One of the most frustrating things I have found in over two decades of working with youth in both a church and Christian school context has been the response of Christian pastors to Christian education. It ranges from apathy to antipathy. Few have the courage to call their congregations to obedience to Christ in this area. This despite the very real danger state education presents to the little lambs in their flock.
My experience has been that many young adults from Christian homes are either incapacitated and rendered impotent by the secular worldview they imbibe during their 17-year secular discipleship programme, or they leave the faith. And a lot of them do leave the faith.
Just this week, I was chatting with a friend who spoke of two young people he knew, both attending secular schools. One no longer attends youth group or church and has decided he is not a Christian any longer. The other, a young woman, has been so indoctrinated by feminism and humanism that she looks up to feminist icons who are responsible for the liberalisation of abortion.
Can pastors continue to look the other way? A pastor is a shepherd. When a lion or a bear came to attack and kill David’s sheep, he would seize them by the hair and kill them ( I Samuel 17:35). That takes manly courage and the ability to face risk and danger. This is the need of our hour. We need pastors who are willing to be courageous men. They must stand between the lambs and the wild animals out to devour them.
Jesus himself warned of the danger posed to little ones. After calling a child to himself and showing his disciples that they must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, he gave one of his starkest warnings. He said, with this little child and perhaps others next to him, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”
We know, without a shadow of a doubt that the 17-year anti-Christian state discipleship programme is in a large part responsible for many little lambs being torn to pieces. Any Christian leader worth their salt should be aware of this. Teaching a child that God is irrelevant to the world he has made by never mentioning him in 17 years of education is likely to cause him to stumble. Teaching a child that Christ is Lord of his heart, but that he isn’t too interested in the rest of life is causing our children to stumble. Flawed teaching on gender and sexuality is causing our children to sin.
So about that millstone…Does it belong to our secular officials who desire to control the future by discipling our children into their faith? Does it belong to the teachers who abuse their positions to poison the minds of children with depravity? Does it belong to parents who fail to follow God’s law to impress God’s laws on their children day and night (Deuteronomy 6:6-9), or does it belong to the shepherds who see the children in their flock falling away from the faith but say nothing?
What will it take for Christian leaders to wake up, grab their weapons and start protecting the flock? When will we hear a sermon about the importance of training our children in the Christian faith and protecting them from the evil one? When will we hear our pastors calling all families to remove their children from the perils of secular education?
Will the recent news of the proposed Conversion Therapy ban wake our pastors up from their slumber? Will pulpits throughout the land warn parents that they are in danger of losing their children? Kris Faafoi on Newstalk ZB was asked whether it was ‘cool with him’ for parents to tell their children they can’t go on hormone blockers. He said, “No it’s not.” Of this law, Family First writes, “Shockingly, parents would be criminalised and potentially liable up to five years in jail simply for affirming that their sons are boys and their daughters are girls. These bans will lock children into transgenderism.” As a teacher with knowledge of the school system in New Zealand, I can assure my readers that this degeneracy is already being promoted by many schools and teachers. Too many naive parents think secular schools are only there to teach Maths and English. Unfortunately, that is about the only thing they are not getting. These must make way for the all-important secular indoctrination programme you see. A law like this is only going to make things worse. Godless teachers will turn children against parents and make them aware of their ‘rights’. The only protection will be removing our children from these godless pagans. Will pastors protect their sheep by saying this? That remains to be seen. If not, God help us.
Recently I was reminded of the Directory for Private Worship which was put together by the 1647 Assembly at Edinburgh. The document gives directions for family worship. The General Assembly believed that family worship was so important to the purity of the Christian faith, that they appointed “ministers and ruling elders in each congregation to take special care that these Directions be observed and followed.” So seriously did they take family worship that where the elders found families not engaging in family worship as prescribed, the head of the family would first be privately admonished, but if he continued in his negligence, he would be debarred from the Lord’s supper.
While this may seem excessive to our modern sensibilities, we can hopefully see the propriety of the concern. Firstly, they were right to see the importance of the Christian faith being taught and practised in the home. It is not enough for our Lord to be mentioned once a week at church and then ignored the rest of the time. Deuteronomy 6 reminds parents that daily regular teaching of children is to be conducted. Secondly, the ASsembly was correct in holding fathers responsible for this duty. God has given fathers authority in the family unit, and he holds them responsible for the training of children as Ephesians 6:4 demonstrates.
This is not something for men to take lightly. While our church leaders may no longer bar us from the table, we should not hold lightly our duty in this area. God still holds us responsible and he will hold us to account. One thing our family has developed and grown in over the years is pairing meals with Scripture and prayer. We always eat together at the table for breakfast and dinner, so we almost always read Scripture together and pray as well.
In a series of posts we will look at the directions set out in the Directory for Private Worship.
A biblical view of education holds parents, and particularly fathers responsible for the training of children. At the end of the day, fathers will stand before God and have to give an account of how their children were trained. So today, we will briefly look at the four aspects of training parents are responsible for.
First of all, we are responsible for what we personally teach our children about God’s world. Christian parents are called by God to train their children to know and love God. In Deuteronomy 6, Moses tells God’s people, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Godly parents do not just love God with all their heart, soul and might, they teach that love to their children. Here in Deuteronomy, this is framed as an all of life thing. This teaching happens everywhere.
So secondly, we should see that as parents we are responsible for what we model to our children. So much of teaching goes beyond the words we say. It is the model we provide. For instance, as parents we might teach that we should obey God rather than men, but if our interactions with others indicate an unhealthy fear of man and we are unable to stand up for truth when it counts, we are providing our children with a mixed message lesson.
Thirdly, as parents we are responsible for the teachers we place over our children through avenues such as school and sport. This matters. When we as parents place our child under the tutelage of another adult, we do not magically hand our responsibility over. It’s not as if God’s understanding of the family shifts in this instant. No, fathers are still the heads of their household, and they are still responsible at this point too. Now, this should have implications for who we decide to place in teaching authority over our children. Jesus himself pointed out, “The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.” Is your child’s atheist teacher at school who you want your child to be like? Is the coach who teaches children to ‘look deep inside themselves for strength’ helpful to your child’s spiritual formation?
Finally, we are responsible for the indirect teaching that happens to our children based on what our children do in their spare time. This is perhaps the area we as parents think least about. The most obvious example of danger here is in our children’s discretionary screen time. Most of us are careful about who we let come around and babysit our children. Most of us want our children’s school teachers to be men and women of integrity. Are we applying this to the digital realm? We wouldn’t let a transgender or LGBT activist into our house to lecture our children about affirming a friend who is ‘coming out’. Nor would we let a woman into our house who had the design of performing a strip-tease show or demonstrating sexual positions. And yet, without proper parental responsibility in the area of screens, we may be actually unintentionally allowing these things.
So there you have it. We are responsible for not only what we teach and model to our children, but also who we place in a teaching position over them, and also the indirect teaching they receive through what we allow them to do in their spare time. This should drive us to greater thoughtfulness in each of these areas.
In a previous post we looked at cultural blind spots and chronological snobbery. One cultural blindspot Christians often have is in the area of education. Imagine for a moment, a first-century Jew, a recent convert to Christianity was suddenly and miraculously transported into the 21st century West. Trapped in our time, unable to get back he finds a Christian home to stay in. He would no doubt be impressed by our technology, the abundance and variety of food we enjoy and our ability to travel easily and relatively cheaply. I imagine he’d marvel at the ready access we have to the apostles’ words. He might be disappointed by our zeal. There would also no doubt be many cultural differences that might make understanding difficult.
But I put it to you, that he would be absolutely shocked by our take on education.
Imagine no longer. How I managed to record the following conversation, and by what method Levi, our first century Christian Jew managed to be transported to Auckland New Zealand in the year 2020 must remain a secret. The key thing is I have the conversation. He’s chatting with his host Mike, father of a 21st century Western Christian family. Can I apologise for Levi in advance? He did not grow up in our pluralistic tolerant age. Consider that your trigger-warning.
Levi: Brother, why do your children leave the house every day and stay at school for so long?
Mike: Well, they’re going to school. It’s important. They need a good education.
Levi: What do you mean by that?
Mike: Well, our world is a complex place. To get a good job, they are going to need to understand it properly.
Levi: Well yes, I entirely agree that children need to understand God’s world. But my question is: why do you send your children to pagans to educate? Your daughter informed me yesterday, that her teacher claimed that Darwin’s theory of evolution means there is no God, and your son said his teacher was explaining the importance of accepting people’s choice of gender. I had to question him to find out what that meant!
Mike: Yes, I have to admit, we are not happy about that, but children have to go to school. It’s compulsory.
Levi: That’s incredible. I didn’t imagine that in the future people would be so fettered by the ruling authorities that they could no longer make decisions about discipling their children.
Mike: Well, there are different types of schools. There are Christian schools – but they cost money, and you can try to get an exemption to homeschool, but that would mean Mandy would have to stay at home to teach the children, and she loves her career.
Levi: But didn’t the apostle Paul say in his epistle to the Ephesians, that fathers, that’s you Mike, are to not provoke your children to anger, but to instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Mike: How is that relevant Levi? I read the Bible to my children after dinner. I pray for them. I take them to church with me and they have a good Sunday school programme there.
Levi: Well do you think a 10 minute chat once a day and an hour on Sundays in Kids Church fulfils your obligations?
Mike: I guess I could do more. But school’s really just about learning Maths and English you know. How to write and stuff like that.
Levi: But don’t you believe what Paul says of Christ in his epistle to the Colossians? He says, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Mike: How is that relevant? I don’t understand. What do you mean?
Levi: Well Paul is reflecting on how the Son is the creator of all things and they were created for him, and they hold together in him. What do you mean by saying “They’re just learning Maths and English …how to write and stuff like that?” Are these things part of the created order that exist for the Son? Are they separate to it? And if not, why are you letting pagans who supress the truth about God train your young and impressionable children to do these things in a setting where the trainers deny the Lordship of Christ and his relevance to the universe he brought into being?
Mike: Hold on a minute. Yes I believe what Colossians says. But what’s the harm in getting unbelievers to teach my children how to do Maths, write a sentence…you know, that sort of thing. Isn’t that just part of the common grace that God gives to people?
Levi: Let’s grant you that point for the moment. Although I think you’ll find that what people believe necessarily taints everything. But do you really think that’s all your children learn? What about all of the incidental learning that goes on in the classroom every day? The teacher’s attitude to life, their understanding of the purpose of all learning, their approach to the issues of the day. Do you think that all of this is not going to come out in a classroom? Why, your daughter said yesterday at the dinner table that Ms Halcombe had told the class that her entire job could be summed up as enabling the students to be who they want to be?! You’d think she was the very serpent in the garden himself with words like that!
Mike: But Levi, Christ called us to be in the world. We can’t abandon the world. This way our children get to understand the world’s perspective on life, and we can show them how it is wrong. They can also be salt and light, just as Jesus wanted us to be.
Levi: Mike! Let me share you the wisdom that comes from history. We Jews have a sorry history that can teach you a lot. Do you know the story of the Judges? Do you know what led to that terrible period in our history?
Mike: Well, surely you can’t be arguing that it was because your people sent their children to non-Jewish schools?
Levi: No of course not. The story begins in Joshua. As our people crossed into the Promised Land, we set up a stone monument with stones taken from the middle of the River Jordan, which God made dry. The monument was to be a teaching tool. When our children asked what the stones meant, we were to tell them the story of God’s faithfulness in our history. Well of course, the memory of what happened lasted for a generation, but as the book of Judges says, after Joshua’s generation died out, a new generation grew up who neither knew the Lord or what he had done for Israel.
Mike: Yeah. I understand that it’s important that we pass on what God has done to our children. But I’m doing that. School’s a separate issue.
Levi: No it isn’t. Training up young minds is the single most important role you have as a parent. In the Law, we were taught the following. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Clearly the training of a child is not a five minute a day role. It’s a process that encompasses all your life with them, day and night.
Mike: Oh, but that’s the Old Testament. That applies to Israel. We are New Covenant believers.
Levi: Do you think that being under the New Covenant places a lesser requirement of love and concern for the spiritual wellbeing of our children than it did for the children of believers in the Old Covenant? You know Jesus warned people against leading his little ones astray. He said those responsible for this would be better off having a millstone attached to their necks and being tossed into the sea. Do you think this suggests that we New Covenant believers should be less concerned about the training of our covenant children now? Do you think Jesus’ requirement to let the little children come to him is compatible with sending them away from him to be trained by those who hate him and are walking away from him?
Mike: Well like I say, I keep an eye on what they are learning, and Jesus calls us to be salt and light. My children can be salt and light!
Levi: But Mike…if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? Look at your children. They dress like unbelieving children. They talk like them. They watch the same television shows, and their role models are the same…what do you call it…’social media celebrities’. Are they salt? As far as I read Scripture, I nowhere see a command for parents to outsource the training of their children to unbelievers in the hope that those unbelievers will be brought to faith. We send missionaries to the cannibals, but we don’t serve them up our children. Besides, when your church sends missionaries to overseas countries, they have to train substantially to be prepared to bring the gospel to this context. How much more children?! Shouldn’t we spend their impressionable years developing in them a Christ-centred approach to the world around them in preparation for a life of being salt and light?
Mike: But Levi, look at the results. Hannah’s friend is now going to youth group!
Levi: Would this still be a victory if Hannah ended up going to hell? Surely you can imagine a world where you are obedient to the commands of Scripture concerning both how you disciple your children, and how you reach out to unbelievers? Surely disobedience in one realm can’t be justified pragmatically by seeming success in another?
Mike: Well I don’t think I’m being disobedient. Besides, like I said, we can’t afford a Christian education. We’d prefer it, but it’s just not doable.
Levi: What do you mean? Is obedience to Christ in this matter impossible? What do you mean you can’t afford it? I know travel is not incredibly expensive, but wouldn’t you be able to cut back on overseas travel? Couldn’t you live in a smaller house? Can’t you figure out a way of making it work?
Mike: Well I suppose we could make it work if we really cut back. But Mandy wouldn’t want to move to another part of town. This is a nice area – it’s close to the city. Our friends are nearby. Plus our house is a great size for us. It’s good for entertaining. We can have Bible study here.
Levi: So it’s not actually about the cost? It’s more about the priority you place on it. You’d rather be comfortably well off than obedient to Christ? Maybe avoiding poverty for the sake of Christ has become an idol for you?
Mike: Well, I’m not sure I’d put it that way. You are pretty blunt you know.
Levi: Well I’ll be blunter still. Paul was pretty blunt too you know. Maybe you live in an age where caring about truth isn’t as important as avoiding offending people. Why doesn’t Mandy disciple your children at home? Surely much of her income is spent on having Matthew at the inappropriately named ‘Best Start Day Care’ each day. Didn’t the apostle Paul say in his epistle to Titus that he was to train the young women to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
Mike: Oh, don’t go there. We’ve come a long way since your day. Women are just as important as men, and we no longer believe they should just stay at home looking after the household. We’ve emancipated women.
Levi: May I remind you that in my day, the apostle Paul wrote that male and female were one in Christ. that does not mean we are all the same part of the body. We all have different roles to play. And I object to your use of the word just. What do you mean just stay at home looking after the household. How is training your children and preparing them for a life of service to Christ “just”. What is it she does anyway? Isn’t she a paralegal? Emancipated woman? What nonsense! You’ve exchanged submission to her cherished husband who loves her deeply and service of the ones she loves more than any others in the world for submission to a man she hardly knows and service of people she neither knows nor cares for.
Mike: I don’t see it that way.
Levi: Perhaps it’s inconvenient for you to see it this way. Perhaps you see the sacrifice another way might require, and you’re not willing to count the cost.
Mike: I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. You have your opinion which is good for you, and I have mine, which works for our family.
Chatting with my wife after a sermon today at church stimulated my thinking on this further. In Christian circles, we all know of missionaries and full-time ministry workers who have taken their ministry so seriously that it has negatively impacted family life. We’ve heard of children shunted off to another city to boarding school while their parents carry out missionary work. In history, we read of men who were so passionate about serving God that their wives and children suffered in a variety of ways.
I’d never thought of things in this light before, but today it brought to mind the passage in I Timothy 5 where Paul is helping Timothy think through provision for the needy such as widows in the church. Here he writes, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.“
Now in this context, we are talking about physical provision, and that provision, focussed on widows. Yet it provoked this thought in me. If it is such a gross sin to fail to provide physically for our relatives, is it perhaps also a profound sin to fail to care for them spiritually? If we parents become so focussed on serving God in our careers, could we not still be in danger if we neglect the greater priority of loving and discipling our children?
Jesus castigated the Pharisees once for their failure to honour their parents. They had come up with a tradition whereby they could gift money to God. This meant that whatever help they owed to their parents could (according to them) legitimately be refused. We read of this in Matthew 15. So here a spiritual reason was given for neglecting their physical duty of provision to their parents. They reasoned it was morally legitimate to give their money to God in such a way that rendered them incapable of helping their parents. Jesus saw through this and condemned them for setting aside the law of God (Honour your father and mother) for the sake of their traditions. Indeed he said they were only honouring him with their lips, and not their hearts.
Are we in danger of doing the same kind of thing? Parents are called to a radical programme of discipling their children.
In Deuteronomy 6 we see this radical programme in outline.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:6-9
And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul in Ephesians holds fathers particularly responsible for the discipline and instruction in the Lord of their children. To withhold this is to provoke a child to anger.
So my question is this. Is it possible that we might set aside the law of God requiring us to nurture and disciple our children and replace (and justify this replacement) with that pseudo-spiritual tradition of men: “ministry”? What might that say about the state of our hearts? Let us search our own hearts and make sure we retain the priorities God has for us.
Does this mean we should have no other ministry obligations apart from family? Of course not! However, our priorities should be rightly ordered. It’s all too easy for something as unnoticed and pedestrian as family to be usurped by a ministry that might seem more important, seem to have greater impact, be more public and provide more excitement and fulfilment.
