian homes, estimating that perhaps 5% of their members are involved in discipling their own children. These same children spend around 1,500 hours in church during their 13 years of school, only about a tenth of the time Jesus required to train his twelve disciples.

We have allowed Satan to run his strategy..."own the schools, and I will own the culture." Our children have been actively discipled by the people who spend the most time teaching them, so it is no wonder then that Christian students are involved in binge drinking, drug use, sexual experimentation, and dishonesty with nearly the same frequency as unchurched youth. Despite unparalleled moral and spiritual decay in our culture and schools over the last 40 years, our strategy for reaching and discipling children in most Southern Baptist churches remains essentially unchanged from the 1960s. If we like what we see looking back over the last forty years, we should keep doing what we are doing now. It not, we must evaluate our educational strategy and make some radical changes.

Passing the baton of faith to the next generation requires taking ownership of the education of our children. We must bring those 16,000 hours back under the authority of the Body (the Christian home and church), providing a unity of message between the home, church and school, instead of the schism that now exists. The fallacious notion that our children will be effective missionaries in schools that are increasingly hostile to Christian adults does not pass the reality test. That has been our strategy for the last half century, and the depressing results are evident. The horse is dead. It is time to dismount. We should quadruple our efforts to train and send adults into this mission field, but the children should be trained by Christian parents and teachers under the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Scripture demands that they be trained to know and reverence God.

What is needed is a new "public" school system, one that is open to the public but owned and operated by the Body of Christ. What if America's largest Protestant denomination, the SBC, opened our largely empty buildings to the children in our communities, starting thousands of schools and offering 16,000 hours of Christ-centered teaching to millions of children? Funding is not the problem, faith is. Would God honor such a grand vision for making disciples by providing every needed resource? He will! Ask God to give us America's children. When Jesus owns the schools, He will own the culture and the hearts of the children!

[Ed Gamble is executive director of the Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools, P.O. Box 1204, Windermere, FL 34786; www.sbacs.org, 407-808-9100; edgamble@sbacs.org.]