The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus engulfed America, Kristen Wrobel got the news: “We heard on Friday that there would be no school for two weeks. Which just turned into no school.”
That was the last time her children — one in third grade, one in first —  were in a classroom.
In the beginning, they did the remote-school thing. Wrobel, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, called it a “nightmare.” The Zoom sessions, the Italian lessons on Duolingo, the stuff she had to print out, the isolation, the tears, the nagging, the shuttling the kids between her house, near Burlington, Vermont, and their dad’s, a half-hour away.
“Everyone was freaking out all the time,” she said.
By May, at the risk of violating state truancy laws, Wrobel had stopped fighting and let her kids log on (or not) whenever they felt like it. It was, she said, “the darkest hour before dawn.”
That September, she started homeschooling. She didn’t like all the restrictions her kids’ private school had implemented: Students seated six feet apart. Masked. In wedding tents. Outside.
She figured she’d send her kids back to the school in 2021, after everything had gone back to normal.
That was then. Now? “There’d have to be a revolution in schooling.”
She’s hardly alone. Wrobel is one of hundreds of thousands of moms and dads across the nation who have decided to become the principals of their very own, very small elementary schools.
The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.
In Wrobel’s state of Vermont, homeschool applications are up 75 percent. And that’s in the northeast, where regulations are strictest. The phenomenon is exploding across the country. In North Carolina, the site for registering homeschools crashed last summer. In California, applications for homeschooling tripled from 2020 to 2021. In Alaska, more than a quarter of students in the state are now homeschooled.
In Texas and Florida, parents are not required to notify the state, so it’s hard to know exactly how many kids are learning at home. But just one South Florida school, Jupiter Farms Elementary, saw 10 percent of its student population withdraw for this school year. Almost all of them are being taught at home.
The American Schoolhouse was in serious disrepair before 2020 — about that no one would disagree. But the events of last year tore the whole thing down to the studs. First, the pandemic. Then, the lockdowns. Then the summer of unrest: George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the mea culpas. Many local school boards seemed more concerned about teaching critical race theory and renaming schools than reopening them. Parents didn’t know what to do — what was safe, what was right, whom to trust. It was like being inside a tornado.
These were changes that rocked every American family.  So perhaps it’s no surprise that the homeschooling trend cuts across geographic, political, and racial lines: Black, Latino and Asian families are even likelier than white ones to educate their children at home.
All of this is undermining the old, Democratic-educational complex — the powerful teacher unions and the office-holders beholden to those unions —  that has long maintained an iron-clad grip on tens of thousands of schools and the fate of tens of millions of American students. And it is forcing a long overdue reimagining of the way we educate children: the subjects they study, the values instilled in them, and the economy for which they are being prepared.
In the beginning, the homeschoolers fell into two camps: hippies and evangelicals. The people who thought the corporate-military-industrial state existed to create cookie-cutter yes-men, and those who didn’t want government employees poisoning their kids with talk of evolution and sex education.
But they had one thing in common: Both groups distrusted the establishment and felt they could do a far better job educating their children.
It was the late 1970s. Vietnam had just come to an end, and a long-fomenting conservative movement spearheaded by Ronald Reagan was on the verge of toppling the old political elites and taking the White House. It was a moment of great discontent.
Out of this discontent emerged a cadre of parents frustrated with the mediocrity and bureaucratization of the public-school system.
That group included Roy and Diane Speed, of Bethel, Connecticut. They were unusual: He’d spent high school in Beirut and Paris, and done a Peace Corps stint in Mali; she was a management consultant who had studied chemistry. When their two kids were still young, they started teaching them at home.
“It was a lifestyle choice,” Diane Speed told me. They immersed themselves in the writings of the patron saints of the modern homeschooling movement like John Holt, a product of Philips Exeter Academy and Yale who had taught elementary school and had come around to the view that children should not be forced to learn. “It can get pretty radical,” Roy Speed said.
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If we are going to make the effort of organizing a day of food and games, why not be creative to think of ways of inviting the wider community to take part in the fun? We need to remember that much of our salt and light is the shared life that we enjoy together. The more we can get ourselves out of the building and out into the wider community, the more the basket will be lifted and our light seen.

Here is a question that I hope everyone cares about: How can we do more mission together as a congregation?
Now, there are two ways to answer the question. The first and more obvious answer is simply to do more stuff. More activities equal more mission. Therefore, if we want more mission, we just need to add events to the calendar. The logic is clear here – but so is the cost. Doing more requires asking more of people. If this method is effective, it is also taxing. A church that is intent to always do more will be a church whose members are often flagging.
Fortunately, there is a second way of answering the question. This is not to do more, but rather to do better. Here the objective is to take what is already happening and to continually improve it. Often, this might mean not adding new missional events to the calendar, but adding a missional element to something already scheduled. For example, a youth event can simply be an in-house event for teenagers already attending HEC, or a banner can be printed and a wider invitation offered so that the scheduled event becomes a missional outreach.
The great benefits of this second method are ease and simplicity. By focusing on doing better (instead of doing more) we conserve the limited time and energy of our members. We ensure that people are not so tied up with church activities that they lose their freedom for the other frontlines that God has given them i.e. work, family, friends, and additional service opportunities.
Keeping the latter model in mind, we will soon be adding a missional element to two regular events that happen in the life of HEC.
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Written by Dr. David S. Steele |
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Our response to unbelief is crucial.  The world is watching.  May our apologetics match the biblical model.  And may we proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in a winsome and compelling way.  For in the final analysis, all of God’s elect will hear and believe.

Unbelief is in the air.  Unbelief is gaining ground in postmodern culture.  Over 100 years ago, the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.”
The bankrupt philosophy of the so-called four horsemen of atheism continues to gain in popularity.  Why?  Apparently, unbelief is in.  Unbelief is hip.  But the question that is burning a hole in the table for Christians is this: How shall we respond to unbelief?  How shall we who have a heart for lost people answer when they malign the Christian faith and mock the very foundations of historic Christianity?
The apostle Peter instructs believers to respond rightly: “But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15, ESV).  In other words, we must develop the mindset of an apologist (ἀπολογία).  John Frame’s definition of apologetics of helpful: Apologetics is “the discipline that teaches Christians how to give a reason for their hope … it is the application of Scripture to unbelief.”  Cornelius Van Til writes, “Apologetics is the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy of life.”  Tragically, the mandate to engage in apologetics often turns ugly.  Well-meaning Christians have turned apologetics into a nasty slug fest.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Notice six crucial principles of biblical apologetics.
Apologetics Involves Verbal Proclamation
Christians are commanded to proclaim the good news.  The Greek word, “proclaim”  (κηρύσσω) means to announce or proclaim; to preach or publish.”  St. Francis of Assisi was on to something when he quipped, “Preach the gospel and if necessary, use words.”  The point: Make sure your life matches the gospel.  However, actions alone cannot convert.  Actions must be backed up with verbal proclamation.  “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17, ESV).  Simply put, the gospel is meant to be published.  The gospel must be proclaimed.  Postmodern gurus and emergent sympathizers may be quick to downplay preaching and promote a “deeds not creeds” mentality.  Jesus disagrees: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to the nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14, ESV).  The first principle of apologetics involves verbal proclamation.

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