Family Friday: Fathers and Education
In Ephesians 6:4, a specific command is given to fathers to bring up their children in the training and instruction of the Lord. This command is not given specifically to the church, though the church is obviously concerned about the instruction of children. The command is given specifically to fathers.
At BBC, our mission is make disciples, but that mission has to start at home before it can reach out to a neighborhood or a world. BBC needs to be a place where fathers are taking responsibility for their children. There’s no school, youth program, or Sunday school that will do the job you are called to do. And if we are using those programs, they need to be operating in loco parentis, which is in place of the parents. In other words, those programs are a part of your program for educating your children; you are not handing them over to someone else to accomplish their own agenda for your child.
One of the biggest obstacles for Christians in the city is education. My family has experienced the financial and practical difficulties of educating children in a city with few affordable Christian schools, a tiny homeschool community, and a church without large youth programs. I want to encourage parents and single mothers that the sacrifices are worth it. Whatever you have to do for your kids, just do it. If it means quitting a job or moving, your kids are your most important responsibility. And to the many BBC members without kids, it is your duty and privilege to help families raise their children. My family has been immensely blessed by the friendship and love of BBC members. Though there is no youth group, our kids have a full schedule of fellowship times with church members of all ages, and for all of you, we are deeply grateful. As we drop off our first child at college, we are glad that he has grown up in a church with good friends and good examples of godly friends and mentors.
We want true genuine Christian community, and if anything is a community affair, it’s education for our children. Christian education isn’t free, and it requires great sacrifices from parents and all adults who love the next generation. I would like to encourage everyone, but fathers with small children especially, to make a commitment to begin reading and learning about education. There are a lot of exciting things happening in the world of Christian education, and there are a lot of opportunities as well as hurdles. Though there are many new books and resources available, here is a small excerpt from an address by J. Gresham Machen delivered in 1933. Written almost 100 years ago, his message speaks even more urgently to us today.
The True Solution
But what miserable makeshifts all such measures, even at the best, are! Underlying them is the notion that religion embraces only one particular part of human life. Let the public schools take care of the rest of life -- such seems to be the notion -- and one or two hours during the week will be sufficient to fill the gap which they leave. But as a matter of fact the religion of the Christian man embraces the whole of his life. Without Christ he was dead in trespasses and sins, but he has now been made alive by the Spirit of God; he was formerly alien from the household of God, but has now been made a member of God's covenant people. Can this new relationship to God be regarded as concerning only one part, and apparently a small part, of his life? No, it concerns all his life; and everything that he does he should do now as a child of God.
It is this profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being, which is brought about by the Christian school and the Christian school alone. I do not want to be guilty of exaggerations at this point. A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life -- those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.
I believe that the Christian school deserves to have a good report from those who are without; I believe that even those of our fellow citizens who are not Christians may, if they really love human freedom and the noble traditions of our people, be induced to defend the Christian school against the assaults of its adversaries and to cherish it as a true bulwark of the State. But for Christian people its appeal is far deeper. I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism. If, indeed, the Christian school were in any sort of competition with the Christian family, if it were trying to do what the home ought to do, then I could never favor it. But one of its marked characteristics, in sharp distinction from the secular education of today, is that it exalts the family as a blessed divine institution and treats the scholars in its classes as children of the covenant to be brought up above all things in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.