What a
Transcript (rough draft, unedited
version) of:
Tapes by Mr. Charles Crapuchettes on: "What a
Dictated by Chuck Crapuchettes
Produced
by Dianna Taplin
(October,
1993 through March, 1994)
Printed
December, 2005
Eventually
to be published on CD and in book form,
with a study
guide.
(Reiterate- this is just a transcript
as it was spoken,
not a finished
version.)
The purpose of this effort is to preserve the
foundation principles of
When pressed
for an outline, a hit list, or a shortcut, Mr. C replied, “Putting the
principles into practice is more an art than a science.”
Success cannot be guaranteed by a formula, or a list,
or by a rule book or
word-of-mouth.
Every year that passes lends the potential for a subtle shift away from
the original concept, which was based on the school verse: “In Christ Jesus lie
hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
“But seek
first
his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as
well.” Matthew 6:33.”
Table of Contents
Chapter
1 Why Most Christian Schools Are Not
Christian
Chapter
2 Most Christian Schools are strangers
to Love and Grace
Chapter
3 What and How Will We Teach?
Chapter
4 What does a Christian Teacher Look
Like
Chapter
5 What a Christian School Parent Looks
Like
Chapter
6 What Does a Christian Student Look
Like?
Chapter
7 High Cost of Christian Education
Chapter
8 Highlights and Successes
Chapter
10 Curriculum: Social Studies and Science
Examine
the question, "What does a
Why we
struggle with Godly concepts, why Christianity and the kingdom of God and
thinking on the heavenly realm is so difficult for us. That is because we enter this world as
sinners. The Bible tells us we are born
in sin and even if we are born into a Christian family and even if from the
very first words that we hear and from our first impressions and our first
experiences and it would be in a very Godly home the fact of the matter is I
bring into this world my sinful nature and so it's very obvious to my parents
that I am selfish and I am only interested in my own appetites being satisfied
and am oriented around my needs; I am demanding, and even if my environment
were ideal it's very clear to everybody that I'm not ideal; even though the
misconception that we have is that we are born innocent and we come into this
world as naive and untainted by sin. The
fact of the matter is that all of our experience shows that that is not true.
However,
the fact of the matter is not only do I enter the world as a sinner, but my
early training is not perfect. I don't
come into this ideal home, there is no such thing, and so my early training is
really faulty. And it's because we as
human beings are so foreign...we are foreigners to grace and the methods that
God would utilize to raise us if indeed he was our personal human father. And so we are mistrained. We are scolded when maybe we should be handled
physically; we are handled physically when we should be entreated or spoken to
in love. And so we are constantly having
our behavior modified. We are rewarded,
we are bribed, we're cajoled, we are indulged; all of these things to pacify
us. Actually, what parents want is a
peaceful, quiet home and whatever they have to do to get it, they do it. And so we learn how our parents manipulate us
and we learn how to manipulate them. And
we get to a very humanistic level very rapidly so that even if we are raised
under relatively ideal conditions, it all boils down to the fact that my sinful
nature is literally reinforced by the humanistic methods that are employed upon
me. My flesh responds to that so I am
reinforced as an unbeliever whenever worldly methods are worldly reasoning is
placed upon me even as a very young child.
As an
ungodly person and as an ungodly society an outside source of wisdom is foreign
to us. And yet core in the Christian
perspective is the issue of revelation.
From outside of our universe, from outside of any ability that we have
to recognize truth, reality, God has pierced into the darkness and has revealed
himself. That is a core truth of
Christianity, that God has taken the initiative to pierce the darkness. And so a Christian has to accept the fact
that man's highest reasoning is no match for God's revelation. We can only be highly reasoned humans and we
can only operate on a very high human plane and we can be very clever and very
intelligent and even be very wise from the world's point of view, but if we ignore
revelation or if we operate outside of God's revealed truth we are making a
fatal mistake. We are missing ultimate
reality. Because as humans we can only
operate within reality as it appears to us.
But if my perception is faulty, I am going to miss reality. And that is why God has made it possible for
us to not depend on either my wisdom or my perception or yours. Because then, it's who is better? Or who is right or who is wrong? And God has pierced through that muddle of
man's reasoning where we would just muddle around in man's philosophies and
that's where so much of the world's thinking is muddled up right now. Different philosophers come into vogue; come
into style and then they pass away, and another one becomes popular. And God cuts through all of that. And he says, "Thus sayeth the Lord...”
and when God speaks, the argument is over. It is settled.
And so a
basic concept is for us to understand that revelation, that divine input, is an
absolutely necessary ingredient into our thinking pattern if we are going to
move beyond our natural fallen human state.
When we
come to Christ we tend to just add him to our thinking rather than renewing our
thinking process. Because it is like the
natural way to be confronted with Jesus was to have the response that the
majority of the people responded to him on this earth was that, “Oh, hello,
you're Jesus. I’ve never heard a man
speak like you've spoken. And I am in
awe at your wisdom." And we kind of
set back a notch or two and take account of him. But the fact of the matter is when all is
said and done, the natural man wants to say, "Interesting, insightful, I'm
going to have to add this to my compendium of knowledge." Of all the things I experienced as I
accumulate all of my life experiences, all my learning experiences, and all of
my little things I've reasoned through on my own, and I think I've kind of
sorted to a world view that I am comfortable with, and everything else. Now I am confronted with Jesus Christ. And he makes sense. This makes sense. Let's add him to the book shelf. So here's my Christian thoughts.
Now we
don't do this purposely because deep down inside we of the Christian world know
that's not what it means to be a Christian.
We know that being a Christian somehow means being transformed. But in effect that's not how we first accept
Jesus into our lives. There are a few
people who have dramatic transforming experiences, because they were introduced
to Jesus Christ at a moment in their lives when they were absolutely at the end
of themselves. And so to rid themselves
of their database so to speak and to accept a new life was relatively
easy. But only a few people,
realistically, meet Christ under those circumstances. Most of us meet him in some sense of
self-sufficiency. And so we add him as
an insurance program, or it makes sense, it is something else that we add to
our file of knowledge. And so that is
faulty and many Christian schools operate on that basis. That a Christian school is nothing
more...that it is nothing more than the sum accumulation of all the classical
literature and the classical music and all of the great sweep of history, but
we add that Christian flavor, we interpret it all with a religious or a
Christian perspective, we add a class in Bible and we memorize verses; that
somehow Christianizes the process. But
nothing could be farther from the truth.
A Christian mind is a mind that totally abandons and forsakes the wisdom
of this world. It doesn't add Christ to
the shelf. And we are told in Rom. 12:1,
2 that we offer our bodies a living sacrifice and we are exhorted to be
transformed with a renewed mind, that we are not to be pressed into the mold of
this world, but there is to be a renewed thinking taking place, an absolutely
new database inserted, so to speak, so that everything, absolutely everything,
is interpreted with a brand new perspective that is obviously not your
own. It's just not your own. And the only reference you have to your
humanistic past is a verification that God's Word is truth. And you have your own experience too, that
confirms that. You know it's true
because your life story tells you that it is true. But you are willing to completely dismiss the
so-called wisdom of this world. Trade it
in, so to speak, for this renewed mind.
Because
we tend to add Christ to our lives and to our thinking, we tend to approach the
training of children as a blend of everything that has "worked" in
the past. It is practical; Dr. Spock
says it has worked. Your child
psychology classes that you took as a teacher says that this is the way that
you train a child at 5 years and at 7 years old. This is the method you use because his mental
development. And so you somehow blend in
all of those things with snatches of understanding that you have of Godly
truth, those brilliant lights, those shafts of insight that God gives to you,
and that he has spoken to certain issues.
You have to think, "Now how am I going to fit in what God says with
everything else that I know to be true?"
And we kind of put the puzzle together.
Just as I said earlier, the way we have a difficult time replacing our
thinking, we also have a difficult time totally replacing our approach to
training and teaching children. Because
we think, "There must be some good in all of this human wisdom, in what we
have learned in society about training children." But of course society has changed so
drastically and we know that through certain periods of our history and through
the histories of great civilizations they've had varying degrees of success in
training their young children and of course I would say we're successful, truly
successful, to the extent we apply Godly principles whether or not we know
that's what we're applying. But the
point of the matter is, when God speaks to us from the outside of this natural
world, and penetrates our darkness with his revealed truth then we do have
specific truths that we can anchor our entire educational process to, because
they are like foundational stones, they are like building blocks we can
absolutely count on. And if we're
building on these things where God has spoken we know we are on solid ground
and we're not going to have to revise our philosophies so to speak because
we've somehow completely missed the boat.
I would
say as Christian school educators and as Christian parents our motives are
good. We certainly want a Christian
home; we want our children to turn out right.
We want to be proud of them. We
want them to be happy. We want them to
experience the blessing of God. But if
we are ignorant of what it means to be truly Christian, it really doesn't
matter what our motives are. The Bible
says, "for lack of knowledge the people perish." And for the lack of knowledge children are
mis-taught. They are mis-directed. The methods used are wrong, and a lot of the
lack of success that we experience in so many Christian schools we kind of
explain away. You know everybody has
their own will...and of course that's true.
But I think we really don't know what to do with our failures, and with
the sense of failure that we so often feel in a Christian school and not all of
this, but a great deal can be attributed to the fact that we really do not know
what it means to train in a Godly fashion.
We are still counting on a lot of the training and wisdom and it is just
hard for us to sort out in our minds the difference between what God has said
clearly in his word, and what really we have adapted as good psychology, but
it's really man's wisdom.
I guess a
new subdivision of this chapter would be this next part where I am saying that
even the religious leaders of Christ's day were blown away by his
statements. And I am going to quote a
few here. But here's the point I'm
making at this point in the chapter: is that Christ was truly a radical. His statements were shocking, literally
shocking. They were shocking to the
common man in the streets because they said, "Never a man spoke as this
man does with such authority and clarity of thinking. And he's reduced it so simple that we can
grasp it. He hasn't couched it in some
educated jargon where he has lost us almost purposely somewhere along the way
like our leaders do, because they are lost themselves." So they can kind of cover that up in the
process. It is not only that he speaks
with that kind of authority to the common person, but that the religious
leaders of the day were shocked. Now
these leaders were the people of all people that should have understood where
he was coming from because this man Jesus was clearly a holy man. He was a prophet, and if he should have had
an audience with anybody, it should have been the religious leaders of the
day. But it wasn't to the common man
that he said this, it was to the religious leaders. He said..."You are like sepulchers,
graves, beautifully decorated on the outside but inside filled with the
rottenness of dead men's bones."
And as they heard the words of Jesus they were literally shocked and I
am convinced today that Christian schools, if they were to realize, if Jesus
were to come and give us some clear cut statements of purpose or of method or
of understanding of human condition, or of the teaching process I am convinced
that we as Christian educators would be rocked right back on our heels. Our breath would literally be taken
away. And to illustrate that, let me
just share some of the statements that Jesus gave to the people of his
day. He said, "The meek shall
inherit the earth.” That's madness,
absolute madness. Who had inherited
Now, is a
persecuted kid on our playground, the kid who we are trying to defend and who
we are trying to protect, blessed? We
just don't understand that. We say,
well, that has to some how be qualified.
We just don't understand how that interprets in the way of Christian
schools.
He also
went on to say, "If you want to save your life you must lose
it." That's insanity. Jesus, now come on. For a while there we thought you had the
words that would save us and words that would deliver us and now haven't you
gone over the edge? What is this? It says do not fear man who can only kill the
body. You mean there is something worse
than that? Jesus, now wait a
minute. Doesn’t fear man because the
worst he can do is kill you? ... No,
"Fear God who has the power to cast both body and soul into
hell." That's a shocker. That absolutely puts to silence the wisdom of
worldly philosophers. Because he takes
man to his limit and then pushes him over the edge. Literally pushes him over the edge. Every time, all of his statements. In fact, he goes on to say, unless your
righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you will perish. Now look at those people who have literally
dedicated their lives to good works and to measuring as high as they possibly
can in the
He says
statements like this..."I am the way the truth and the life. No man comes to God except through
me." What an exclusionary
statement. And we live in a world that
increasingly is going to rise up against that kind of exclusion. "Come on, just be sincere." or
"We can't say that you have the right way, you’re saying that everybody
else is wrong and you're going to say that man over there in Africa and India
and all those devout Buddhist and how about those Tibetan monks living way up
in the mountains and praying for hours every day and living their whole lives
in celibacy, are you going to condemn them to hell?" Jesus says, "No man comes to God except
by
Now, the
next statement here- Our human nature wants to qualify each one of those
statements. Those are too much...Jesus
didn't mean...we try to excuse him...try to make it look good, we try to make
it palatable. Or, he couldn't possibly
have foreseen the implications for that in today's world and today's society
and we're always trying to modify these
powerful, strong, unworldly statements of Jesus that are so foreign to us, that
even sound strange as they come out of our lips, and we're wondering is that
true, but that's what the kingdom of God is.
In fact, Jesus said, "Let me tell you something: unless you can become as a child you will in
no wise enter the kingdom." Can you
stoop that low? Are you willing to allow
this to be that simple? Not many high,
not many mighty are chosen, God has chosen the foolish things of this world to
confound the wise. That's the amazing
thing about the gospel...but you see, so often we feel compelled as Christian
educators to compete with this worldly system of education and to somehow
measure up to some standard that they throw out there for us. But what we're doing is totally
unworldly. It is absolutely foreign in
culture, in value, in its basic fundamental precepts. It is so different that we are doing
something totally different from what the world is even engaged in. They are training the mind, and what we are
doing is changing a life, an entire person.
Not only a lifestyle, but the person themselves; we are introducing them
to the Lord Jesus Christ who has a claim of Lordship over that life and we are
saying that that makes all the difference... Our school verse is,
So often
our Christian schools are just a result of our perception of: What would Jesus
do. So, we twiddle our thumbs in a board
meeting: what would Jesus do, as if he
was a historical Christian person, figure, who lived 2000 years ago, and we
read the life stories, the four gospels, and we try to amalgamate the sum total
of all his actions and all of his statements and then we try to project them
into today's problem and we say now: what would Jesus do? And we fail to see that that's not even
Christian, that's pagan. Paganism is
mimicking true Christianity. It is trying
to produce it in the flesh; it is trying to somehow parallel it or mirror it or
reproduce it within ourselves, rather than saying, "Jesus, you're here,
this is your school, and we need to hear from you on this decision, and we wait
upon you." It's not: what would he
do; it is...Jesus do it. It is a subtle
distinction. In fact, it is so subtle
that I am convinced we miss it because it sounds so close. The most widely published book in the
Christian world is "In His Steps".
It is...what would Jesus do. And
it is marvelously inspirational but if we don't get to that next step that is
that Christ truly desires to act unrestrictedly and uninhibited in each one of
us that is his ultimate desire that we would be an extension of him. That our hands would be his hands, that our
mouth would be his mouth, that's what it means to be Christian. It is not to mimic him; it is to be him
expressing himself through us. There is
nothing we can do for God absolutely nothing.
He doesn't need anything. He
basically wants our love and our fellowship.
He died for us because he loves us, not for what he could get out of
it. He didn't have an ulterior
motive. He didn't say, "Now if I
can get this Chuck Crapuchettes saved I think he'd make a pretty good Christian
school principal some day. Maybe I can
get that out of him." He loves me
because he loves me. If I never did
anything...that's what it means...unqualified love, unconditional love. And that's the only kind of love that God
knows really anything about. As we get
glimpses of it and experience a little bit of it, it's got a great power to
transform us.'
But
anyway, the important concept here *** is that Jesus does really want to and he
is capable and he is able of running this school. It is just like-- Let Me. And he has always been restricted to using
people. And he uses people in varying
degrees of understanding and we are all imperfect as instruments in his hand
but the fact remains that he is fully capable of being the head of not only the
church but of every enterprise that is dedicated to his glory in this case the
Christian schools. He's not inadequate
for this.
So, what
does a Christian school look like? First
of all I think it is really important to realize that we won't all look the
same. If I could profile for you the way
a Christian school would look and somehow intimate that we would all be cookie
cutter editions of each other, that once you saw Cook Inlet Academy you would
produce your Christian school in the same mold and we'd all be carbon copies of
each other...that would never be God's plan because he didn't make us to look
alike. Look at how different we are in
the family of God. If there is one thing
we learn from creation, it is infinite variety; no two snowflakes looking
alike. And it is the fact that we don't
even get a chance to examine that, to verify that, but we understand from
people who have taken that time that that is true. It's a God of infinite variety. He takes endless pleasure in our
uniqueness. And he made us like nobody
else so he made someone just like me and someone just like you... That was his heart's desire. And the more we become like each other, or
try to, or become like Abraham Lincoln, or David Livingston, or Billy Graham,
or some great man, the less we become like the person he made. And the same is true of Christian schools.
So, what
does a Christian school look like? There
are some characteristics that will be in every school but we will not look like
one another. And that's absolutely
exciting. That our individual
differences and all of our backgrounds and our insights and inspiration will be
expressed through all of these schools.
James expressed his personality and his experience and his walk with the
Lord in the book of James and yet his book was divinely revealed. Paul wrote with his own language style and
his background and all of his understanding of the Jews and their heritage and
all of his tremendous training of sitting at the feet of Gamaliel and yet his
words are inspired. And so Cook Inlet
Academy is a Christian school not looking like any other Christian school and
yet it is God expressing himself through the leaders, the teachers, the board,
in a unique way in our community, meeting the need as God sees fit here and as
we are open to God expressing himself in his unique way here, we will see God
meeting the need here that no other school or no other style could possibly
meet because he has called us and he has chosen to use us in this place at this
time.
Wasn't it
said of Esther that, "God has brought you for such a time as
this." Here is a queen who is
perfectly silent in all of history and yet at one moment in time her one voice
saves her nation that is in captivity because she is willing to stand up to the
king and go into his presence which was forbidden and take the chance that he
might listen to her. And God used her to
intervene on behalf of a whole nation.
And so
God uses us all in very unique ways. So
Christian schools will look different.
And we need to be excited about that.
One of
the things that will help us to understand what a Christian school will look
like is to understand what it will not look like. It will not be money-driven. In other words, the dollar will not be the
bottom line; the making of money will not be the bottom line; the salary of the
teachers will not be the bottom line. We
will not compromise certain things we initially set out to do for the sake of a
dollar, whether it is in the fundraising techniques, the methods, the programs
we use, or the way we collect money that's delinquent, or what ever we do we
will do it in a way that brings honor and glory to God. It will be consistent with the nature of
Christ. It will be an expression of
Christ in us the way that we handle all of our money. Just as money is the God of this world and
drives this world it will not drive this Christian school, and yet a lot of
them will say we've got to be pragmatic, practical, the economics is where it's
at. If we don't take a certain
businesslike approach it is just not going to work. There is nothing wrong with that so long as
that is Christ expressing himself through you, not the dollar bill. Christ wants us to be accountable. Christ wants us to be good businessmen, but
he doesn't want the dollar to drive us.
It's not
need driven. (A Christian school is not
need driven.) The world looks for a need
and then says, "I can generate a product to meet that need." There it is, the man that invents the best
washing machine or the best mouse trap, he tries to see a need and then fill
the market and hopefully get wealthy doing that. There are needs all around us. Every little child represents a universe of
needs but that still does not justify the call because we cannot meet every
need. Only Christ can.
And so
not only do we exist just because there is a need and certainly that is one
reason we exist, but we cannot somehow subtly create our own needs so that we
represent a source of needs in our community.
We need money for our capital expansion program, we need money to pay
our teachers, we need money to put in a new carpet, we need money to buy new
books. If all you have is needs and you
are representing that to the community and you are driving your whole program
on the basis of your needs, it doesn't seem like that much of a ministry. How many times did Jesus express his needs? He met needs.
He didn't meet all the needs.
There was never one time where Jesus healed everybody in the
audience. It was always just kind of a
select few. There are people dying and
starving all over the world, there are neighborhoods all around us with
needs. How are we going to have the perception
to understand just which of these that we respond to? It has to be the life of Christ within us
directing us in such a way that out of our innermost being flows this river of
living water that allows us to be a blessing to our students to their families
and to our little community around us so we are not always being seen as having
our hand out with all of these needs.
But that we are this lighthouse, this happy source of blessing and light
in the community.
You know,
we need to do better at that in our own community. Even the needs that we meet shouldn't drive
us. You see the thing that drives us
needs to always be our response to what the Lord is doing in our life, our love
for the Lord. It can't even be the need
itself. We can't meet the needs that we
necessarily see; we have to meet the needs that Christ brings to us.
Let's
talk about this deaf child that tried to get into this school just
recently. You see how frustrated his
family is because they have him in the only deaf school in all of the state of
And so
you say what would Jesus do and we say well Jesus would have probably healed
him and then he could have heard and he wouldn't have been a deaf child any
more. But the fact of the matter is, as
you just commit it to the Lord and just say, "Lord, I feel so badly about
this family and the situation. It is
causing so much pain and anguish. If it
is in your plan to use this school, to meet this need, you are going to work
this out." And as they go down to
the central school district and make inquiry as to is there a sign language
teacher available and is there state aid available or what kind of a program
can also be meshed in with our school system? "I have to believe that the
way this is all going to be resolved is going to be according to your
will"
And when
all was said and done, the family came here and said, "You know nothing is
working out. I guess it is not going to
work."
So there
was a need. We couldn't meet it. And we would have been literally beating
ourselves to death if we said somehow as a board or me as an administrator,
"I am committed to meeting that need." That really tore my heart. That family needs to have their kid closer to
home. That kid needs to be challenged
academically. We will as a school meets
that need. That would be a serious
mistake. We cannot be driven by
needs. There are so many needs. We can't meet all of those needs. And so we say, "Christ, you are going to
have to direct us and bring to us those people with needs that we can
meet. You're going to have to bring us
together. The services we offer and the
abilities that we have you are going to have to mesh that with the part of the
body of Christ that we can minister to and bring those students to us that you
want there. And when they come here we
are going to have to believe that these are the ones Christ has brought us.
Where do
they come from? I don't know. How did you find out about
How do
you feel about the ones that we had to let go last year? How does that fit into this? Well, I think the families needed to learn a
lesson; we needed to learn a lesson that Bible stories, the gospels, tell us
that there were some people that Jesus couldn't help. The rich young ruler turned away
sorrowful. Jesus told him what he had to
do. Did Jesus fail? Did Jesus fail in the case of Judas? Did Jesus fail in the case of people who
denied lepers? In the case of the people
that didn't come back and say thank you?
You know
there are a lot of stories that could be interpreted and we experience all of
that in the Christian school and we just have to give it to God. And you know one of the things that the
parents struggle with is the fact that " I cannot buy success for my child
and I am faced with the fact that my responsibility as a parent is core to
what's going on in the life of my child and I can't make up for it by paying
somebody else to parent my child for me."
And when they struggle along with
That a lot
of it has to do with submitting to what the Lord has clearly revealed to us in
his word. And we reject or ignore those
truths to our own peril, our own harm.
And our children suffer as a result of our own disobedient
behavior. A Christian school can't
prevent that. One of the greatest
teachers in all of God's system is this cause and effect thing. That we can absolutely count on and one of
the mistakes that parents often make is rescuing their child from a natural
consequence, which very consequence would have been the strongest teacher in
that situation. While the rescuing
actually reinforces the poor behavior.
As that is true, a Christian school cannot intervene as a rescuer either
because then we prevent families from learning that same very important lesson.
A
Christian school cannot even be driven by academics. Academics sounds like a very noble
thing. Shouldn't your school be
academically sound? Shouldn't it do well
on the standardized test scores? Don't
you want to see your students excel?
Don't you want to hear from them as they go to college? If they just score on the top, won't that be
some kind of a measure of success? There
is nothing wrong with experiencing success in those areas, but that can't be
your driving force. Because academics in
themselves, just pure academics, and the only things that SAT and ACT can test
for is something that's lodged in the brain.
They are not testing for character development. They are not testing for values, obedience,
faith, the ability to trust, the openness of a heart to discipline and
instruction of the Lord. And those all
are more important than the academics.
So if you
are driven by academics alone you are going to miss some of the major substance
of training for a Christian child. You
can't even have character development...now character development is a very
noble thing but you can't just have that to be...like if I can just develop a
man of integrity because in early America we had founding fathers, many men
like that who were not Christians.
Because they happened to be valued qualities in
*** I am
trying to make it very clear that a Christian school is something totally
different from even very high and noble purposes and goals, or even
excellence. I have excellence sitting
here over my door because I believe it is such a core of what we see in Jesus
Christ. Jesus Christ represents
excellence. And yet somehow that can be such a worldly term...that somehow you
admire my excellence. I want you to
admire my Jesus. And somehow we can get
so caught up in excellence....didn't you notice how excellent our kids scored
on the text...don't you notice how excellent our facilities are? Don't you notice how excellent our teachers
are? Now we hope they are all of that,
but don't you notice how excellent my Jesus is?
We have to make sure we don't take that one step that goes too far and
detracts from the very core of what it means to be a Christian school. That means to have Christ at the very center,
not excellence. It is a subtle
distinction. A school that does have
Christ at the center will be an excellent school. Excellence will be there, but excellence
cannot replace Jesus. That's the very
subtle difference. And to the extent
that all of these things replace Jesus in our school we cannot look like a
Christian school. It is only to the
extent that Christ is Lord, that he is in control and we are absolutely
committed to the concept that "in Christ Jesus lies hidden all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge."
It is the degree that our school exemplifies that truth it is to that
degree that we're Christian and any subtle reliance on the highest and most
noble values of man is a very poor and worldly substitute for what it means to
be a Christian school.
So we're
talking about a very subtle thing, it is very easily missed. It just makes me weep because some of the
most eloquent speakers I have ever heard speak in our seminars and in our
Christian in-service trainings...they are so close and yet you can see that for
one reason or another it is because of their training in a public school system
or still their infatuation with the wisdom of this world they are just very
close but they haven't gotten to the heart of the thing because the heart of
the thing is always Christ. It's never
anything else. It is so far between
people and preachers who seem to know that.
That's one thing that if we could get this concept into this book
somehow because there are some people going to read this book and say, "Oh
yeah, I've heard all of that before."
I know that, but you see they say they know that but they don't know
that.
I am
saying something, something different and radical here. I am making one of the statements that Jesus
made...It is except and unless you be
born again...It is so definitive. It
focuses in only on Jesus Christ, he is the focus, not only of every pursuit of
knowledge, but the methodology the very method you use is the expression of Christ
in your life, to that child. That's what
we are going to get into in the second chapter...how love and grace is
expressed through the system to a child.
So the method is so critical here.
So, this
book and I will end a chapter by saying something like this: This book is an attempt to help families and
educators dig deeper into this issue. I
hate that statement because it doesn't match in eloquence what we've been
saying here, but if we could challenge Christian families and Christian schools
to rethink some of their basic assumptions and see if there is anything that is
displacing Christ in the operation of that school then this book will have
succeeded in its mission because a Christian school looks like *** Jesus
expressing himself through people to reach out to the world. And that is what it looks like.*** It looks
like Jesus in action, like Jesus there in the flesh reaching out to the needs
of people. And that is what it boils
down to.
It has been
my experience that from the Christian Schools that I've interacted with, that the very basis for the Christian
community and our relation with God is love and
grace --are in rather short supply in our Christian schools. And I suppose the first place where that
really becomes evident is with our rules.
And a thought comes to mind if Christ for some strange reason were to
establish a
And then
I also thought of just a wonderful thing that these documents should be...as a
written reminder of God's faithfulness.
And the thing that brought my attention to that is I was remembering as
God led the children of Israel through the wilderness and they were getting
ready to go into the Promised Land we have this book of Dueteronomy which is
Moses once again standing up against the children of Israel and gathering them
all together and reminding them of what the Lord had said. Remember, lest you forget. This is a remembrance. And I think that maybe the second important
function of the documents of a school should be the recording of God's
faithfulness to that school. The lessons
that God has taught us so that we can communicate to prospective parents, lest
we forget. Not that we are writing a
rule that governs us but it is a reminder to the board, to the faculty, to the
parents, to the administration to the school family that this is who we
are. And this is how God how God brought
us to where we are. How we came into
being. This is our mission. And we have to review this constantly. We need this, the school board, and
administration and you need it too.
Hence we have a policy in our school of every year reviewing our
statement of faith, our educational philosophy statement, some of these
documents that we have in our manual because we just need the reminder of
it. (We, being the faculty). It not only facilitates the transfer of
information to new teachers but then it also serves as a reminder of God's
faithfulness and of the mission to which he has called us.
So that
puts this document in a completely different category than like, say, a rule
book that runs the institution. Then it
becomes like laws and you look up the page number and say "This is what
applies here."
This of
course really stands out in sharp relief in most school manuals in its dress
code because kids and their parents want to know, "How can I come to
school dressed?" What is allowed. What is permitted, and what is not
permitted. And I think one indication of
how committed a school is to having the document run the school, or communicate
the school's philosophy is to take a look at its dress code. Because I think the more a school is
comfortable with the approach that I have suggested- the document being a statement
of philosophy and transfer, you will have a short dress code that clearly
communicates the position of the school on these issues. If it is a long, involved dress code that
goes into minute detail, then very possibly you have a school that has drifted
in the philosophy that the school will be run by that document and those pages
will be referred to often as discipline is brought to bear in the school system
and the student body.
I just
thought of a verse that starts this way:
"hereby shall all men know that you are my disciples," and the
Bible ends that, ..."if you have love for one another." But you can read many school manuals that
might be "hereby shall all men know ye are my disciples by your short
haircut and your necktie." In other
words if we look like Christians, what
we feel a Christian should look like: clean cut, close shaven, girls may even with preferably long, flowing hair,
long dresses, no make-up. Whatever our
vision of what this model Christian student should look like then that's the
way we would complete this sentence "hereby shall all men know you are my
disciples by (fill in the blank.)"
And your dress code shows how you intend for that blank to be filled in. How shall all men know that your students are
Christian students? And our manual says
they shall be dressed in clean and modest apparel. I think that conveys the heart of the
Christian message. Now of course modesty
is interpreted in many different ways and we will have to discuss that with our
students and with ourselves as staff, but is certainly a principle that
scripture supports.
So, I
might just conclude this little section on rules that as I have said, the
document should not run the school.
People should run the school, people indwelt by the Holy Spirit. This makes it very much of a person operated
thing, our teachers, our administration.
I think we want our children to be accountable to people and not to a
rule book.
It's a
valid thing that God has brought us into this community to build relationships
and that remains one of the highest challenges and callings of the Christian
community. We need to start at our
school emphasizing to young people that this whole thing is relational based,
and we want you to relate properly to your teacher, to the Principal, of this
school, to the office staff, to have a good attitude, to rejoice in the
freedoms that you do have and your liberties in a responsible sort of a
way. I think that starts by not letting
the rule book get in the way. Children
should learn to relate to a teacher and to desire in their hearts to please
him. The Bible says a good servant
learns to please his master. You are not
just putting in your time, you please your master. You are not insisting on your rights; you’re
not forming labor unions and picketing for your cause. And yet that whole aspect of servanthood is
lost in our society today. And it starts
with a desire to please, out of a heart that really has come to learn that
there is joy in those kinds of relationships.
Which
leads us into the next area that I'd like to discuss and that is the fact that
this kind of running a school does take a little bit more time. It would be a little bit easier if we could
just go by the rules. Sorry, Bobby, a
rule is a rule and so you are out. It's
a pity that so many institutions back themselves into a corner because that
rule book is paramount, supreme.
But I
have found that if you are willing to take the time to talk to kid’s one on
one, the payoff for that is beyond anything that you could possibly
imagine. And basically speaking, I think
there is a real reticence to spend time with kids. Somehow we feel that talking to them is a
waste of time. I think it is because in
our own family settings most of our
teachers are parents, most of our office staff is parents, and they know that there is a great deal of talk
in the home in the way of discipline or
scolding or moralizing on an issue that seems to have little consequence. And so we tend to place little value on this,
except I think we fail to see that kids see teachers a little bit differently
than their parents. They hear the
parents moralizing over the same thing.
This <teacher> is a new adult that has shown interest in your
life. And hopefully they sense that the
It takes
real discernment on the part of the teachers to see that some of the
differences (in dress) are just the children asserting themselves. And so the fact that they want to be unique
and they want to be themselves, it's really important to understand the child
is really making this statement when the dress is a little bit different from
the others is the fact that: I am me, and if you really knew me for who I
really am, as a unique individual, separate from all of the other students in
this class, with plusses and minuses, but mostly minuses, would you still love
me? And I am going to test you. I am going to act this way, I am going to
dress this way to see if you are still going to extend yourself to me with love
and acceptance and deal with my imperfections in a Christ like way? Or will I experience rejection which has been
the pattern which the world has shown me all my life to this point? And I think there is a real issue that is
going on in the mind of a child; and that is: Could you possibly love the real
me?
So a lot
of times they will overdo it; they will go to an extreme in behavior or
dress. But really it's a cry for the
fact that I am not like Johnny on my left or Susie on my right. I am me and as Me do I have worth? Do I have value? And is your love capable of reaching me?
If we
really desire change in the life of a child, we certainly want that change to
come from within because anything else is just pasted on. And if we are going through some kind of
superficial charade in our process of molding children, then it's a sham, a
mockery, and the hypocrisy of this grounded and built upon ..they will someday
reject it. I think we have to encourage
this change within, the desire to please.
I think it was James Braley, a man who has been in Christian education a
long time--this is his phrase, "Changed lives changing lives." We could say that all Christian education is
a changed life, changing the life of another.
If that
kind of an impact isn't made then we are truly falling short. They may as well be in public school. They have the knowledge base, they have
bigger libraries and more computers, and the access to just pure information is
probably more available there just because of their facilities and their
financial base. They can buy those
things. But "changed lives changing
lives" is absolutely unique to a
Moving on
to written records on students that are a part of any school by necessity-
report cards, cumulative folders. We say
that they are necessary. The public
system seems to demand it. It seems to
be our accountability to the State Dept. of Education, that we somehow track
these students and show some measure of accountability in the way that we are
tracking them. But it is so easily
abused. What are we willing to make
permanent concerning the life of a child?
What will we track? His failures?
Many schools require a written narrative record of every time Johnny misbehaves and a certain accumulation
of these is going to require a parent
teacher conference and a few more accounts will get a
parent,teacher,administrator conference,
and then maybe the board, and then maybe expulsion. But it all has to be tracked how Johnny has
failed; how he's missed the mark. They
are going to track his poor attitude and behavior, his lack of
cooperation. Are we going to say that
this record that we are going to hold forever on this child is going to show
how BAD he is? And what a failure he
is? OR, are we going to make a decision
as a school that the permanent record of this child is going to also be an
outgrowth of the love and grace principle operating in our school? And so is it going to be a record of the
growth and progress of the love of God operating in his life?
Now this
is an amazing concept because it seems like an unequal distribution of the
pluses and minuses in the child's life.
Shouldn't you record the pluses if you are going to record the
minuses? And is seems that there has to
be some fairness here because a child isn't perfect and we're not saying a
child is perfect. But there is policy
that I think was first brought into the
Now, that
absolutely sounds like it can't possibly be.
Yes, Jesus Christ dies for my sins and so I am guaranteed a home in
heaven and my future is taken care of.
But the fact of the matter is, salvation takes care of all the sins of Chuck
Crapuchettes. And they are remembered
no more and I am clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And when God sees me I am justified in
Christ. I get the credit for the track
record, not of Chuck Crapuchettes, which is a pitiful track record. My track record now reads like the track
record of Jesus Christ. That's my
cumulative folder. When they pull out
my cumulative folder in heaven, somebody ripped out all the bad stuff. It's gone.
There's one little page and it says this man has been credited with the
sinless life of Jesus Christ.
Now
that's just a mind boggling fact.
Totally mind blowing. Do I
deserve this? No, but that's what grace
is. Grace can only be extended to one
who is unworthy. If you are worthy, it's
not grace.
How is grace
going to operate in our schools unless something that superficially and in the
flesh does not sound fair- be extended to our children??? That's grace. You say maybe that would work
in a church but not in a school. Ah, but
this is a
God has
blotted out our record forever, the record of our moral failures. Can we offer our students less? Of course the answer is obviously no.
Moving on
to policy. There is so much written
today about policy and most of it in good faith. ACSI has policy manuals for this and
that. Standard policies as the basic
document and you can vary it according to your own needs. But I see it as a kind of necessary
evil. In some cases it is good, but it
can tie your hands. Here again, how is
the school run? Is it run by policy, but
the handbook, or is it run by Christ? I
think basically we should see policy as a document of philosophy. What is the way we want to approach these
situations as a school board, or as an administration? Not the rule kind of policy that says,
"On the third offense there will be an expulsion." But a policy that
says "We will approach these kinds of infractions with these kinds of
corrective measures. This is kind of our
thinking in this matter. And I am
comfortable with policy that spells that out because we always have new
teachers; we always have new board members.
They need to have some kind of a document that gives them the flavor of
the school. And the manual that you hand
out to parents or to students would become too cumbersome and a lot of
extraneous material if you had all of your governing policies also in this
manual, so you do need a policy manual.
But I think it needs to be engineered in such a way that basically what it does is to say that we see love and grace
operating in these situations consistent with
our school statement of mission and purpose. We see that the outgrowth of those policies
to be this in this situation and to be that in that situation. Guidelines.
And it is
so easy to have your policy tie your hands.
A policy can almost be like a promise of the board to itself that the
next time this happens we will do this.
I remember in the Bible a story of a man who celebrated a victory and
say, "The first living thing I see as I come home I will sacrifice to
God." And it was his own
daughter. And to make good on his policy
he had to kill his own child. Well, he
tied his own hands by making this promise to himself and to God. And when policy manuals become that confining
and restrictive, they have gone too far.
They need to facilitate the operating of the school, they need to leave
room for flexibility, for board members and administration and even teachers,
to operate with the freedom of the Holy Spirit.
To look at that individual situation and using the wisdom that God gave
them to come up with a decision.
The Bible
says, "If any man lack wisdom, let him ask it of God;” but if you have a
policy manual you don't have to ask God.
You can short circuit the whole thing.
And of course that is an easier thing to do. There are a lot of times I wish we had a
policy just for the sake of it avoids me turning to the one who is running this
school and say, "I am in desperate straits and I need to seek your wisdom
here." No, I just seek page 92,
it's faster. It's a cop out. But so many cases that's what policy manuals
do- they keep us from having to do it the hard way of where we really wait on
the Lord. And receive from him the
wisdom he wants for us. We're not asking
wisdom from Him and so we don't get it.
So it is
very easy to allow grace to be in short supply and let policy take over.
The final
statement I would like to say: that love
and grace are desperately needed. A
student doesn't have to be in this school very long before they know how
important they are. Some Christian
Schools, a student can walk in and he knows right away he is a number and if his performance isn't up to snuff...it's
the School that's important; it's the
School's reputation that's important;
it's the School property that's
important. It's a School rule
that's important, and he's just a tiny cog in a big wheel, and he doesn't count
for much. He knows that kind of
intuitively, instinctively, the way he is treated in a school.
Sometimes
we think we can fool our students with this.
And we say, "Oh yes, we are a Christian school." Does love and grace operate in your school? "Oh yes", well, let’s ask the
students. "Oh, well, they don't
really understand about love and grace.
They wouldn’t even understand if they saw it staring them in the
face." You tell me that a 13 year
old girl doesn't know love when she thinks she sees it? Or a 16 year old? Or a 6 year old?
A child
enters our school with needs, hurts, some with deep scars. How can we operate an institution that's
going to avoid confronting those issues in the life of the child? That kid literally has needs that are crying
out to be fulfilled. How dare we march
him into the classroom and say open the math book and do the first 10
problems? If there are aching issues in
his life the math is not important; it has no application to where he is in his
life. Love and grace have to come
first. We don’t teach math in this
school. We teach children in this
school. The child comes first. We don't teach English, we don't teach social
studies. We teach children. We teach God’s children. They are his children, and we are accountable
to him for the way that we reach out to them with love and grace and minister
to their needs.
To the
algebra teacher it is the quadratic equation that has to be conquered
today, and yet if he has 3 kids in the
classroom that have parents on the edge of divorce, no food that morning, because an alcoholic
mother is still recovering from an alcoholic
night the night before. Some have
major crisis’s going on in their life; maybe they walked out of the home in the
middle of a big fight. There is no way
the quadratic equation has any relevance to that child. And so it is really important to realize that
we have to commit ourselves to teaching children.
Who will
communicate God's love to our
My
contention is that if you do not address anything that is in the textbook,
don't even open it, but, for example,
just talk about people in Europe, talk about western heritage and how our heritage came from
there, but basically what we are going to
emphasize is the importance of people that lived in Europe, years ago,
throughout history. How are we like they? And how are they like we are today? What are the similarities and
differences? And once we try to explore
them in the context of who we are as a person, we never open that book. Then we take the final test at the end of
that book you will not score less than a person who is just rigorously had his
nose put to the grindstone all the way through that book and he was disciplined
and he was scolded and he was treated poorly.
His whole diminished self-worth, his whole attitude he will do worse on
that test than if he never even opened the book. Because just the eagerness of just the
natural curiosity of learning will take him farther than harsh inhuman
discipline. I will think that thought
through a little more and get to it again in a later chapter.
There is
something in our flesh that says now this can't be right. There has got to be some kind of
accountability for our misbehavior. That
only makes sense that if I fail God's
moral law then not only should I pay some kind of natural consequence for that which most of us do. But there's got to be some ultimate
consequence because isn’t the moral law kind of an eternal law that you can't
break without getting away with it?
There is somehow build into us this concept that I will answer one day for
this moral interpetude. And I
should. We don't have any problem with a
preacher that waggles his finger right under our nose and says "you'll
answer for this some day." And
there is something inside us saying "Yeah, I probably will." It just makes sense. That's justice.
But you
see we don't ask God for justice. If he
ever gave us what we deserve, it would be hell.
That's what I deserve. So the
point of the matter is: the thing that
makes grace so incomprehensible to the human mind is that "Yes
exactly. I don’t deserve it." That's the very basis of how much I qualify
for grace. Because grace can only be
extended to that which is not worthy.
You see I have to think about that;
I have to mull that over again and again. Jesus, are you really offering me total
absolute forgiveness? My sins are washed
away, and not only washed away so that my past is just this big black hole that
is empty. You fill that with your track
record. I am credited with the track
record of Jesus Christ. That becomes my
past. Paul says, "I am crucified
with Christ." What he is really
saying there is that when I come to
Christ and say, Jesus, I believe you died for me, I believe you made a
payment for my sin, I believe that as
you hung there on that cross that you made the absolute and total final payment for my sin. There is nothing more I could do. I could not even do any more than what you
have done. You have paid the ultimate
price. And Paul says, "I am
crucified with Christ." When was I
crucified with Christ? When Christ was
crucified. He isn't crucified
again. He did it once and for all. He died for the sins of the whole world.
And when
I reach back through time and accept that and say: God you are my
substitute, you died in my stead, then I
also reach back through time and realize that God does not transform me now at the moment of my
salvation. (blank space..end of tape...)
Even
though they know theoretically and theologically the concepts of grace and
love, they have not been overwhelmed by it.
It's not a reality in their life.
And though there is no way that I can genuinely extend grace to my
students if I haven't been the recipient of it.
It's just plain and simple. I
cannot do in some kind of a clinical antiseptic sense where I just kind of can
transform this and let them feel love and grace. If it hasn't been a dynamic experience in my
life, there is no way I can communicate that to these children.
And I
think we have a lot of teachers who are at different levels of experiencing
grace and love in their life. And to the
level that they have experienced it, that’s the level that their children are
going to realize it. And we can't even
imagine how our schools actually throttle the operation of love and grace based
on the response of the teachers to love and grace in their own life. We have the power to really stem its flow;
stem its cleansing tide by failing to allow ourselves to be really overwhelmed
with the reality of what God has done for us.
You know
just to graciously bend over beside a little six year old boy and to talk to
him like he is important, like he's loved.
His heart just leaps within him.
It’s never failed. I am always
amazed at the response to love. One of
my real sadnesses (real word?) is that I know that these kids will not
experience any more of that than I am willing to allow God to operate in my
life. It drives me, it compels me it
propels me forward into my walk with the Lord that I could just drown in the
sea of his love. Because if I don't,
they won't And what I refuse in my life
as far as allowing God to work in me and
refuse to cooperate with what his spirit is trying to do in me then my children pay the price for
that. And they probably will never know
it consciously but they will suffer. And
that's why in James it says, "Let not many of you desire to be a
teacher." Because of the
accountability that is there because you are actually duplicating
yourself. The Bible says when a child is
fully developed he will be like his teacher.
And wow, that's probably more of a responsibility than most of us
teachers really want to face. And apart
from the grace of God, we can't.
A school
that is a stranger to grace can generate all kinds of problems for itself. Seventy to eighty percent of all the problems
that a school spends time trying to fix are problems that the school
generates. A teacher or administration
that has been raised in the worldly system and even though they make some
concessions to love and grace, they aren't drowned in it or overwhelmed by
it. So there is no way to communicate
that to the students.
I want to
say this in a gentle way. I want this
chapter to not be accusatory. I want
them to just see the potential for change in their school that love and grace
can bring, once it is an operating principle.
You can't have it operate just by deciding it’s going to operate. You have to surrender to the love and grace
of God so there has got to be a genuine revival in soul and spirit and the
discovery of what it means to have an exchanged life first before you can ever
let that be the relationship with your students. Once that starts to happen, it will be just a
transformation of night and day in the schools.
You don't
use the world's method of motivating by spreading guilt around. Good behavior is motivated from within by a
desire to please. "I could never
hurt my mother this way." "I
could never hurt my Lord this way."
And I want to please them.
We want
to know what it is that will empower a child to live a righteous life. And the answer is clearly given to us in
Titus 2:11. It says, "For the grace
of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men; it teaches us to say no
to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright and
Godly lives in this present age."
It doesn't say the wrath of God; it doesn't say the fear of God, but the
grace of God.
The fact
of the matter is, we don't believe that.
We could never say that out loud to each other. But the pure simple fact is that we do not
believe that. Grace of God is what it
takes to teach a child to say no??? to
his worldly passions, to his self control, to help him live an upright and
Godly life? He needs to be overwhelmed
with the fact that God gives him what he doesn't deserve. Once that really registers on his
consciousness and on his subconsciousness, he is absolutely and eternally
indebted to a God like that. I owe him
my life. My wonderful Lord justifies me. How can I go on living like an animal when he
has graciously given me heaven's best? I
can't refuse, I say no to that
lifestyle. That's what empowers us to
say no. And yet I don’t even know of a
If we
indeed see the grace of God as being weak and lacking in ability to change us
then we have failed to understand the grace of God. And so we are admitting to our own ignorance
of grace and love when we say, "That won't work." When God says it will.
Most
people don't know about grace from experience. they do know about it from
the pulpit and theologically, but it is
not part of them; but they do know about
wrath and they do know about fear.
I like
the statement that I coined: "I get the credit for the sinless life of
Jesus Christ." because it sounds so radical, so outrageous. If that doesn't grab your attention, nothing
will. Because it sounds so unfair, and
that's what I like about it. Because
it's not just--- That's what grace is...
It is the unjust extension of God’s mercy.
These are
powerful, powerful truths, and I think this is where we fail our children more
than anywhere else. We don't operate on
this basis because we don't believe it will work.
One
example is a student (TK) who transferred here in his junior year. He had gone to Christian schools for his
whole life; I think he'd been to four
And the
interesting thing is, the Bible says clearly that David is going to reign from
This is
from a Russian student, "Just last year I didn't believe in God, but He
sent a group of American kids from Soldotna to Provideyna, all of them were
Christians. They told us about God and
Jesus Christ, but it was very hard for me to believe because I was born in a
communist country and the main idea of communism is that God is a myth. But now I am a Christian and I believe in
God and in Jesus Christ and my life has become so much better than before
(sic.). Because when I have problems or
troubles I can always tell him about it and know that God will understand me
because he loves me. When I was not a
Christian, I believed in coincidences, but now I don't. How could it be a coincidence that when the
first group from Soldotna came to Provideyna and everybody was very shy and
nobody really wanted to talk with one another that Mr. C was the first American
with whom I began to talk? And she was
my first American friend and I remember that moment very clear (sic.) And nobody could guess at that time just one
year later that I would live with her and go to her school."
We teach
children, and that seems an obvious mission for a school of any sort and
especially a Christian school, but I would like us to think about that for a
minute because I don't think it is as obvious as it appears. I think all too often we focus on
academics. The fact is that our job is
to provide these young children with skills and the knowledge base that they
need to function productively in society.
They've got to be productive members; they've got to lead successful
lives in some way or other and if we don't transfer to them those skills that
they need, we're not doing our job. And
so there's a focus on that. And then of
course we know that once a year we're going to go through some annual testing
and we'd like to test well, we'd like to score well. It makes us look like we're doing our job.
And of
course one of the reasons we like to focus on academics is that it is more
measurable than some of these other areas that we are going to be
discussing. And since it is more
measurable, we know what we have to do to raise this score and so we are going
to work on those things to raise the test score. And of course the fallacy here is that we can
feel very good about ourselves, and maybe overly good about ourselves if we end
up scoring well and think to ourselves well, we've done a good job....and
parade our test results to all who come and say this is a measure that will let
you and anybody else know how well we are doing. Actually we could be failing miserably as a
school and still have good test scores.
That's probably not the way it would work but it is a possibility.
But
actually I think we have the cart before the horse if we're stressing academics
because I think the struggle that many schools are having with academics is
because when you put that first, when that is obviously your prime thrust, the
students sense it, the parents sense it.
The homework assignments, everything that hits the home, that impacts
the home, gives them this message: this schoolwork is the most important thing
your kid is involved with. This is what
his life should revolve around right now and as parents we want you to
reinforce what is going on here. You put
so much emphasis on that that it actually disenfranchises a child and a family,
if somehow he senses that he is of less value than that book that is sitting in
front of him, it obviously doesn't make sense.
Because, intrinsically you are telling him that this is a Christian
school and God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son and no
where in that message does it talk about mathematics or algebra or
biology. And yet you are trying to make
it mean that to him. And really the
first message that we gave him was God so loved you, Bobby, and we immediately
get the focus off of that and say get your nose in a book. It doesn't ring true; and I think if Bobby
realizes that God does love him, and if we are addressing Bobby, his needs, and
who he is becoming, the academics will follow.
And if instead of pushing academics...push Bobby, lift up Bobby,
encourage Bobby. In that process the
tasks that you are asking Bobby to do will come along very naturally and quite
easily.
This all
makes sense because one of the basic Christian principles is: Who we are and what we become is more
important than what we know and what we can do.
Consequently, our job is to teach these kids how to live. You can't really live algebra. Somehow it doesn't transfer very easily into
building relationships and learning how to forgive one another, and learning
how to build trust and those sorts of things that are so important for everyday
life.
We must
teach these children how to live. And
you say well that's not the job of the school, but the fact of the matter is,
if these children are living well, are living correctly, the business of school
becomes so much easier. And so we must
address those imperatives. So that the
secondary task of our school which is to cultivate his mind becomes
easier. You can't put his mind before
his emotional and spiritual parts because what he is feeling is going to
overwhelm him and what you are trying to put in his mind is blocked because he
is feeling sorrow (his mother and father are getting a divorce, his dog was run
over in the street yesterday) and you are going to act like that is
meaningless?? He is supposed to forget
that?? He is supposed to get to the bottom of this quadratic equation? And that matters more at that moment in time
than those big issues that he is feeling and is hurting?
So
consequently a Christian school teaches children; children are the prime
focus. What this child is becoming is
more important than the knowledge base, just the skills that you are equipping
him with.
ACSI has
done us a wonderful favor by developing a curriculum around character
traits. They have listed 50 of them and
if you will look in the appendix of this book we hope to get permission from
ACSI to list them there and their definitions.
They don't exist anywhere, a summary of all that is going to be a useful
tool. Look at the appendix and you will
see what we mean by teaching character traits to your children with scripture
references to go with them.
Of course
when you are teaching character it is more than just a lesson, and I think this
is why character training is so often not done in any great depth in a
Christian school is because really we teach more by example than any other way
and when we as teachers realize that it is contingent (right word?) on us (it
is our job) to model, we look at our failures and our weakness, and we tend to
back off. Yet we need to hold up God's
expectation for us in these areas of character traits.
A
Christian school believes that the teacher is the curriculum. This is a key point because in a secular
school a curriculum can be pointed to as hardware and maybe even software in
the school. It is that manipulative,
it's the textbooks, it's the scope and sequence that is published by a
particular publisher. Your curriculum
could exist somewhere in a curriculum library, on the bookshelves...there is
our curriculum. You want to see our
school, come and look at our curriculum.
Not so at a Christian school.
Because we know that with the best computer labs, the best biology labs,
the best chemistry labs, the best physics labs, the best PE equipment, the most
wonderful set-up that you could possibly pour into a school- the teachers have
the ability very easily to absolutely make the educational process in that
school ineffective. Poor teaching, poor
attitudes, corrupt people can literally corrupt those children. It doesn't matter how marvelous the
curriculum or facility is, actually the key thing in that school is the teacher,
because the teacher is the thing that interprets all of the things that lay
around in the room, these things that should facilitate the learning process
and give it a human value, give it a human dimension. We were not designed to learn from computers,
we were not designed to learn from any way of processing information. We were designed to learn from people. The Bible makes that very clear. The father is to teach his son; we are to
listen to the elders; the young Jewish men went periodically for training, they
were found in the temple, they were reasoning together over scriptures. We see this down through all
generations. We would be deceiving
ourselves if we are thinking that we can somehow streamline and modernize this
learning process to escape the human element; that we are going to forget the
teacher, we are going to set every child in front of a computer and somehow
transfer that information into him. Yes,
we could transfer the database, but we couldn't teach character. It must be modeled. We can't teach the life values, we can't
teach the human dimension which is where this will all play out in its own
life. And as he tries to relate to it
realistically, and so the teacher is the curriculum.
And
because the teacher is the curriculum, we have to hire teachers in our school
that exhibit those character traits that we want our children to model. And so as we have a teacher application blank
rather than just a list all of his academic qualifications and all of his
experience and we have page after page of that and then we say and by the way
give us three character references. That
should be the major focus of our investigation in the background of this person
because he is moving into this school to be the living curriculum. His life will live out, and not only will his
life live out but he will interpret for the class every sentence that is
stated, every bit of subject matter, every art project, every musical song that
comes to that room. It will be
interpreted and be evaluated by that teacher.
That's why scripture says, “Don't many of you desire to become teachers,
because you are asking for yourself a greater judgment, a greater
condemnation”. Look, that's exactly
what's happening. You are responsible
for so much, you better be very careful that you know how absolutely critical
your job is.
So on top
of those character qualifications you are looking for in a teacher we're not
going to disqualify all of them because they are not perfect, we're not going
to find one. I would say the most
important one is: are they humbly
growing in their walk with God? Is this
a person who realizes that there are areas of growth and says I need to grow in
this area; I want to grow in this area.
This models for the child on of the most important Christian virtues,
the fact of discipleship, a following
hard, a pressing hard after Christ and being open to Christ working in
us to transform us from within so that we are more Christ like in the way that
we respond to others and the way we approach our world.
We can
find a teacher. Those teachers are
findable. Not perfect models, but
teachers who say, "I want to be known as a disciple of Jesus Christ." Someone who personally is growing in his walk
with God.
Because
we teach children, we will have to be bold in the fact that we will also teach
values; that there is a right and there is a wrong. God has spoken clearly in scripture. There are some absolutes. Society is awash in the concept that whatever
is right for you is right for you and whatever feels good is maybe right for
you. But there are no real
absolutes. We have subtly bought into
that in one way or another. We have
bought into that and that’s one way we express our individuality. And of course we are all unique individuals,
but it doesn't mean that we live in some kind of a moral vacuum where there are
no absolutes. There is a biblical basis
for our moral behavior so we must teach scripture. God, the Lord Jesus Christ, must be at the
center of every thought and everything that is taught in our school.
Education
cannot be divorced from our convictions.
You know the secular world wants us to believe that is possible to teach
in some kind of a neutral zone, but it is a myth, it does not exist because if
you can divorce education from your convictions, if you are not convicted about
the things you believe or teach then there is no real thrust, there is no real
dynamism, there is no commitment. We
realize we can't do that. Education is
an extension of our convictions. The
public school is an extension of somebody's conviction, the way the books are
written, the way the curriculum is written, and the way every classroom is
controlled. And so that is true of a
Christian school.
I am
surprised by how many Christian schools do not teach Bible. Most Christian schools that I know of do not
teach Bible. They figure there is no
credit in the educational process for Bible.
It's not required. Language is
required, mathematics is required, social studies, those sorts of things, but
Bible isn't required. So it's kind of
taught incidentally by a devotional period, a memory verse, and maybe they will
have a chapel session. And incidentally
you are supposed to understand that because your teachers are Christian and
that's the slant, the bias that is given in almost every classroom, that you
are going to be instructed in the things of God.
I think
that it is absolutely imperative that we turn that around, that every school
teaches Bible as a solid subject, the most important subject. And that children not be given the option of
failing Bible. At
The Bible
says, "The entrance of thy words gives light, giveth understanding to the
simple," and if we really want to give our children this wonderful
advantage of not only having the indwelling Christ within them, but of having
the purity of his truth continually washing their minds can you imagine the
advantage that will give that child as he approaches every subject that he has
in life? We must teach the word of
God. Jesus looked at his disciples and
said, "Now are ye clean through the word which I have spoken unto
you." It's washed you; it's taken
away the dross and scum of this world's reasoning, and rationalization, and
excuses for failures. And as God's word
comes to us crystal clear, all of a sudden we are cleansed in our
thinking. And we can go from there to
math or to history or to any other subject much more ready than we could
otherwise be because our mind has been sharpened by this two edged sword. We've been given discernment, the ability to
see truth. And we are going to recognize
error immediately. But we don't
recognize error if we can't put it along side of truth because all of us have
the capacity to be deceived. The only
thing that is going to keep our learning oriented to the solid rock of God's
word is the truth itself; constantly there we are being exposed and washed by
it. And then we are going to notice the error and reflect it when we see it.
Not only
do we have a Bible class but the concepts of scripture, the biblical world view
must be integrated into every lesson. To
eliminate God is a sacrilege. (I would
like a paragraph that develops this.)
Basically what I am trying to say is that here is God who says, "I
am the way, the truth and the life,” and everything that is made is made by him
and for him. Everything! And then to
dish it out to our children in the absence of that God is an outrage. It's an outrage. It's sacrilegious. To divorce Him from all of this which He has
done, it's an expression of His nature, it's an expression it's an expression
of His wisdom. It is unthinkable. Yet even Christians will say, "Let's
close our Bible, we've said our Amen, and now let's dive into this biology, or
let's dive into this geology. Let's take
mathematics or any subject which we might consider the most secular in nature,
the most easily separated from the truth of God and assume that we can make a
series of statements about this word problem or about this mathematical series
of equations that exclude God is also an outrage. You say, “How do you involve God in that
process?” There are many ways but one of
the ways that I notice more clearly than anything else is that children who
have a problem learning, the problem is disobedience. Once a child can see that as he goes through
a problem......here's how I notice it: I
have a 5 step sequence that I ask my kids to go through in solving a physics
problem. First I say visualize it in
your mind and draw it out. What are they
asking you in this story problem? Some
of these physics problems are very complex.
And then I say let's go shopping for a formula that will help us to do
that. I list the 5 steps and if they go
through the 5 steps I've rarely met a child who has a problem. They get going on their assignment, they come
to my desk and they're stuck with number 7.
My first question is "Where's the picture?" "Oh what picture?" "Remember Step #1?" "Oh I didn't want to do that." It's disobedience that they don't want to do
that so now they're lost and the lostness progresses because they really have a
heart attitude that says, "You know Mr. C I just really want to be done
with this and get a grade for this assignment." And I am his teacher and I say, "I want
you to learn this. I want you to submit
your will to the discipline of this assignment on your life. It is a spiritual issue. The Bible says in Hebrews 5 that even Jesus
Christ learned obedience though things that he suffered. Are you higher than Christ? Are you trying to avoid suffering and pain in
your life? Yes, let's go for the steps;
it will all come together, you are going to learn it, it is going to be easy
for you. Not only will you learn it, you
will be able to teach it because you are going to thoroughly understand it; you
are going to master this material. And
how will you know you have mastered it?
You will go to the board and say, "Class, I will solve #7 for
you." And you will blow us away by
your clarity of thought. It is because
you have agreed that you are not doing this for a grade, you are going to
surrender your mind and your will to learn this material. You want to learn that. It is a spiritual issue.
Mathematics
is a spiritual issue. And once you have
got beyond the grade and getting the assignment and beyond meeting a deadline
and say NO I am going to submit myself to the discipline of this subject
matter. I want to learn it because my
elders who are in charge of my education have decided that this is good for me
and I have signed up for this course and I will not try to short circuit the
process. I will learn it." When a child understands that it is a
spiritual surrender of his will to the truth, he learns it.
To go on
with the biblical teaching, I have a list of some of the things that I think
the Bible program should include: It should include concepts that are basic to
the Christian world view. "How does
a Christian see his world?" Then
those concepts have to be fleshed out with those Bible stories. So that's why these kids have to become
familiar with the stories of the Bible.
They are the things that give life and meaning to these concepts that
Christ is trying to convey to us. And
then there is some basic doctrine and I think a school has to be careful that
they don't get into those areas that are distinctives of separate
denominations. But there is a tremendous
basic core that we as fundamental evangelical Christians all subscribe to. We need to teach that as a teaching. A kid is not going to know that just through
some osmotic process. It's going to have
to be carefully laid out to him, following a curriculum. And he is not going to know these great
truths of God's word unless somebody takes the time to share it with him. He may or may not learn it at church. He may or may not go to church. And somebody has enrolled him in our
school. And it is our job to convey to
him the same truths about prayer that George Mueller knew, the same truths
about missions that Hudson Taylor knew, the same vision for the lost that the
Apostle Paul had. And he is going to get
it from a disciplined approach to teaching these concepts.
And then
memorization: Memorization is almost the
ultimate surrender of the will because the mind rejects the discipline of focused
concentrated effort which is involved by memorization. And there is such an
emphasis in our society today that rote memory is not only a waste of time but
is almost a cheap shot at the educational process. But it is such a marvelous discipline. Those people should not ever be found in a
gymnasium working on some kind of a treadmill or bicycle because what a waste
of effort just to go through those motions.
And yet those same people who say you shouldn't do those mental
gymnastics go and pay good money, memberships at a spa, and do that themselves
rather than getting up and climbing a mountain or doing something productive,
maybe digging up a field and doing some farming. So membership is really wonderful. It has been a characteristic of believers
down through the ages to hide God's word in our hearts that we might not sin
against God. And that will not come to
pass unless we make a specific effort to do that.
We need
to teach discipleship and that is the fact that God wants us to learn from one
another, and preferably from someone who is your elder, mentor. In Cook Inlet Academy we have a discipleship
program for our upperclassmen where they are paired one on one with an older
person who can share their walk with God who can spend an hour a week talking
about their life and their walk and scriptures and pray together and to be
discipled.
And then
I think a good balanced program has an outreach program. It teaches kids that to go beyond yourself,
reaching out to those who have a need, to carry the message of the gospel and
not just the gospel, but Christian love and charity to help those who need help
is not only a duty but a wonderful privilege.
There is so much blessing that comes into our lives as we get out of
ourselves and allow our hands to be the hands of Christ and our very bodies to
be his instruments to bring blessing and hope to a world that is feeling so
hopeless.
Then these comments on excellence: I think that I see a lot of Christian schools
who think, "Well, because I am Christian and because we are run by the
church, or run by donations or our teachers get a substandard salary or our
facilities are substandard that everybody should understand why our effort is
substandard, and why our expectation is substandard. It's just because it's just a Christian
effort, it's just done as kind of a charity.
And you don't have to give a charity your best. And nothing could be further from the truth. Excellence should be the hallmark of a
Christian school. To do whatever they do
to the glory of God; to do it well; to do it as best as they know how, with all
of their vigor, with all of their enthusiasm.
Not excusing slothfulness or laziness.
One way I
think will help us to focus on that is, "How would we treat the children
of a royal family?" Let's say the
King and Queen of England asked you to come and be the tutor for the family
children, how would that change your expectations? Well, you'd have high expectations, great
respect for the child. He's
royalty. And a great sense of importance,
of an important job, this boy is going to be the next king and his training is
in my hands. And you have a sense of
destiny, a sense of almost impending great accountability and something that
you can hardly put your finger on, but you are just literally overwhelmed at
the importance of your job. And the fact
of the matter is, we are training a royal family. The Bible says that these children are going
to be kings and priests in His eternal kingdom.
That's exactly who we are training.
And we would scarcely recognize these children a thousand years from now
as they are majestically sweeping through space or some celestial job in the
entourage of angels and as they go by there we say well I recognize that face,
isn't that little Patrick who we had in preschool, isn't that so and so?. Look at that awesome responsibility that God
has entrusted. Look at how God has put
his glory and his grace upon them. Wow,
what a privilege to have a part in their life.
And I am afraid that some of us would say, "If I had known what
these people were becoming I would have had a much greater sense of destiny and
urgency in my teaching process. And I
would have realized how much it was worth, my best and highest effort, rather
than making excuses for the fact that I was having a bad day or I wasn't
feeling well, or what can you expect anyway and I've got no prep period and
when do they expect me to eat my lunch?
And all of these things can easily weigh a teacher down ...than to just
realize that we've been given the most wonderful privilege of ministering to
these young children. We are teaching
royal children.
Skip to
the question on excellence...Is it everything you do needs to be the best you
have to give, not everything that you expect the child to give?? There is a subtle duality here because we can
become perfectionists. And one of the
biggest struggles in the life of a perfectionist is..You
get less than perfection and then you are disappointed. There is a difference between saying well
because it's not the best I won't give it the best and use that as an
excuse. And I think schools that say,
for instance, that gives this image of excellence by saying, "We're number
1, we're the best, we have the best athletic team, we have the best facilities,
we are going for excellence, that kind of excellence can supplant Jesus
Christ. That's a worldly view of
success. All of the trinkets, everything
that attaches itself to that kind of almost a false excellence.
dt..Is
that showing your excellence? What you
are talking about..the good kind is..is giving your best to improve your
school. Showing excellence vs. giving
excellence.
cc..Exactly. Jesus is excellent. He is most holy and most mighty. Everything that we do should reflect His
excellence. Let me put it this way. We have secular schools that have excellent
swim programs, excellent writing programs, etc.
What I am saying is that you can have excellence as far as the world would
judge it without Christ. That is the
kind of excellence we don't want to focus on.
We want to focus on the kind of excellence that is an outgrowth of an
excellent savior expressing His beauty and His majesty through His creatures.
It is a kind of an outgrowth of who we are rather than adornments we attach to
ourselves. Let's say we had just built a
new swimming pool and the public school had the #1 team in the state and we had
the 15th team in state. If our kids are
great testimonies they radiate the love of Christ if they are doing their
best. If everything that we are about
exhibits the love and the joy of Jesus Christ; if out of their lives comes
flowing a blessing of God, then we have an excellent team. After the meets are all done the kind of
comments that you hear in the crowd, "Did you notice the kids from so and
so Christian school? Weren't they
wonderful?" You see it doesn't
really ultimately matter who won or lost, it is the impression of a transformed
life that in this world is incredible.
And parents of every stripe are attracted to a genuinely radiant
teenager. You can't fake it, it is hard
to fake. But when the excellence of
Christ is radiated in their life, it is something that is beautifully
attractive.
That is
where we are headed. It won't always
happen, but that is why excellence is there over my door. That is why my job is not done when I go home,
whether it is at 5 at night or
Refer
back to the attitude part:
I am
teaching the Jr Hi language class for a while and am on the diagramming; these
kids are struggling. It is not a
grammar problem, it is an attitude problem.
Their problem is a heart attitude.
You know I couldn't even teach this school if it wasn't for behavior and
attitude grade. Because if you tried to
bypass that part of the process and make the child feel that that is not
important then you are not teaching Christianity because there has to be a
change of heart. If there is not change,
then nothing is happening of real value.
If you throw out God, you just dig a deeper and deeper hole.
dt..question...How
did you come up with all of this?
cc
answer...Most of it is experience. Most
of it I have never read any where. No,
most of it was not in my head when I started here. I really like teaching. My teaching gift is not a spiritual
gift. If I wasn't a Christian, I would
be a good teacher without Christ, just because I have that ability from the
world's standard. Mostly that original board
had just heard I was a good teacher. It
wasn't for really spiritual reasons, I don't think, because I didn't like the
idea of a Christian school, I was reluctant to come here, I didn't want to come
here. I couldn't visualize how it would
work. So this came to me bit by
bit. The Lord just said it would be an
on the job training process and show you the only way this is really going to
work.
I've made
probably more mistakes than right things.
But you learn from those you know.
It really
concerned me that when I came back the outreach program was gone. It wasn't really the fault of the people that
were left with this school when I left.
It was the fact that Satan made a massive invasion into this
ministry. He knows that if he could hit
hard enough he could eradicate this and be done with
Some of
the principles I knew from my heritage, growing up in a Christian family. But they started to gel in my mind the year
that I put the board off. They asked me
to do this and I said no. And then the
Lord put me through the ringer. And I
substituted in just about every school in this borough. He showed me some things that I was shocked
at. And then I kind of felt Him saying,
"Ok Chuck, what do you think? Is
this where your kid is going to be? And
how are you going to rationalize it? And
what will happen to your child if they aren't here?
On the
first day I asked how many wanted to come to this school and only 3 raised
their hand and none of them were my own kids.
It was just days before school began that the Lord gave me the idea, I'd
never heard it anywhere else, for weekly report card and behavior and attitude
grades. Thos were two insights and I
don't know whether they came in a dream or what. Because I can't imagine even thinking that
up. I thought, “How am I going to enlist
the parents in this process?” How are we
going to make this work? Writing
devotions was the third thing. They were
going to write me a page once a week to let me know where they were. I had to know what they were thinking and
where they were. I wasn't going to just
teach bodies out there. We had to
establish some kind of relationship.
Those were three things that came before school started and I have to
give the Lord the credit because I don't know where it came from. I never read it. I can look back now and say, at least from my
point of view, those were the salvation of the school. Because it helped me get a handle on where
the kids were by reading their devotions and the behavior and attitude let the
parents know what was going on in the class and that weekly report card made
them accountable for the week's work.
And if something was to done, anything was not done in a particular
subject they would get an incomplete. That they could not pick and choose in
this school what they were going to do and what they were not going to do. It was assigned and you were going to do
it. And that was a totally new
concept. It was like shopping in Safeway. I couldn't believe the attitude these kids
had. They just went grazing through my
assignments. And yet even today after 22
years I have parents objecting if an incomplete shows up on the report card and
one little thing is not done. And I just
look at them with love and tell them that one of the reasons we have had
success with kids is because of that policy.
It is one of your best friends.
We can't let our children decide what they will learn and what they will
not learn. If I can't justify an
assignment to a parent, then we need to talk about it. But once we have agreed what they will learn,
then for all the children that will be that assignment. And until it is done, it is an
incomplete. These kids make wonderful
progress because they are accountable.
Accountability is just so lacking in our society today.
So, with
those three things God was rescuing me from disaster. In the beginning I would go to the kids about
every two weeks to keep the anticipation up for feedback on the new things we
were trying. If the new stuff was a success
we kept it. If not, I said to them that
it was a disaster, they would agree and we would throw it out. They grew with me. When you are willing to admit your own
failures the kids see you are human and they feel free to make mistakes
themselves. You don't have to be perfect
to be accepted. Then of course, loving
the kids is the secret. They know you
love them; you can't fake that. That has
taken me longer than anything else: to really be broken in my own spirit and
heart where that I could look at the most ragged muffin little guy who is
rebellious and actually, totally love him.
I just love him into a behavior change.
This last
week we had a kid we thought we were going to have to kick out of school. The parents were frustrated; the teacher was
frustrated; but I wasn't really frustrated because I knew what we should do. I said we should spank him. But they didn't believe in spanking. So I asked them what they wanted done but
they asked what the alternatives were. I
said, "You don't understand.
Spanking is the last alternative.
“I listed all the things we had tried, explaining that we were at the
end of our options. "Now,” I said,
"It is up to you to come up with the alternative."
The next
day was worse. So that night I phoned
the parents and said it wasn't working.
After much deliberation they said I could spank him. But I said to them that I didn't want to talk
them into anything, that this could end in a lawsuit, that they had to
wholeheartedly subscribe to that. After
another long deliberation they said I could spank him, so I told them I was
writing down the decisions. I thought it
was over, but he showed up at
It has
taken everything that kid had to get turned around, but it was never going to
happen till Mom and Dad were convinced.
A lot of
parents have problems. Is this going to
be a place that can reach out to them in love, and help them?
One of
our parents is a lady that never graduated from high school. She said, "You know Mr. C we are so poor
that we can barely keep our kids in this school. I never got any education. I never got beyond the eighth grade. Could you be my teacher? I tried to explain that I didn't have much
time. She asked that if she bought a
book, and did the work, would I just look at it. I agreed.
She wrote a letter expressing her sincere thanks. "I thank you for helping me with all of
this. I praise God for you. I don't know of any principal who would take
the time to help a student's mother to learn.
There is no way for me to attend college with the children. . So
this is the answer to prayer for me. I
have been praying God would help me. So
then I just felt comfortable asking you for help. Words cannot express my thanks to you." She is saying thanks for making her feel
important enough to help. That's why our
philosophy statement says we don't enroll students in CIA, we enroll
families. We are not going to take your
kid. But if you want to be involved in
this process as a family, education is a family thing. We can't, won't do it outside of the context
of the home.
***there
is a section here not typed. It refers
to the downward spiral and ramifications (financial, morale, worldliness,
spiritual) during the disaster period, and Satan's hard push. Refer to tape if the info is wanted.***
If
anybody should recognize what a Christian teacher should look like, it should
be a Christian school principal, and the Board members, those in the
administrative position, looking for this person who is going to fulfill this
role. I think it is really important
that they have a mental vision of something that they want to see in this
person. This is what they are looking
for, fairly well defined. Now
remembering again one of the things we said in the beginning, Chap. 1, What
does a Christian school look like, and we agreed they will not all look exactly
the same. And this tremendous variety
that God has built into His creation has reminded us that sometimes
preconceived notions about certain things can be very limiting, too limiting.
And so
the intention, as we describe the Christian school teacher, is not to limit
what this teacher is going to look like, but to lay out some kind of
fundamental concepts about this person that we want to know about, and patterns
that we want to see in the life. We
assume that the reason we are looking for these qualities is that these are the
things that parents care about. After
all, we are a ministry to children who are part of Christian families. And we are called to do a job in the greater
Christian community, to minister to children.
Now a lot
of time has been taken in many books which have expanded the professional
qualifications. It is not the purpose of
this text to go into that except this much:
I would say that it is very important that when a principal and a board
is looking at a new teacher that we see if their level of mastery of the
subject matter is somehow couched in the framework of the great Christian
worldview. In other words, many of these
candidates will come from secular institutions.
Or even coming from a Christian institution it doesn't mean that they
have a Christian world view, because we have a lot of liberal Christian
colleges out there. And they are
training these college students in a very liberal mind set. They come away from these schools thinking,
falsely so, that they have received a Christian education. And actually the only thing Christian is some
word in the name of the college or on the diploma somewhere, but really has
very little to do with the humanistic outlook that they have received from
their professors, from textbooks, but from the whole atmosphere of the whole
educational environment which has been very secular.
But
moving on past the professional qualifications which as we said are covered
rather extensively in other publications, these are the personal questions that
I ask teacher candidates that come to this school because actually what we are
really giving to our parents and what we are really giving to our students more
than anything else as a teacher is a role model. To some extent we would like the facilities
to be adequate, we would like out textbooks to be up to date, we would like
other things to meet expectations. Above
and beyond all that, the teacher is the key in a Christian school education
because the teacher is in fact the curriculum.
And scripture does tell us that a student will grow to be like his
teachers.
But some
of these questions that I have listed here seem to be rather bold and maybe
invasive. Yet, I think if we take too
timid an approach in our investigation of the candidate we may not uncover the
type of things we really ought to know, and have a right to know, and have a
right to be able to express these concepts to the parents that we are serving. And a lot of this is just not found in the
resume. It is not just superficial
stuff. So I think we have to be ready to
do a little digging. One basic
fundamental concept of the Christian community is that we have a relationship
with each other that is deeper than the superficial relationships of the world
because there is a commitment here. We
have some real commonalities. The more
we share them and the more we explore them the better we will know each other
and the more we will grow and are committed to growth in the Christian community. And so since this is going to be a dynamic
living stone in this building we are building we want to make sure that it is
alive and well; and it will take a little investigation.
The first
question I ask all candidates is: What
is a Christian. And that definition
gives away a lot about this person's entire understanding of the whole position
of lostness of humanity. You see one fundamental concept that the Christian
philosophy of education holds is an anathema to the public system is that we come
born into this world children of the devil.
We are sinners by basic nature.
That is the absolute flip flop of the public sector which says that we
come innocent, naive, and all this corruption is placed on us by environmental
factors. In fact they violently object
to this and so I want to know in this description of what is a Christian
through my follow up questions I will ask one that is: If this person is clear as to the need that
the human race has for a savior, if there is a real clear understanding. We have many people interview in this school
fully assuming that they were Christians and fully assuming that they were
qualified to teach in this school and we might say assuming or expecting to be
hired and after the discussion of that first question it was evident to them
and to us that they were not a Christian.
And that statement never had to be made by me. It was just a conclusion of the follow-up
questions. They take it that we here are
a pretty narrow brand of Christian, that there are not too many Christians that
fit this narrow category, that I kept narrowing it down to a personal savior,
that works, and that living this good lifestyle was separate from our need for
Christ to forgive us. It was very difficult
for them to realize that, but when they finally did, they'd say, "I don't
think I am who you are looking for."
The next
question goes a little further into revealing where this teacher really
is. How has God changed you over the
last few years? This is a very
insightful question. In fact, many
teachers are not prepared for this kind of an interview. They think that you are going to ask about
their professional training and about things that you saw on their resume and
something about a previous employer. But
these personal questions throw them a little off guard. And yet that tells you about the person, and
it also tells them a lot about our school:
that we want to know who you are.
And who you are matters more to us than what you can do, in a
sense. Because if you are the right
person, it won't be long before you are doing the right things if you are open
to that kind of change in your life. But
if you aren't the right person there is almost no amount of training that we
can do. In fact, we are not prepared to
take that chance with the children, to put that wrong kind of person here.
So, How
has God changed you over the last few years?" is going to take a lot of
introspection. Change? Let me see.
Did something need to be changed?
So it is going to tell you right away if this is a person that has any
self-awareness of a walk with God. If
this person is growing; if this person
actually sees himself as a pilgrim making progress (as in "Pilgrim's
Progress"). Are they going
somewhere? Do they sense a spiritual
journey? Are they being honest about
real, deep issues in their lives? Or,
are they seeing this whole thing very superficially? And of course they are entering a spiritual
war zone that a person who is really unprepared should not enter. And that is why you want to start at the very
first, making sure that this person is aware of what are the spiritual forces;
what are the stakes in the game; what are some of the consequences of being
involved in a ministry like this?
(perhaps
here insert some anecdotes on spiritual warfare)
And maybe
they would just as soon be a public school teacher where that spiritual
dimension isn't so much in the forefront, you might say.
I always
like to ask them, "What is your relationship with your parents?" Because this tells you a lot about their
early life. In fact they usually start
with the way it was and the way it is now.
It is a very insightful way to find out about how they have arrived at
their present state in life. The Bible
tells us a lot about fathers and mothers and what we receive from them. And some of these people will come from
Christian families and some from non-Christian, but it is important if they can
identify strengths and weaknesses in their homes, the kind of heritage that
they received from their home, whatever it was
Where do
they stand with their parents right now?
Let's say a candidate said, "Well, my father and I are not speaking
right now." I would certainly want
to explore that a little bit to see if I could understand why, because it could
also be that this candidate is not speaking to their spouse or maybe not on
speaking terms with a boss or a parent.
What is it that blocks this and can it be determined from an interview
such as we are having? Whose is the next
move and how could this be moved off of dead center. So our relationship to our parents is very
important. A lot of our understanding of
God's relationship to us and our understanding of the way that he treats us as
his children is our perception of the way our parents treated us as children
and our response to that training process.
And since
that is so basic to the way that person's life was put together in their
formative years it bears a little exploration.
Because I think you can learn more about a person in a shorter period of
time if you can ask the right questions.
And that is one of the right questions you need to ask.
The next
question, "How have you resolved your past moral failures?" Now they usually stop and think for a while
here, because they wonder first do you have any business to ask them about
their moral failures. Why couldn't you
just say failures? Or are you saying
sins? But you didn't use the word
"sins" because that would be a cop out; that would get them back to
their salvation experience which is question one. And they could say I just asked Jesus to
forgive me so that is all taken care of.
But that
question is raised in such a way that they wonder, "Now how much of my
past do you have a right to know? And
since you used the word moral, are you talking about my sexual
failures?" Now that is not
necessary. Lying cheating, a lot of
deception is also a moral issue. We are
moral creatures. We are involved in a
value system that we are always up against and failing our standards, if not
God's standards, on a pretty regular basis.
But the question here is,
"How have you resolved these?"
It is another way of saying, "How do you handle guilt?" What role does guilt play in your life? And you try to ask the question in such a way
that you don't use any of those words that will trigger a quick, unthinking
response. You want them to have to think
about the question. And so you ask
them: How have you resolved your past
moral failures? You see the Bible says,
"All have sinned and come short of the glory of God."
So they
sit and reflect and say, "Now what does he really want to know about
me? Now basically all I am looking for
is for somebody to say, "But for the grace of God, I have laid them at the
feet of Jesus." And I don't know
just how they will say that but it really boils down to: Has this person really experienced at an
emotional level, at a feeling level, not just a factual understanding, but at
an emotional gut level have they felt the touch of God on their life? Have they experienced forgiveness and do they
understand that their status before God right now rests on the merits of Jesus
Christ and not on their own.
Now you
want to ask a question that can get that answer without giving them any clues
as to where you are going with the question.
As you see them stumble around there, and you keep them going, you just
keep throwing the ball back in their court but what you are trying to
understand is- is this person really a recipient of God's grace and what is
their understanding of that?
Now that
is really important because we are working with students who want a teacher who
understands grace. This is a theme that
we have seen in prior chapters in this book.
And it must operate on a personal level in this teacher's life. It has got to be more than theology. And so you ask them a very personal question
about their moral past and you watch them stumble around with their answer and
it will give you an understanding of where they are in this issue of grace. It just exposes them wide open. So in a sense you might say it is a little
unfair, and yet you need to know that, and you need to see how open they are to
growing in that area because we all need to grow in an area like this. But a person who is very defensive about
this, a person who says, "I thank God I was raised in a Christian family
and I never did get into sex and I never did get into drugs or cigarettes and I
just thank God for it. If you detect a
real self-righteous attitude and a real perfectionist defensive posture, maybe
this person is not being too real about themselves and will be very judgmental
when confronted with other staff members, or by their own students that don't
seem to be measuring up to that kind of a standard. This person doesn't know how to give moral
leadership because basically they are in denial on moral issues. It is an area that they have blocked in their
thinking processes.
Then I
would ask them, "What does it take to maintain a healthy
relationship?" The Christian life
is a life of relationships. We are born into
God's family and that's the most marvelous thing. This candidate may or may not be
married. But the key strategies of
relationships are involved with parents, with students, with staff members,
with staff members, with administration.
And I want to know if this person knows what are some of the
fundamentals of establishing and maintaining a relationship. Do they understand how important
communication is? This flow of sharing,
of talking, of disclosure, we call it. I
can't just assume that I knew what you were thinking, and you can't say that I
thought he knew that. No, that is where
misunderstanding takes place. We just
have to take the time to communicate.
Does this
person understand that he joins this little community of school people here which
is a separate little mini-society here, a little microcosm? And communication is going to be very
important. Does he understand that there
needs to be commitment, a loyalty, develop between these people he has a
relationship with to protect them, to defend them, to love them. To nurture and nourish them. That's all part of the process. Does he understand how love and forgiveness
operates in the development of this relationship?
So you
are looking for those words. And if he
says, "Well, I don't know what you are getting at." And you just have
to say, "What I am getting at is- what does it take to build and maintain
a relationship? And if a relationship is
not strong, how would you advise somebody to strengthen it? What is it going to take for you to have
strong ties and to build strong ties in this school, with the administration,
with the faculty, with your students, and with their parents? What is that going to take on your part to
have healthy relationships? Do they
understand that? Sometimes they see
themselves as just a mechanic, a very clinical person, who dispenses knowledge,
grades tests, gives a grade, and goes home.
<I just want to teach math. I
don't want to be involved in their lives.> You see that person doesn't want
to teach here then, because you join a Christian community here. And there comes this big sense of commitment
and if this person is not willing to make this kind of a commitment to all of
the relationships an all of the ties that are involved there, then they have
applied at the wrong place.
And you
might ask the question: "Describe
your walk with the Lord." <Well,
I get up every morning and I do this and read this and do this> It is
interesting to just hear them say what they do.
And I think the way they answer that you might be able to tell how open
and honest and how much of a real person they are. You can kind of tell how much reality there
is in that statement. It doesn't mean
that everybody has to say, <My walk with the Lord could be better> which
is basically a standard statement that many of them say. But, "Is it alive, is it something
real?" Has Jesus Christ ever become
a conscious reality in their lives, so that they actually relate to Him as a
living person within them, not just beside them? Or not just somebody who helps them. He's not just a helper, like a sidekick,
somebody you hand your books to when they get too heavy. He is an enabler. He lives within you and the fact that most of
what we do in the supernatural order of things like loving and dispensing grace
and mercy and being this kind of a role model which is almost a supernatural
thing. Apart from God's life within us
expressing His life within us in this vital dynamic way we are empty
shells. We are just gongs and tinkling
cymbals as 1 Cor. 13 says. You've got to
be more than that. You've got to be
genuine. You've got to be the real thing.
Describe your walk with the Lord.
Tell me how it is. And it won't
be very many sentences before you will know whether the relationship that they
have together between them and the Lord is a vital, real, dynamic thing.
And then
since so many Christian schools deal with so many churches, I would ask this
person: Describe the church you prefer
to attend. And it has to go beyond a denominational
label. I want them to describe the
church. What about a church do they
like? What do they want to see in a
church? Which tells me what it takes to
nurture or nourish them spiritually.
What are they looking for? Are
they looking for a place to minister?
Are they do -or - works oriented?
Are they looking for a place to be filled? Are they looking for a place where they can have
fellowship? People of like mind? What are they really looking for? And will they say, "I am looking for
people who believe like I do?"
Ohhh, what sorts of things? And
if the first things that jump out are denominational issues then that sets up a
little flag. Because it is not that we
don't all go to some kind of a denominational church, but if it is really important
to this person to be fellowshipping with the people who major on the same
little denominational distinctives and those are big issues, those things could
be big issues in the classroom. They
could be divisive issues among the faculty.
And basically I want to know how important are the denominational
distinctives for them. And it is at that
point in the interview that I express to them that there will be students from
many denominational groups here and that it is the intent of this school to respect
all of those; to keep away from denominational distinctives. And I would ask them how would they react to
that? Would they truly have a problem
with somebody who has a different interpretation on a certain passage of
scripture?
Then I
would ask them a question that seems like it would have already been covered
before, but: How are you being
discipled? What this says is that we
believe in this school that the teaching / learning process is a cycle that we
are involved in all of our life. And we
don't want somebody here to just teach our children. We want somebody who, themselves, is a
student. Because if they are learning
and growing, they will be in this wonderful teachable mode that will make them
grow along with us as a faculty, grow along with us as a school, grow in their
walk with the Lord. Do they sense that
they, as a Christian friend, the administrator of the school, another Christian
partner so that this business of accountability in their walk with the Lord is
a part of their understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Many people coming into the ministry today
have never been discipled. They have
just always thought that part of being a Christian was-- well, you go forward,
you get saved, you go to church, and you just grow. Well, where is the accountability? Have you ever talked with the preacher
personally about your walk with the Lord?
Your struggles?...<Well, no, we have a very large church. I never talked to him personally> Well, who have you ever talked to personally about
where you are, on a rather consistent basis, about intimate type things, where
they really get to know you? <well,
nobody like that> Well, Where do you
see discipleship as part of God's program for His church? <oh yeah, I think it is important> Well, if you have never been discipled, are
you willing to be discipled? <Oh I
suppose, what do I have to do? > Well
you just have to find a friend, and talk about the Lord with your friend and
about how things are going with you.
This could be your husband or your wife, or it could be another
person. It could be in a small Sunday
School class; it could be in a home Bible study. The setting is such that you are committed to
discussing your walk with the Lord with another friend and growing in that
relationship. You are not going to talk
about just the weather, or about your hobby, or anything else. You are going to be talking about scripture
and addressing the claims of Christ upon your life. And the reason this is important is because
we are in the business of discipling.
That's what this school is all about.
We are showing children how to be accountable to other concerned
Christian brothers and sisters for their daily lives. I'm not talking about some sick way where we
all know everything about each other. I
am just talking about a very healthy way where relationships are maintained and
where we take seriously our growth and our walk with Jesus Christ.
And so, I
find that many people just don't understand.
They think discipling is a great idea, but they've never been discipled,
and they wouldn't know how to disciple anybody and they've never been involved
in this process in any shape or form.
And yet somehow all of a sudden they are hired in one sense part of
their job is to disciple. The kids are
going to be writing devotional messages to their teachers telling them about
their spiritual walk and the teacher is going to counsel them in some kind of a
discipleship type of arrangement and they are going to find themselves suddenly
in the midst of discipleship and if they don't even know what that is about,
that needs to be addressed in the interview.
So, that's always an interesting question.
And then,
I like this next one. Describe a recent
crisis you have faced. And they will say
<a crisis, a crisis--I can't think of anything bad ever happening to me-- oh
yeah, my friend's mom died about 10 years ago.> And I think:
man, that's the worst thing that's happened to you? Basically speaking, we all go through
crisises on a fairly regular basis, at least every 2 or 3 years something kind
of major. And I suppose somebody could
drift along 5 or 10 years without a crisis.
But if a person could really look back on their life, and I am surprised
at the number of people who cannot identify a crisis. There is a lot of blocking going on
there. There is a lot of denial of
feelings. As I start to investigate,
either they have been through a crisis recently and were in denial or didn't
grow at all from it. Or once in a while
I will come across a candidate who can very clearly identify a crisis, (they
got fired from a job, a very embarrassing situation, or a very close relative
died, devastating experience.) And I
want them to describe that and kind of walk me through that crisis with
them. That will tell me a lot about
them. Will they admit to the fact that
they struggle with some anger and some resentment. And for a while they were disillusioned about
God in their life. There was a while
when He didn't answer prayer, apparently.
And that was frustrating. How
honest can that person be about those very disillusioning experiences? There is nothing more private almost, than
our personal disappointments with God.
How can I tell you that I am disappointed with God when He is high and
holy and can't do anything wrong? I am
not supposed to say that and yet that is a fundamental and human
experience. I want to know how human and
honest that person is who is applying for this job. Can you say, Yes, I was hurt, I was in
anguish, I was in pain? God did not
answer my prayer. And I will know as
that person has gone through that crisis, and if they went through that cycle
that we see in the grieving and healing and recovery process that person has
grown by leaps and bounds through that experience. And that is stronger, more mature person who
is going to be better able to handle the whole panorama of things that are
going to be thrown at them at this Christian school. And it is very important to me to know how
that person has come through that kink of a crisis, and I hope they can find
some recent experience in their life to identify it.
And then
leaving the things that we might call just really a spiritual area to go to
another area that really tells you a lot about their lifestyle is a private
question about their lives of indebtedness.
How much money do you owe? Here
again you see, they have a perfect right to tell me, <you have no right to
know this> and I would have to agree; I am not talking about my rights
here. I would like to know. Would you like to tell me? And if they say <no, I'd rather not tell
you> that tells me something about them.
If they own up to huge debts that they and maybe their spouse went
through college, let's say $40,000, as they discuss that, I'll see their level
of anxiety about that, how important is their paycheck. How desperate are they financially? Because a desperate person behaves quite a
bit different from a person who has this rest that God wants His children to
have. And a lot of times maybe through
not very wise choices in their past they have accumulated a lot of debt. And that does become an over-riding issue in
their life?
Quite
frankly, if a person is seriously in debt, all other things being equal, that
person is probably not going to be a good candidate to teach in this school
because that paycheck is going to be a little bit more important to them than
it really should be or than it would normally be. Now it is important to all of us, and we
believe that a workman is worthy of his hire.
I am not talking about that. I am
talking about the fact that most Christian school teachers are underpaid. Satan is going to use this as a point of
discouragement over and over again in this person's life. The shortfall of funds, not enough money to
go around, how is that person going to adjust to that? And as those financial pressures build up
personally for them in their own home in their budgeting process, how is that
going to spill over into the classroom?
Are our children going to suffer because this person has allowed
themselves to be boxed in by the pressures of this world to the extent where
they truly are not free to minister in a spirit that is resting in God's grace
and peace? Now it is conceivable that
somebody could come and apply for the job and admit, give ownership to a great
pile of debt, but truly demonstrate a complete reliance on God. <I know that God is going to meet my
need.> And I know as they walk me
through how they arrive at this debt and their attitude about it and their
trust in the Lord they may be able to convince me that this is not going to be
an overriding factor.
But just
the way they answer that question will let you know where they stand on
indebtedness and how much that is going to affect their performance in the
classroom.
I hope
that our school is never independently wealthy, never has a source of revenue
that doesn't have to depend on the tuitions for the basic part of its
budget. Because the more financially
secure you feel, the less accountable and the less responsible you are to those
to whom you administer. Just as I
believe the only government that we should have is a totally impoverished
government that literally has its hand out begging for every dollar it has to
spend. If you finance government to the
hilt, give it all the money it wants, it won't come asking you if it can do
this, that or the other thing. It will
do whatever it wants to do. Total power
totally corrupts. A school, even a
Christian school, will behave in the same way.
So that
follows into the next question of how you handle stress. You look at their eyes when you ask that
question, because darting eyes and tension usually lines them because stress
always brings reflections in their mind of how they handle stress. So you notice the twitching of the
mouth. Because that question itself can
raise the stress level in a stressful person.
And I think that is one thing we need to know is. what is this person's
stress level and how do they handle that stress?
I
personally, have been under lots of stress in different phases of my life. And I think if I had been asked that question
in an interview I think I could have satisfied the interviewer by saying that
even though I had a lot of stress, I felt like it was handled as well as could
be handled and that the performance was adequate at all times. Although I think we can say that the less
stress we can have, we are free to perform naturally. And so we need to talk a little bit about
stress. Life does tend to be
stressful. School does tend to be stressful. And especially the more we receive
challenging kids and the more challenging situations, and challenging parents
the stress level can really raise. And
what is this teacher likely to do? Is
this teacher likely to become physically sick?
Burst into tears? What will be
the response? I think we need to know
how a person handles stress. And how
really well equipped they are emotionally to handle a challenging job like
teaching at our school.
The next
question will tell you a lot about a teacher too. What are the greatest needs of children and
how would you meet them? So, if you get
a very antiseptic sterile response <Well every child needs to have the
skills necessary to function successfully in a society> Well that sounds
like something they got out of a textbook, and it is not very personal. I mean, do you really believe this child's
greatest need is to have skills to function in society? How about his need for love? To be in a safe place? To just feel like he is being appreciated,
where he is being affirmed. How is he
even going to be interested in the skills you want to teach him if he is afraid
of you? If he is intimidated? Or if something else is going on in his life
that makes what you have to say of no consequence at all.
And so,
does this person know enough about human nature and enough about the needs of
children to know that they are little people? They are people with hurts, with
sensitivities, with a myriad of needs and you are there to minister to this
child, to meet the needs of this child in any way you can, in any way that God
enables you to do that. And are you
willing to do more than the job of a teacher?
Are you willing to be the under shepherd that leads your flock beside
the still waters? In the green pastures,
through the dark valley, into the banquet table, just as our Good Shepherd does
to us. Are you willing to be the little
undershepherd of that flock and lead them in the day to day experience, looking
out for their needs? Because, like a
sheep, they will wonder. They will go to
the worst place they need to be. They
will go to the precipice of danger and are you committed to nurturing and
saving these little lives that are committed to you? Do you understand the needs of a child?
And you
see, there is no class in school to teach us this. They are taught methods of math, and methods
of teaching reading and on and on, and they come to me ready to show me that
they learned that. And I am saying to
this new teacher: that doesn't matter
until the other needs are met, until you have a heart for these children. That is secondary. We are teaching children first, and the
subject matter comes next.
So do
they understand that and do they have any concept of how they will try to meet
these needs?
And one
that will really show if they have really developed any skills in working with
children is: What steps would you take to discipline a failing student? And I like to ask the question in just that
way because it infers that I assume that they are going to punish the child in
some way. I want to know if they jump in
on that punishing side because that tells me a lot about them. <Well, I
think that the parent should spank them.> and I am not saying that some of
these discipline measures shouldn’t' be taken, but I would hope that this
answer would look something like this: <There must be a reason for the
failure. I think I would look long and
hard and see if I couldn't go back to the source of those reasons.> That is
the answer we want. Does this teacher
care for the child? And so when he sees
failure, is he going to try to do something to correct the problem, or is he
just going to punish the problem and punish the child for just being the way
the child is. And largely he is what he
is because of some kind of adult input into his life. He is not an island. He hasn't developed separate from adults in
his life. So either his teachers, or his
parents, or somebody has brought him to this point. And it is the responsibility of a loving
teacher to get to the heart of these problems for failure and turn that around
so this child can succeed if at all possible.
And not to assume that it is never the child's fault. Bu the point of the matter is that it is the
source of these problems that is so often uninvestigated. And so some form of discipline, some form of
punitive action is the easiest road to take which never brings correction,
restoration, which is the heart of a the Christian approach to any problem of
this nature.
And then
I would like to ask "In what ways has God prepared you for this
ministry? And this basically allows them
to kind of trace for me how they received the call to teaching, and how they
were brought to this particular point in their lives. Why are they sitting in this room here, interviewing
me for this job? And as I listen to them
tell the story I try to determine what threads they are weaving together to get
a picture of where they are. It is
important that they sense that they are in the center of God's will. And that if they were to teach in that
school, they would be exactly where God designed them to be and that they would
be using the gifts and the talents that God gave them.
And then
finally, how would you want your service to be measured or evaluated? This gives you a good insight of what they
really want to accomplish as a teacher.
Do they want to be evaluated by the scores in higher percentiles on
national standardized tests? Well, that is
not a poor goal, but if the teacher wants to be measured that way, then it is
going to be a very academically oriented classroom, and it's going to be an
"on task" type of situation going on there all the time and it tells
you the importance of academics to that teacher. And that's good, but I would also hope that
the evidences of discipleship, real growth in the life and character of the
students would be important to the teacher.
And so I would like to hear something like this: I would like to have a classroom where
children enjoy coming to school, where if the child is sick and the mother says
you have to stay home today the child says no, I want to be in school; my
teacher is the most wonderful person and I want to be in school more than
anywhere else.
The
teacher might say they want to create a situation that is exciting, is
interesting, is motivating for the student.
They want to create an atmosphere of curiosity and growth, a great love
for the Lord Jesus. I would like to hear
statements like that along with the other things and this would let you know
what you are also working on, maybe subconsciously as they plan the lessons, as
they go through the day. That they
really see that they are in a large way responsible for shaping the lives of
those young people. And a lot of
responsibility has been placed upon their shoulders. Do they want to minister to the whole child
and do they see the big picture.
To follow
up on that if they really want to minister to the child in what ways would you
want me as an administrator to help you?
What ways do you ask for help?
How open are you to suggestions?
And when I would come into the classroom and suggest this change or that
change how does that make you feel? Is
it easy for you to respond to that or do you tend to take those things
negatively, how open are you to criticism, so that your own goals, what you
want to accomplish in the classroom, are really reached. Can you see me being a partner with you in
that classroom setting?
It is
really important to me to see that his teacher is open to be part of a team and
open to criticism and personal growth.
And I use that word in the positive sense.
By the
time I have finished this interview, I have a good idea of what this Christian
teacher looks like. And as I go to my
school board and describe this person there is hardly any question that the
board will want to know, that I can't tell them in preparation for their own
interview. I feel like I have in my mind
a picture of this teacher. And I can tell
through the ministry of God's Spirit to me whether I am looking at the person
who is to be the next teacher, or not.
Because the Spirit is always either affirming or giving caution during
the flow of conversation. And all these
questions do is force the flow of communication and force developing the
disclosure, this awareness. And the Holy
Spirit is really going to be the one who, hopefully, will choose our next
teacher. I, as administrator, want the Lord's choice; the board wants the
Lord's choice. So we need to develop an
instrument that will help us to know this person to the extent that we know
this person well enough to say we feel very comfortable that this is who the
Lord has for us. The more uncertain we
are about the teacher, the less we know about them, the less sure we feel about
a decision like this.
So I
think it is really important to have a list of questions that give us the
picture of our Christian school teacher clear enough so that God then can make
it just very evident to us how He wants us to vote, yea or nay, on this
candidate. And it really boils down to the
fact if He is really running this school, then He will also send us people to
fulfill the needs and the slots that we have in the school for Christian school
teachers. And we want Him to make that
ultimate decision. And as we seek His
will we want to enable Him to speak to us.
The more this teacher is talking, the more God is affirming. You know when Samuel went down to choose a
new king he saw all of Jesse's sons, all of who were skilled, some who were
handsome and strong, and wise because of their years and many things and as
they all passed before Samuel one by one he shook his head no. And he said to Jesse, "Don't you have
any more?" And he says, "Well,
I have one young kid out in the field."
And Samuel says, "Bring him to me." And immediately the Holy Spirit within Samuel
said, “This is the one.” There was
confirmation. And he was anointed to be
the next King of Israel. A lot of the
other people were passed by. They had
the professional qualifications. They
had a lot of other qualifications, but I kind of feel the very kind of things
that Samuel saw in David are the things that we are looking for in our
teacher. And God's spirit will either
affirm that as the interview proceeds, or say nope, this is not what a
CHRISTIAN school teacher looks like. And
you say thank you for coming to the interview.
But you also send him a letter saying that you hired Mrs. Jones instead
of you.
Another
question that needs to be asked is: How
would you feel if, for one reason or another, the board had to let you go? What would be your response if you were asked
to resign from a teaching position? I
think that would also see how open to the leadership of the school and the
authority and the administration and the board did have over the teaching
situation or had they been so indoctrinated into tenure and teachers rights
that they really felt that after a few years it would take a pretty elaborate
legal process to move them out and it might be the signal for a real potential
problem. If you took a random sampling
of ten teachers, it could totally destroy the school. The teachers are the heart of the
school. And that is why you just can't
be too careful.
*********
New
part...unplanned. Refers to another part
of the book, as yet not charted.
(paraphrased)
It was
exciting to see growth of new, and questioning board members because it
immediately brought flashbacks to me when I was starting my whole exposure to
Christian education. And a lot of my
wandering around and groping for answers- I just didn't know where to start,
and where do you go to find answers in certain things? I love to see people
come in with a fresh new perspective.
You can't expect to come out of nowhere and land and be fully mature and
fully developed. And I think a lot of
those questions that a new person asks in joining a team like a board- it is
healthy because it forces the board to go through and once again ask themselves
those same issues. If we are all at the
same level, set's say we have all been on the board ten years then nobody is
rephrasing these fundamental things over and over again. We need that new board member that says: What? Why?
And it forces us to reaffirm, rephrase, rethink the things that we think
we know and we say: Do I really believe
that still? Is that really still
important? And that is why I think new
blood is so important because we don't need their experience. What we need is their ability to ask honest,
penetrating questions. And the way we
feel that will let us know whether or not we have any depth or any convictions
of our own as a board. I am excited when
a new board member makes us rethink the whole thing. It needs to be refreshed in our minds.
Another
part is about starting new schools on the peninsula. Not for this book, but the info. is on the
tape for a later publication. (Kodiak,
Homer Christian, Kalifornsky Christian, Anchor Point. 1974>>>)
It won't
be possible, neither is it the intent of this chapter to describe the parenting
process. There are so many good books on
the market where that's the focus. We
live in one of the most fortunate generations in that respect. We live in a generation that has more good
information at their fingertips and yet never has there been a generation that
flounders as badly as ours does. So what
we are going to try to do is profile a Christian school parent, those that come
to the Christian school and want to be part of the school family for one of
many reasons. And we are going to
discuss some of these reasons and possibly the best reason, one we hope would
be the reason. I might say that it
doesn't really matter particularly the reason that a parent comes because most
of us really don't understand the true reason.
We grow into the true reason and I think we need to give all people,
just as we intend to give our students room to grow, so we need to give our
parents room to grow in. I t may be that
as we look in retrospect that as they look a year or two down the road as they
look into why they came to this school, they have some better reasons and they
see some results being built into the lives of their kids, things that they
never even thought of.
One
reason is to compensate for an inadequate home.
They have this nagging feeling that the home is not what it should
be. They want to make up for it somehow,
they just have this yearning to be what God wants them to be as a Christian
home and they know they are not meeting the standard. It might be the husband is not a believer; it
may be that the husband is absent a lot because of his job. And so it is kind of an attempt to make up
for that lack, that male figure, the authority that should be the spiritual
leader who should be providing the nourishment and the guidance for the
home. He is not there, and the hope is
to buy that service somehow. And in some
cases it is maybe the wife who is the weak link or the missing one, but that
doesn't seem to be as often the case.
Often it
is just a single parent, it is not just that the parent is gone away working,
he is just not there and there are more and more single parents in our
society. These are people that really
have a need and are almost desperate in their need, especially as they try to
raise their sons. As the boys get to be
8, 9, 12, 14 and the parents are just overwhelmed with what it means to be
working full time and somehow providing for these young kids in their homes,
and especially the boys. How are they
going to possibly do that? They come
with almost desperation on their face as they present themselves and their
families to the school.
Sometimes
they really sense that even though the father and the mother are there, there
is no spiritual depth in the home at all.
Maybe they have for one reason or another stopped going to church, and
they know that is not right. They feel
the church never hurt anybody. And this
may be a non-Christian family, but enough in touch with some Christianity in
their background that they feel they want this, that they don't want to raise
their kids in a vacuum. So because there
is basically nothing going on at home they have chosen a Christian school.
Some
realize they have really blown it as parents.
They have made some real serious mistakes, and they want to compensate
for that. Some realize that they entered
marriage and maybe the first one or two children with a very irresponsible
lifestyle, drinking, maybe on drugs themselves, maybe going from job to job,
really abusing their children in several ways.
And as they take stock of where they are as a family they are headed
nowhere real fast. And they are real
concerned and they want to play catch up if it is possible.
And they
are beginning to see behavior traits in their children that are beginning to
alarm them and before it gets any worse they want to do something about the
situation.
So, there
is that great group of parents that somehow want to compensate for this great
lack that they see. And they feel if
some one was to evaluate their home on any kind of a basis they would just come
out too low on the scale. And they are
maybe a little bit ashamed about that.
And they want to correct that if possible.
There is
another group of parents that see poor performance on the part of their
children. It is not so much looking at
the home that bothers them. But it is
looking at how their kids individually have turned out. And often these people have not in any way
honestly looked at their homes. They
don't see where their homes have failed.
This
performance may be in the behavioral area where the kid is running with the
wrong crowd, starting to be rebellious, talk back to his parents, mother is
feeling a little bit anxious about where this growing son is going. And if it goes on much longer she is not
going to be able to handle him.
Or it may
be academic. He is just floundering
worse and worse, he is getting way behind, he is just not doing his work, and
it just seems he is not going to be able to compete in society at all. College is out of the question: he is probably not even going to finish high
school. Parents get concerned.
One
phrase that I find characteristic of this family is that, "Bobby needs
this, but Susie doesn't." In other
words, they have children that are performing acceptably, but there is one
child that is their problem. And of
course as we see this, what we have to offer, Christian education, an entire
philosophy, Susie needs this as bad as Bobby does. So when a parent has identified their need
for a Christian school on the basis of poor performance, we realize it is not
really a valid reason, but it is still a presenting reason. This is why they are presenting themselves,
and we accept them on that basis, but, we still have a long way to go with a
parent like this. The main reason is
they don't see the part, the roll that they have played in the child's
background to bring him to the place where he is. It is not that we want parents to feel
guilty, or to feel the blame. But the
inference is: I am paying you to fix my
child; I have one child and he doesn't need fixing, but I have Bobby and he
needs fixing. Please fix him. And of course the inference is that the home
doesn't need fixing, the marriage doesn't need fixing. And as I have said earlier in this book and I
will say again here, the child's main context that he arrives to us in is the
context of his home. And that is why we
enroll families, and not students at
It is
possible that the family doesn't think that they don't need help, they just
don't know that they need it. And if you
were to bring it up, they may be quite defensive at first because Susie has
turned out right and that is certainly justification for something. It would take quite a bit of investigating to
get to the root of the problem. But we
would like to believe that being associated with
Another
reason that we see people bringing children to our school is that it is the
lesser evil of all the available options.
They don't like the public schools; they basically are kind of sour on
society as if nobody is really doing it right.
And we don't really like your school either, you are not our brand of
Christianity, or we wish you weren't Christian, just a secular private
school. Somehow we are not really good
enough for him. And they let us know
that this is not really what they are looking for, but what they are looking
for isn't available so they have come to us.
That is kind of a hard person to make happy. But the fact of the matter is, their child is
precious and their child is probably a hurting child. The parents are critical, the parents are
bitter, sometimes they are apathetic; they should like they are interested, they
have lots to say. There is just this
constant stream of language coming out of the first interview and you get the
impression that these parents are really into this, but you let the kid get
enrolled, and they are gone. They are
not that concerned, they are bitter people, they don't have friends, and they
don't know how to maintain relationships at all. They realize maybe subconsciously that things
aren't turning out right for their child, and where the child was, things were
going bad. So they are just trying
something else. They are unhappy
people. You might not be able to make
these people happy because they will tend to blame the school and the teacher
for anything that goes wrong. In fact,
they are almost looking for somebody to blame.
If they hadn't tried the Christian school, then the gossip in the
neighborhood might be: Look at how bad
their kid is going and they are horrible parents; they are indulging the kid,
allowing him to do whatever he wants to do, and things are going from bad to worse. But if they can say, well, we tried the
Christian school and even that didn't help.
So, there. So in other words they
just want one more defense mechanism to shore up that they have done a good
job, they have done their best but with this kid you couldn't do anything. That's the point they are trying to
make. A lot of the time this is
subconscious, but basically speaking they are trying to justify the failure
that they see coming. And somehow they
are going to have to give an account to somebody for the fact that the kid did
not turn out right. So they come to you
trying to get one more option cleared out of the way. And they really don't have an expectation of
success. They are more or less convinced
that failure is going to come.
So what
is their idea of success? It is
happiness, progress, a kind of report on the child that they have never gotten
before: the child is doing beautifully, the standardized tests even show that
compared to other students he is just doing a superb job. But these are unhappy people so they are
braced for bad news. They would like to
hear a little bit of good news, a relief, but they know it is going to be
short-lived.
There are
a lot of parents in this category. It is
hard to work with their child because this kind of a parent is such a poor
parent that they have not established a positive relationship with the child
and they don't know how to nurture that relationship at all. So the child is really floundering in a
quagmire worse than some of these other situations that we have already
described.
And then
we have the parent who comes to us with goals for their family. They have usually a high level of
expectation. They may or may not be a
church family. They want their kid to
get into a good college. They see the
standardized test scores in the public school.
They see some of what is going on there.
And they see clearly that x Christian school down the road is their best
option. So they come here quite
motivated and quite supportive. It is
kind of fun to work with these parents.
Sometimes they don't know anything about the philosophy of Christian
education. But now they want the best
for their child. And usually they are
there for the child. Initially there may
be a lot of resistance to the spiritual aspect of the school; they want to see the
religious curriculum (what are you going to teach my child?) After you lay that all out, their reaction is
that it is all right, pretty benign stuff.
The inference to the child in the interview is that we really don’t care
how you do in that area, just kind of stomach it. It won't hurt you. But we want you to get some A's in math and
science, and some of these other courses.
Right
there I say, "And by the way did you know our school has a policy that you
can't flunk Bible? This is a very
important subject, one of the reasons this school has been established. We don't know where this subject will end up
on your priority list but we are telling you up front that it has top priority
up front. So you can't opt to flunk
Bible. You must do the assignments, and
you must pass them to remain in this school." This is a bit of a shock, but after a little
thought they decide they can handle that, just the taste of the medicine is
kind of bad, but we can swallow hard.
Then
moving on to what we might call the best reason for putting a child in
Christian school: As we said earlier
this might be a growing awareness in any of these parents that we've discussed
already, and there are others than those that we've described. These are just some of the major categories. I am reminded of a verse out of this song,
"I am a soldier of the cross,” a wonderful old time hymn. It says, "Is this vile world a friend of
grace to lead me on to God?
And of course it is a rhetorical
question because basically what the author is saying is that the one thing he
has come to realize is that this world is an enemy to grace. This is the kingdom of darkness; this is
Satan's domain and I have come to realize that I am asked to raise my children
in a totally lost and darkened society.
And so basically what is needed, this parent says, is something
radically different from what I see all-round me. This is the parent who comes with conviction
that you are not only pouring knowledge into my child's head, you are shaping
his mind. You are messing with the way
he thinks. His fundamental approach to
life, the perspective through which he will view every subject you are going to
teach him, his point of view. And I
cannot, absolutely trust that to a humanistic or pagan society, to shape my
child. Now if it was just knowledge,
just opening up an encyclopedia and shaking out the knowledge into the child's
head, in some kind of an antiseptic or sterile situation that might be one
thing. But the fact of the matter is we
all come in the context of these world views, of these perspectives. And so consequently, we are shaping a life,
the way the child is going to think.
Now,
Jesus had some rather startling things to say.
"A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. He is like the sea that's driven by the wind
and tossed." There is a tremendous
amount of instability in a double minded man.
And what our Christian sub-culture is trying to do is to make such an
accommodation with the world that you can have my child for five days to mess
with his mind and to sink down your point of view and then on Sundays give him
to me for an hour and I will teach him this other track. And then somehow he is supposed to resolve
these total incongruities in his mind and there are hardly any similarities
there at all. We are raising a
generation of children that are totally unstable. That is one way we could define our society
today. Look at the violence, look at the
rebellion, look at the problems that we are creating for ourselves as a
society. Have you ever thought of
this: that the major problems that beset
us as a society are the problems that we create as a society? As we turn our backs on God and even as the
Church deliberately makes choices to train its children, unChristianly with a
pagan mind set then somehow hope that they are going to be able to track
right... and of course there's always some that are going to turn out
right. You know there are kids that
actually survive abortion. We talk of
abortion as putting a baby, that should be in a very secure and nurturing
place, in mortal danger and destroying him.
So the public educational system is a place where the very Christian
that is against abortion is all for the abortion of their 10 and 12 and 14 year
old. They put them in mortal danger of
literally destroying them, in a very hostile environment that is dead set to
destroy their faith and to make them unchristian and unbelieving in their total
mind set. And that is what they are
dedicated to. The fact that some kids
can survive that is a miracle and it does happen. If you just look at the statistics of
abortion alone I think there is an interesting parallel here. I am told that between 10 and 20 percent of
aborted babies actually survive the process had have to be killed or left to
die by themselves. Abortion is an ugly,
heinous act and it is possible to survive it.
Well, it is possible to survive public school, too.
So this
is a parent that understands that clearly and that says, "No, you cannot
have my child, and you will not shape his mind, and you will not destroy his
faith. And just as I make no apology for
the roof that I put over his head and the shelter of the four walls that I
provide for him to grow in. So I make no
apology for the shelter that I intend to give him as his mind is developing,
the shelter of a godly education with instruction that is founded on the word
of God, that will teach him to see life as God sees it. "As the heavens are higher than the
earth so are my thoughts from your thoughts and my ways than your ways."
And so
this parent is identified as one who supports the school and supports the
staff. When the story comes home with
the kid and he tells his version of what the teacher did or said and he's got
his lower lip sticking out, the parent's first reaction is to defend that
school, is to say, "No, we checked the school out and in lieu of the fact
that I haven't heard your teacher's story, I believe that your teacher is
making the best decision and until I can go back to school and get this story straight..." We have a supportive parent and what a
difference that will make, a parent that will believe what the school is doing
on behalf of their child. This is a parent
who gives extra money, extra time. This
is a parent who supports the school because this school must survive. This school has got to be there for their
kid. They are doing more than buying an
education for their child. They are
ensuring the fact that their community will have this option in the future for
them and their friends. So they are
willing to put out that extra effort to make sure this school survives. And they know that's going to take more than
the tuition payment alone. And it does. Most Christian schools will admit up front
that this is a bare bones price and it is going to take more than this to make
this operation survive. And these are
the parents that understand that clearly, and they are willing to make that
additional sacrifice.
I think
that every parent has a right to ask this question and I think this being in
print in a book might really help. One
thing that only ONE parent has ever asked me in the 21 years of this school, is
to give a success story, give something to point to that shows what this school
is all about, a reference that they can check upon. When I get an employee they give me
references and I check on them. I think
a parent has every right to check on this school. Now it is true that many of the Now it is
true that many of the parents know about our school from neighbors, and they
are pretty satisfied with our track record.
But I believe that parents that are new in the community, parents that
move in, should go to the school and say, "I want you to give me a family
that you have made a difference in their life.
I'd like to call them and talk to them about this school. I think any bona fide school should have many
of those families and say, well, you have a kid going into the sixth grade, let
me give you a number of a family with a kid in the sixth grade. Just rap with the parents about what they
have been happy about in the school, what does the school lack, what does it
need, what would they like to change about the school if they could? That is a wonderful way for them to really
get a feel for where you are as a school.
Because I think I must say at this juncture that I cannot unequivocally
recommend any Christian school in any situation. Because I know that there are some Christian
schools that actually have the net effect of driving children from God because
they are operated so legalistically and so far removed from grace and love that
these Christian schools have a tremendous capacity to do damage in the life of
a child and of a family. I hate to have
to say that, I wish it weren't so. But
some people have started Christian schools for the wrong reason. Some have done it as a reaction to- maybe it
was desegregation in the South, a reaction to evolution that was taught in the
school and they didn't want their kid to hear about evolution; or a reaction to
sex education that was taught in the schools.
But our school should not exist for a negative reactionary reason; it
should exist as a proactive reason. We
have a mandate from the Lord to train our children in the fear and admonition
of the Lord. So we have a positive
reason, even if there were no public schools, even if there was nothing to be
against, we should still be here. A
Christian school is valid.
This kind
of a family supports a student in a healthy fashion. It doesn't always rescue the child. I think of so much damage parents can do in
rescuing their children. Here is a
little paragraph that compares protecting and defending a child, and I think
sometimes as parents we get this confused in our thinking. I think a parent has every right in the world
to protect their child. That is not only
an instinct we have. We don't want to
see them come to harm or danger. And we
should protect our child, not only from physical danger, from any kind of
abuse. A parent has an obligation to
protect their child. But to defend a
child is a different issue because basically speaking you are teaching a child
that you are always going to swoop in to his defense and to make his side of
the argument, make excuses for him, justify whatever failure, whatever lack. And the child comes to expect that. And a weakness and a lack of character comes
to a child who is always bailing a child out, is always defending the kid. And I have seen kids grow and make remarkable
progress when parents tell their children, go and face the music. You talk to the teacher. That is an issue between you and the
teacher. And you can handle that. I have confidence in the teacher; I have no
reason to believe that your teacher has anything against you or is out to get
you. I have reason to believe that they
are fair, honest, open, loving, kind.
You go talk to that teacher. You
don't feel like doing it. You are at a
low point in your relationship with your teacher, but me stepping in here right
now is not the right thing to do. That
is the wrong thing. If your relationship
is to be healed then you two have to work on it. Where parents are willing to do that
absolutely remarkable things, great things.
happen. And those aren't easy
things to do. And a lot of times parents
say, "I have to protect my child from that kind of pain." But you see we protect them from abuse. Now hopefully your teacher isn't abusing your
child. You have a right to know
that. And maybe on your own you can
confirm for yourself that is not taking place, maybe check with the administration
to ensure that. But when you are sure
that there is no abuse, but this is part of the pain of growth, then it is true
that no pain, no gain. And your child is
not going to develop any character in his life at all without pain. Don't rescue your children from the hardness
of schools. The Bible even says,
"Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ."
Somehow
Christian parents rush in to protect their children from hardness, from
hardships and they will never develop character. That child is always weak, is always
dependent. The parents never seem to be
able to explain that weakness of character that they complain about until they
are 20 to 30 years old. It is because
they never allow their children to reap the consequences of their choices. It is to realize that there is a cause and
effect built into this universe that God has used as a major teaching
tool. And whenever a parent steps in to
interrupt that cause and effect relationship they stop a major teaching tool
that God has designed to teach that child the facts of life. And when we interrupt that process our
children will suffer every time.
This kind
of a parent builds responsibility in the child.
This kind of a parent expects the child to be accountable for his
homework, for the relationships he develops at school, for his assignments, for
the responsibilities that are asked of him at school. And he will develop that. This kind of a parent trusts that God is
going to bless their child. And even
those areas where there is normal parental anxiety and you wonder if your Billy
or whoever is going to turn out all right, this is a parent who eminently says,
"To the best of my ability I am making the best choices I can for my
child. I am being the best parent I know
how to be. I am providing the best
educational I know how to provide. I
will trust God that in a given situation where it is a little bit shaky I may
need some consultation with the teacher, but I must believe that God cares intimately
(passionately, choose a better word) for my child and He is not going to let
him go. And right now in this situation
God is going to work it out and things are going to get turned around. The child is going to get back because I have
consulted with the staff. I have
consulted with the administration and I believe it is Godly. And even though my child seems to be
suffering right now I precede trusting God that I am doing the best thing I
know how to do. Very often that is hard
to do because it gets at that point where the evidence that you want to see,
that turnaround, that progress that we are so desperate to see in our child,
when it is not there, when we want to see it, that is when we tend to pull
back. That's when we say, well, I guess
we made a mistake here. I guess this
school isn't the right answer, I guess your teacher isn't the right one for
you. I guess in this case...and we start
to backtrack. We start to look back over
our shoulder. And the Bible says no man
having put his plow to his shoulder and having looked back is fit for the
Another
characteristic in a Christian school parent that is the profile we are looking
for is one who maintains healthy personal relationships, healthy family
relationships, this parent, to the best of their ability, will have a strong
home and family. They will be concerned
about the marriage. They will be
concerned about the relationship with the children. They will be developing that relationship,
they will believe that somehow their children are worthy of a relationship,
that they are actually fun to get to know, and fun to be with.
How many
families have you come across that just don't like to spend time with each
other, don't enjoy each other. They are
drifting further and further apart. Boy
they need to get a handle on that. That
is a symptom of some serious problems within the home. And a symptom or a characteristic of a strong
Christian home is that those relationships are good. They have good friends and they have a church
that is supporting them and that they are supporting, where they are being
nurtured and where they grow. And that
will be the characteristic of a good Christian home.
And then
finally I would say that a characteristic of a good Christian parent is that
they are personally growing, and they are open to instruction. This is a parent that comes in and you really
feel that as a teacher, as you have a conference with this parent that this
parent is really, truly open to what you have to say, just as I hope that my
staff is open. And as you have a problem
with Johnny and he's gotten to a plateau or is he sliding back down hill and
you want to address that problem, you have a conference, a consultation. As you talk about that, you're open to what
the parent has to say, and hopefully this Christian parent, the one that we are
profiling here, is one that is open.
They are listening to what you have to say, and they appreciate the
insight that you give them on their child, because you see them in the context
of their peers, you see them in the context of carrying out assignments and
responsibilities. And you are relaying
this information to the parent, and how open to that information is the
parent. Are they defensive? Are they saying that you should be open to
that too, but the parent will not hear what is being told to them then we have
a problem? And the problem is that you
have a parent that isn't fully availing themselves of what they are paying
for. And what they are paying for is a
partner in the process of raising and training their child. And when you are arguing with your partner
the whole time you are not getting very much use out of that partnership. (( Note to CC:...Up until his very sentence
I was wondering if this part about parents was really right for this book, but
this bit about the partnership brings it all into focus. DT
)) you see that is somehow a
combative relationship rather than a parallel, a joining of hands
together. And so it is really important
that they see that is really a partnership, that the teacher wants to go with
your child in the same direction and has the same destination in mind as you do
as a parent. What a joy it is to work in
that kind of a partnership. And so this
kind of a parent sees that clearly that, "that teacher is my friend, they
are the other half of this equation, and we are going in the same direction, we
have the same goals for my child. And
this teacher is investing his life, his energy, his talents, the gifts that God
has given to him into my child. I am
fortunate to have my child in his class."
If this
parent can have this attitude this is an open parent who is growing and there
will be some things that will be hard for both of them. And if we are all in a growing relationship
we realize that really the major part of the equation is God Himself. And as we see God working, we are open and we
pray for God to give us a solution.
Sometimes neither the parent nor the teacher has the answer. And we pray together that God will make it
evident what it is that is going to motivate the child, what is really the root
of the problem, what it is that's blocking the learning process? Lord, reveal it to us so we can help Johnny
over this hump and move on in his life.
And if
you can form that kind of relationship, you have the picture of a Christian
school parent. That is what he looks
like. He looks like someone who has
found a friend in the raising of children, a partner, someone to join hands
with. And parents who are overwhelmed in
our society today with raising children and don't consider Christian education
as an option are missing one of the greatest opportunities that God has put at
their disposal. And I run into these
kinds of people all the time in the grocery store line, Christian families,
deacons, elders, they are telling you this long drawn-out story of what is
happening. The kid has run away from
home, this has happened, that has happened.
They don't understand. And I feel
like, phew! Once this book is written I could just hand them the book. But you don't want to stand right there in
the grocery line (and explain) and all you can do is sympathize with them. "That's tough, I didn't realize you had
that kind of pain going on in your life, I'll be praying for you." And that is as far as you can go.
But what
I am thinking is, "That is what we are here for. Is that extra $300 in the bank that you were
going to use for something else- is it worth it to you? How much is the free public education costing
you? How much is it really costing
your kid? Are we losing a life? Is there an eternal destiny at stake here
that is not worth $300 a month or whatever the tuition rate is?
So
consequently I think the Christian school parent is one who really understands
what is really at stake. It is possible
to do it without a Christian school, but increasingly in our society as it
plunges into this social madness I think as long as God makes Christian schools
an option, that the Christian community needs to support it. And we must do everything in our power to make
sure it survives.
(some q
& a at this point on work...refer to tape.) It boils down to the following sentence:
Christian
schools aren't perfect, we don't have perfect administrators, or teachers, or
parents. That's part of the process we are struggling with, but this is the
direction we are heading. So somehow in
this chapter I would like to get across the concept that we have every kind of
parent that you could possibly imagine, but this is the direction we would like
to take 'em. They should come with the
mind set that this is an institution that is committed to holding hands with me
and helping me raise my kid.
They
should be encouraging. It is not just
buying an education and saying, "Here's the tuition and fix my
kid."
In our
troubled society I think single parents are more likely to see this. We have Christian single parents now that
love us for that reason. They don't have
any idea what they would do without this school. They can't even imagine the future of their
child without this school. It is a
privilege to be in that position. It is
also scary. For them we have to
survive. Why do you as a board member
have to make the best decision for this school?
You have parents who are desperate for its survival. With Satan as our enemy and living in a
society that is totally against what we stand for, it's only by the grace of
God that this school is going to be here tomorrow, much less than a week from
tomorrow. God Himself has to run this
school, because it is not going to happen without Him being the head of it.
******more
on the story of the "child who turned around” which was previously told,
but this expands the details.
He's a
first grader, was just getting worse and worse.
He was a pill as a kindergartner.
Poor old Patti Russell was just marching him down to the office saying
Mr. C you have just got to talk to this kid.
After I
was just pretty sure that the whole thing was strictly a discipline problem I
phoned home to the parents and said, "I see that you have written a note
here that you don't want corporal punishment used on your child. Our policy, then, in that case, is that you
will take care of the situation. Which
is fine. We don't have any problem with
parents that don't believe in corporal punishment, but the fact then remains
that when we have tried everything that we think we are obligated to do to
correct a situation then we have to dump it back in your lap because you have
retained that power and that right which you have every right to do."
At first
I couldn't get hold of the parents so I told the boy, "I think I have
figured out how to solve this problem. I
think you need a spanking." Well he
just broke into huge tears. But I said,
"Don't cry, I am not going to spank you.
You parents don't want me to spank you and I am trying to get hold of
them now to find out why they want done."
I let him go back to class, but I ended up calling the parents that
night. The father is a probation
counselor so he is in the judicial system.
He knows how bad things can get.
I talked with him about an hour and he was backing up slowly, but he was
very firm in his conviction. So he kept
asking, “What is the next step?” I said,
"You don't understand what I am telling you; the next step is yours. You have retained the right to correct this
situation. So I am giving it to
you. I am also saying in this same step
that if you can't correct it that it is not going to work out for M--- to be
here at school."
They
didn't want to hear that. That is like
saying your child is going to be expelled, except I am saying it very nicely.
So, with
his hand over the receiver, he had me on hold for ten minutes. He is arguing with his wife about what they
are going to do. Eventually he says,
"Okay, I guess we will give you permission to spank him, but we want you
to call us first."
That was
a very tough phone call because I knew that emotionally I knew the parents were
really struggling with this issue and I was praying for them to make the right
choice. But it was so hard for them to
do.
Without
me asking, the next day at 8:00 am right after faculty devotions, he was at the
door with a signed piece of paper that said, "This is a permission slip
signed and dated by both me and my wife that you have permission to spank M---
whenever you think it is necessary and here is our written permission. We are placing our confidence in this
school."
From that
moment on M--- was changed. They sat him
down and said, "M---, guess what?
We have just told Mr. C that he has permission to spank you."
The
change was so dramatic that for the first week Patti Russell was on pins and
needles. She said there is no kid who
can change this fast. Week two goes by. Her prayer request is now a praise. "Praise God.” This is a miracle. I have a miracle child in my room. But I can't believe it will last another
week." The next prayer request is a
praise. M--- Is a miracle!"
I was in
the room one day while they were singing songs in Russian. She whispers to me to look at M---. Who was the most into it, doing the best,
absolutely the most ideal performer?
M--- The boy is fundamentally,
radically changed. He is not the same
boy.
What
happened? We know that it wasn't a boy
issue. It was a mommy and daddy issue. The Bible says, "Spare the rod and spoil
the child." You don't even have to
use it. He just has to know you have the
right to use it.
In cases
like these the truth is too good to be real.
We live with that every day, all the time. Amazing, exciting. But these little battles are not won
easily. There is a struggle. There is pain. It is so much easier to dismiss the kid,
rather than just explaining the process with the parent, putting the
responsibility in their lap, watching them agonize and argue with the
problem. The whole process just opens a
bad wound but it just has to happen.
More
specifically, what does a Christian school student look like? Because a
Christian student could attend any school and we are focusing mainly on a
Christian school student.
First I
would like to talk about who they are and the fact that we are going to focus
in our school as to what is happening inside of this person, inside of this
body that walks in this door, and we are going to address that rather than
address the outside which is the presenting problem, usually. The presenting problem is the way the kid
looks and you want to do something right now to fix him up if you can, or to
change him or make him fit your preconceived image. And yet immediately I think the Christian
school should go right to the heart of the child and address him where he lives
and for who he is.
And so,
we are going to stress character and the character building process which we
have mentioned earlier in this book. It
is more important than academics. And I
believe I have listed before the fact that ACSI has published a character
building series which lists 50 character building traits. And not only do we use them in the school to
identify different target areas of growth, but we like to award and recognize
kids for the trait that they most exhibit, and that way bless our student body
and bless those around them.
We have a
habit in our school of every other year in Awards Chapel, which is our last
ceremony of the year, of awarding a character trait to each child. And basically what it is that we as a faculty
notice this character trait about this child.
We don't do it every year because sometimes it is the same one because
it is really a strength and it gets old.
And we don't want something like this to be old. Because a character trait is different from a
physical trait. A character trait we
have by choice. We choose to have those
character traits. You can look at a list
of 50 character traits and actually go shopping and have any one of them for
the taking, for the choosing. They all
represent a discipline. They all
represent something that is difficult and sometimes painful because it involves
change. But physical traits we have no
choice over, character traits we do. So
we encourage children to develop these traits.
We want to acknowledge those traits that they exhibit.
Besides
awarding those traits, our weekly report card grades the child in behavior and
attitude. Besides the academic grades,
weekly he is being graded in what his behavior is for the week, and what his
attitude is, the attitude that he has been exhibiting through out the
week. This is a character quality; this
is how the children have been conducting themselves and how they approach the
business of going to school and associating themselves with their peers. Hopefully we see him working on those grades
as well. We ask the parents to, please,
before they ever even start to address the academic grades, which is of course
where parents are normally more concerned, we ask them to conference weekly
with their child about their behavior and attitude grades until they are at the
level that is adequate as far as the parent is concerned. Our handbook clearly states what a B stands
for and an A and so forth. It is spelled
out for the child and he can set his sights on the goals that he wants to
attain and go for it.
Our
sports program: Although we would like
to do more in the sports program, we have always incorporated it as an
important part of our school because of its character development
qualities. There is something about a
good, quality facility and good coaches functioning together that accomplishes
something with a child that is very difficult to do in the classroom, because a
classroom is a kind of an artificial little environment. We don't normally live in classrooms; that is not the way we normally interact with
each other, sitting and discussing intellectual type things we get out of
books, but the athletic environment is more everyday because it is more
involving ourselves physically with other people, it's interacting, it's
feeling the heat of competition. It's feeling the rush of anger when we have
been treated unjustly, unfairly by a referee or by another player or
whatever. We have to handle those issues
of life and we do it in an environment where somebody loves us enough to train
us, to build character into us. So we
find that is a very fundamental part of our school where the child is
developing character and becoming that person that we believe God wants him to
be, through the athletic program.
So, the
gymnasium, or the basketball court or the football field becomes the classroom;
it becomes the place where he actually learns to build into his life these
character traits that are so important.
Also we
have a policy in our school of cleaning up the school daily, a 5-10 minute
chore. We go through the whole gamut of
resistance to this program from students all the way to parents who don't think
this is something a child should be asked to do. And yet, it is there deliberately. Not only for 22 years now has it kept us from
having to hire a janitor in our school, and keeping the cost down that way
which you would think parents would certainly appreciate, but the fact that it,
itself, is one more responsibility, one more discipline that certainly does not
overload the child, but reminds him that somebody is not always going to be
there to pick up after them. And it
makes you think twice before you make a mess because you might have to clean it
up and you also notice what messes your peers are making because that might be
your responsibility and so there is a check and balance system amongst the
students that makes them watch each other and care for the facility, and
realize it is their facility and there is no janitor, nobody is going to clean
it up unless they clean it up, and one of them will clean up or repair. And that is a marvelous real life
living. That's where we are everyday,
whether it is our bedroom, our living room, our kitchen, or whatever. That is a lot of what life is all about; that
is teaching such a quality life lesson.
Such a practical lesson. With
just a little 5 or 10 minute lesson incorporated into the lesson plan each day
is such a little time with such great rewards are generated from that small
program.
So we are
focusing on what this child is becoming.
And we are designing little things into our school day that helps him to
grow, that stretches him. They are
little things that you normally don't like to do; none of us like to do the
painful things, and yet we grow from that, and become bigger and better people
as a result of it.
Spiritually,
is another area we are of course very concerned with. All Christian schools are. I would say probably the first question that
most secondary students are asked as they make an application for Christian
school enrollment, "Are you a Christian?" We don't ask that question at our
school. It is not because it's not
important; it is probably one of the most important questions in a child's
life. But most children are very
confused where they are on that issue.
Most of them either have made a decision at a very young age and they
don't know if that is valid now. And
really the thing that is valid is where they are right now in their life, their
level of obedience, their spiritual walk with the Lord. So rather than have them put something down
in black and white and say, "Yes I am.", which makes it very hard to
respond in that way, or "No, I am not." and have to get around that
one to be thoroughly honest in that question, it is best left unsaid.
What I
want to know is, "Do you want to be here?" “Do you want a Christian education?" And "Why do you want to be
here?" Now they might say,
"Well I am a Christian and I want to be in an environment where God is
honored and where I am encouraged and built up in the things of the
Lord." Well, that is a wonderful
testimony, and that is the way to respond.
If they are from a non-Christian home, if their life is devoid of
spiritual input, that often I have found to still be their answer, "I want
to be here, I have seen what has happened to some of my friends who have gone
their own way and want nothing to do with a positive value system in their
lives and they self-destruct very rapidly.
Sometimes a kid can't verbalize that but he knows instinctively that he
should be here, that he needs this in his life.
And if he can verbalize that to me that is very important because they
are saying, "I want what this school has to offer; I want what I see in
kids my age that attend this school. And
I make it very clear that we have a Bible class, that everything is taught from
a Christian perspective. We sing, we
pray, we are part of the family of God and we celebrate that moment by moment
all day long and they need to think twice before they get into an environment
such as that. So, that is the kind of
questions I would ask them.
We also
go so far and I don't know of any Christian school that has this item on the
quarterly report card we have a little line like How is the penmanship, how
does the student get along with their peers, and this type of thing. We also have a line that says, "Is spiritually
responsive." The choices of answers
are Needs Improvement, N, or Satisfactory, S, or Outstanding, O. It is really hard, and probably impossible,
to grade academically where a child is spiritually. We can make some guesses, but we don't
know. We all know that behavior alone,
which is the way we normally grade each other, is not an adequate means, and it
usually fails in letting us know where anybody is because most of us behave
well or less well at different periods in our lives, depending on what else we
are going through. But I think it is
fair to indicate whether or not a child is responding to the spiritual emphasis
of the school, and to convey that to the parent. (left out 2 sentences of rambling)
I think
one of the failures in a sense is in our Sunday School program that most
churches have is that they kind of muddle along, they don't keep attendance in
the sense that there is any accountability there or not, doesn't matter if he
goes or not. It is kind of like church,
it is an optional program. So a lot of
people who opt out of Christian school say, well, I take my kid to church. Okay, let's talk about church. Let's talk about your Sunday School
program. Do they keep attendance? Does your teacher give you a report of what
is going on? Do you have any kind of a
report card of your student there? Or by
blind faith have you just delivered a child and you don't know if he's fooling
around, or what he is learning. In other
words, I think a report card is valid in a Sunday School system. Because children are children. And accountability is one of the things we
want to build into their lives. They
need to respect their Sunday School teachers, they need to respect that hour
and give it their best. Follow up from week to week stuff that they are
supposed to be doing at home. I just say
that parenthetically because I think we fail miserably nationwide as churches
in really making our Sunday School a school.
And if that is the only school your child is getting his spiritual
training at much less a home that isn't very adequate in that area either then
I am saying to America that you are not passing on your Godly heritage to your
offspring. And that is THE most
important thing that God has given you in this life. If he has allowed you to parent a child I
know what your primary responsibility is, at least concerning that child, and
that is to pass on that Godly heritage.
God has raised up Christian schools to do that. We need accountability in that area where we
are talking about the spiritual growth, the spiritual walk of the child.
We've
designed a Fall Retreat that we take our high school students where there's
just hours and hours of interacting on a meaningful level, mostly informal,
where they get used to singing and praying and talking, and debating,
discussing, getting to know each other spiritually. The Bible says, "Henceforth know we no
man after the flesh but after the spirit."
Now the implication of that verse is as we walk in our faith and with
one another it should be that, "I know you physically at this certain
level, but the further we have intercourse with conversation and discussion of
idea and exchange of thoughts and sharing spiritually, you giving me your
prayer requests and me sharing mine, I am going to get to know you
spiritually. I am going to know your
joys and sorrows and your depressions and your successes and all of those
things. And henceforth we don't know a
person after the flesh but only after the spirit. And so this retreat is designed to allow
these kids to know each other at least a start in knowing each other in a
dimension that goes beyond that physical thing.
And if that start is not made, they will go through an entire school
year relating to each other physically as basketball mates, or as they have the
math class together they share language or help each other with physics and we
just see each other that way till the bell rings and everybody goes home. When are we really going to take time to
develop that? Now you are doing a little
of that in your devotions, your Bible time, your chapel and one thing and
another. What this 3 day retreat does is
really helps the kids to concentrate on the fact that to know each other beyond
the superficial to develop real friendships based on mutual faith, on mutual
experiences, on a disclosure level, on a level where I am able to share things
that I normally wouldn't share with people who don't care about me, I wouldn't
share it with people who have no business in my life, but I am learning to live
that kind of deeper life as I relate to one another. And so we teach our children that. That's an important part of their spiritual
walk and it starts with that retreat.
And then hopefully we can carry that thread, and it is difficult. Sometimes years for some children, they don't
get very far at all, and some children really catch the bait so to speak and
see there is a dimension to life and they will say things like this, "You
know, I used to think I had friends but not like I have found here. Basically what they are saying is that there
is a quality to the friendship that is different. It is deeper than something that they have
found before. And that is something that
you'll try to cultivate in the child.
We also
have an assignment that our secondary students do every week where they write a
devotional paper. Now usually a devotion
is thought of as a time you quietly spend with the Lord. For lack of a better term that is what I call
it. It is a composition they write each
week which is a language assignment. In
this day and age whole language is the big word where you want the child to be
able to express themselves and not be worried about spelling and grammar and
lots of other things, but to just kind of let the thoughts flow. But my answer to that is, write it the first
time and don't care about the grammar and let the thoughts flow, and then
rewrite it. Well, most children don't
want to rewrite. I don't care how they
do it, but when something is presented as a work then it needs to be well
done. We need to be able to communicate
well with our English skills. So it is
graded as a language assignment. So a
devotional paper gets two grades, it gets a Bible grade and then it gets a
language grade. And a Bible grade is
graded on how much of a child's life they are willing to let me see. And if they describe their weekend, and what
the pastor said in church, what they learned, just kind of factual type of
informational things that anybody could get, then that is a C. If they want to put some meaning into that to
show me they have done some introspection, they have done some thinking, a
Christian ought to life this way, showing that they see a cause and effect
relationship, "the pastor said this and it means this", That's a B. But once a person can say, this is the way I
feel, this is what is going on in my life, this is some of the things I am
struggling with, this is one of my blessings that I would like to share with
you, it is A. A child is being very
candid, full disclosure and setting the window open enough to just share. And a lot of times it takes a kid several
months, maybe a year or two depending on how gun-shy they are. But that can actually be a tool for spiritual
growth and development because so much of what we have received as a result of
being saved is being made a member of a large family. And that has got to involve some kind of
communication, some kind of give and take.
And I think we as God's family at large don't do too well at that. We hold our cards pretty close to our chest
so to speak because we are just not sure who cares, who really wants to know
this kind of information. And once they see in their teacher as person who is
just not concerned about biology but who is concerned about them, and they can
share on that level with that person and that anything shared is going to be
held in the strictest of confidence and there is going to be some feed back
coming from the teacher. Lots of times
the kids will ask, "What should I do?" and the teacher writes a line
or two. Those are marvelous
opportunities to personalize for each individual. Where a teacher can sit down after school,
take as much time as you want. Sometimes you want to write more back to the
child than they wrote to you. Usually it
is just a word, might even be just an exclamation point, a smiley face, and
"I understand." Or "isn't
that great?", or "Praise the Lord", or "I'll be praying for
you." It doesn't make any
difference, it is the fact that it is a two way street. That little document becomes like: they touched
my spirit and I touched their spirit and we both know something about each
other, we care about something, we value something in common, we hold that
together.
There has
got to be a quality of life there that is so important, that caring about thing
that others care about, sharing, or bearing as scripture says, one another's
burdens. Bear one another's
burdens. Well, how do we do that? Well, go to weekly prayer meeting. Adults do that. I don't know that kids do that. Well this is a way that is done very
practically on the student level. It is
done one to one. They know that when
that teacher is reading that paper they know that they have got 100% of that
teacher's attention. You might never get
that in the classroom. And vice
versa. When that teacher is reading
that, that child is focusing on that paper, on that assignment, on that sharing
process. That is a one on one. So what you can't do with a classroom full of
thirty kids, having all of this action going on a really candid level, you can
do that through a piece of paper. So
that devotional assignment becomes a very precious thing. And through the years you can just see as
kids grow up to that and get used to that, that becomes just a wonderful
emotional and spiritual outlet in their life.
And you can see them grow right in front of your eyes. If you have been commissioned with the
responsibility of developing this child you have to have a tool that reaches in
to the child. Now scripture does
that. Prayer does that. We know that, but if we have another tool,
which this devotional assignment is, why not use it? And we use it, we use it effectively. It has been a life changing thing for many of
our students.
We also
have a discipleship program we use for our juniors and seniors. And this is a program where one period a
week, Tuesday morning, the Bible class from
Sometimes
it is difficult to get adults to commit to that program, especially men. Men are all working in the morning. In Alaska here we have men who work on a week
and off a week, and that makes it a little easier, but often we have to depend
on pastors, missionaries, people in some kind of child evangelism, Missionary
Aviation Repair Center where they have men who are thrilled to personally have
input into a teenager's life one hour a week.
It is not a big commitment, but it can make a big difference. And then we have an outreach program where
students can go on missions, might be a local mission to a high school, or it
might be overseas, a foreign country. We
have a mission at least once a year to
What does
the
And then
we move into the second area. What is
going on in this child's head, what they know.
And of course, that has always been the prime focus of the educational process,
the academics. After all isn't that what
schools are for, to teach the kid something?
Give the kids the basic skills.
But the fact is, if you get academics before character, then you are
pushing a chain uphill. You are trying
to make water run uphill. You cut out
for yourself a huge assignment because you are saying to the child,
essentially, I don't care what is going on in your life. Look at this book, turn to page 149 that is
why I am here and that is why you're here.
And just let the rest of your life check out. Well, you can't do that when you are a
teenager. You don't check out of a life
because their emotions are too strong.
Everything that is going on in that kid's life is messing up his mental
processes enough at that moment. When he
walked out of the house that morning and everybody was yelling at one another,
I mean who knows what was happening.
That is what is going on in that kid's mind. Page 149 is really hard to come to that point
in time with everything else that is going on, but if he knows he is in an
environment where what is going on in his life matters, the fact that you are
not getting to it right then, he can put it on hold, knowing that the program
of this school and the interest of this teacher is to get to the real issues of
his life sooner or later. I can put
biology on hold because the things I fear, the things that are not working in
my life, my teacher also cares about that, and we have a time in our school day
that is going to address that. We are
going to get to that, I can wait for those few minutes. So that makes it possible for that child to
learn. So if you put the spiritual and
character building first, then, academics- you are only asking him to learn
what any child his age should learn.
He's not being asked to do anything a child his age can't do. So you know he can do it. All you have to do is get everything out of
the way that keeps him from doing it and it is as easy as falling over. And I don't care what subject you are
teaching, you are teaching it at their grade level and supposedly they are
ready for that. Now if you don't let
that readiness tale place then you are trying to do the impossible task with
this child. And I am saying to my
teachers, make your job easy. The
academic stuff that your kid has to do this year is so simple it will just
happen. It is almost that easy. If you set your priorities straight, when you
get around to that lesson, it is a snap.
Most
blocks to learning are a rebellion issue.
It is a matter of the will. When
a kid is struggling, making a point, it may be a very passive-aggressive
response to a situation in life that they feel is very unfair, there is no
better way to express that passively than to say, "I don't get
this." And as you are explaining it
for the 10th time and they still say they don't get it, it is like they have
the power to shut you off. They see you
trying so hard to teach and they just tell you they don't get it. It is a rebellion problem, a will
problem. You have got to deal with that.
Academics
of course teach more than just the knowledge and the facts. Just the discipline of the homework and doing
those assignments, doing them neatly, teaches responsibility and
accountability, pride in your work, teaches workmanship. The work ethic is lost in our society
today. In fact it is very common for a
kid to think, “What is the easiest way to do this?” Well, the easiest way is to copy the answers
from somebody else's book. Or at least
ask somebody else how to do this. So as
important as the actual answers to the problems and the knowledge base that you
are trying to have the child acquire are equally as important as that is
teaching the work ethic. Just the
discipline of doing that, of focusing your mind, bringing your intellectual abilities
to bear on that page, on that problem, and figuring out for yourself is a
marvelous development of the mind, of the discipline that God is trying to
bring into your life. And to not submit
to it is to miss the point of it. If you
just copy the answer, even if you get an A, if you don't go through the process
that that discipline was trying to bring to bear in your life, you are
depriving yourself of the great lesson that God wants for you in that area.
So, even
in academics, in a very real sense, character is still the issue.
The
hardest thing to do in school is to listen.
A few students do learn by listening.
We all have ways that we learn best.
I do believe that it was designed by God that we learn from being
told. That is somehow the order of
things. God said. And people listen. And Moses got up on a mountain or rock and
said Children of Israel gather round I am going to read the scriptures to you
and TELL you something. And you tell
this to your children. This is God's
method...talking and listening. This is
kind of the teaching model that we see Jesus using. He didn't have workbooks. He didn't have the Mickey Mouse manipulatives
that we have today. It was a lifestyle
that He transferred through just walking with Him and discoursing with Him and
dialoguing with Him. This is the
classical model that we find for the teacher and the pupil.
But you
see this presupposes that you know how to listen. Our society is the poorest listening society
on the face of the earth. I am convinced
of that. And it is because all around us
we have information pouring into us. Of
course television is the biggest culprit here, where we learn to tune in and
out. There is no accountability of what
we listen to. So we don't know how to
listen. We don't know that listening is
allowing somebody control of your mind where they can spill these words and
concepts in there. You make an eraser
and a blackboard in our mind and you are telling somebody, "Now you go ahead
and write on that." And everything
he says only has meaning because you can relate to those words, the vocabulary
that he was using. And the way you
relate to it is you remember different things.
So your mind wants to race down all these different memory lanes. If he is talking about airplanes flying, you
are thinking of a flight you were on. If
he is talking about airplanes crashing, you are thinking about the last news
story. In other words in the listening
process we have to discipline our mind so that we don't give ourselves the
luxury of going down all these little memory lanes that are triggered 500 times
a minute as this person is talking; but we focus. We focus, discipline. We don't know how to do that in our society.
We as a
Christian school need to teach the discipline of listening, and not give up in
despair and say well, since kids can't listen, then we'll do it this way. You actually teach listening as a skill and
it gets more and more difficult. I have
been in this teaching business 35 years now and every year it gets worse. Every year kids can listen for shorter
periods of time. It is just sheer
torture for them now for them to listen.
And if they have learned to be obedient and quiet (looks like listening)
give them some kind of comprehension check and you will see that they were just
spacing out. They were just looking at
you and smiling but they were on their own little mental journey. So you have to teach listening and that can
be done in many ways. We won't get into
that here. But a Christian school
student should develop these skills, academic skills, and listening is
certainly one of them. The work ethic
goes along with it, where he can bring his mental faculties to bear and use
them in a disciplined way; he knows how to study. He has those work study skills. He knows how to acquire information. He leaves your school and goes to college,
comes back and says I'm glad I leaned how to do this. Or he says I wish I had listened to you
better because now I know how important it was.
And he is really affirming to you that you were on the right track. We don't always bring every student to the
level we would like, but they certainly know where you are headed with them.
Finally,
what, physically, do they look like? As
I said at the beginning of the chapter, this is so often what we first
address. I like this little thing here,
"By what shall all men know that ye are my disciples? By your neckties and your short
haircuts!!" Of course that is said
tongue in cheek, but I think many of the dress codes that are in Christian
school manuals are a bunch of parents or a bunch of adults getting together and
saying, "This is the way we want our children to look." Somehow we can be deceived into thinking that
a child who does look that way is halfway there. No I have heard the arguments that a child
behaves better when he is dressed better.
I know that whole line of thinking.
I used to use it myself. Quite
frankly, I like kids that take time to be well-dressed, but that is not where
the focus of a Christian school needs to be.
If you get them there as a result of all of these programs that we have
been discussing, then I think you will have been doing it the right way.
But to
focus on that right up front gives some false impressions. One of the false impressions is that a child
can meet your physical standards and somehow never meet any kind of a spiritual
standard or growth process attained inside.
Go all the way through your school and it will almost be that model
student, there is his necktie, there is his short haircut, there are his
slacks, look at his shiny shoes, look at his manners, this is the product of
our school. Here is Joe Doe, Exhibit
A. This is our kid. But he is a disaster. An absolute disaster. He tumbles out the door as a graduate and
falls flat on his face, is an embarrassment to everybody, and you just don't
talk about it; you just write him off.
That may happen to any school but when that becomes the pattern,
something is wrong. You have been
majoring on the minors, and missing the main point of a Christian education.
I think
we need to emphasize the true display of Christianity which is graciousness,
gratefulness, considerateness, these character traits that we have talked about
before. And that will show in the way a
child behaves. And of course there is
always room to work on a child in that area and sometimes we are very
frustrated because our children aren't behaving on the levels in those areas
that we would like to see. But that just
defines our goals and objectives, and that is what we keep aiming at as
teachers, as staff. That is going to be
our job.
We do
have a chapel dress code where kids dress just a little bit nicer on chapel
days so they realize that dressing appropriately to meet other people's
expectations is a fact of life, too. It
may be that you will be an executive some day for IBM. They have a very strong dress code. We can't just be trained to think that dress
never matters. It matters. We need to be dressed appropriately where
ever we are and so we do have a way we dress one day a week so we let children
know that we are going to bring that discipline into our life and be subjected
to a little set of rules, which in our school is very modest: shirts with collars for boys and dresses for
girls. And as modest as that is, you
will always find children who find that intolerable, insufferable. Of course we live in a rural community where
that is understandable. In a large city
it would probably be much more dressed up than that.
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here when tape side 1 ended)
Whenever
you work with children, and that applies to every parent reading this book, you
are going to be disgraced by your children at one time or another. They are going to let you down. That is part of working with children. If the thing you are communicating is: You behave this way, the way I am telling you
to behave, so you will not disgrace the name of Smith, or you will not ever
disgrace your mother and father; you will never let us down. In other words, our honor and our name and
our reputation are more important; in other words your performance is more
important than what is going on in your life. So often that is the message that
kids get. So on certain occasions they
behave well, but there will always be times when children let their parents or
their teachers down. That is the nature
of a child. They are going to behave
disgracefully at one time or another.
And I
think that no school should be above being disgraced. What if a newspaper item came out that said
John Doe and Jane Doe were caught shoplifting in a certain store, what does the
Christian school do about that? Now all
of a sudden their name is drug through the mud.
If you can't handle that, you shouldn't be in Christian schools. None of us like to hear it. It is very disappointing. But that is one of the facts of life, is that
sooner or later, your children are going to let you down. The children of
(short section
stricken by request)
We just
have to be careful that when a child brings our school or the cause of Christ
into disgrace because he appears in public with clothing with our school name
on it or he is in some way identified with our students, we have to be careful
that our response to that is thoroughly Christian and it is not a bunch of you
shoulds and you oughts because that tends to be superficial. That tends to bend the child to a conformity
that doesn't come from the heart. But
rather we need to deal with it in the sense that "What do you think the
significance of this is? What are some
of the implications of the report that I have heard? Let's talk about that. Try to reason and touch the heart of a child
so he understands that there are deeper issues, so he understands that you are
not just concerned with your image. That
actually this naughty child matters more to you than your image. I'll tell you, that is a rare school that
will communicate that point to that delinquent child. That naughty boy, and he knows he is naughty,
he got caught, and it is obvious the way he is being treated respectfully and
the way he is being entreated, and loved in the disciplinary procedure that
takes place there, it needs to be obvious to him that he matters more than that
school's image.
Now a
school image does matter. But let me
tell you that if you have a school body who know that they matter more than
your image, that will do more for your image than anything else you can do. That is a real school. Real people go there, real caring people with
hearts full of love, that love kids.
That school was designed for kids.
That is a place where kids are nurtured into this Godly lifestyle that
we want to give them.
So these
are all different ways of looking at a child and most of what we have talked
about in this chapter are things we can't readily see on the surface. But if you look closely and if the school
program is designed in such a way, all of these will be apparent to somebody
who is really studying the way this Christian student looks like. And he will look like a child who is
responding positively to the spiritual input that this school is giving in his
life and he is growing as a result of it.
They will all be in different stages of growth, from the reluctant
beginner to the one who is walking in real victory, with joy in the Lord and
has a vibrant testimony. You will have
every one in between and not one of them worth more or being loved more than
the other. In other words, showing each
one where they are that they are worthy of being loved and we don't idolize or
hold up the saint so to speak, but we equally love them all and treat them all
in love. And under that situation, they
flourish. They are nourished. And they become the children that we want
them to be.
Scripture
says in Luke that when a child is fully developed, he will be like his
teacher. He will look like his
teacher. And if his teacher is Christ,
he will look like Christ. And it is
clear from scripture that that is what the Christian life is all about: Till Christ be formed in us, that is what's
happening. And a Christian school that
is run by Christ himself and the teachers are subject to Christ and see
themselves as instruments of Christian principles where Christ is absolutely
free to work in everybody's life, then your product is going to be more Christ
like than anything you could artificially manufacture through a rule book that
is 10 inches thick and try to force a child into some kind of a mold that is
your pre-conceived idea of what a Christian student looks like. When Christ is free to produce that in the
child then it happens as a result of His love and grace at work rather than law
and legalism at work.
I would
like us to consider actually how expensive free public education is for just a
moment. Because it is true; all
education is costly. One of the things
that parents consider when they consider a private school is the cost of
it. Budgets are already stretched to the
limit. It seems like impossibility. Education which appears not to cost anything
because there is no additional cost is quite costly. One of the costs is that every family that
has a child in Christian school is a taxpayer and has paid for a public
education. So it is costly because we do
pay for it; the government isn't paying for it.
The government doesn't have any money but what is first taken from the
people. We Americans are funding the
public schools of
If there
are vital aspects of the education that is missing as revealed not only by test
scores, but is revealed by the fact that even the textbooks themselves are not
presenting the material as they were presented 50 and 60 years ago. There has been a great rewrite of history, of
social studies curriculum. Our whole
science comes from a different point of view.
All of a sudden we are alarmists ecologically and environmentally and we
are getting new causes to rally around almost to divert the public's attention
from the failure that we are experiencing in education today. So we are getting emotional support from the
public on these side issues hopefully just to divert the attention of what
people should really be looking at which is the failure of the public school
system.
That is
resulting in a very spotty situation going on in the public school system. It is very much a hit and miss so there is a
lot that isn't there. We are paying for
that and our kids of course pay the price of missing that education. It is not only that some of it is missed,
some of it is wrong. They are learning
things that are not so.
Scripture
talks about a double minded man being unstable in all his ways. I feel one of the primary tools that trains
double mindedness in our society today, for believers, is for us to send our
children to a public school where they must take off their Sunday clothes so to
speak, their Sunday behavior, the approach that assumes that God is the
creator, He is the originator of all things, He is the most important One, and
everything else that has to do with the gospel of the Lord, we lay that
aside. And for five days a week, we
become part of this secular society that has nothing to do with spiritual
values. We actually train ourselves to
think with two minds. We have a mindset
for home and family and church. And we
have a mindset for school and education and everything that is knowledge based,
anything that has value in our career and as far as our profession is
concerned.
So many
times where those values conflict, we are asking the children to make a
choice. Quite often they make the choice
in favor of what is practical, what is expedient, what is going to involve
getting ahead in the business world. A
guy does what he has got to do. He hears
that over and over again, regardless of what the absolutes are in the situation. So actually we are training a generation of
people that are double minded. This
makes for an unstable man. That is what
scripture says. A double minded man is
unstable in all his ways; he is blown of the wind and tossed. We have a generation that beautifully
illustrates the truth of those verses.
We have an entire generation that is lost.
How much
is a soul worth? What is the value of
your child? If you were to lose him to
the kingdom of darkness forever, how much have you paid for a free education? The cost is infinite, way too much. So a free public education is very
expensive.
So the
converse of that is: Christian education
is also very expensive. Some of the
costs I would like us to consider at first are not the financial costs. It is the cost of being on the front lines in
the spiritual warfare for our children.
Because once you enlist your children in a Christian school, and once
you as a staff become engaged in this battle for the minds, the hearts, the
souls of young people, Satan is going to take your incursion into what he
considers his domain very seriously. A
child born into this world is born into the kingdom of darkness. So, Satan claims every child that is born
into this world; he is born in sin. He
is in need of salvation. That is a
fundamental principle of our gospel that we preach, that a child needs Christ,
and he needs to be converted. When we
actively involve ourselves in the process of reaching out to these children and
rescuing them from the kingdom of darkness, then Satan is going to direct his frontal
attack on the institution that spends six hours a day, five days a week with
the youth of this nation. He objects
strenuously to that. Look at how
actively he is involved in sweeping the children into his kingdom, whether it
is MTV, the educational system of this world, or the entertainment system it
all militates against the salvation of the child's soul. It militates to keep him in deception, to
keep him in darkness, to keep him from ever discovering the truth and the
glorious light of the knowledge of God.
Because
of this tremendous spiritual pressure that we experience in Christian schools
there is a subtle temptation that comes, especially over the administration, I
would say especially over the Principal, Administrator, of a school, to
compromise. Because there is this
constant pressure from the kids concerning:
the rules are too strict, there is too much work here, we don't like
this, we don't like that, it would be easier if we went back into public
school. This appears to be physical, it
seems to be an every day situational problem, but it is a spiritual
problem. This is the way Satan militates
against this school- is to create dissension, grumbling, a murmuring
spirit. And when teachers hear this constantly
from students and from parents there is a tremendous temptation to compromise,
to dilute the work that is required, to lower the standards and say, "Oh
well, I guess it is not so important."
This isn't consciously done by the families that you are serving. They don't come into the school to try to
destroy the school. They are just
products of the world in which they live and they live in a very worldly
world. It is a very ungodly world. And those ungodly influences are far stronger
in their life than the would ever admit, maybe than they ever realized. So as they grumble against what the Christian
school stands for so often they don't know that they are party to what Satan is
doing which is to do what the children of
And so
here this Christian school that rushed to open its doors and thought that
people would be happy to be there all of a sudden find them on a battle field
with bullets and cannonballs flying, and they think, "What
happened?" And it is because you
have made inroads into the kingdom of darkness and you are claiming in the name
of Jesus Christ these children for the
So, in a
war zone there are casualties.
Now the
most common casualties in a Christian school we would expect are kids that
don't make it. They don't reach our
standards and so they are out for one reason or another. It could be a severe violation of the rules,
they are not keeping up with the academic work.
We expect to see some casualties.
Some times we see families literally fall apart and disintegrate in
front of our eyes, from the pressure of their own situation. Maybe they had come to the Christian school
as a last ditch effort to hold the family unit together and somehow do
something right that would make up for the many mistakes they had made as a
home. And it doesn't work. And so we would expect to see some of these
kinds of casualties.
Believe
it or not, we see casualties in the staff, in the faculty, of Christian schools
across this land, and that is because Satan makes it his business to personally
attack and destroy these people any way that he possibly can because he wants
to see the demise of these ministries that God has raised up in these
days. So you are asking for trouble when
you are asking for a job in a Christian school.
I would
just like to give a brief personal testimony to that very thing. After
There are
many aspects of this. It is not the
purpose of this book to deal with the physical situation, but to give it as a
prime example of the fact that there are many casualties on the battle field so
to speak in this spiritual warfare that happened as a result of where we
are. And of course, when Satan sees these
taking place it looks like he has won a great victory. A few years back we remember the Jimmy Bakker
stories and the Jimmy Swaggart stories, and the scandal that represented, not
only to the church, but to the world, how they could wag their tongues and
bring so much shame on the name of Christ.
That is happening in our Christian schools and I experienced it
myself. You wonder if a ministry can
survive. Some don't. It is to the testimony of the love and grace
of God that
So I
guess I would like to say that not only have I personally paid a big price as I
have entered an area which I reminded the Lord that I came in kicking and
screaming because my dream was something else for myself. When I was asked by a group of parents to get
this school started, my first answer was no.
I didn't want it. It looked like
trouble; it looked like more than I bargained for and there was no security and
no pay and no retirement and just a lot of things that didn't appeal to me and
I said no. It just looked like a huge
headache. And yet after God worked on me
for a year God brought me into this ministry.
And I have had many times to ask the Lord, "What did you get me
into?" And yet I think that anybody
who has been through a divorce realizes that there is a part that everybody
plays in the failure of a marriage. And
the Lord has helped me to see that for me.
But that still doesn't heal my home.
It doesn't make it go back together again. And now ten years later I am still in a divorced
state and it is very painful. Yet God
uses that almost daily in my life to ...to humble me, and to keep me quiet
before Him, and waiting upon Him, realizing that my waiting process and what He
is teaching me through this, and the growth that I experience in not only what
I need personally in my life, but this school is going to benefit from
that. God is going to use that tragedy
for another greater triumph.
This is
something only God can do. He has done
it consistently throughout history- to take the believer's tragedy and turn it
into something good. And He will do it
every time, if we are willing to accept His grace and His forgiveness. I call it bringing life from death.
That is
what this school has experienced: learning lessons the hard way. I would like to just list some of these
lessons. They are costly lessons. So when we think of some of the pain and cost
of a Christian school education these days are some of the lessons that those
reading this book that have been involved in trying to get a school started, or
keeping it going, in any way trying to administer a school, they'll identify
with some of these things.
We had
accumulated a lot of debt. The Lord
showed us that that was not a way to run this school. From a rather laissez faire relationship we
had with banks, and because we had a fairly decent cash flow, they were willing
to loan us money; it was kind of easy to
get a loan. Yet we found out rather
quickly that we got into a world of hurt in the area of finances, which really
brought us to our knees. Most of these
bad things center around the divorce period of our life. That three year period that the Board asked
me to leave to see if I couldn't get my marriage together and see if there was
some healing that could take place in my own personal situation. (We will have to tie it together for the
reader without over doing it.)
During
the same period, Satan wasn't just after me; he was after the destruction of
this school. And it was during this
hiatus, so to speak, this parenthesis in the existence of this school, that
Satan just cut loose every volley that he could possibly muster to try to make
sure that this ship was sunk and would never float again. When the board did come back three years
later and asked me to rejoin the staff at the school and to be the Principal
again, we started making a covenant together that we wouldn't go into debt
again.
We
developed a new financial structure that involved creating just a core budget
which we will talk about a little bit later.
Pro-rating the tuition; having new contractual arrangement with our
teachers where we guaranteed them nothing, but we would just split amongst them
what came in for tuition; and the sports budget and all of the budget that had
to do with what we might call non-academic essentials they would be a separate
budget and whether that budget was raised or not, the school would still
function. In other words, we would make
sure the tuition covered the academic core purpose and mission statement of our
school.
Since
then our school has been out of debt. We
paid the last payment on our property that we have been buying here. The school has no debt; owes no bills to
anyone other than the current utility bills that come in every month. That is a great relief and a great sense of
freedom. Money and the budget do not
drive this school. If we had a large
debt over our head, we would be forced to make many decisions that we wouldn't
want to make if we hadn't made this policy which allows us to turn our
attention to the mission and purpose statement that we have adopted for this
school which is a ministry to the families in our area.
We had
kind of some broken promises on the books of
Another problem
that we were facing: we were threatened by lawsuits. We had several teachers
that threatened to take us to court.
Some of them looked like they were going to make good on their promises
for many different reasons. So there was
a lot of mistrust, a lot of disunity, right here in the staff of this school,
and it threatened to tear the school apart.
Now we see a staff where there is unity.
There is love, they are united.
They love to gather around the faculty table for devotions and
prayer. There is not mistrust. The board, the administration, the faculty
are all seen as being on the same team.
There is a mutual sharing of problems, of resources, just a wonderful
ebb and flow of communication going on.
There was
a period of time during the death throes of our school where the school was
quite unresponsive to parents. Parents
would complain, parents would want to see this take place, and for various
reasons, it just wouldn't happen. They
started to get unhappy. Enrollment
dropped. There was a lot of
dissatisfaction taking place. It has
developed to the point now where the parents actually have a written evaluation
of every staff member and their opinions are respected. They can tell us about the program so that
their participation is actually solicited.
We take on PTF in January of every year where we pass out evaluations
and have them quietly there and have them evaluate nine different aspects of
each staff member's participation in the life of their child. There are several lines there for comment
about the program of the school. And
then the administration and the board go over these, and try to get a better
and stronger school as a result of this input.
So that is a complete turn around, life coming from death.
In that
same regard, we went from a school that almost had no volunteers participating;
you could hardly find any body to say, "Yes, I will help with
this." To a school full of
them. You come to school at any given
time of day and you'll find four, five, or six adults here at any one
time. We have a full participating
volunteer program; of course we have put some incentives into the program. But the fact remains that when you have
parents actively involved, it completely changes the complexion of our
school. And it also changes their
attitude to what is going on here because it is not so distant, and also the
attitude of the children, as they get used to seeing not only Mom and Dad here
but their peers' moms and dads. And they
get a sense that this is something we are doing together as a community of
believers, a community of concerned parents.
So we are all in this together; it is not us against them attitude
developing. It is much more of a collaborative
atmosphere. And I think it is very
supportive, it is encouraging to the child.
And I see
another lesson learned- instead of getting ahead of God, extending ourselves
where God has not given us permission to be extended, to make commitments that
we can't keep, to rush ahead with out plans and hope the money follows, it's
taught us to wait on Him. Waiting is
always hard. It is probably one of the
most difficult lessons that Christians have to face in their personal life. And the same is true in the life of a
school. We have a gym that is half
completed. It is heated and has
insulation. We would love to be in there
and let our children have recess in there and do what we can in there. But the sheet rock is not up. The electrical is not finished. The fire marshal won't let us in there. So we have to wait. We wait for God's timing. We wait for God's provision. It is not easy to wait. We ask God: "Do you know what you are
doing? What are you doing? What do you have in mind?" God tell us.
Yet the very heart of any of our growth goes through the pain of waiting
upon God. It is at those moments that we
develop a relationship with Him.
If we had
no reason to be calling out upon God, we would be doing our own thing. We would be saying, "Hey God, see you
later, thanks." And we would be off
and running. But He knows the exact
strategy that each of us needs, and the degree of pressure that needs to be on
each of us as individuals to keep us pressed to him because we are in a
struggle, you might say, a wrestling match with God. Look at the illustration that is given in the
Old Testament of Moses smiting the rock.
And the New Testament tells us that that rock was Christ. Who hit Him?
Was it Pharaoh? Was it the
enemies of God? No, it was Moses. Who wrestled with the angel all night? Jacob woke up from that experience
wounded. That was an angel of the Lord,
taken as a symbol of Christ, if not in fact an appearance of Christ in the Old
Testament. And so, the Christian walk in
a sense is a love/hate relationship with Jesus Christ because we hate it when
He makes us wait. We hate it when He
doesn't answer our prayer and yet we know we have no other place to turn and so
we wrestle with Him. And many times we
want to break. We've tried to get Him
off the edge of the mat and He keeps dragging us on there. He is not done with us. It is a physical conflict that we have with
God. There are many times we want to
disengage and take a breather, just say, "God I am taking Friday off." I am taking the weekend off. Just go and do your thing and I'll do my
thing. I need this break from you. Because that is how intense the conflict can
get.
But
Christ knows that is those times of intense conflict that we interact the most
intensively, the most passionately, when we will get to know Him, when we are
driven to Him. God knows how to design
even the experience of the school in such a way that we are driven to
Christ. Many times we just have to get
fed up with our own complacency, with the fact that we are going nowhere and
have Christ literally drive us to our knees so that we will move off of dead
center and move out into the life and liberty and the provision that God has
for us.
Well,
listening to a series of victories that God has given to us in bringing life
after death, it might seem that
I have a
real burden for a prayer ministry to be built up here at this school. Not just one or two, but dozens of people
that meet together regularly, praying for the ministry of this school, praying
for the staff, and praying for the students.
We are in a spiritual warfare and my heart is heavy when I see that
basically as a school we are not aware of that, we are not alive to that. And so we wait upon God to bring us to an
awareness of how much we need to pray and to hold up this ministry before God
because we are in this war zone that we talked about. We need to develop a core of donors. We need to develop friends who maybe their
kids are raised and gone and see that there is a need for something like a
Christian school. We have a long way to
go to effectively know how to reach out into the community and encourage them
to see the positive aspects of our ministry.
As far as
encouraging the community to have a part in the Christian school, and there is
this mysterious thing about how God has used the wealth of ungodly people, and
some people are uncomfortable with that, but certainly as the children of
Israel left Egypt we are aware of how they showered the wealth of these people
on Israel as they left. Listen to this
passage in Ecclesiastes 2:26. "But
to the sinner He gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it
over to the one who pleases God."
Did you know that verse was in the Bible? Isn't that amazing? "But to the sinner He gives the task of
gathering and storing up wealth...” there they are making money...."to
hand it over to the one who pleases God."
And God can put it into the heart of these people to support your
ministry. And of course that is not where
the bulk of support from any ministry should come from, or probably will come
from. It is an interesting verse. I don't believe we have begun to see how God
is going to meet the needs of our school.
And I think we need to just open ourselves to the fact that God can do
great and incredible things. We talk
about the fact that He owns the cattle on a thousand hills and I think we spend
a lot of time trying to figure out how God could possibly do a certain thing. I think when we get to the point where we
don't see how He is going to do it is the time when God is really free to do
what only He can do. I think we have to
be open to what He can do.
I think
we as a school have a long way to go to develop awareness among Christians,
among churches, of the philosophy of Christian education. The Christian community at large is largely
in the dark about what we are all about and I am not sure of the best way to do
that. Maybe it is a little bit like a
salesman that knows he has a wonderful gimmick and knows it would make all the
difference in the world and just doesn't know how to get started to get his
message across. He doesn't have
everything at his disposal that he wants to shout to the world. Christian schools are much the same way. We have this wonderful opportunity to meet
with our children and pray and worship and sing with them every day and to
nurture them in the things of God and to show them how God is woven into every
part of His creation and there is nothing that we can't talk about. But isn't it an expression of who God is and
it has to do with something that He is teaching us out of His word. What a wonderful privilege and opportunity
this is and yet the majority of our Christian brethren are outside of this
movement completely. I think many of
them are suffering as a result of it.
So,
Christian education does cost. You know,
it costs a lot, but really there is something in each one of us, in every
parent that is reading this book, that really wished it didn't cost so much. In fact, they wished it cost nothing, they
wished it was free. There are some who
have probably spent 20, 30 or 50 thousand dollars on tuition already. Yet I am reminded of this verse in II Samuel
24:24 where King David was going to make an offering to the Lord, and it was
something that was given to him. He
said, "No I am going to pay for this.
Do you think that I am going to offer to God something that cost me
nothing?" In fact as we bring our
offering to God I believe that the joy that we receive is somehow measured by
the cost of that offering. As Jesus and
the disciples were watching money being put into the offering box in the temple
the rich gave out of their wealth a lot and the widow gave two mites. And Jesus said, "She has given more than
they all.” Of course what he was really
saying is that a gift is measured not by how much you give, but how much you
have left. How big a gift was that to
you? How much did that really cost
you? The fact is, Christian education is
very costly. And parents that have seen
their families go through a Christian school have paid a very big price for
that. And I think scripture says that is
the way it is going to be. There is no
way around that. It is costly to do
that, but children are precious, and things that are precious cost a lot. When you bring a child into the world God is
going to enable you to bring that child up in the fear and admonition of the
Lord. We need to pray that God will see
that fulfilled for all of our parents.
So, to
recap, I would just say that most Christian schools I know about have had a
rather painful birth and if the birth itself wasn't painful, if they rushed
into it, the rebirth is always painful.
There is usually a place somewhere in the life of a Christian school
where things kind of collapse. The work
of the flesh and the sheer momentum of the occasion dies out and you are face
to face with whether or not you are going to allow Christ inside to run this
school, and to allow Christian principles to permeate every aspect of the way
this school is run. From that first
death that many Christian schools experience there can be this painful rebirth
and the learning of some very hard lessons.
I don't know of a Christian school that is in existence today that
doesn't have constant loving sacrifice behind it, continually offered by the
teachers, by everybody that is involved.
They are paying a price every day.
That is the way it is with any Christian ministry I know that is worth
its salt. We can expect no less. We joyfully offer it to the Lord. It is our children who are at stake. It is our heritage we are passing along to
this next generation. We want them to
know the Lord. We want them to be
excited about His love for them. And we
want them to respond to Him with their whole heart.
This
chapter will hit some of the little peaks and little plusses in our
program. If someone came to our school
and interviewed our teachers and students these things would come out in the
interviews. Repetitively they would be
referred back to as things that work in our school. I thought we could have a chapter where we
could group all these things together and outline them in bold with a way to
reference back to that if somebody was trying to implement one of these
programs in their school.
I do
believe that God uniquely prepares us all our life for our next step, whatever
that is. In fact all of life could be
considered a readiness program.
Childhood is getting ready for adult.
First grade is getting ready for second grade. A freshman in college is getting ready to be
a sophomore. Senior in college is
getting ready for a career or profession.
And all of this life is getting ready for heaven. So, we are preparing. But it is not always that we have to wait to
really live, wait to really experience the best. Even though life is that way, God intends
that we should have this abundant life.
So that there is several things going on at the same time in our
experience as we walk with God. One is
this conscious awareness that God wants us to establish this vital living
exciting relationship with him where we are interested in growing and
discovering. He gives us this curiosity
to get into His word and find out what this relationship means. But also we are in preparation for the next
thing that He has for us. Sometimes an
event of the day prepares us for a confrontation that we are going to have that
night, but we are not aware of it. But
God has, very much in His wisdom, set us up in preparation for that point.
I was
raised in the China Inland Mission. My
parents were missionaries with the China Inland Mission. They were married in
I find
that the memories I have of my Christian school experience are quite fond. Many times I think I am trying to recreate a
lot of those things that I had in my past and bring it into the here and now. It was a British school system because most
of the people that were on staff and most of the people that were in the
administration of the
But one
thing that I did sense there was this family atmosphere. All of these kids were living away from their
parents. This was a boarding school. Their parents were scattered all over
I think
as I look back on my Christian school experience my mother was a single parent
because her husband had died, was killed in the Chinese war with Japan, and I
realized that I depended a lot on my school to fill that gap in a very
subconscious way. That gap was never met.
And I know as a young boy having missed my father that for me, sexual
things were never really explained adequately.
That has always been such a hot button in American society. I really feel that probably most of our
schools are failing our children in having some kind of a healthy meaningful
dialog on whatever level is appropriate and proper in the family of God in the
school atmosphere. I do believe that
home is the place for the values to be initiated. And those are the values that should be
reinforced. But if any of us can
remember, those of us especially the boys being a boy myself how the sexual
thoughts and the sexual questions were so overwhelming, kind of overwhelmed
every aspect of my growing up that I kind of wish that there had been more
answers there. I wish that there was
maybe a little more meaningful way that we could approach that in Cook Inlet
Academy, but I think that the way that is most healthy there that we are
meeting the needs of our kids is that we do serve many single parents and many
single parents are hoping that a school like this will end up in a more rounded
experience for their child. Rather than
allowing sex to be a hot button, a hot issue, to bring it to a level of a
healthy dialog where we are not interested in talking about the erotic side of
it, but basically the responsibilities of it, the consequences of it, the
responsible handling of this gift that God has given us. And do it in a way so that hopefully the kids
can leave with a healthier respect and outlook on their sexuality than they
would if they had not been in this school.
That is a very difficult bill to follow.
I think that we can miss our mark of meeting our kids' needs for
sexual dialog by overemphasizing it, by
having a class on sex education and then everybody's all excited- what are you
going to teach and who's going to teach it, what's the curriculum, rather than
just take it on as it comes basis. I
seldom initiate the dialog on sex. But
it is before us in the newspapers; it is before us on a day to day basis as we
do current events, as we study history.
We are aware of many things that need to be approached. It was John the Baptist that approached King
Herod about his illicit relationship with his brother's wife. All of these things give us an opportunity
for the Christian mind to be expressed in that situation. You can either over-react to it or you can
take it as a very healthy next step so that it is something that doesn't even
fall into the category where you allow Satan to use it as a tool against these
kids.
But that
has been a difficult thing and I think largely we do have a healthy dialog
going on in our school in this area. But
I think it is something that has to be monitored very carefully so that it is
done in a way that honors the parental values, it doesn't violate what parents
expect you to do, that you are not circumventing because sex education is not
part of our so-called curriculum yet probably some aspect of it is expressed
almost every day in some way in the classroom because of the impact that
sexuality has on our culture today. It
is in our media, our advertising, it is all around us. So, I think it is imperative that a Christian
school have a healthy philosophy as to how they are going to transfer the
heritage of the Christian philosophy of sex to their children without violating
the privacy of the home, the rights of the parents to give the basic
instruction. The birds and the bees thing was something for my generation, not
for this generation. They stumble into
that way too early in today's society.
But then how to handle that information is the issue.
So that
was missing for me, really sorely missing.
I regret that today. A meaningful
dialog established back then would have helped a lot of us boys. Anybody who is trying to establish a
Christian school cannot fail to address how you are going to meet the needs of
the kids in this area, and do it in a way that is not offensive, that is Godly,
and is being done as if Christ were present.
So I
would say my first experience with a Christian school was quite positive. The second experience I had with a Christian
school was coming back to
The
reason I wanted this is because all of these kids were unknown to me. I had no idea where they were coming
from. I wasn't going to have the chance
to keep a running dialog personally going with each one of them. I was their teacher, yet I didn't want to see
them just as a class, I wanted to know them individually, I wanted to help them
individually, and I wanted to be specific in some of the suggestions and encouragements
I had for them. So I was literally
surprised, overwhelmed, at the value that this assignment had in our
school. I think if a kid does come into
school with a negative attitude a lot of that is I don't want to get to know
you, and I am not going to let you get to know me, so that is a given. So what is this book you want me to
read? It is kind of third party
stuff. Subtly what you are doing is
breaking down all these barriers; you are joining the same team. You are becoming mentor and student or
brother and sister or brother and brother depending on just how that
relationship develops, but in other words there is a melting of the barriers
until pretty soon they begin to see you on the same side of life as them,
sharing with them in their experiences, walking with them in their shoes,
understanding when they complain, whatever, that you are there to hear them out
and to never, never condemn the fact that they gave voice to something that
they wanted to say. I don't think I
could ever express...if that alone was the only pay I got from Christian school
education, that would be enough, because there is no doubt that is my greatest
pay every week. To have somebody that
trusts you enough with something that they care about to share it with you. Of course it is held in absolute confidence
and they know it. So they grow and
discover what a trusting relationship can really be and how they can benefit
from that.
Now the
other side of that coin is that there are two grades on this and the reason I
go into great detail is that someone might want to institute this in their
school. It is also a creative writing
assignment. Creative writing is such an
important skill to develop because communications is at the heart of developing
any relationship and it is at the heart of reaching out to a lost world that is
in need of a message. If we have not
learned how to creatively communicate and to be ourselves, and to be expressive
we are not going to be effective in so much of what we really want to do and what
most of us are able to do. At Cook Inlet
Academy I can say that kids who have been in our school in the high school and
junior high, the last six years of their school they have had a creative
writing assignment every week every year they have been in school and it has
been evaluated not only on the content, that is one of the grades, but on the
grammar and the composition. So they get
two grades like an A/C. The Bible
portion of it is the A, and the /C is the grammar, the way the paragraphs were
developed. Now, the whole approach to
language today is that you shouldn't stifle a kid by grading his grammar if you
really want him to communicate with you.
I say that until a child develop the level of competence in the language
skills then his first write should be a rough draft and he should be addressing
content, sharing from his heart and saying what he wants to. Now once he has got that down on paper he
should be his own best critic, pick up that document, rewrite it, and pay
attention to spelling and grammar and for many people it is hard to pay
attention to both at the same time. But
this whole business of rewriting and being our own best critic is something
that is lost in our educational system today.
Everybody else is supposed to evaluate you, you are not supposed to
learn to evaluate yourself, catch your own mistakes, be self-directed,
self-improving so to speak. This one
little assignment does so much that you could almost receive an education in so
many of the things that are important with this one assignment alone.
So the
devotional assignment was absolutely a gift to our school, and it has given me
a relationship with a host of students and alumni that I know I never would
have had if that had never been an assignment because there is no way in the
busyness of our days that we could have had any meaningful dialog. This way I have meaningful dialog with
absolutely every student and nobody is excluded. So you don't have to be noisy and boisterous
to get my attention. You just have to
write me a nice composition and you have got my attention. And you know I am going to read it in the
private and quietness of my study and while I am reading that I am focusing on
that kid, he knows that. My comments at
the end are going to show him that he has got my attention, 100% of it.
The second
gift that the Lord gave, because I don't really take credit for this, this is a
simple thing and many schools might do it, but this is a weekly report
card. This is an attempt to enlist
parents and make them partners with me in this process. I was envisioning panic those few days just
before school opened, thinking this thing is really going to happen. These parents are going to dump their kids
off in the basement of this church and I am the only one there, there is not
going to be any other adult, and we are going to have school. As I panicked, I thought, "You know I
need help." Now I had taught for 6
years prior to coming to this area in rural
Some of
the parents spoke so little English that it was not even possible to
communicate my philosophy with them. In
that way God helped me to see the importance of somehow having at least some
measure of success when I was operating almost within a vacuum, almost within a
society that may or may not have been aware completely of what I was trying to
do to help their children. So I felt I
could do it if I had to, but now when I came against these white American kids,
they weren't nearly as well behaved s the native kids of
So I
said, “You know what I am going to do?”
I am going to let you know every week how they do; I am going to give
this report card to you and I want you to follow up. So we developed the idea for weekly report
card. Not only were we going to record
the academic grade for the week, but we were going to grade the behavior and
attitude of each child. This report card
was going to list the week number, the student's name, all the subjects they
were taking, the academic grade that they had gotten for the week, and it was
going to give them a behavior and attitude grade. And it was going to be cumulative so if there
was unfinished work, the parent could see that the grade still had not been
changed and go back and make sure the work had been made up. So we were going to form a team, the mom and
dad and school and work together to encourage that child to submit himself to
the discipline of that school. I think
most of our parents would testify to the fact that this is an important aspect
of our program here at the school. This
keeps them informed and keeps them in touch.
They know what is going on. It is
one thing when Johnny comes home to say, “How did it go today?” “Oh great.”
“Got all your work done?”
“Yeah.” “Any problems?” “No.”
This gets the teacher a chance to say on every Friday, "This is the
way it went as I saw it." It
develops an honesty and a flow of communication that I think has been just very
central in what we are doing here.
Another thing
that has done is that it has almost placed more burden on many parents than
they had first anticipated, because many parents think when they are paying
their tuition that should pay for us to educate the child. It is a little bit like a person hiring a
tutor to come into the home and not expecting the parent's load to increase as
a parent. They are paying the tutor to
do that. So if you have that mentality,
you pay for an education at
So really
what we are doing as a Christian school is we are subtly reminding a parent by
having this report card. Now the job
isn't over, here is the report. How can
you fit in your parental responsibilities to sit down, counsel with your child,
discuss these grades, set goals, set minimums, and ensure the process has the
kind of reinforcement it needs from home.
Some parents don't like that initially.
They have allowed themselves to get quite relaxed or delinquent in this
parenting process and this is characteristic in our society today. This malaise has touched even us as
Christians. So when something comes
along to sharpen us or remind us what our responsibilities are, initially we
don't like it. But after we think about
it twice then we say this is the way it ought to be. We submit to it, we say yes, I am this
child's parent and this is my responsibility.
I realize the lion's share is being done by those at school. But I am a key element in this process. This child has a connectedness to me as his
dad and his mom that he won't have with any other humans on earth. They know that you have that unique
relationship and one of the ways that you are going to have a level of
integrity and believability with this child is to do your duty as God has
clearly laid it out for you in scripture.
When we are doing that we get the respect from our kids that God ensures
that we will get.
So we
find parents developing parenting skills almost in spite of themselves through
our PTFs, through a lot of the conferencing they find themselves better parents
as a result of joining
Another
way we keep weekly contact with our families is through our weekly
newspaper. We have done this since the
first day of school. When the school
first opened its doors it was larger than just one church home. There were many churches and many diverse
people in this little one room classroom.
I realized that we just couldn't keep holding meetings every week. So it was just a one page flier that grew and
grew and got to be a document that the kids put out as part of their language
assignment. Now we have had a newspaper
for 21 years. There are not many schools
that do it every week; some do a bigger one once a month. Basically it is an instrument that we keep a
communication flowing home. I think that
is very important to give the parents ownership into the school.
Something
that we started from the very first day of school is a daily cleanup of our school. It takes five minutes. Everybody has an individual assignment- clean
the board, dump the trash, pick up the papers in the hall, clean the mirror,
floor, and trash in the bathroom.
Everybody has their own specific job and in just a few minutes the basic
grubbiness of the school is taken care of.
It won't look polished as if a professional had done it, but they learn
a very important life lesson.
We
actually had parents come in and say they weren't sure if they wanted their
child responsible for the janitorial service of the school, isn't that what
they are paying for? No, you pay tuition
and we actually have no paid janitor. I
don't know if there is a school in
Another
program that has been quite successful is our discipleship program. We do that with our juniors and seniors. The upperclassmen girls are paired up with a
lady, upperclassmen boys with a man, one morning a week. We do it Tuesday morning during our Bible
period,
This has
been a wonderful thing. We have a rather
informal program. We ask that the
mentors, the disciplers try to have at least three things going on. One is dialog; try to find out what the
student's week is like, the joys and sorrows of it. A study time when they address scripture and
they are confronted with the claims of Christ in one way or another. And a time for prayer. If you are doing those three things
meaningful dialog, addressing scripture, looking at what God says about life,
either about the issues that were just discussed, or follow a little study
guide, it really doesn't make any difference as long as you are interacting
with the Word of God., and then learning to pray together. By the way, this goes two ways. It is not just the child sharing his
life. The adult does the same thing
too. And treats the youth like a young
adult. This is a two way street. The more that they see these adult Christians
as people that have disappointments and discouragements and joys and failures
then I think they get a much more realistic view of what life is really like.
One interesting
aspect of this that many parents have asked to disciple their own kids and many
kids have responded to that. That has
been a wonderful result because as this program is explained we have had many
parents exclaim, "Boy would I love to have an uninterrupted hour with my
child where we could just talk and develop a relationship. I don't want somebody else to do with my
child what I would give anything to do myself.
Of course they always have first dibs.
There are times where mutually it might be better if another adult was
in on it and that is appropriate, too.
***See the sheet in the appendix of comments of feedback over the year
evaluated the things they have learned and ways they have grown and appreciated
about this whole thing that they would never have really have anticipated when
the year began.
Another
thing we do that gets the year off to a good start with the high school
students is we have a HS retreat where we leave as an entire student body for
several days and go to some Christian campground. The student body is always a little different
mix every year; the seniors are gone, that always leaves a hole. We have a new bunch of freshmen and they are
kind of squirrelly and immature and yet we are going to have to work as a team
and we have to learn to live together and work with each other. I suppose some schools are so big you could
not do this altogether. Maybe you could
just have a junior or senior retreat.
But some way get together at the beginning of the year have a time of
devotions, have a time of outdoor education, do some exerting mountain
climbing, get in some challenging situations.
We've done some rock climbing where they have been hanging literally in
the balance with their life suspended from just one rope and learning about
trust and about how important an otherwise insignificant other things can be in
their life, another teen that they wouldn't probably ever look at or talk to
all year, they can be thrown into that ..would open their eyes to that would be
a good person to know. So this has been
very strengthening. We try to do it as
soon as we can. It is almost like every
day of school that we have before this is lost.
Because everybody is a little shy and they really don't know each other
and they are being cutesy. A few of the
kids that do know each other are into their group already way too fast. They new student that doesn't know anybody
doesn't have anything that is throwing him socially with the group so the
faster you can get this behind you, the better.
In fact if it looks like it is going to be three or four weeks, we will
have a social right at the beginning anyway to start to get this family feeling
going amongst the high school students.
The
outreach aspect of our school has gone through many phases. In the beginning of our school while it was
quite young, we spent a lot of our time visiting other high schools, their
biology classes particularly and getting a dialog going on creation. Those were just wonderful times. I was rather surprised at the openness of the
public schools to have a bunch of students come in with some charts, some
presentations, willingness to field questions, let them know far enough in
advance so that they could get their questions.
The teachers of both classes stay out of it an the kids based on how
well they have been trained and how much they have learned, just kind of dialog
together in a very respectful way, not an argumentative way. That made a lot of impact. Lately our thrust has really been in
missions. Being such a small school with
only about 30 high school students we just can't get spread too thinly. You know if you have a student body of about
30, some are going to be kind of shy, not participate. They feel more comfortable just watching, you
are not going to have a very large group if you get involved in too many
programs, to keep the family feeling. It
has worked for us as a small school to narrow down our options and do what we
do well, and do it together so that it unites rather than divides us. We play boy’s and girl’s basketball, almost
everybody in the high school is involved in that. But outreach is our missions and now we also
do
We have
four exchange students from Russia here today as one indication of what can
happen when you go into a town, small little Russian community, that would
never have been reached and now four of them are under the sound of the gospel
every day and five days a week, six hours a day and there are in a Christian
school. We feel very privileged to have
them here, we are sponsoring them here, and this is our way of following up on
outreach to
We have
one student and there may be more, that are actually doing long term
missions. We now have a program for
seniors who have completed the bulk of their requirements for graduation, to
spend their senior year abroad. This is
kind of an experimental year, but it is something that all of our student body
is following very closely. Just the
other day we had a commissioning service and a good-bye party for Melissa as we
sent her off to
Another
thing that has been successful is we used to just have a jogathon in the Fall
to raise money for our athletic program.
It is really our one big student fund-raiser where the students are
involved. We found that adults were
reluctant to sponsor big old high school students just running around in a
circle. We developed a program that is
not unique with us going out into the community and participating in hospitals
and senior citizen centers, Salvation Army, Christian campgrounds. Our seventh through twelfth graders give a
whole day as a donation to these organizations and serve in the community and
find out a little bit about these non profit service arms that take care of our
community and in so doing their sponsors sponsor that day in the community
which is a very meaningful experience for the student and for the community and
raises money for their sporting program.
We have a commendation from our governor which not only when he heard
about it but when he came to our school to investigate and find out what was
going on here wrote us a personal commendation.
We do feel it is a much more positive way that we can impact the
community and be a lighthouse as we believe God wants us to be salt and light.
Another
success is the volunteer program that we recently developed among parents that
actually is initiated by a two level participation as a parent in our
school. The associate member pays the
tuition rate that is posted in our literature.
A discount is offered to a member who can give about ten hours a month
to the school as a donation and will meet the need of the school in some way,
providing transportation for field trips, helping with recesses, grading
papers, helping with facilities, painting, whatever. This has been a wonderful program. We are only into our second year. It has gone a hundred percent better than our
first year, but we do look for 100% improvement in the following year. One of the things I like is that these kids
get used to seeing their moms and dads around them all day long, somebody's mom
and dad. And it is in a very positive
way and this way it gives the parents a real heart for what the school is
doing, and a heart for these children.
And they begin to see it more than just going out and buying a product,
buying education. They start to own it
even that much further. So the total
quality of the product that we are offering our families is improved because of
this volunteer program. Of course the
fact that we can offer that quality product at a lower price because of the
volunteer hours, we get between 500 to 800 donated hours a month. That is a significant donation in a school's
program.
Faculty
devotions- I can't imagine running a Christian school without getting the
faculty together every morning but this can be a marvelous time of meeting with
God and spreading out before him the needs of the school. The way we do it in our school- we keep a
sequence of faculty members that do it every week, that are responsible for
leading the devotion, the prayer time, the requests. We all pray every morning. This has done a lot to weld us together as a
faculty and to keep our dialog flowing, not just every day dialog about school
events and books and curriculum, but our dialog that focuses on the spiritual
aspect and the spiritual mission of this school, which is our mission and
purpose statement. So we have a twenty
minute meeting every day of our faculty that focuses on the spiritual mission
of this school. We meet with the Lord
and we refocus and we remind ourselves and make ourselves consciously available
to Him to bless our children, His children, to us.
Lastly I
would like to mention the school day of prayer.
Most schools have in-service days where they prepare for the kinds of
things they want to accomplish; they want to make sure time is made available
for that. This year we have set aside an
in-service day that is just for long range planning. The parents, teachers, board members try to
look down the road and see what God is telling us about the directions that we
need to take. We also have a day of
prayer at the beginning of the school year where the faculty prays together all
morning and then we have an open house prayer in the afternoon and each teacher
sponsors a prayer session in their classroom for students and for parents. We have taken time to develop a prayer list
that is meaningful in each of these situations.
I really think it has helped to remind us if nothing else of what we are
all about as a school. But it also
reminds us that we are in a spiritual warfare and it is very easy to be a
casualty. If we are in a spiritual
warfare, then we are going to have to take significant premeditated steps,
specific strategies, not only for engaging ourselves in this spiritual battle,
but for making sure that we know that this is the Lord's battle and we can win
it and there is a dimension to the process that is going on here at this school
that is beyond the academic, beyond the physical, it is the spiritual, mostly
it is invisible, very easy to dismiss the invisible, and yet what this day of
prayer does is brings what we are all about and what the kingdom of God is all
about into sharp focus and helps us to be committed as a faculty and as a
school to fulfill God's plan for this school, for that year.
Often
when we talk about discipline we think of the unruly child. We are talking about the kid that is up out
of his seat, talking out of turn, who is a distraction. Teachers want to know what are the management
strategies that we have to modify this child's behavior. I think that the school that determines it is
going to attack this behavior problem in the school and it is going to make a
frontal attack in that area is going to find it is creating more problems, like
putting out a series of wildfires, once you get one out another one
starts. I think the way to really
approach this is to realize there are several areas of discipline; the behavioral
one is only one of them. If you are
working on the other three that we have identified here, the fourth one which
seems to be the most obvious, it is the most presenting problem which a teacher
or an observer would run into, those almost melt away, though you are always
working on behavior problems.
First I
would like to talk about the discipline of manners. We don't live in a society that practices
good manners. As a rule, kids are quite
rude. To say please and thank you is
something they have been taught, but somehow they haven't learned. They need to learn it again. They need to be in a classroom situation
where taking turns without interrupting and those kinds of things are stressed
and the child is reminded of it again and again until it literally becomes a
habit of behavior. In fact good manners
are nothing more than making your presence valued. The kid that is a nuisance is the kid that
you want gone. His friends don't
appreciate him. The very fact that he is
ignored and people are pushing him away makes him more and more of a nuisance
because none of us wants to be ignored.
None of us wants to be insignificant.
None of us wants to have no part and no significance in the life of
another person. So these kids who are
always misbehaving are those often who are being pushed away as a reaction to
their behavior. That is the reason why
these children who are taught manners become a valued member of their little
classroom community. And they start to
be appreciated because they learn to respect one another and they learn to show
interest in another person, they learn to be a good conversationalist and reach
out beyond themselves which is all part of good manners. Developing Biblical values, this is right
behavior, this is wrong behavior. The
Bible makes it clear to develop a value system for those children that is
Biblical. Then we find that their
behavior starts to become exemplary.
Poor
discipline does truly damage relationships.
As we said, here is a kid who has no friends; he doesn't know why he
can't get a friend. He doesn't know that
all of his poor behavior that makes him obnoxious is an attempt to gain
friends, to gain recognition by his peers, and yet it is all counter
productive. He needs to be sat down and
shown a strategy that is the opposite of what he wants to do. Once he develops some good manners, once he
develops some good personal relationship skills then all of a sudden he can be
a friend and have a friend. So we need
to take the time to teach children the discipline of good manners because it is
in their own best interest. That is when
they become worth so much more to the little community that they are a part of
and their peers seek them out because the are so friendly.
Many
teachers are sort of upset that they have the job of training these children. Why don't parents do their job? Why don't they send us perfect little
children? It would be so much easier to
teach these children. And yet, our
philosophy in our manual states very clearly that we join hands with the
parent. The parent is delivering the
child to the school acknowledging the job isn't over yet. I am asking you to help in this process. I am sorry I can't deliver to you a finished
child; can you help me finish my child in the training and so many of these
areas? So I think teachers should expect
that they would really act in the parent's behalf as it is called in law terms
in loco parentis, and they become the parent.
And they are not put out over the fact that they have to do a lot of non
academic stuff wit the kid. They have to
literally train the child as you would if he were your own child. Yet we need to look forward with joy because
it is so productive; it is so worthwhile to build that kind of character into a
child that is going to last him all of his life. And people are going to respect him and
appreciate him if he can develop those fine skills of personal relationships.
Then of
course, there is the discipline of academics.
If you want to bring discipline into your school then something has to
be going on to engage the child's attention and to absorb his energy. A lot of times the behavior problems we have
in the classroom are because there is nothing going on in the classroom,
nothing going on academically challenging his mind. These kids are active, they are growing and
you have got to engage them. So,
Academics are called a discipline; we need to see them as the discipline of the
mind. It is bringing the mental
abilities of this child into focus, teaching him how to concentrate. This takes a great effort. Children don't normally do this in our
society. We tend to be mentally lazy; we
don't look for puzzles, we don't look for things that are hard to figure
out. There are not many things lying
around on the living room table or in the den or bedroom that really challenge
his mental ability. He is allowed to
relax, to think of leisure activities that don't engage him mentally so we
really have children that are quite mentally lazy. So academics, besides the subject matter,
which is important, is an opportunity to produce discipline in the mind of the
child. The fact that we do have a will
that controls not only what we think, but how we manipulate those thoughts,
those ideas, so that we come to productive conclusions, we learn how to problem
solve. We learn how to approach a
certain assignment and organize it in our mind and figure out how we are going
to do the assignment in such a way that will please the teacher.
Besides
the discipline of the mind which is an important discipline, and once a child
has a disciplined mind do you see how the behavior, the activity of the child
is going to come into discipline too?
Because our actions are an outgrowth of what is going on in our
mind. The Bible says, "As a man
thinketh in his heart, so is he."
So we can start with the inside of a person, with where he is
thinking. We are going to start to
engage him in his effort, his activity, in something that is productive and
fulfills the purpose for his educational career rather than just let him be
free to misbehave because he is bored and there is nothing else to do.
One of
the hardest disciplines that a child ever does in school is to listen. You tell a child that and of course he is not
convinced because he is thinking mathematics or something else is hard. But actually listening is a very high level
skill because the words that somebody else speaks only have meaning to you as
you make mental associations in your own vocabulary. If I spoke to you in a foreign language all
those sounds coming out of my mouth are totally strange to you. They would be meaningless. I couldn't engage you in a meaningful dialog,
there would be no communication going on.
So you have to be able to take these sound patterns coming out of my
mouth and you have to be able to relate them in your mind with your own
experience that you know, your own personal definition of the word, you have to
follow the train of thinking of the speaker.
There is a sense where listening is a very disciplined skill because for
a moment, any way you are surrendering your mind to another's, you are allowing
someone else to take the lead and control your thought. As soon as you stop allowing him to do that,
you stop listening. You are independently
operating and the speaker is continuing, and you are not listening. So it is a very difficult discipline to
listen. And listening skills in
And along
that line I think another discipline that I like to see in my classroom and I
ask my teachers to make sure that there is a quiet period in every classroom
every day. By that I man an absolute
quiet with no distractions for a child from pre-school through a senior in high
school, they will have on period of time and of course it will be much shorter
for the pre-school child it might be 10 or 15 minutes, for the high school
students it might be an entire period.
But it will be quiet, there will be no distractions. There is something wonderful about silence;
there is the ability to not have to deal with external stimuli and to focus on
just the assignment, the book, whatever the subject matter is at hand and bring
all of your powers to bear on that subject.
Also
silence is wonderful for reflection and for thinking, without extraneous input
and even allowing the Spirit of God to move in and control the thought
processes of a mind. I think if we
really want our children to learn, to hear, and to listen to God, part of that
is going to be to learn to think in silence.
And as they contemplate either the word of God or whatever it is they
are thinking about, their relationship with the Lord. God is going to be able to step in a lot
easier if He is not combating outside input: noises, music, a soundtrack,
whatever, it is competing for our attention.
Knowing human nature we tend to give in to that. Silence is just a real discipline for real
personal growth.
I think
it is real important to use quizzes and drills to increase speed and accuracy
in thinking. I think that is a marvelous
mental discipline. Not only are we lazy
in our mental processes, but if we are allowed to, we think very slowly. We don't learn how to hurry up. The reason a runner disciplines the body for
the race is so that they can run faster, a weight lifter to lift more weights,
a wrestler to wrestle more powerfully.
Well, what are we trying to do in the mental process, to not only
struggle with more abstract and difficult concepts, but that we could do it
more rapidly so that our mind actually becomes a servant of ours. It is literally a computer; it is a tool that
we can use more efficiently. And if we
disciplined our mind we will find people will come to us and ask questions and
we will have the answer. And why is that
happening? Because we have been willing
to be disciplined in our mind and we can think quickly. That is a great advantage as we go through
life. Every employer and every job will
benefit if you are a quicker and more accurate thinker.
There is
a wonderful discipline in engaging each other in the whole arena of ideas. That is a discipline because I think
naturally we want to do it physically.
Naturally a child wants to interact on a more concrete level than
abstract because abstract is such a mental discipline and you have to be able
to grab with your mind and surround with your mind words and their definitions
and their innuendos. And as you are debating
or discussing the fine points of an issue, and this can happen even at very
early grades, it is important for them to realize that you can do absolutely
marvelous things and come up with amazing conclusions and have this sense of
real satisfaction from purely a mental process.
See, a young child thinks the only way you can be really satisfied is to
eat a dish of ice cream and cake because that physical satisfaction is
something he is very familiar with, being hungry then eating and being
full. He likes that kind of
satisfaction. We have to teach the child
that a disciplined mind can bring something totally new into his
experience. And that is mental
satisfaction. To be pleased with a
mental accomplishment, to understand or dialog or to argue maybe successfully
some mental concept or idea...that is a discipline but it is very expanding;
that is part of what education is all about.
That brings real discipline into the child's life.
The last
academic discipline I would like to mention is just striving for
excellence. I am told that in the Middle
Ages master craftsmen used to sign, used to have a mark they would put on their
work, whether he was a furniture maker, or a potter, or whatever. He would either sign it or have some kind of
an insignia on it that showed he was the maker; he was proud of it. And he built a reputation on his
workmanship. We are losing that very
fast. In
No. Excellence matters. Discipline matters. Reaching for the stars matters. Because we are learning life lessons here,
life skills. The fact that four plus
four equals eight and that appears on the page does not make an A paper. He has got that part right, but there is more
to life than adding two numbers together.
It is a discipline. It is a
mental academic discipline. And if we
fail to do that then the child will see that discipline does not matter. And if it doesn't matter, that is why he
speaks without raising his hand. That is
why the teacher has this problem with Johnny because the whole way that
academics have been established in the classroom is in a very undisciplined
way. So discipline has not been brought
in academically so it leaks over into the behavior area. That is why the teacher finds himself
contending with when he could solve many of his problems if he brought
discipline into the assignments and into the academics.
Then I
think we have touched a little bit in prior chapters on the discipline in
athletics, but this is another area that children need to be challenged
in. Basically to interact in some kind
of an athletic activity where they are physically challenged and they can put
their entire effort and energy into a process.
To play soccer and to run as hard and as fast as they can until they are
so exhausted that they say, "Coach I have to come out and rest." It is a wonderful experience for a child to
reach the end of their ability and then watch that end ability be extended as
they train, as they discipline themselves.
To experience the pain of exhaustion, having spent yourself having run
as hard and as fast as you can and then to see that extended as you keep
pushing against that pain threshold and watch personal growth take place. It is a wonderful experience.
And then
of course the whole competition aspect of athletics in which a child is taught
to handle emotional overload such as frustration, anger, pride, failure,
revenge, anxiety, before a competition.
These are all fierce, passionate emotions that sweep over a child. He has to be taught that there is a proper
way to respond and to handle all of these emotions.
Christ
teaches us how we are to live life under these kinds of stressful
conditions. And a child can be taught
that. Sometimes the lesson he learns out
on a soccer field is more important than the lesson he is going to learn in the
classroom because it is a lifelong lesson that is going to teach him to rein in
his emotions and his passions and help him to be a temperate person.
Teaching
sportsmanship, that you care about your opponents, you care about your
teammates, and you realize that the love relationships that are established,
even in a wrestling match convey not hatred, not bitterness, not anger, but a
fair display of skill and strength. It
is just approaching it from a different angle.
And love is the most powerful motivator in any competitive event. And of course it is always displayed by good
sportsmanship. So it is not whether you
win or lose, but how the game was played.
You have heard that phrase so often, but sportsmanship is at the heart
of it because that is where life lessons are being learned. The Christian coach has a marvelous window of
opportunity into the hearts and lives of these young people because he or she
is able to teach these life lessons to these children which will stand them the
rest of their life. Many of these
children will not remember any of their teachers, but few of them will forget a
coach. Because it was the coach that
stood by them when they lost the game and they cried or whatever, that
emotional crisis was and brought them through that and taught them how to stand
up under those kind of pressures. So a
coach, a Christian coach particularly, has a wonderful opportunity to influence
a young person, and of course to bring discipline into their life.
So
finally we get to the discipline of behavior which, like I said, can eclipse
all the discipline problems of a school, but if we are taking care of the
discipline of manners, the discipline of academics, and the discipline of
athletics, if we are somehow weaving that into the life of our entire school,
then we have an engaged child. He is
engaged in all of these activities, he is busy, he has learned how to rein in
his passion, how to focus his passion; he has learned how to control his
emotions. And so the discipline that a
teacher wants to see in the classroom is going to follow. It is not that which is going to be a
problem. For some children it will be a
problem. But the point of the matter is,
if these other things are happening, they will be much less of a problem.
All
behavior, all actions, as we have said before, come from inside. The Bible tells us we act out what we are
thinking. In fact many times the only
way you can tell what a child is really thinking is to observe him and to watch
his behavior. So consequently we use a
behavior and attitude grade on our weekly report card. The behavior is the overt expression of what
is going on in the child's life. The
attitude is the covert, or what is inside.
And yet that is fairly easy to discern in most children. And the reason for giving a grade to a child
in that area is pointing out to the fact that what is going on inside is not
only observable, and it was observed by the teacher and that is how it got
graded, but it is subject to the child's will.
It is something the child can do something about. Our attitude isn't out of control; our
attitude is a choice that we make. We
choose to be happy, we choose to be angry.
Sometimes we have feelings of sadness- if we get some alarming, bad
news, the sadness overwhelms us. But that
is not attitude. Attitude is
different. Attitude is basically an
approach to authority. Attitude is how I
am going to submit in areas of relationship.
So consequently that is a choice.
Once a child understands that attitude is a function of their will, they
do learn to work on that area. They
focus on that area. They realize that
behavior grade will often follow that attitude grade. As the attitude grade improves, as a child
learns to willingly submit to authority, comes to truly believe that the
teacher and administration of the school is on his side, not opposed to him,
truly loves him, wants to encourage him, then the child does not see conflict
going on, but a supportive relationship where he can cooperate, develop an
attitude, that will make his behavior then follow and become what he wants it
to be.
The
discipline that we bring into that is that when three weeks in a row go by and
the behavior or the attitude are below the C level, the average level, then the
child is on probation. I suppose all
schools have some policy of probation, but ... the parents are notified, the
weekly report cards will say probation, the child cannot participate in sports
and he is under constant review to make sure this discrepancy is made up. So that becomes a discipline of itself, just
a weekly report card that then becomes a dialog between the home, the school,
as to is improvement seen in this area of behavior and attitude. So it becomes a tool in the area of discipline.
My
observation over the years is that most discipline problems that children face
today are because somewhere in their past the parents prevented natural
consequences from happening to their children.
And they were rescued again and again, or the thing that should have
happened didn't happen. The parent made
a threat, didn't make good on the threat, so the child has lived in this sea
that is awash with- there is no cause and effect. One of the best teaching devices in the whole
universe that God built into it from the very beginning is cause and
effect. For every choice there is a
consequence. When we as parents or even
teachers intervene in that process then the child is bewildered; they don't
know what is the natural consequence.
There is a great discipline built into this whole physical world. In fact God has made it possible for us to
learn many of the lessons of life the hard way.
Now He says, "My son, I want you to be wise and I would rather you
would learn it from listening and choosing to obey. But there are other ways of learning this
lesson, too. You fall down, you scrape
your knee, it bleeds, it hurts, maybe there is a little bit of infection. But the fact of the matter, there is a
consequence for our misbehavior, for our poor judgment, and usually it is
painful. But we can learn that way, too.
Now when
a child is denied experiencing the consequence he does not even get to learn
the way that God designed through Nature or through the cause and effect
relationship that God designed for him to learn. So we have a very confused child. He sees a lot of inconsistency on the part of
the adults or the parents in his life because sometimes he gets the consequence
and sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes the
threat is made good and sometimes it is just hanging there over his head. And we have a real serious discipline problem
in the life of a child.
So just
to wrap up that thought, I would say that our failure to allow consequences to
have the teaching effect that it should have in the life of a child prolongs
his immaturity, prolongs his period of learning, prolongs the amount of pain
that he is going to experience, and often passes off the responsibility of
training the child in that area to another who will allow the child to
experience it and will allow the child to learn the lesson. There are a lot of times when the parent's
child is not appreciated as they are handed to the Sunday School teacher
because they know the parent can't control their own kids. Basically what that parent is doing is
handing over that responsibility for a teacher to do what the parent didn't
take the time to do.
We do
have a corporal punishment policy in our school and it is certainly under the
area of the discipline of behavior. It
is not very popular subject in
There are
many scriptures, and quite frankly I haven't heard a sermon on this in years
and years, and I think it is because we truly fear the pressure that society
has brought upon us. Proverbs
Now, of
course, there comes an age in a child's life where that will be no longer
appropriate. But if we start earlier
enough and if we apply this kind of corporal punishment, discipline, in faith,
believing that God is going to fulfill what He promises, that if you train up a
child in the way he should go and this is part of that scriptural process, we
have to believe that God is going to honor my obedience. And of course corporal punishment isn't
punishing in my anger, my wrath, me out of control. It has to be a very difficult decision I make
to inflict pain on a child in order to bring conformity, in order to bring
obedience.
There is
an amazing verse in Proverbs
As a
school we use it very sparingly. I have
gone through years where I have never spanked a child. But of course children know whether or not
that is your policy and whether or not the school retains the right to do
that. That does bring a level of
discipline into the school knowing that you have not surrendered that
right. Often that is all it takes. Basically I believe that spankings belong at
home. They don't belong at school. And I don't think you should spank for
chronic problems at school- if a child is never doing their homework, or has a
behavior pattern that you are trying to correct. That is a job to be done at home by the
parents. Spanking at school is only for
serious infractions that happen right there at school and that need to truly
impress on the child that kind of behavior will not be tolerated. He cannot run up to his friend and punch him
in the nose and give him a bloody nose or something like physically assault
somebody else and somehow just be scolded or told never to do that again,
especially when you find that those kinds of disciplines have no effect on the
child. He is going to have to be brought
up short.
Corporal
punishment is something that you do under well spelled out guidines, do it very
fairly, needs to always be done in the best interests of the child. You need to be looking into the child's
future and what you are developing and if it is ever going to be counter
productive; of course it shouldn't be done.
And there are cases where it would be.
I would
say my overall guideline in discipline is go for the heart of the child. Make sure the child knows that his behavior,
even though it is important, is not as important as his heart. And when you talk to this child, you MUST
convey that he matters to you, that you love him, and that you don't love him
any less and he is not worth any bit less because he has misbehaved. In other words, his behavior can never change
his status, or his value, and if you ever make it so, you will fail him
miserably. And of course play into
Satan's hand so that the child never does experience the kind of forgiveness
that God wants him to experience as he comes to the cross of Christ, and
realizes that God so loved the world that He gave His son for that child. And Christ died for the very boy that you are
disciplining. So consequently he has to
be treated with absolute respect.
I have
found that one on one conversation, particularly with the older child, but I
would say from the fourth grade on up I will find that when you can sit down
and share with a child where his behavior is taking him, and let him know
through this whole conversation, that you love him, if you can convey love,
that you are interested in his heart, you want him to respond with his whole
heart. That you want him to be a caring
and loving person. You demonstrate that
you are a caring and loving person. I can
only think of maybe one or two times in the 35 years I have been in education
where I came out of a disciplinary confrontation with a child that I didn't
feel was very beneficial. Because
children cry for attention. They cry out
to be affirmed. And if you can do that,
I don't care what has been going on in the life of that child, if you can
affirm and validate their frustrations, their fears, or whatever, it is that
they are acting out. If you can let them
know that they are a worthy person, a wonderful person, to be in your school,
you are glad that they are there, if you can shower them, and drown them in
love, that child will respond so positively and will walk out of there and the
next time they see you in the hall they will want to catch your eye and to let
you know that you did listen and you notice that their behavior is better. Every action they do lets you know that one
on one time when you touched them with loving words mattered to them and they
are going to show you by their good behavior that they want to live in your
favor. They want you to be pleased with
the response that you see in them. It
just works wonders.
I think
without love we are not going to be able to discipline our children properly at
all. I think a lot of times we say that
we love our children but everything we do to them, every expression of our
face, every tone of our voice is saying the opposite thing. The child hears your words but he walks out
of the office feeling rejected, feeling unloved, feeling unappreciated, feeling
like he was not understood, feeling like he did not get a hearing, and if he
leaves the office like that, there was no discipline happening. It was counter-productive. How many children walk out of the school
office feeling just that way? And it is
wrong. We can't afford to do that. Christian discipline is not taking place
unless there has been reconciliation, restoration, affirmation, hope, so the
child can see that there is a future for him.
He can do better, he will choose to do better, and he is in an
environment that is going to support him and encourage him to do better. That is when we are going to see life
change. Love is the only substance in
all the universe that has the power to change a life, nothing wise, not rules,
not the rod, nothing else. Only love. And that is why the rod without love is
totally ineffective.
Question
about the choice by student: to spank or not to spank:
A. Even though I think a spanking would dispatch
the whole incident much more quickly and be done with it; it would be behind
both the student and me. I still value
that student's choice, even to the extent that sometimes we allow them to make
the wrong choice. So, sometimes I do
give the student a three day suspension, or three swats. Because I feel that three swats are
scriptural, I think they are effective and children that make that hard choice
because it is painful, it is going to be three hard swats and then it is going
to be over, they think about that.
Usually I give them time to think about that. But a very important lesson is being built
into the life of the child and his making a choice over that. In fact, I have had a child who has come to
school and for a certain infraction was given that same choice: to be suspended
for three days or three swats. He and
his friend sitting there in the office, his friend took the swats; he took the
suspension, because in his own words, nobody was going to spank him. Well, the friend got the three swats, he
stayed in school, didn't get behind on any work, nothing more was said, there
was no public humiliation, he was treated with respect and love, he was totally
reinstated into the community of the student body, and felt accepted. He went out on recess and interacted with his
peers. His friend was gone for three
days, got behind, came back, had to explain his absence, and about a week
later, because he had not learned his lesson, made the same infraction, and was
left with the same dilemma, was he going to take three swats or the
suspension. Without thinking, without
hesitating, he says, I'll take the three swats.
I asked why. He said, "I saw
how quickly B got over it and I realized I hadn't learned a lesson. I was just avoiding a consequence." And he had the three swats and that was the
end of it. It was all over. And I think it was a sense of really, truly
submitting to the authority of the school, to my authority as the principal,
what they say when they choose voluntarily to take the swats, they are saying,
"You are right, I was wrong. I will accept my punishment and it will be
history." If it is done in love and
respect, there will be no humiliation and the child realizes he has learned his
lesson and he doesn't want that repeated.
So it is a marvelous technique for bringing respectful discipline into a
school.
**Don't
write this so it looks like the kids choose all their punishment. I don't let first, second, and third graders
have the choice because I know God makes it very clear to me that the child
isn't really old enough to make the right choice. Since I know the choice he should make is to
get the swats, I make the choice for him.
It just saves him from wrestling with that dilemma. Now once he gets in Junior High, it is a
slightly different matter because even though I know the choice the child
should make, he is old enough to bring his own will under submission. He knows all about consequences so if he
would rather suffer through the consequences of a three day suspension then it
is up to him to see if that is really what he wants to do.
Up
through Jr. Hi. A spanking is appropriate.
After that it is only appropriate if they choose it. And I have spanked 18, 19 year old
seniors. And they were still my best
friend and never did lose their friendship over it because it was their choice
and they realized that it was a pretty serious matter that we are talking about
here, it was pretty embarrassing, they want it dealt with in a pretty severe
but quick way. And it was a good choice
because it did settle the issue and in a sense it did deliver that child from
what could have been much more serious consequences and much more serious
behavior pattern. So it can be a very
healthy thing in the life of a school if done in a healthy fashion with love.
You know
that the curriculum that is taught in any school is very important. It is the central issue that brings
discipline to the mind. It is the things
that you are going to discuss, expect the students to know, and test for that
content, hopefully at the end of the year assume that this child has acquired
an entire body of knowledge and value systems and perspectives on life based on
what has been discussed in the curriculum.
So the curriculum is very important.
Curriculum
can be infiltrated with worldly thinking, with humanistic thinking. Even the Bible class. And even though I don't intend to discuss
Bible curriculum here, it is very easy to have any subject matter, any study
that is done in any school to make some basic humanistic presuppositions because many Christian educators were
educated in secular institutions that they don't realize that a lot of their
presuppositions don't come from scriptures at all but come from professors and
from a worldly framework of thinking, from the media, from reading, from just a
lot of what I call infiltration of our minds by this world system. Maybe unknown to us we are thinking with an
unchristian mind. It is only constant
study and checking with the word of God that brings God's position into clear
focus once again. And it is only when we
have the Bible first and we see the curriculum through the Bible, that is the
only valid filter for looking at content in any other discipline. And once we lay the Bible aside, or once we think
we remember what the Bible says and we don't have it there right before us
to constantly check and double check, the curriculum can drift. It can very easily do that even in Christian
schools.
Certainly
we have seen in
Social
Studies and Science seems to have come under the most fire in the curriculums
across
So as man
runs from the Biblical basis for morality and societal values he runs toward
humanism and relativism. And these are
the people that are engineering the changes that we see in the curriculum
coming about across
Political
correctness is such an issue in our society today. We see it creeping into our schools. There are some answers now that are
absolutely not acceptable because they are not politically correct. There is no format in American public
education today where a child can stand up and say, "I believe
homosexuality is an invalid lifestyle."
There is no forum in a public education scenario where he can do
that. He can't even say that he believes
unwed motherhood is a basic problem of society.
You can't say that because we have bought into those social disorders to
such a degree that now we are excusing that.
We are politicizing that and we are establishing the rights of these
so-called sub-classes of our society.
They are guaranteed and protected.
So now as a society we have to almost defend that; we can't say anything
against it because of peer pressure, government coercion, legal action would be
taken against anyone who took a stand against these things, the very things
that would be an anathema a generation ago, are today protected by law, and if
not by law, certainly by peer pressure and political correctness.
It is
amazing to me in this new way that we socialize people we are not even aware of
the current events of what is really going on in our world because even the
news that is given to us is so selectively chosen. Billy Graham has a marvelous campaign in
So,
without the teaching of real history we have a total lost sense of history in
our young people today. They have no
sense of heritage, no sense of roots or connectedness to the past, what has
gone on before. We are doomed to
failure, just as the Russian system collapsed.
We have now Russian students in our school and a teacher from
Tatiana
made the comment the other day that it was wonderful that they sold
So they
know, they see it so clearly, having made these mistakes and they marvel that
we are headed in that direction. We are
creating a society that will be totally deceived when the ultimate lie is
formulated in the mouth of our President or our world leader, or whatever it is
that we will buy into that wholeheartedly as a society because we will have
lost our connectedness to history. We
will have lost all of the lessons that should have been brought to bear on that
one moment of decision. We will vote, we
will self-destruct, because we have not learned the lessons of history. Science is very similar. There is so little science in the Science
textbooks of today; it is a philosophy.
So much is philosophized about the origin of the universe, the origin of
life. Some of the basic presuppositions
that are made about all of this are completely diabolical because they are
uncontested. And you move on from that
point, whether it is the timetables that they use, they have the millions, the
billions of years. Every book you go
into the charts lay it out. You learn
that just like you learn George Washington was the first president of the
This is
why we must have Christian textbooks.
Textbooks written from a Godly perspective. Textbooks written by teachers who recognize
the error, the falsity of that science, so-called, and will teach science. And where an origin or something is not
clear, will state what the Biblical statement about this is and say this is the
truth of scripture, this is our presupposition.
We take this to be true and we base our teaching on it.
Evolution-
everything evolving to a greater and greater form is woven very subtly into
everything that has to do with a life science.
That man is an animal. Our whole
approach to sex education is that man is basically animalistic. Man is not
accountable to any higher authority than himself. There is no absolute right or wrong. So when we deal with this whole issue of
mankind it is almost like he is an impostor on planet earth, and we need to
almost save the environment for the environment's sake, that there is no
relatedness between Man and the planet on which he lives. It is kind of a coincidence. The Bible tells us that was the place, the
garden, that actual place that was built for Man to be in. That was his home, his place not only to
dwell in, but to have dominion over, to be a responsible steward of what God
has given to him.
I just
love to see these nature programs on TV.
Our kids see them. And most of
our Christian schools would not object in the least to showing public
television's nature series in the Christian school. I think it might be safe to do so in the
context of a good Christian teacher who was able to point out these
things. But you can't watch it for very
many minutes before they will say something like, "And you will note how
this moth adapted this color change phase to protect himself. Notice how he blends in to the environment;
he developed this so that he could live longer.
All of these plants developed these flowers with these bright colors so
that they would attract the insects to pollinate them. Imagine these flowers getting this figured
out! Imagine them getting together and
saying, "If I was red, maybe...."
It is
amazing, but they say it over and over enough times where it becomes a basic
assumption, rather than seeing that there is a design, and where there is a
design there is a designer. Where that
is ignored, actually a child is being deceived and we as teachers are part of
that deceptive process if we are not careful to steer away from that and point
that out every time that it comes into discussion, whether it is a textbook or
a movie or a science magazine. It even
gets to the point where science is all powerful; it is almost like a god. You get this mindset not only in educators
but in the political community that - if you give us long enough we will solve
any problem that presents itself. It is
the omnipotence of science...we will solve anything that we set our minds to
do. We don't need a god, we become our
own god, and we set ourselves up on this pedestal. So I really think that in Social Studies and
Science we really set ourselves up where we see the greatest invasions of these
presuppositions which of course we have a bias toward the Creation story,
toward the Genesis account. We make no
excuses for it. That, at least, has
stood the test of time. Those documents
have been written for thousands of years and have never been disproved by
anybody.
Societies
and individuals who base their lifestyles and their choices on those values
that are presented in that have enjoyed the best life that you can have on
earth. And those that have violated
those principles have done so at their own peril. I feel that when we don't have thoroughly
Christian texts, thoroughly Christian curriculum, a thoroughly Christian world
view, thoroughly Christian teachers, we actually teach our children double
mindedness. They learn to think with two
minds. One is the Biblically oriented
mind, the one they put on when they go to church, when they open the Bible and
for family devotions. Then there is the
mind for school and learning and everything tat is scientific and everything
that has to do with your profession and getting somewhere in this life. Anything that is interacting on kind of a
worldly basis. It accepts a whole new
value system. I think it is because we
as Christians have bought into that.
Basically we as a church are a major supporter of public education in
the
Look at
the psychological profession today and how it flourishes. Christian counseling and Christian psychology
is (are) a major industry among Christians today. We are getting fixed. We are trying to fix the fact that in our
youth we bought into a lie. In our youth
we allowed ourselves to be deceived. In
our youth we learned everything wrong.
Somebody has to tell us how to get a Christian mind again and how to
think again and how to make choices based on the Biblical principles because
nobody made that clear as we were growing up.
We became part of our own problem and bought into that. We thought we were making the right
decisions, but we were thoroughly confused.
The
Christian mentality of course is that of absolute truth, that there is such a
thing as absolute truth. And because it
is absolutely true our responsibility is to be obedient to that. We are subject to the truth. The truth is greater than I am. The truth is nothing less than Jesus Christ
himself. And I must submit myself to
him. To the non-believer the truths that
he shares in the classroom, those are his stock in trade. Those are the things he manipulates to his
advantage. He gets paid for sharing
truth. And once he finds out that the
truths that he learned today are disproved by discovery and science tomorrow
then he just shifts over and abandons the first set of truths and teaches a new
set of truths. He has no problem with
that because he is just like a dentist that has a new technique for drilling a
hole in our tooth. He will just accept
the latest theory, the latest invention and the latest medication. But not so with God's truth. It stands the test of time. It never changes. It is the solid rock on which you can
stand. When the storms of life assail,
you will be firmly planted.
The
godless mentality is that of relativity and self-sufficiency. It all depends and we can go it alone. That is so pervasive in our society today
that we don't find men reaching out and crying to God. They don't need God. They have all the things that they need. Our educational system merely helps them to
manipulate those things to their own self interest and their own best
advantage. What a selfish way to
live. What a godless approach to
life. What a nihilistic self destructive
view because this whole society is headed for a river that is headed for the
waterfall that are about to plunge over and nobody is talking about anything of
eternal values and absolute truth. It is
all this nonsense.
Christian
schools if they don't stand in the gap and rescue this generation or a segment
of this generation from this kind of deception they are failing to do the job
that they were raised up to do. That is
to teach children the truth and teach them a respect for Jesus Christ and His
Lordship in their lives on a personal basis.
Just
because your book was published by a Christian publisher and written by a
Christian author doesn't mean that it will display an adequate understanding of
the truths involved. I think a review of
the curriculum on a regular basis needs to be made. As the school grows, as the school board
grows, as the faculty grows and as the curriculum steering committee grows and
as their own awareness of what scripture really says on a particular issue,
then they need to look at their own curriculum with a jaundiced eye and be
ready and willing to criticize that and make the changes as necessary. So the word "Christian" tacked on
something, like "Written for
It
surprises me that many Christian schools do not teach Bible as a subject. They do it in a devotional way; they start
with maybe a Bible reading and prayer.
Then they plunge into the curriculum, the work of the day. Well, our public schools used to do that
years ago. Fifty years ago, that was the
way most public schools started. That
doesn't make our school Christian. Not
only does the Biblical value and the Biblical message need to be woven into
every subject and into every sentence that is said, but Bible needs to be
taught as a subject, as a discipline in the school. The Bible narrative, the stories. They are profound, not only in the simplicity
but in the basic lessons of life that are taught through those stories. There are dozens, hundreds of them that every
child in every Christian school should know.
Then
there are some basic doctrines. And I
know that it is easy to have doctrinal problems within a school. But thee are some that are so fundamental
that kids need to know what it means to be saved, why it was necessary for
Jesus to come to earth to die. Some of
the basic doctrines about Creation, the God who gave us the Old Testament. The validity of the priestly account and of
the tabernacle which shows us what Christ was going to come to do. A student needs to be aware of all toes
things.
Then not
only the doctrine of it, but the authority of the Bible. One thing that has characterized evangelical
Christians for the last 2000 years - that the Bible was the standard of our
faith and practice. It was the final and
ultimate authority. When people talked
about a political system and whether this was right or that was right, it is
what was said in the Bible was the final authority. We need to make sure that our students
understand that because it is not the authority of our nation today, it is so
rapidly eroding in its power to be considered an authority that unless we teach
it as an authority in our school it is going to lose its power. They will be saying, "Who cares what the
Bible says, no body else does, why should?”
Then of
course we should include Bible because it is essential in that student's
devotional walk with God. It is
imperative that young believer grow and without the Word of God he is going to
find it well nigh impossible to do that.
So we need to teach Bible because this is going to help this new student
and new believer build a relationship with God and become all that God intended
him to be...
Then you
have got to have music as part of the curriculum in your Christian school. The reason why the fine arts like art and
music are so important is because art is the interface between the seen and the
unseen world, between the material and the immaterial world. When you are looking at a great painting,
physical media is used to bring great emotion and great passion and during the
Middle Ages, these great religious paintings so much of the spiritual life of
medieval society was portrayed there, what they considered to have value. So much about the afterlife was portrayed
there.
And in great
music our emotions, our sensibilities, everything that matters to us,
everything that grips us and moves us and gives us passion and joy and the love
of life cannot be expressed better than it can through the art form. That is how we express what it means to
really be human, made in the image of God.
With this capacity for this indefinable, invisible ability to appreciate
that which we cannot see: love, faith, hope, virtue, integrity. All of these things matter. The thing that can best bring it into shaper
focus into our human experience is the arts.
Music is the language of the soul.
There is nothing like music that so powerfully portrays the basic belief
of a man, the lostness, for instance, that a rock star feels as he gyrates on
that stage with that pulsating music is conveying his meaningless of life. It thunders across the audience and it finds
a responsive chord because that is where they are. They are lost. Life is meaningless; it is frustrating to be
alive. From his soul to their soul that
senseless message is not only given but received.
And the
opposite is true. Handel's Messiah
Halleluiah Chorus in that the heavens are open.
It is just gorgeous presentation of the scriptural truths and you are
gripped with the presence of God and the power of spiritual truth. At that moment in life to be virtuous and
honorable and to be godly for a moment is more important to you than anything
else in the world. We can lose these
moments. But what will give them to us
is music. We must be given that again
and again to remind ourselves that that is what God leads us to, that is what
He brings us to. And when we fail to
give ourselves to the highest and the best of these art forms, we just fall
that much short of being all that God created us to be, truly humans to
experience on this lofty level that he wants us to know that we are not an
animal. We are unique creation of His,
able to communicate in these ethereal, mystical ways with each other. In these art forms that have intense meaning
and emotion and passion.
That is
why we need to teach these in a Christian school because these are powerful
mediums and the world is surging ahead with these powerful tools. They know how powerful they are and we see
them using them so effectively, whether it is MTV with its combination of music
and the visual can just capture the minds of a generation that is just hell
bent to destruction. We as a Christian
school cannot surrender those powerful tools and say, well kids, you shouldn't
do that. We must give to them the best-
the best music, the best art form, the best of everything to capture their
imagination and to use all of these creative powers and the ability that they
have to respond to this creative expression, to be all that God intended them
to be. We must teach this in a Christian
school, because this makes us more than anything we could be, mentally. Music acknowledges that you are more than a
body and more than a mind, more than just academic. You are a culture. You are a universe of possibilities and
sensibilities. It is just amazing and
music speaks to that, music makes you aware that life is very complex, it
weaves a tapestry of all of your human experiences and memories and nostalgias
and all that you are, and brings it into focus.
Music does it in a way that nothing else can because of all the art
forms... you can just look at art and there it is, you can look at a writing
and there it is, you can close it and it remains static. In order to enjoy music you must wait for it
to be performed from start to finish. It
literally takes the passage of time. It
has to capture time for you. Even a play
has to be portrayed in the same way; you can read a play and put it away. But music, every time you want to enjoy it,
it must be performed. It literally
posses us; it requires that we give ourselves over to this composer who was
inspired (use this term modestly) to convey the highest and noblest and most
lofty of all virtues that God has bestowed upon us. So don't fail to teach art and music in your
school.
Then we
cannot close this chapter without saying that the teacher is really the
curriculum. Because it doesn't make any
difference how fine the teaching materials are in the school, if they are being
misinterpreted by a misguided teacher, he can destroy everything you, the
board, and the administration had intended to be taught in that room. And likewise you can have a flawed
curriculum, and most of our curriculum is flawed, but a lot of that can be compensated
for with a Godly instructor because more is going to be learned from the
modeling that is done in the classroom than what is spoken or tried to absorb
through curriculum. So that is why the
most important curriculum a board can make for the classroom is to place a
teacher in there that is going to be worthy of that class.
That is
why the board of the school must choose carefully, train carefully, grow,
nourish, encourage, do everything you can, to support that teacher because that
teacher is your school. They can make or
break what goes on in that classroom. As
easy as it is to criticize a teacher and to see their flaws, if you want them
to grow, if you want them to be a better teacher, you better be doing all of
those things because that is the very heart of your school.
A school
had better be very careful on the way they handle their teachers and try to by
God's grace, never lose the fact that what we do here cannot be done if God
doesn't lead to us the lives that are living examples that are poured out as a
daily sacrifice on the alter before God, literally giving themselves to these
children. Because that is what is going
to make the difference in that classroom.
So the teacher is the curriculum and we can't lose sight of that.
This is a view of the job of the overseers, in
the driver's seat, looking at the issues that those people would be facing.
The first
issue is the interdenominational nature of our school and many others. The original thrust of this book was to
be..."this is what your Christian school should look like....now I think
the thrust should be...this is what we do look like....And if God called you to
duplicate this or use any of this information, fine. But we just want to open a window on where we
are, what we have learned over the years.
If this can be a blessing to you as a teacher, as a principal, as a
board member, as a mom and dad, looking at an education, then God has used this
book in a powerful way. I want it to
trace the faithfulness of God in revealing his purpose and plan to anybody who
wants to wait on him, for anybody who is willing to learn, who is willing to
stumble and fall and be lifted up again and get on with the business of growing
and moving on forward in the faith, and Christian walk with God. This is the way we are and God has taught us
some really neat things. We hope that
the telling of this tale is a blessing to you.
I find
that even church schools....we are an independent Christian school...we are an
independent board, a non-profit corporation, that is operating separately from
any other organization. We are not the
average Christian school. The normal, I
think, is to be attached to a church.
But most of these churches are serving a wider constituency than their
own parish. Because of that, they are
taking on this interdenominational flavor.
There is
a difference, in my thinking, between the interdenominational and the
non-denominational position.
The
interdenominational position is the position of compromise, of negotiation, of
giving everybody equal say. Making sure
the Baptists don't get anybody more time than the Presbyterians. Trying to give equal strokes to folks,
regardless of what they are. Making sure
that when you have so many pastors from this denomination in chapel, that you
kind of pass them around.
Interdenominational means you are recognizing these separate
entities. If you let one church
advertise activities then you have to let another church advertise.
This can
become a very complex thing. You are
opening the door to somebody who is aggrieved, they haven't been treated
fairly, didn't get the same amount of coverage, or press, or they don't have
the same amount of access to the youth.
Youth is a pool that we represent here- many youth workers from a church
say, "Oh you mean you have families that don't go to any church? Is there a way that we can exploit themed How
can we manipulate the activities of this school to direct them in our way? That is what you are faced with if you have
this interdenominational stance.
If you
have a non-denominational stance, it is a much safer game to play because you
are saying, "we are color blind here, we don't see color."
We
service over 38 churches in our school and our students do not know, for the
large part, what churches their peers go to.
It doesn't come up in conversation, it is a non-issue, it has never been
an issue in 22 years. Now some people
know, because it is their best friends and they may attend together
occasionally, but we have never allowed it to become an issue. It is quite a different stance and so we
don't let any church advertise. If
something is open to everybody, Youth for Christ for example of a
non-denominational ministry, we are careful, maybe a church will invite
everybody to a ski trip somewhere.
I think
that in the murky waters of what is ahead for churches in general, I think it
is the better part of wisdom to take a non-denominational stance and to
recognize our unity in Christ, to celebrate it, our one-ness. Not our differences, celebrate our
commonalities, the things that bring us together. The statement of faith that ACSI has for its
basis is also our statement of faith. It
unifies thousands of Christian students across our land. Many families look at it and say, Yes, I can
buy into that. That is what we share in
common, that is what we celebrate here.
The fact that we are different and we are denominational in our personal
choices that is something we can celebrate on the weekends, in our homes, with
our families. Here at this school I
think the non-denominational stance has been a wise one to take because we have
had very little inter church conflict, in fact, none that have really
threatened to be an issue. A couple of
things concerning eschatology has been raised a time or two, but basically
speaking, the Lord has really blessed in this issue. I think we are stronger because of it.
Coming to
the running of the school and financial matters, there is one little saying I
am pretty much committed to. I think it is really important as a ministry
within a Christian nation, at least a nation that has been exposed to the
gospel, and has been the source of missionaries for years, that we are here to
meet a need, not create a need. I think
it is very important that we don't move so far ahead of God in a rush to
provide some grand plan for our children that then we have created needs and
obligations that we go into the Christian community with hat in hand begging
for the kind of support and putting them on a guilt trip- Why aren't you out here
supporting your local Christian school, what is wrong with you people
anyway? It is very important that we
don't become a need. People have
mailboxes that are full with people soliciting them for their money. A lot of them are worthy and our world is in
a world of hurt. There are just
thousands of people trying to find a donor who would be sympathetic to what
they are doing. We don't want to join
their ranks because we are not meeting the needs of a clientele like that. We are asking for families who have children
who want to raise these children in a Godly fashion to lay aside part of their
income and dedicate it to the education of their children. That is a new concept for Americans because
we have been raised with the concept that this would be provided free. Nobody can find room in their budget for this
kind of thing. But they have to adjust
their priorities and get themselves to a point, if God leads them, to affording
it, of weaving it into their financial picture.
So we
need to make sure we are here meeting the needs of our community and the way we
meet one of the needs is when the phone rings and they ask, "Is there room
in your school?" You make a modest
attempt to let the world know you are there, and this ministry is
available. You owe that to the community
because they need to know that you are there for them, that your heart is
reaching out for kids and for families that want this kind of ministry.
So I
think it is really important and that you keep your school on a strong financial
basis that can survive some of the tests that we are going to talk about.
I really
admire schools that have great programs to help them with some of their
costs. I have read some of the financial
structuring of some schools where the tuition covers about 60% of the budget
and then through rather remarkable fund raising schemes is able to supplement
that to bring the full final amount in.
As long as they can do that and people aren't going through burnout and
this is sustained, for them that is probably a viable plan. However it is my conviction that the basic
services that you offer as a school, the minimum academic program, the things
that you want to make sure that you are offering, in the elementary it is just
the core curriculum, in the high school it is the requirements that they need
to graduate, the bare minimums, I believe that should be covered by the tuition
that you are charging the parents, so that the people who are saying,
"well, maybe I can't really afford this but I am going to," the
people who are willing to make that sacrifice, can make that program fly. Any institution that is operating on a
subsidy, not only does not have a sense of the true commitment of its
clientele, because the question then remains, if the subsidy was removed, would
my clientele still be there? Is the
service I am offering worth what my overall charge is, or is it the subsidy
that makes it a viable option for them?
If the subsidy is necessary, then there is a false economy going on
there someplace. The same would be true
of any business operating in
So we
have a different program to fund our activities and our enrichment program.
Basically our sport program is funded by our students. When we have a capital improvement campaign
we do it completely apart from the tuition.
When we try to move ahead in those areas, we try to make sure the core
curriculum, which is covered by tuition, will always be offered as long as
possible until the time comes when the economy is such that that can no longer
happen.
One of
the things that we found in the early days of our school when we had a salary
schedule that we tried to emulate what is done in the public school by having
an automatic raise in salary every year for the teachers both horizontally and
vertically across the pay scale, we got ourselves into a situation where really
our salaries were such a burden to the school that it was starting to sink, in
fact it did get seriously in debt. A
serious restructuring became absolutely necessary if the school was going to
survive. A plan that we came up with
that schools who might also be experiencing this kind of real financial crunch
might consider, is to take what your tuition that comes in, in any one month,
and decide what your core monthly expenses are going to be, pro-rated for the
entire year, take that out first, and then take what is left and divide it with
your staff. It doesn't have to be
divided equally, but whatever the percentage basis you hired them on
originally, that is the percentage on which you pay them. The Lord has blessed us with most of our
years getting the amount of pay that we had agreed to at the beginning of the
year. But when we have had some bad
years and the economy has suffered a setback in the area, the teachers were
only getting 80% or 70% of what we were wanting to pay. But that was the agreement; they knew that
was what the arrangement was going to be.
Now, of
course, nobody likes to work for 60% or 70% or what ever it might go to, but if
the understanding is there from the beginning, then that comes as no
surprise. They are saying it is like
making this commitment that, "I am willing to throw in my lot, my
fortunes, my financial future, in with this school that I believe in, to the
extent that I believe that they are managing the money well enough that I can
trust them that if they are going to only pay me a percentage then I know they
are cutting every other dime in every other corner to make this thing work and
make it come through.
You would
think that would result in tremendous faculty turnover and tremendous
demoralization of our staff and the opposite has happened. What has happened is that those that truly
feel called to this ministry and are willing to make that kind of a commitment-
they are here because the want to be here.
Our staff comes back year after year.
We hardly ever lose any staff. It
is attributable to many factors, but one of the factors is they have a sense of
mission. They feel called here. They feel that for what the economy is able
to bear, what the families are able to pay, what is reasonable that the school
is charging a reasonable rate, it is fair, it is high, but not too high, and it
is not too low, it deliberately or obviously depresses their salaries. They look at that. Some of them are paying that tuition
themselves. With all things being fair
and all things being equal, they want to throw in their lot with this kind of a
situation. So we don't have a contract
as such. We don't sign any arrangement
that puts us in a binding obligation with the teacher as an employee, but is
just an arrangement. It is called an
agreement. The offer is there that if
the money is there they will be paid at such a rate and if it is not, they
understand that they will just get a percentage based on the lack of income. That has been a marvelously freeing
experience. Because within two years we
were out of debt. As far as our bank
loans were concerned, within even two more years we had even the land payment
paid off and we were debt free. That is encouraging from many aspects, but from
one major aspect is that this school does not make decisions based on pressure
of debt. We don't make our best
decisions under those kinds of circumstances.
Because something else, the managing of money and being backed up against
the wall and making decisions that you wouldn’t normally make can be a
horrifying experience. And you realize
that you are letting the clientele down, you are letting the children down by
cutting everybody short to pay financial indiscretions sometime in the past of
the school.
So I
believe being debt free is a goal for every Christian school and for every
Christian as an individual too, and I believe God honors that. It gives you a sense of freedom and you don't
find yourselves chewing your fingernails as you look at the future or look at
enrollment for the next year. You don't
worry what is going to happen because you have not made obligations that are
going to bury you and are going to sink you.
You are acknowledging that it is a work of faith and you look to the
Lord, not only for the supplying of the need, but the supplying of the pupils,
the teachers, whatever the school needs.
I really
sense that the staff has been welded together as they have caught this sense of
mission. There is building of
relationships on the staff and I sense also that in our time of devotion every
morning there is a time where we knit just our own spiritual walk, we don't
necessarily discuss the problems of the school and the needs of the school in
the morning. We discuss our walk with
God. We challenge each other to think
clearly once again and to exalt Christ and to praise him. Because we can't lose that focus, ever. We can't ever fulfill our mission if we
do. I like the fact that we make a point
out of everybody participating.
Everybody prays. Everybody takes
a week turn in leading the devotion, and asking for prayer requests. So that this is a small part of the body of
Christ functioning in a very intimate way in our spiritual walk and exhorting
each other to walk this holy walk that God has called us to. It is our way of having accountability. It is our way of almost disciplining one
another in a wholesome way. I don't know
if that is unique to Christian schools at all, but that is the way we do
it. It is a powerful force, because I
know, and maybe many people reading this book know, how dry and dull devotions
can be. It can be just a tradition, just
a perfunctory thing, somebody stands up and says a few thoughts and says a
little prayer and then it is getting on with a few items of business, then
going out and hitting the halls and classrooms for the day. Nothing could be further from what we are
doing here. We want to meet with
God. We must have this encounter or
there is no empowerment for what God has called us to do today.
Then, in
our staff meetings that we have once a week after school, that is the time we
share the burdens that we do carry within the classroom, the students that are
hurting, that have the need, the parents, whatever problem is overwhelming at
that moment. We record these. We have a log going back years and
years. We can trace the blessing of God,
the answers to prayer, some of them so dramatic that we almost giggle with
laughter, we are shocked in amazement where the next few days we can't believe
that something which was such an overwhelming and oppressing need two days ago
that we just had nothing else to do but to give it to the Lord, that He
intervened in ways that stunned us. We
were left practically gasping. Those are
exciting and we have them on record. I
am glad that we record them because none of our memories are good enough to be
able to review those to be able to see the faithfulness of God and how he
answers prayer and how lives have been changed and how impossible situations
have been turned around. It is a record
of God's faithfulness, and His great glory, and the fact that this is His
school. And that He wants desperately
for us to be involved in the lives of His children. This actively not only engages us but
solicits us you might say, God in a conscious way to be involved with us. To make this happen on a supernatural level
that education just cannot take place outside of a Christian school, in the
public arena.
Well, of
course, most schools have a school board.
I would like to talk just a moment about selecting board members because
they are really critical. Schools often
go up and down and maybe tread water for a while based a lot on the board that
is leading them and on the board that God brings to the school. But one of the things that I think God has
taught us to look at is the proven track record of the parent. I think it is wrong to say, "Wouldn't it
be nice to have a medical doctor on the board?
Wouldn't it be nice to have a lawyer on the board? Wouldn't it be nice to have a businessman on
the board? Wouldn't it be nice to have a
contractor on the board?" Those
would be nice and wonderful, but those are not the qualifications that God
looks for. We look for that because all
the multifaceted problems we face in those areas, we look for people that can
help. But our greatest help is God. We need people who are in touch with
God. We need people who are committed to
Christian education if they are going to lead this school. So we need to look at families that have
demonstrated a commitment to Christian education. Not that they are going to try to gain an
interest because they have been solicited by the board. But they have already demonstrated that. We see that.
You see this is the process by which a church should choose an
elder. They don't just see a bunch of
names on a roster and say, "I'll go for Mr. Smith, he hasn't had a turn
for a while." We are to seek the
mind of Christ and to say to Him, "God show me who the elders are to this
church, the ones that you have an appointed, the ones who are true
overseers. They ask me about my home, my
family, my "herds". They have
it built in to their whole lifestyle.
They are the ones that shepherd me.
They are my shepherds. They need
to be the ones that you have recognized as the ones that you have called. So to choose somebody is just to ask God who
He has already chosen. You are just
saying, “God, who have you chosen?"
That is how you select a board member.
God who is already a board member of this school, we don't know that
yet. The way that you have showed it to
us is the interest, the commitment that they have made. The fact that they are here, they are asking
about our school, they are following up; they are doing little things that
normal people don't do in our school.
God you have already laid this school on the hearts of this person, you
are showing us already who these board members are."
Not only
do they have to have this track record where we can see God's hand in putting
the burden of this school upon them, but also there has to be some measure of
personal success in the raising of their own children. Now, this can be a downfall because I think
all too often we sense that we have to be this role model of perfection in our
society. And if we can't be perfect, we
basically bow out, saying no I don't want that job, I don't want to speak to
that issue because I don't want anybody looking at my life and saying what are
you up there talking about because you are not perfect yourself. There is something in human nature where we
look very critically at each other that way, especially when we are touching
issues that touch us very close to where we are as people. We are all aware of our failures. Why don't a lot more pastors talk about
family and home? A lot of them are not
hugely successful in that area. So
rather than speak even what the Bible says about that the temptation is to keep
your mouth shut. They don't want anybody
pointing the finger at them. Satan uses
that in our life to keep us from exerting the kind of leadership that we should
be because we are unwilling to have people point their finger at us. We are unwilling to stand up and be counted.
Now the
solution for that is to remember that we are never the role model, really, it
is Christ. If we are faithfully pointing
to him and not to ourselves, if we are faithfully lifting up Christ to them and
not ourselves, then we are exposing somebody for them to follow that will never
let them down. That is Jesus
Christ. That is why we have to be very
careful that we don't feel that we are the one that is being exalted or lifted up
to a position of leadership. No, it is
Christ. So if that responsibility is
placed upon us, we will only be dispatching that responsibility in a Godly
manner as we exalt Christ. We,
ourselves, will fail.
But, that
said, I still think that we have to be careful that the people that we ask to
be on the board have learned some of the basic lessons of child rearing, have
shown the wisdom and confidence to make good decisions because they are going
to be advising other parents and they are going to be setting the pace. So we do have to look at that and take it
into account. Not that we look for
perfection, but we look to families who are very concerned about what their
children are becoming and they sense their responsibility in that process and
are dispatching that responsibility, they are doing something about it. They are not just saying, Gee, I wish I had
spent more time with my kids, they do spend more time. I wish I had been more strict. They are as strict as they feel they should
be. They are making those hard choices,
not popular choices in our society today. And they wonder what kids will say if
they think I am not a proper parent, they say well, I wish so and so was my
parent or I wish I could live over here because ...etc. And parents are so sensitive to that today
that they are backing down and they are not really creating the kind of home
that they had intended to create for their children.
So, we
need to find that in parents who we are asking to be on the board, who are
doing a good job.
Then we
need to share with these board members a real sense of vision and mission. We need to sharpen that for them. In other words, as they join the board they
are not automatically going to be up to speed instantly, just because you
invited them to come aboard. You have to
make it your job as a school administrator and board to bring these people up
to speed. When you look at the learning
curve that each one of us took to get to where we are, it can be frustrating to
look at a new one coming on the board and that process taking so long. I think we can accelerate it if we can make
it part of the board meeting or part of an initial fellowship at the beginning
of the year, a retreat or something. But
we have to collectively rekindle the vision and this sense of mission that God
has placed upon us.
There is
a verse where Paul says to Timothy, "Lay hold of that gift that was given
to you by the laying on of hands."
It is like- remember that initial fervor that you felt, that first
love. It is easy in this hurried society
to let that fall to one side. We have to
bring it back to its top priority again.
I think
that all too few people really understand the critical nature of Christian
education. Satan wants our children
badly. The coup that he pulled in the
Garden of Eden was stunning from his perspective in many aspects, but one
aspect was that the seed of every human being that was born into this world
would automatically be his. What a
stunning maneuver. Here is Adam and Eve,
special creations from God, neither of them had a father, neither of then had a
mother. They are both original
creations, created without sin, originally pure, perfect, holy beings that God
made. And Satan duped them into this
mistake that would mean that their progeny for millennia would automatically be
his. And you and I today can only
produce offspring of the devil. Jesus
looked them in the eye and said, "You are of your father, the
devil." Because the Bible, and only
the Bible, makes it very clear that we are born in sin. We are born needing a savior, we are born
outside of Jesus Christ, we are born in sin.
That is a message that the world stops its ears, they don't want to hear
that. In fact that is anathema in public
school, to talk about original sin, or to talk about being born in sin. Because we have so duped ourselves into
thinking that it is society that warped society and it is only as you grow up
that you become tainted with anything that is bad or wrong with you. They say it happens because of your
environment, not because of who you are by nature.
So this
is a powerful Christian doctrine, but because of that we are in the business of
robbing the kingdom of darkness, invading the territory, shedding the light,
bringing the gospel into the darkness, and teaching these children what it
means to be loved by God, what the sacrifice on the cross meant and invite them
to join him as a child of God. This is
stepping from darkness into light. This
is leaving Satan's kingdom for a forever future with God. The devil has lost them forever. And he is losing them by the thousands within
the four walls of a Christian school.
That is where he is losing them today.
That is why his anger and his vengeance is being wrought out against
this ministry across our land and around the world today, because an
intolerable situation is taking place right under his nose, in his
territory. This is the devil's domain,
this is his territory and it has been invaded by Christian schools establishing
lighthouses to spread the gospel and little sheepfolds of safety and security
and where these little lambs are being nurtured in the
Another
factor that I think is really important to have in a board member is that we
all come from a variety of Christian traditions we are very fond of. It is difficult, we haven't grown, even as
adults, to a point of seeing what is just a cultural thing, a Christian
cultural thing, as being separate from what is a core element of faith. It is very possible that some Christian
schools have really struggled, and to a large part, God has delivered us from
this, with a board that is obsessed with Christianizing the little subjects,
the children, in that institution, making them look and behave like some little
idyllic situation that they want to create from their past or some idea that
they have that Christians should all have this kind of a haircut or wear this
kind of clothes, or wear this kind of a pious look on their face when they are
praying. It doesn't make any difference-
how they observe certain traditions of the church, maybe. It is very easy to be obsessed with this sort
of a thing, to burden the kids of our society, no matter what kind of
background they may have, with things that are peculiar to their denomination.
I have talked with a lot of kids who really resent that there was a lot that
went on in their Christian school that had nothing to do with their
relationship with Jesus Christ. In fact,
it almost put guilt trips on them; it alienated them from the grace of God. It distorted the whole picture of what Christ
came to do in Man's heart in life. And
certainly Christ did not come to bring religion to this earth. This earth was loaded with it, it is loaded
even now. And when Christ comes again to
this earth, it will still be loaded. He
will come to an apostate world, but it will be filled with religious
people. It is just the nature of
man. It is his own way of making it into
the
So, I
think we need to have board members who have a real sense of operating in the
grace of God and who want to communicate that to the kids of the school, rather
than put them in a kind of religious box that makes them look and behave like
Christians rather than BE Christian. It
is a subtle difference, but it is powerful, and it can be deadly when it is
operating in a school.
Then of
course, it really behooves a board member to be setting the lead in faith and
practice. These need to be people who
are really having a walk with God, who are taking time to grow personally,
taking time to pray, taking time to go for a walk and just silently communicate
with God and say, "God, what about this school that I am a part of now,
what are you showing me about a need, or about something that you would like to
see happen there?" And waiting upon
God. In this hurried world, all too few
of us really take time for this. And I
think the board, of all people, need to be in communion with God because there
is no way they are going to be able to dispatch their responsibility to this
school without walking closely with God.
They need
to have their personal priorities figured out.
You can't have a guy on your board who has 47 irons in the fire. You admire these people and they are
workaholics and they are doing a juggling act all the time, rushing from place
to place. That is fine for them. You don't want them on your board. Because you are just one part of the things
they are trying to keep in the air all the time in their juggling act. They may be talented, they may be
brilliant. Maybe they can be brought in
from time to time as a consultation but they are not part of the team. They have too many other things going. You are not going to be able to weld together
the sense of unity that I think needs to be a part of the board. So I think that we have to watch out for
people that are just so busy. If God can
show you in that initial interview, - Mr. Jones, do you think you will have
time to be a board member of this school?"
"What kind of time are you talking about?" "At least a meeting once a month of
several hours, and maybe some additional time, and time personally to walk with
God and lay out the needs of this school before Him and to wait upon Him for
answers for the needs that we have as a school.
Do you have that kind of time?"
It is a valid question. Because
that is what we need to lead our school.
We need board members who will meet the kind of criteria we are talking
about here and who will be able to shepherd this school through the perilous
waters that we face.