Posted on 06/02/2009 7:28:14 AM PDT by achilles2000
The Southern Baptist Convention is Finally 'Throwing in the Towel' on Government Schools
President and Executive Director of the SBC Executive Committee Proposes Major Expansion of Christian Schools by Churches
COLUMBIA, SC, June 2 /Christian Newswire/ -- In 2004 Brig. Gen. T.C. Pinckney, USAF Ret. and former 2nd Vice President of the SBC, and Dr. Bruce Shortt, Houston attorney, opened a debate over education by submitting a resolution to the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention urging Baptists to remove their children from government schools and, instead, give them a Christian education.
Although the Pinckney/Shortt Resolution was met with howls of execration from many Christian leaders, and the Resolutions Committee prevented it from being voted on by the Annual Meeting, the Resolution initiated an important debate over education, both inside and outside the SBC.
Despite the Pinckney/Shortt Resolution's hostile reception, in 2005 Dr. Albert Mohler, President of the SBC's "flagship" seminary, Southern Theological Seminary, called for the SBC to develop an "exit strategy" from the government's schools. (www.albertmohler.com/commentary_read.php?cdate=2005-06-17) Since then other Christian leaders have endorsed, in part or in whole, the call to provide Christian children with a Christian education.
Now, the SBC has come full circle. In an article that recently appeared in The Baptist Messenger, Dr. Morris H. Chapman, president and chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee, called for churches to provide many more Christian elementary and secondary schools as alternatives to the government's schools. (www.baptistmessenger.com/story/11E2669E88B513F2EAC03509EACA78D3)
The anti-Christian moral teaching within government schools was among Dr. Chapman's chief motivations for calling for a major expansion of Christian education: "In far too many public schools throughout the country our children are being bombarded with secular reasoning, situational ethics and moral erosion."
Moreover, Dr. Chapman sees the need for greatly expanding Christian education as urgent: "In recent days, two questions have weighed heavily on my soul. If Southern Baptists don't do it, who will? If we don't do it now, do we risk forever losing the opportunity to build schools for God's glory and the future of our children, grandchildren and the land we love?"
To implement his vision of a major expansion of Christian education, Dr. Chapman advocates two initial concrete steps. First, he identifies the inner cities as places where a Christian education ministry is much needed and would be welcomed. As Dr. Chapman sees it: "In such areas, Kingdom schools would serve as a central ministry among a myriad of ministries that would help families recover from the chaos that now exists and help them establish Christ in the home."
Second, Dr. Chapman calls on every local Baptist association to create new schools: "Why shouldn't we have at least one Christian school in every association that merges dynamic biblical principles with academic excellence? At minimum, a number of Southern Baptist churches in the same association could band together to create an outstanding Christian school for the area. In our voluntary fellowships with each other, Southern Baptists still have shown themselves uniquely structured and resourced to take on such a challenge. Elementary and secondary education is an area we can add to how we cooperate in missions and ministries."
Dr. Chapman's proposal has been warmly welcomed by Dr. Shortt, the co-sponsor of the 2004 education resolution and of education resolutions in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008:
"As the chief administrator of the SBC, Dr. Chapman's voice is extremely powerful. With his recent call to greatly expand Christian education among Southern Baptists and others, Dr. Chapman has, in effect, laid out the first step in the "exit strategy" called for by Dr. Mohler in 2005. All Christians should note this sea-change in sentiment within the SBC. The spiritual, moral, and intellectual pathologies of the government school system are now obvious even to casual observers. Christian parents and pastors need to ask themselves just how much longer they intend to render our children to Caesar's spiritually dark, morally decaying, and physically dangerous government schools."
E. Ray Moore of Exodus Mandate expressed his hearty agreement: "Dr. Morris Chapman's clarion call for a major expansion of Christian elementary and secondary schools is an example of bold leadership, not only for the SBC, but for the entire Christian community. This could not have come at a more opportune moment when families are crying out for assistance with their children and churches are losing the next generation of youth to worldliness, humanism and post modernism due to public schooling. In the last several decades, Christian organizations and publishers have created excellent curriculum materials and online Christian education programs that will work for small or large churches as well as for home school families. Technology combined with good curriculum have made K-12 Christian education available to anyone anywhere anytime and at reasonable cost."...
Good for them! I support our local Catholic school, so have no extra educational dollars to send to Baptist schools, but I wish them well.
The article said — “... a resolution to the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention urging Baptists to remove their children from government schools and, instead, give them a Christian education.”
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Well, that’s long overdue and something that should have been done by Christians a very long time ago — pull out of public schools and leave them to the sewers, like they are.
Southern Baptists should have been building their own school system years ago, as Roman Catholics and Mo. Synod Lutherans did. Without the support of Baptist families and Baptist public school teachers, government schools in Texas and the South would be in tough shape.
Exodus Mandate stirring up the education discussion as the SBC heads for its Annual Meeting in Louisville June 23. Ping
You are absolutely right...
The SBC needs to focus on newer educational models than traditional schools. We’ll see how innovative they are.
The SBC has ruined almost all Baptist churches in the northeast Texas region. Don’t put much stock in what they have to say.
I guess we will have to see what the SBC actually does. There is a fight going on internally between the “hip” emergent church wannabees and the traditional Baptists - which is a different issue from education, of course
On the contrary, Christians need to focus on OLD educational models, those given by the Bible.
Any “innovation” should be directed at following God’s direction within this contemporary society, so that our children are “in the world but not of the world”.
“hip” just means being world-friendly,
and we were sufficiently warned about that. (James 4:4 for one)
So have PCA Presbyterian....we saw the handwriting on the wall too.
I think you assume I was refering to content. I was merely suggesting that instead of starting traditional schools, as the leadrship is probably thinking, tey should look at university model schools, academic homeschool coops, Christian oneroom school houses using (Christian) distance learning, etc.
My kids attended a Baptist school 30 years ago.
There were at least 3 operating in our area at that time, within a metro area of about 150,000 population.
Even back then, vouchers or aid to parents with kids in church schools was being discussed. Our Pastor informed everybody with kids in the church school that if any parent ever accepted aid from the gov because their kids were in church school they would have to withdraw their kids from the school.
It was a sound policy then and in my opinion, still is.
Yes, and I have a friend who will be working to bring the issue to a head in Louisvile...the SBC emergents are mainly just theological liberals who are trying to camouflage themselves by claiming to be “inerrantists”.
The only way to defeat Liberalism/Marxism is to dry up the revenue.
***The SBC needs to focus on newer educational models than traditional schools. We’ll see how innovative they are.***
Like “University Model Schools”. I teach at Grace Prep in Arlington, TX which was the first of now 32 UMS schools.
Parents covenant with the school to “school/homeschool” elementary students, who only meet on TTh, and to heavily supervise secondary students, who meet MWF.
The the classroom space need is half, most teachers are part-time, and thus the cost is about half that of a traditional Christian school.
What’s cool is that there are more and more Christian colleges popping up to serve the homeschool community.
Patrick Henry College was founded by Michael Farris, founder of HSLDA and a Constitutional lawyer.
By the time my kids are ready for college, there will either be plenty of choices for “homeschool friendly” colleges and online universities,
or homeschooling will be illegal, and we’ll be in CWII.
“inerrantists”?
As in, they claim to hold to the inerrancy of the Bible?
To be liberal, you have to totally reject that concept because biblical truth and liberalism are totally opposite. I don’t get it.
So is anyone running odds on it passing this year? They’ve been sending something like this up every year for the past 5 years. It seems that it has more backing but it hasn’t been a winner before now.
Not an SBC member. Just an interested bystander unfamiliar with the internal politics of the SBC.
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