When Schools Educate Children away from Christianity
Parents, know what your children are being taught. When your children attend special seminars and lessons with outside groups, do your homework and find out what’s going on. Ask the school in advance for information about what will be taught. Debrief with your children afterwards. Listen to their questions with lots of patience and love. Remind them that God’s ways are good and show them how to persist with kindness and grace when our schoolmates disagree. Lest you think this is only an issue in Government schools, this is now widespread among private and independent schools.
A friend’s teenage son recently attended a high school excursion in the city. The day was focusing on empathy and learning skills to understand people who are different from ourselves. Sounds great! There we are discussions about homelessness and disabilities, which is great. Some of the day was about how to relate to LGBT people. It still sounds as though it may be useful. As part of the training, the presenter informed the kids that Christians are among the worst offenders in handing out bigotry. Christians are hateful people who cause all kinds of harm to LGBT people. Indeed, the school children were informed that parts of the Bible needs to be removed.
The boy spoke up in front of the class and explained that the trainer’s claims were untrue; that takes courage. One can imagine how his views were received. The poor kid went home having been essentially made to feel that he and his family were awful people on account of their Christian faith…and his entire class now know it!
Let’s leave aside the overdose of irony about an ‘empathy’ training event teaching kids that Christians are the worst and are bigots, and so are parts of the Bible, the claim is simply not true.
This presenter is simply repeating the popular lie which alleges disagreement equals hate. The correlation is both intellectually and morally insipid. Take Jesus for example. Jesus Christ disagreed with all manner of beliefs and behaviour (including sex outside marriage) and yet he is the most loving person ever to have lived. Indeed, it is his love that drives him to disprove ideas and actions that contradict God’s good purposes. Jesus even went to the cross and willingly gave his life for people who actively opposed him in every way imaginable. Activists, politicians and educators may repeat the mantra a thousand times, but disagreeing on important matters is not equivalent to bigotry and hatred.
And notice the gall of the presenter, who in the name of tolerance and acceptance, felt confident to tell a class of school children about all those hateful Christians and their hateful Bible. According to the group’s website, this organisation teaches 1000s of school children every year; imagine what other messages they have pushed onto children.
In a reasonable world, one might assume that defaming a religion directly to school children in this manner would be unacceptable. Surely inclusion includes Christians? Imagine the public outcry if a school program taught that Islam was evil or that Jews held abhorrent beliefs? Common sense ought to lead parents to trust that schools will object and never use the program again. But in today’s world, schools will probably shy away from doing the right thing because the fear of being outed by activists is tangible and the very long and judgemental arm of the Government is also quite real.
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Regeneration
Sometimes we think of our regeneration as the moment when we first put our faith in Christ, but as Jesus himself says in John chapter 6: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” Regeneration, then, is something that must happen before we can put our trust in Christ. Before we can reach out for the life preserver, we must first be given life.
Regeneration is a word theologians use to describe how someone becomes a believer.
I became a believer in Oxford in 1992, during the spring semester. And as I look back at that time, it’s tempting to wonder, Why is it that I reached out for Christ, while it’s quite possible that the person sitting in the pew next to me did not?
Was it because I listened a bit more closely, or read the Bible more attentively? It’s embarrassing to talk like this, but was it because I was slightly more teachable, or slightly more humble? Maybe I was a bit braver or more selfless than the person sitting next to me?
I’m not talking about taking a huge amount of credit here. Some have said that a person becoming a Christian is like a drowning person reaching out for a life preserver. You wouldn’t exactly say that by doing that, the drowning person was rescuing themselves. But they do at least have to make some effort to reach out and grab it. Christ, the life preserver, is clearly doing the heavy lifting in this act of rescue, but nevertheless, you’ve got to take hold of Him in order to be saved.
Is that the biblical picture of salvation?
At the heart of the issue is the question, What does God actually do when a person comes to faith?
One writer puts the question like this: “When the Holy Spirit regenerates a sinner, does He contribute only some power, such that the sinner must add some of his own energy or power to bring about the desired effect [that’s the life preserver view of salvation], or is regeneration a unilateral work of God?
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Chapter One: Believing The Bible
If you are in Christ, I am your brother. One day we will meet in glory and we will both be right and wrong about various firmly held beliefs. Keep your open-hand items and give grace in abundance to those who don’t currently hold your conclusions. Their tertiary beliefs will adjust over time, and so will yours. The Christian life is one of transformation that doesn’t stop until our breathing does. If you are not transforming in any way, you are drifting. And nobody ever drifted their way to holiness.
That sounds a bit presumptuous, doesn’t it? In Christian debate, it is not uncommon to hear someone give reasons why their view is the biblical view, inferring that the opponent is unbiblical. This book opens with a chapter that says that the first step to accepting the supernatural realm as defined by the Bible is to be faithful to what God’s word says. That is true in all things, and allow me to begin by saying that everything the Bible reveals is perceived in its own time. I have read through the Bible several times and each time I come away with insights that I hadn’t considered before.
Accepting the supernatural view is the sort of thing that will challenge some of our notions, and it may need to be accepted gradually. And even as grace can be shown to someone accepting it in smaller bites, grace by those who are more knowledgable than me can be shown to those who are considering it with a healthy amount of skepticism.
In my church tradition, there are “open hand” and “closed hand” beliefs. Closed hand beliefs are those that one must believe if they are to be a Christian. Open hand beliefs are ones that you can hold to, but these are not ones that Christians should use to invalidate the Christianity of others. A closed hand issue would include a belief in the trinity or that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. An open hand issue would include most eschatological views or what mode of baptism is proper. You can believe you are right and your brother in sister is wrong. You can discuss it and debate it together. But it is inappropriate for either of you to declare the other reprobate just because they think that many of the predictions Jesus gave in the Olivet Discourse were fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
I say all this to confirm to you that your acceptance of the concepts put forward is not salvific. You may disagree, you may agree but to a different extent. That’s OK. If you are in Christ, I am your brother. One day we will meet in glory and we will both be right and wrong about various firmly held beliefs. Keep your open-hand items and give grace in abundance to those who don’t currently hold your conclusions. Their tertiary beliefs will adjust over time, and so will yours. The Christian life is one of transformation that doesn’t stop until our breathing does. If you are not transforming in any way, you are drifting.
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America’s Tug-of-War Over Children
Christians must stand firmly as the culture rages against truth and pushes it further into the fringes of society. We have a duty to be loud and proud about God’s truth, because those who know the truth cannot be deceived. Lies, identity confusion, and disrespect of God’s sovereignty are destroying our children. The side that trains the children will control the future.
Lately, education in America has dominated the news cycle in heartbreaking ways. Battles at the schoolhouse gates are portrayed as just another partisan political conflict. In reality, they are an extension of the broader spiritual battle going on in the world, between God’s kingdom agenda, which pursues truth, and the world’s agenda of deception and lies. Both seek to gain the allegiance of the youth in order to ensure that the children grow up to be soldiers of their army.
But it’s a battle that truth must win.
States like Florida and Texas are partnering with parents in this battle to protect children from deceitful indoctrination, by ensuring that families teach their children about morally sensitive issues, not the state. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a law declaring universal school choice in the state, permitting all K-12 students to use state vouchers for private schools. The state also banned instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity before third grade and plans to expand that protection through twelfth grade.
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