Posted on 10/20/2006 1:24:53 PM PDT by achilles2000
If you like sexually transmitted diseases, shootings and high teen pregnancy rates, by all means, send your children to public schools. That's the word from a leader in the fast-growing movement within the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention for parents to pull their children from those schools in favor of homeschooling.
Pastor Wiley Drake
The program is called Exit Strategy and Pastor Wiley Drake, whose home state of California has done some things especially offensive to Christians this year, is a leading promoter.
In an interview with WND, he said that those problems and others are prevalent in public schools, and some Christian leaders even have said it could be considered child abuse just to register children in such a facility....
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
As I recall the fellows doing the most hollering on this aren't laymen. And personally I've found their remarks and assumptions rather insulting.
I'd be interested to know who is doing the hollering from your point of view. Just curious...
I'd be interested to know who is doing the hollering from your point of view. Just curious...
That is not true.
Right. I'm interested in growing the number of homeschoolers, but the really HUGE change could come if the Baptists could use their existing facilities to multiply the number of church-related schools.
At their peak in 1965, Catholic parochial schools in the United States constituted the largest non-government school system in the world, enrolling 5.5 million American students. This system has shrunk to a mere 40% of what it used to be, enrolling just 2.3 million students in 2005-06.
There are demographic and sociological reasons for this: many of the schools were founded to serve ethnic parishes with lots of immigrant parishioners --- inner-city Poles, Italians, and Slovaks who have long since integrated culturally and moved to the 'burbs.
But the main reason, I think, is the disastrous drop in the number of religious sisters who used to staff the schools. Nationally, the number of religious sisters has plunged from 180,000 in 1965 to 68,000 in 2005.
To be frank, the nuns worked "for a prayer" and practically lived on air. They were dedicated, most of them were young (back in 1965) and most were very competent and effective teachers.
I am excited and thrilled that the Baptists are talking about using their existing buildings to start Baptist schools and pull as many kids out of the public schools as possible. But I wonder how they can affordably do it without a cadre of teachers who will be as dedicated (and low-paid) as the splendid cadre of nuns who taught me when I was growing up.
But there are possibilities. Internet and satellite education... hmm... Well, go get 'em. Baptists, my hat's off to you. I wish you all the best!
Baptist ping...
hot topics today, tongues and exit strategy
Yes, it's a sad thing about the nuns. But it could still be turned around. Our parochial school here in Montpelier, VT, although things are still pretty tough, has been on an upward path these past few years, mostly because of strong parental concern and great lay leadership, even though the whole diocese was left in sorry shape by the last bishop.
And while some orders of nuns are dying, others are thriving.
I find that I am donating regularly to one religious order of nuns that consists mostly of very old nuns who are terminally ill and dying, with few younger sisters to support them, as they should be doing, because they all jumped ship. A sad business, but someone has to support these sick and elderly nuns.
At the same time I am donating to a younger order who just keep drawing in more and more young postulates, and are bursting at the seams and having to put up new buildings and expand them in mid-construction.
As Fr. Benedict Groeschel pointed out in an article I read some years ago, it's in the nature of things that old institutions grow corrupt and die, and they simply may not be salvageable. But then new ones come along to take their place. In the case of religious orders, this has happened recurrently for more than a thousand years. So, possibly the Jesuits might die out completely, which would be sad, but some other order will spring up to take their place.
The Baptists can do it, if they set their minds and hearts on it. God will support that kind of genuine commitment if it is truly performed in His name.
We were able to get a number of churches involved in the new school. Our church has singlehandedly carried the burden for our own school here and it's tough to do that. We have some great teachers and students. I'll miss them when they move to the other school. It's been a financial struggle for us but it's now beginning to take off.
That's what I was talking about. What is it with these liberals? They drive me up the wall...
"who is doing the hollering "
Off the top of my head I can't think of the two guys that introduced the resolution regarding homeschooling at the SBC convention last year and this year. Both I think are pastors in Texas.
Oh, I agree 100%. But I suspect the pope will tell US to get on this...;o)
Seriously, read this history of these schools. It wasn't any top-down, directed-from-the-Roman-Curia thing. It was tough, God-loving, dedicated pioneers like Mother Frances Cabrini and Mother Elizabeth Seton who had 2 teachers and $20 and a pile of cinderblocks, and said, "Sweet Jesus, We're building a school."
See post #26.
how about attention homeschoolers:
Do you really think a Democrat Party majority, which is proped up by the NEA and the FTA is going to just let people NOT go to public school?
In germany they are putting home school parents in Jail.
If Baptists want to home school they had better know where their best chance of independence lies.
I think I have heard this before. Oh, yes. "Come out from among them, be you separate, and touch not the unclean thing." Someone smarter than me said that once.
Wouldn't that image better apply to a kid in a government school? It's best to home school or pay for private education.
The way you're acting, I would guess you have kids, and you sent them to the government for an education. Nice.
I understand part of your point, but, respectfully, the founders were 55% Episcopalian/Anglican. There were actually more Catholics than Calvinist founding fathers.
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God bless Pastor Drake and may my fellow Catholics follow his Baptist and Christian lead.
We started by putting my eldest in the Catholic parochial school where I was educated many years ago. About six times in kindergarten and first grade, she came home complaining that her teachers had told her that Jesus Christ did not know He was God even when dying on the cross. The pastor was perfectly Catholic but busy as a one-armed paperhanger with a disabled assistant pastor in a very large parish. The principal was a feminist ex-nun of very questionable faith hired by politically correct and religiously porous diocesan bureaucrats. I sent her ten single-spaced pages of protest and other sass, thoroughly footnoted to Scripture and Magisterial documents and then, without receiving the courtesy of so much as an answer while they were busy inviting (until stopped by the pastor) the pro-abort "Catholic" Congresswoman to a fund-raiser, I decided that I had better things to do with my life than waste it writing nastygrams to the likes of her and we started homeschooling. Public schooling was never even considered given my wife's experience in them.
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