Posted on 12/19/2007 2:40:07 PM PST by wintertime
Bruce Shortt in his resolution to the Southern Baptist Convention, May, 2007, writes:
"In 2002 the SBC’s Council on Family Life reported that roughly 88% of our children leave the church within 2 years after graduating from high school. It is reported by LifeWay’s Zan Tyler that Josh McDowell Ministries pegs the number who leave at 92%.3 " (B.Shortt)
However the retention rate for homeschoolers is much better.
"Research by Dr. Brian Ray, founder of NHERI, found that 94% of all homeschooled children retained their faith into adulthood." (B. Shortt)
Regarding the successes of children educated in Christian schools, they are far superior to those children educated in government schools:
"The Nehemiah Institute’s worldview testing shows that students in Christian schools reject moral relativism at a rate 500% higher than Christian children attending public schools. The same worldview surveys also show that children receiving a Christian education do better on worldview issues overall than their public school counterparts, with outstanding results typically coming from Christian schools that incorporate worldview materials in their curriculum and homeschooled children." ( B. Shortt)
I ask Christian teachers teaching in government schools,”How much influence can a Christian teacher have on children in government schools who are not from Christian homes?”
In my opinion, Christian teachers have little or no influence over the spiritual lives of their non-Christian students. If dedicated Christian parents are having so little success with their own children, I doubt that a Christian teacher can turn around a child who goes home every day to a secular family.
My recommendations to Christian teachers in the government schools:
1)Resign.
2)Consider your own children and the children of the parents in your congregation as your most important and urgent mission field.
3) Get your kids and the kids of your congregation out of the government schools.
4) Organize, and be teachers in, Christian schools in your own congregations.
5) If you can, homeschool your own children, and be a resource to other homeschooling parents.
5)Large brick and mortar buildings are not necessary. With today’s technology it is possible to have many “one room school houses” meeting in Christian homes. Of course we do have existing church buildings that, in my opinion, are greatly under-utilized. Christian teachers could be a tremendous resource in supporting these endeavors among the members of their Christian congregation. We may actually be surprised to learn that the educational and spiritual outcomes of children in "one-room-schoolhouses" are better than those in traditional schools built and run following the Prussian model.
6) Once your congregation has a viable and healthy education structure for its own children take in as many non-Christian children as possible ( provided that it would not overwhelm the Christian culture of the school). Mentor the parents of these children.
7) Work to organize private Christian scholarship foundations so that **every** child in the U.S. would have access to a private Christian education. Harvard has and endowment of $35 BILLION ,and small colleges like Amerhert or Williams $1.7 and $1.9 BILLION, respectively. We are a wealthy nation. If Christians REALLY WANTED they could do the same for children in this nation. http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010985
Finally, to ALL Christian teachers, NO! your school is NOT different. All government schools are Anti-Christian, and if you are paying dues to the NEA you are further pounding nails into the spriritual coffin of our nation's children.
Bruce Shrott writes:
"All Public Schools, By Law, Are Anti-Christian"
"First, it is important to distinguish between individuals and institutions. There is still a sizable remnant of Christian adults employed by the public schools. Many of them pray for their students and a few, though they risk being disciplined or fired, furtively try to witness. But this certainly does not mean that institutionally any public school system is, as some try to argue, “sympathetic to Christianity.” In fact, expressing nontrivial institutional “sympathy” for Christianity, let alone teaching from a Christian worldview, is absolutely prohibited by a complex web of court rulings, legislation, and regulations that apply to every single school and every single school employee subject to the laws of the United States. This is the hostile institutional environment in which Christian adults in the schools are forced to work. And, unfortunately, when you put good people in a bad system, the system almost always wins, which is the reason the public school system continues to deteriorate."
“Sympathy”, or the lack of sympathy, however, is simply not the relevant standard for judging whether a school is a suitable place to train up a Christian child. Christ tells us clearly that “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad.” For forty years and more, every public school has been legally prohibited from being for Christ. Unless one chooses to disregard Christ’s teaching, the only conclusion that can honestly be reached is that the entire public school system, by law, is against Christ. As will be seen, this is further confirmed when we look at the evidence of whether the public schools are “gathering” with Christ or “scattering.” "
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:kY4WNVux_NIJ:www.exodusmandate.org/20070503-resolution/2007-letter-to-committee-members.doc+Dr.+Bryan+Ray+percentage+Christian+children+leave+faith&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us
Please ping those who may be interested.
Thanks!
Thanks.
Wintertime
Parents are the only people who can make a difference at the grass roots level. Public schools are a joke.
The money quote.
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One of the reasons that we don’t see more Christian schools is due to there being so many government school teachers sitting in the pews. The ministers are too afraid to offend them.
Follow the money.
Parents are the only people who can make a difference at the grass roots level.
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What is needed is a mass Exodus!
Interesting article, wintertime.
It is very sad but a true conclusion. Public schools are dying because of Democrats and courts.
I’m already out ... my kids that is ...
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Parents can NOT make a difference. Why? Answer: Because the Anti-Christianity is embedded in law. (Please read Bruce Shortt’s paragraph “All Public Schools, By Law, Are Anti-Christian”. Government schools can NOT be reformed.
Shortt also writes that there is no neutrality in education. This is a fundamental characteristic of all education, and, being axiomatic, can NOT be “reformed” by parents or anyone else.
There Is No Neutrality in Education
Often Christians attempt to argue it downs’t matter that the public school system is not for Christ – that education is somehow religiously “neutral.” Education, however, is never neutral.
Any Christian who believes that government schools operate on religiously neutral principles is simply deceived. There is no such thing as metaphysical or religious neutrality. If an institution rejects the Bible’s teaching about the nature of God, Man and the universe, then it necessarily accepts, implicitly or explicitly, some other worldview, whether it be the materialist metaphysics of secular humanism, the cosmic humanism of the New Age religions, or something else. Government schools are no exception.
On a practical level, the net result of nearly sixty years of Supreme Court rulings on the meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution has not been to create a level playing field for different beliefs, but simply to take all vestiges of Christianity out of government schools. Today, secular humanism, postmodernism, New Age mysticism, and other forms of paganism pervade government schools at all levels. The teachers’ unions, such as the NEA, are openly hostile to Biblical Christianity and its values, and the curricula of schools of education and teachers’ colleges, from which the overwhelming majority of teachers are drawn, are suffused with a mélange of postmodern and other nonchristian worldviews. Not surprisingly, textbook publishers accommodate the education establishment’s worldview by providing textbooks that conform to the prevailing anti-Christian perspective of the education establishment.
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The fundamental premise of government schooling was flawed from the very beginning.
1) Education can never be religiously neutral. ( In conflict with the First Amendment)
2) To have orderly government schools, the government must trash free speech, free press, free expression of religion, free assembly, and no school is religiously neutral. ( First Amendment, freedom of conscience, and human rights violations)
2)Consider your own children and the children of the parents in your congregation as your most important and urgent mission field.
3) Get your kids and the kids of your congregation out of the government schools.
4) Organize, and be teachers in, Christian schools in your own congregations....
6) Once your congregation has a viable and healthy education structure for its own children take in as many non-Christian children as possible ( provided that it would not overwhelm the Christian culture of the school). Mentor the parents of these children.
7) Work to organize private Christian scholarship foundations so that **every** child in the U.S. would have access to a private Christian education. Harvard has and endowment of $35 BILLION ,and small colleges like Amerhert or Williams $1.7 and $1.9 BILLION, respectively. We are a wealthy nation. If Christians REALLY WANTED they could do the same for children in this nation.
Nothing is more important than this. The church's first mission field has to be its own children. Lose that battle and nothing else much matters.
Um, parents can take their kids OUT of public schools.
Nothing is more important than this. The church’s first mission field has to be its own children. Lose that battle and nothing else much matters.
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That needs to be repeated, and repeated, and repeated,,,and,,,shouted from the roof tops!
The Christian teachers that are in public schools are tightly controlled so they make no difference anyway. They get to act like atheists in the classroom otherwise..they are out.
You hit on the bottomline..Lose your own kids, your culture dies. I had no idea Baptists were losing this many to the world. We have seminary and 2 year missions, but the world can still steal a significant percentage. Peer groups drag most kids down along with the Godless system of education.
wow.
This is a violation of the first amendment -- you know the one that is misapplied to guarantee the schools WE MUST PAY FOR FIRST AND FOREMOST secular. The feds have made a school system. They insist that it is secular. They insist we all must pay for it.
The situation is absurd. The federal government is supposed to stay out of religious affairs. Worked fine, until governments made EVERYTHING their affair, while at the same time the restriction on the federal government was expanded to all levels of government by judicial fiat.
OBVIOUSLY teachers are not the federal congress. OBVIOUSLY They do make laws. SO HOW CAN THE POSSIBLY VIOLATE THE FOLLOWING: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free practice thereof."?
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