Baptists turn from public schools [NC]

News & Observer ^ | Aug 26, 2007 | Yonat Shimron

[jern]

Convinced that God has been erased from public schools, Southern Baptists are now working to open their own schools, where Jesus is writ large and Bible study is part of the daily curriculum.

Church leaders are not calling for a wholesale exodus from public schools, which would be a monumental hit, considering that Southern Baptists make up the nation's largest Protestant denomination with 16 million members.

Rather, they talk about alternatives to public schools capable of educating a new generation ready and willing to advocate for biblical principles rather than popular culture.

"In the public schools, you don't just have neutrality, you have hostility toward organized religion," said Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest. "A lot of parents are fed up."

Southeastern is leading the push, sponsoring a Christian School 101 workshop Monday and Tuesday. The program is designed to train church leaders to open private schools.

At Southeastern and elsewhere, Southern Baptists have become convinced that fighting to change the system is futile. They say public schools have long demonstrated a commitment to teaching evolution over creationism, world faiths over Christianity, sex education over abstinence, moral relativism over Christian claims of truth.

A history of alienation

The denomination's disenchantment with public schools is not new. It dates to the 1920s, when states debated the teaching of creationism vs. evolution. Evolution increasingly won, despite the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, which gave the victory to creationists. The 1962 and 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and devotional readings from public schools only increased Southern Baptists' ire.

Since then, alienation with public schools has grown alongside the nation's culture wars, pitting evangelical Christians against secularists.

"Southern Baptists see the new religious establishment in this country as secularism,"

[beezdotcom]

Everyone using the government schools should feel defensive and be fully prepared with lists of excuses.

You're right - with pleasant conversation such as yours, what should I have to feel defensive about?

[blam]

Magnolia Springs Baptist Academy

"Thank you for visiting Magnolia Springs Baptist Academy. We are located at 6058 Theodore Dawes Road in Theodore, Alabama. The Academy was established in 1968 with the goal of offering a quality Christian education. In 2007, our goal is still the same providing our students with an academically advanced Christian education."

[beezdotcom]

It is not so much an issue of 'rogue indoctrination' for me.I don't see 'teaching' as just academics. When I look at 'teaching' kids, it is more than just science, math, reading, etc. that they are learning. They are learning how the authority figure in their life at that moment handles life situations. They are overhearing conversations that two teachers may be having, whether it be Mr. Jones and Ms. Peachtree, or my wife and myself. They are seeing how Ms. Peachtree handles frustration, envy, strife and maybe anger.

You're absolutely right. However, as they continue to grow, they will also observe authority figures in their workplace, in the community, and a number of other real-world environments. I can't be in ALL of those locations. School is probably the most controlled of these environments, and if it's in a district where I feel the parents are still empowered (as things happen to be in our district), then I'm happy to begin that process in school.

If I ever send my kids to a school, I will have to spend a lot of time getting to know each teacher. I need to know what they believe, why they believe, and how their beliefs influence their core values, or worldview. I'd want to see in their lives the residual effects of the parenting their mother and father had on them, and also the effects on their own kids.

That's pretty close to my approach, although I use it not just to filter, but to instruct. Among my kids this past year, twelve of their teachers had fairly quantifyable (and compatible) value systems. Two others had axes to grind, but were otherwise knowledgable teachers. I considered placing them in other classes, but I found it rather instructive to be able to predict to the kids how the teacher would attempt to spin certain things BEFORE the teacher had done so - and watch the light bulbs go on in the kids heads when my predictions came true.

I think the age of the children and the school district matter quite a bit, too - I kept my children in a private Christian school from K4 through 5th grade. By then, they were ready to start observing some of the differences with the public schools. However, I can also envision that if we lived in some districts, I'd probably keep them out of the public schools altogether, because it would be too hard to control their education in some districts.

[gondramB]

>>Please name one<<

I just did some spot checking - The Critical Analysis of fossils Prentice was the one that made post a suggestion to be carefuol using that site. The use of terms like macroevolution show a lack of familiarity with science while senctences like

“Their fossil “evidence” gets destroyed by facts every so often, but they never question their assumptions, they just string together a new set of bones and call it a “series of intermediaries” until it gets disproven as well.”

shows a desire not to educate but inspire blind disdain for science.

The section on transitional versus “composite” is poor attempt to say that students should ignore transitional fossil evidence and then they leave out the reinforcing DNA evidence.

Maybe the rest of the site is better but the part i checked out led me to suggest caution.

[cinives]

Why should they figure it out or care ? Public schools are getting your tax dollars regardless of what they teach.

[Marysecretary]

We operate a Christian school out of our church. It’s been there for over 20 years now. Problem is that it’s hard to fund. We want any child who wants a Christian education to attend but it takes a LOT of money to run it. Parents who can afford it pay the entire price of around $3,400 yearly. Others who can’t, pay less. I don’t know if we’ve ever been in the black but we believe strongly in christian education and we keep going. It’s a wonderful school.

[Marysecretary]

Trust me, our church gets NO revenue from the school we started here. Our finances suffer greatly because of the school but we think it’s worth it because of the education they’re getting. Teachers sacrifice all the time for the school. This year they were asked to take a 10 percent cut in pay. It’s not easy to maintain a school in a little church in the middle of nowhere but we’ve been doing it for over 20 years.

[napscoordinator]

I am surprised they have not done this years ago. I went to Catholic school my whole life and always wondered why otehr religions did not follow and open their own schools. It is really so much better. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

[Marysecretary]

My daughter in law (former) was from Missouri and she homeschools all four of her children. One of my grandsons, her oldest, graduated and is working in TN as a Honda salesman. He’s very good at it and he’s a great young man. She had him in public school and he was bored. The only solution, after they told him he had ADD (wrong!) was to have him sit in study hall reading encyclopedias. She got him out of there and taught him herself. She’d never done that before and I’m sure it was difficult, but all four of the kids are now homeschooled.

[DesScorp]

I’d like to see every major church in every town sponsor a school. Pardon the expression, but give the public schools hell.

I homeschool my oldest....

[napscoordinator]

We operate a Christian school out of our church. It’s been there for over 20 years now. Problem is that it’s hard to fund. We want any child who wants a Christian education to attend but it takes a LOT of money to run it. Parents who can afford it pay the entire price of around $3,400 yearly. Others who can’t, pay less. I don’t know if we’ve ever been in the black but we believe strongly in christian education and we keep going. It’s a wonderful school.

God Bless You!!! I tell you that you will be richer than you can imagine in Heaven. That is just so great and exciting!

[<1/1,000,000th%]

About time.

[stevio]

Church leaders are not calling for a wholesale exodus from public schools, which would be a monumental hit

Why not? I think they would get the gist pretty quick.

[achilles2000]

Well, here are a few:

1. Our schools are different.
2. My child is salt and light.
3. I stay involved and deprogram my children in the evenings.
4. Not every public school is antiChristian.
5. Christian schools can be just as bad as public schools.

I’m sure that there are more, but these should suffice for maintaining self esteem.

[noamnasty]

Dept of Education wants to keep the kids in line ,the teachers union is a very big lobby .

Wonder what kind of school the early Christians in Jerusalem went to ? I bet they didn’t teach evolution .

[massgopguy]

Unless she attributes the Hail Mary to Doug Flutie instead of Gabriel.

[HANG THE EXPENSE]

I agree with you whole heartedly.My hats off to you and yours.

[Wallace T.]

Individualism has been both America's great blessing and great curse. Without it, it is unlikely our country would have left the British Empire or developed as rapidly and strongly as we have. Unlike the Latin American nations, which broke away from a Spain greatly weakened by generations of poor foreign and domestic policies and devastated by the Napoleonic Wars, we declared our independence from Britain, a nation that was the superpower of its day, having bested her old rival, France, in the Seven Years War. Our prosperity and prominence are unsurpassed in comparison to any other nation in this hemisphere, Canada included. It is the remaining element of individualism that has prevented this nation from being as socialistic or as secularist as the other Western nations. Even the fact that the United States, unlike the other English-speaking nations, still uses a variant of the British Imperial system of measurements is evidence of American individualism.

OTOH, it is also a curse insofar as the absence of government restraint was not met by an adequate measure of self-control as a countervailing force. The lingering of slavery (which ended only after America's bloodiest war), child labor, air and water pollution, union busting, and Jim Crow laws are examples of greed or malice unrestrained by self-discipline. As undesirable as some of the legal remedies used to address these problems were, they were nonetheless the result of unrestrained human sinfulness.

As for what happened to the worldview of the British descended Protestant churches and believers, I do not agree that their declension was due to the fact that the churches were organized in rebellion against Rome. Protestantism was effectively crushed in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and made little headway in Italy and Spain. Yet all three nations, and Mexico as well (where Protestant influence was almost nil), underwent anticlerical revolutions. In the case of France during the French Revolution and Spain under the Communist-oriented Republicans, thousands of Catholic clergy were murdered, often in the most brutal manner. Even Cromwell would have blanched at the ruthlessness of the Jacobins and Marxists.

Anglo-American Protestants strayed far from Biblical precepts in a number of areas. Evangelicals and fundamentalists made some mistakes in their response to liberal Protestantism as well. The greatest error on the part of the mainline churches was their ongoing attempt to synthesize the worldview of the French and Scottish Enlightenments with that of historic Christianity, This was particularly true with respect to the areas of higher criticism, which denigrated the historicity of the Biblical text, and Darwinism, with regard to both macroevolution and the age of the earth. Even conservative theologians like the Calvinist B. B. Warfield and the dispensationalist C. I. Scofield attempted to find some sort of via media with the theory of evolution. (Of course, so did Popes Pius XII and John Paul II in encyclicals a half-century apart.)

Another mainline Protestant error was in the area of eschatology. Before World War II, many mainline Protestant ministers and laymen were postmillenialists, but not in the sense of the more Biblically based Puritans or Reconstructionists. This view was a deviation from the traditional amillenialism to which Catholicism and the Reformed and Lutheran branches of Protestantism historically assented, influenced by the views of Augustine of Hippo. Postmillenialism in the liberal sense assumed that the world was making steady progress out of poverty and superstition and that the church was the instrument by which the millennial kingdom would be established. Hence, political activism in areas such as pure food and drug laws, breaking up of trusts, and universal public education would, in the minds of liberal Protestant leaders like Walter Rauschenusch, G. Bromley Oxnam, and Henry Sloane Coffin, lead to the establishment of the Kingdom of God.

The liberal Protestants and post-Protestant groups like the Unitarians were a major force in promoting both religious and secular liberalism. With few exceptions, like Gresham Machen, the conservative Protestant reaction was singularly ineffective and compromised. The Holiness movement and the fundamentalists strongly emphasized personal morality, becoming avid supporters of Prohibition and advocates of blue laws. When they were not calling for government action to limit personal freedom, they supported various moves to suppress free speech. Even Jehovah's Witnesses, a post-Protestant sect that held to a strict moral code but opposed war, were subject to harassment. Many conservative clergy did nothing to stop various acts of violence by lynch mobs against blacks or the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, some conservative ministers and others not so conservative actually endorsed the Klan. In the South and the Border States, Baptists, Methodists, and other evangelicals were strong supporters of the New Deal. All of their actions managed to discredit conservative Protestants among the public at large.

Government and society at large turned against evangelicals and fundamentalists in the post-World War II era through bans on prayer and Bible reading in public schools, the general shrinkage of local government authority, and an increased hostility in both elite and mass culture. With few exceptions, like Carl McIntyre and Francis Schafer, their spokesmen were detached from cultural and political matters. The half-century of political withdrawal by evangelicals following the wildly unpopular Prohibition experiment and the Scopes trial public relations fiasco deterred the development of effective argumentation against their opponents. Their predominant support for racial segregation was thrown back in their faces: prominent conservative Baptist ministers like Jerry Falwell and W. A. Criswell would publicly apologize in later years for their support of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s.

Both the liberal mainline churches and the conservative evangelicals confused power with righteousness and their sentiments with Biblical mandates. As America heads into a post-Christian era, it is time for serious reflections on what strategies will be effective in making use of the weaknesses of the Left and overturning the secular humanist order. This country can survive four or eight years of Hillary Clinton. It will not survive the poor stewardship of Christians when given political power.

[John Leland 1789]

Praying for you. I say, Charge Ahead! Certainly there are many in your situation and with your motivation. We have a different approach, and that is to hold school for parents, rather than young people, to promote and encourage home schooling. But we don’t intend to discourage you, or folks like you. God bless your efforts!

Courses we teach in our Bible Institutes

*Biblical Homes
*The Primacy of the Institution of the Home
— The relationship of the home to the local church and how the church should support the home and the headship of the husbands/fathers.
*Headship of Husbands/Fathers
*Mothers in the Home With Children
*Fathers As the Stewards of Child Education
— Why education is the responsibility of the fathers, (not the church; how the church may assist).
*Family Based Enterprises
— Ways to involve wives and children in the family income without sending wives/mothers out of the home.
*Home Schooling
— Methods, procedures, conviction, discipline, curricula research.
*The Spiritual Republic
— Republican church government (in contrast to the Congregational form); how to involve all heads of households.

[Search4Truth]

This article is an excellent example of the apostasy of Western Christianity. The article represents almost 5,000 words of men and not a single word of God. While claiming to be Christians they give no reverence to God and His word. But they seem quite enamored with their own thoughts and ideas. This must be the Christianity that Barna research tells us over and again is no different than the world.

Can one really be a Christian, and ignore the word of God?

Lets see what God has to say about the relationship between believers and unbelievers.

“Be you not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? and what partnership has light with darkness? And what harmony has Christ with Belial? or what part has he that believes with an infidel? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? for you are the temple of the living God; as God has said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore come out from among them, and be you separate, says the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.” (2 Corinthians 6:14-18)

Now, as Christians, our only duty, is to conform our lives to His word. That is what it means to be a Christian.