Christian Education

[00:00:00] This audio sermon is provided by AnabaptistSermons.com and may be freely copied and distributed. You may not sell or edit this sermon. Our prayer is that you would be blessed by this ministry. I would like to speak to a few of the nuts and bolts of Christian education and some of the things I think need to happen for there to be a continuing, a continued vision in our day. [00:00:33] Okay. I have, I believe, five P words. They begin with P. To give to you to help us think a little bit about the specific areas where I believe vision needs to happen. Part of my burden here is I hear a lot of people talking about the need for vision, and I couldn't agree more. We do need some strategy in this area. What do we mean? Where do we need the vision? Do we just need some preacher to come and kind of get us hepped up? Or do we need to really think about the key areas that really have to move forward if in fact we are actually to have an ongoing vision? [00:01:19] So, these are five words that I shared, I believe, at a teacher's institute a number of years ago. Here's a verse, first, from Philippians 4. I know both how to be abased and how to abound everywhere, and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ, which strengtheneth me. I would like to offer this in a positive context this evening. I believe that the Lord has given us the resources to do what he has called us to do. [00:01:53] And clearly, if we went back to Deuteronomy, the Lord has instructed us to teach our children. Amen. And so we can do, we can teach our children through Christ who strengthens us. I'm going to begin as practical as I can get. The first word that begins with P is pennies. And the question is, how will we fund our schools? How many board members are here tonight? How many of you have struggled wondering how in the world you're going to pay for this school? [00:02:29] All over the land, I know people struggle with this. How's this going to work? And somehow it does. Well, I want to say just right to begin with, every dime that is spent on Christian education is well spent. It really is. Every businessman that I know will tell you that you cannot make a business work if you do not invest up front. Now brothers and sisters, if we have millions to invest in businesses, tell me why don't we have at least tens of thousands to invest in the future of our children? [00:03:12] Look around you at these youngsters sitting on the laps of these parents in this audience. Brothers and sisters, there is your future. And every businessman would tell you, if you fail to invest in the future, you're going under. And so I'm telling you, when you open your billfold, and you know I'm not a salesman, but I just want to tell you, when you do, and you put that $10 toward the education in your school, I'm telling you, it's investing at the right place. [00:03:55] It really is. I have a word that I have used all over the country, it's infrastructure, I-N-F-R-A-S-T-R-U-C-T-U-R-E Don't use a big word just for the fun of it, it's the best word to get a hold of what I'm talking about What is at the inside? What holds the thing together? Where are the rivets and the nails, the infrastructure that keeps our communities put together? It's in these children, at least part of it is there [00:04:30] We're only as strong as our infrastructure I don't want to know what the outside looks like I want to know what's on the inside To know how well the building is built You know that great parable in the Sermon on the Mount The wise man built on a solid rock The foolish man built on sand What's inside? We need frugality with excellence and we need sacrifice with purpose. Did you hear that? Frugality with excellence. Don't worry. I'm not an advocate of saying, look, we can fix everything by just throwing money at it. [00:05:03] Our government has tried that. It's a mistaken view. It doesn't work. I know that. Hence the word here under pennies, frugality with excellence. I do believe in offering education, and by the way, for a good price. By the way, I want to pat us on the back here just a little bit. At least in Pennsylvania, the going rate today, public education, it costs them $7,000 per student to educate children in Pennsylvania, public school. [00:05:35] Actually, Pennsylvania, believe it or not, in spite of some of their stringent ideas, have the notion, you know, look, if we can get the public sector to do this, it'll save us money. And we can actually lower taxes. and for that reason they actually have a little thing going in there it's called EITC where they will if you're in business they'll let you take your Pennsylvania income tax and put it toward the school of your choice because they say it's cheaper for you people to educate the children then we can't do it that cheap so if we let you put the money that direction it'll save us. Frugality with [00:06:05] excellence. My point here is if you're cutting yourself so short that you can't do a good job that's too frugal. In fact, it's not frugal. It's wasteful. You know how that is, don't you? If you're going to buy something, if you're going to buy a piece of furniture, right? If you buy too cheap, you're wasting your money. I agree, if you get too lavish, you're wasting your money too. Hence, frugality with excellence. [00:06:37] Sacrifice with purpose I have found that when I spend money on something that is of excellent quality I don't mind spending it as much as if I'm spending it on something that's not worth anything So I'm telling you, brothers and sisters Don't operate a school because you have to comply with the law Operate a school because God has told you to do it and he has told us to do it to the best of our ability. [00:07:15] Go back and read about, what's that guy, Bezalel. I love that story in the Old Testament of Bezalel. Do you remember, and it says the spirit of God was upon him and God said, Moses, you go get that Bezalel because I have poured out a gift on him and he is an excellent craftsman. They didn't go and just find anybody. Forgality with excellence, sacrifice with purpose We need some pennies The second word, probably just as important or more important [00:07:46] Begins with P, people My question for you is, who will be the teachers in our schools? Now I have again, all over the country Argued for long term school teachers Any of you who are businessmen, no So, if you're a carpenter, you have a construction crew, and you have a man who is a pretty good carpenter, and he's worked for you for 20 years, that man, probably, you can turn him loose, and he can just make the thing go. [00:08:18] He can almost run your business without you being there. But if you have rapid turnover, I can tell you, the quality of your work will always be a little bit under par. The same thing is true in our schools. I'm kind of looking at the men over here and one of the reasons I'm looking at the men is we need men long term in our schools I didn't say every man so don't go on a guilt trip if God has not moved you there that's not my point my point is we do need [00:08:50] I hesitate to say this because it feels like I'm stomping somewhere where I shouldn't stomp stomp Now, we need our best men in our schools. We, I don't know why we have the idea that here is the investment in the future. And so it's August and we can't find a teacher. And so we just kind of call her the first 18 year old or we can find and God bless him. [00:09:24] Listen, my hat's off to the people who have done this type of thing. But brothers and sisters, as a community, let's think about infrastructure. If we're going to spend $100,000 this year on school, let's take care, let's work hard, let's work hard at developing good teachers. And don't you hear me complaining or fussing where things have not gone so well. I am humbled by the people who have stepped up to the plate when nobody else would. [00:09:58] and have done what they could. God bless you. That was the right thing to do. But on the other hand, I'm saying we're maturing in our concept of public, I'm sorry, of Christian education. It seems to me to be wise to work hard at developing good teachers. I believe that teachers should be trained. I'll be careful on this. Anybody who knows me knows that I don't tell everybody they need to go to faith builders, They need to go to college, but you do need some training. [00:10:31] I like very unorthodox forms. I really like direct apprenticing. I think the right thing to happen in schools is if you have a long-term teacher, an experienced teacher, either in your school or a next-door school, connect your teachers, your young teachers with them. Again, that's just common sense. How do you teach somebody to be a carpenter, milk a cow, or mow hay, or sew a dress? you show them you get them alongside of you you show them how to do it [00:11:02] that's the least we could do and I think it's probably one of the best things we could do is do a lot of direct apprenticing, seminars, teacher training you know about those here's one, resist over specialization in public education I have a son-in-law who teaches in public education what he does is he teaches chemistry so he studies one chemistry lesson And he teaches it to seven classes, I think, during that day. Okay? And again, in some ways I envy him. [00:11:36] In other ways I say, oh, okay. So he knows chemistry. He knows chemistry. And he really is a good man. But he himself says, the problem is, is I don't, there's a whole lot of other things that I'm shorthanded on. I like well-rounded teachers. What I mean by that is, yes, they know how to work, they know how to play, they know how to study, they know how to do a lot of different things. Resist over specialization. Less than the best is not enough. I'm going through some of these points here rather rapidly. [00:12:11] The fourth P word is the word politics. I want to say something about this. The reason I use this word is I have a question attached to it. Will government toleration of Christian education continue? Well, I'll tell you, as long as we do a reasonably good job, I don't know that I expect a real quick turnaround in our government's opinion. [00:12:44] And here again, I just want to say that let's not fall down on the job. If they want 170 days, let's go to school 170 days and let's do a good job while we're there. I can give you some testimonies here. We had a young lady in our school one time who, I guess in a typical school, she would have been considered mentally retarded probably. And we just, we streamlined her. Not mainlined her, mainstreamed her. I'm sorry, I'm getting my terms tangled up here. [00:13:15] Mainstreamed her, we call that, okay? And put her right in with all the rest of the students, didn't give her special classes, things like that, just kind of send her homework home with her, were very reasonable. If she didn't get things done, I was fine. We had some state people come along to do some evaluation, just kind of standard, and they said to us, what are you doing with that girl? We gave them an interesting answer. We said nothing. We didn't quite say it that way, of course, but the point is we were doing nothing special. [00:13:47] We didn't have some special program we were using. Their mouths dropped open, and I just want to say this humbly, I said we're astounded. Are they going to bother us? Are they going to come quickly and close our doors? Well, they may. I'm not making any big statements here, but listen. When they come by and they see what you're doing and they say, listen, a quality education is happening here. People are learning. They're walking out of those doors and they know how to get along in life and they know what to do. [00:14:24] This girl could add and subtract fractions, mind you, and they knew that in a typical public school, if you were in her category, you weren't going to be able to do that in no way. that will stop the mouths of the gainsayer always what is produced and so I'm just again arguing let's do it well excellence is admired and honored throughout the world you probably have heard of Booker T. Washington I always get these two confused [00:14:55] I'm either quoting him or else George Washington Carver who had one of his young fellow Negroes come to him very very distraught because he had been turned down here and there for various jobs or whatever and I believe it was Booker T as I recall and I said to him, he said, young man I want to tell you something are you a furniture builder? he said yes he said I want to tell you something if you learn how to build furniture and build it well and do excellent on it [00:15:28] above the normal, above the average, well above the average. They don't care if you're black, yellow, purple, or white. They'll buy your furniture. Excellence is admired and honored throughout the world. That's the point here. Fourth, a word that begins with P, purpose. Why should the Christian school exist? Christ, and I have written in my notes, we need to take up the mission of the threshing machine. [00:16:05] What do I mean by this? Listen carefully. Our communities are in disarray. Are you aware of that? I suppose you are. Now, I know there never was really a golden era, but when you think back on the era when all of the men got together were during the summers at various times because they were threshing. They had to help each other on the farm. There was a certain built-in community, whether you liked it or whether you didn't. That's just the way life was. Now, I didn't live in that era, so I know, I'm guessing a little bit, [00:16:38] but as my dad and grandpa described it, that's what it felt like to me. Now, you realize today we live tremendously independent lives. Tremendously independent lives. Now there's one place in our communities that we have to pull together. We can't make it go. It's called school. And so I just have been encouraging communities, all right, this is the one place where you can stand shoulder to shoulder and you know that if you drop rank, if you don't hold rank in making this go, it's not going to happen. It's one of the places we can build community. [00:17:15] And I'll say further, beyond that, it also is a testimony in the communities in which we live. There in Guy's Mills, we've heard over and over and over again, just admiration and a blessing from the community for the school being there. Let's take advantage of the opportunity. And the fifth word I have here that begins with P is passion. I teach my fellow teachers this when I get a chance back at Faith Builders [00:17:45] Education that arouses the passion of a generation must be moral in content I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I just want to say it again Let us not apologize for teaching right and wrong Let us not apologize for saying there is a place called hell, there is a place called heaven. Let us not apologize for declaring the full counsel of the Lord even when it is tough. [00:18:24] Two stories, just to make this one of them personal, one of them not personal. A university teacher, Alan Bloom, in the University of Chicago, a well-known education teacher for years, Jewish, I believe, not a Christian at all, writes a book. It's called The Closing of the American Mind. It's a little heavy reading, I'll tell you that just right ahead of time, but it's an interesting read if you can wade through it. And among the things he says, the theme of the book is something has happened to the American mind, and the question is what has? [00:19:03] One of the excerpts from his book is that he tells how that when he first, he's an old man, he might even be dead I believe, do you know Tester? I don't know if he's dead or not, but he'd be a very old man if he's not. So when I first started teaching at the University of Chicago, when the students filed in and sat down in my room, and I asked them a question like, do you think divorce is okay? He said it wasn't long until I had a rip-roaring discussion and argument going on in that room because this guy had this opinion, this guy had this opinion, and so forth and so on. [00:19:36] And he didn't go on to say what he thought. I'm quite sure that he was perfectly okay with divorce. So now I want to tell you, he wrote this book in the 1970s. He said, when my students come in now, it might have been the 80s, and sit down, and I ask them a question like, what is your opinion about the issue of abortion? Sigh. Look out the window. Some cases, okay, I don't know. [00:20:08] I wouldn't want to be judgmental about it. And he laments that. He is a non-Christian. And his comment is, the American mind has gone shut. It cannot think anymore. It has no category of deciding what is right and what is wrong. And since it cannot think, neither does it have any passion. So the bottom line is, it doesn't care. I've made all the sense, the lights came on for me as soon as I read that [00:20:43] I said you know that guy's dead right, that's exactly it, that's what's happened the problem is, is nobody is willing to stand up today and say this is right and this is wrong public school story now this is hilarious I had a world cultures teacher, his name was Mr. Dolly I don't know if Mr. Dolly was a Christian or not but he'd come in every day this newspaper, he'd get the newspaper out and he'd hold it up And he starts to read some article in there and he said, no, no, students, what do you think? Silence. Not a word. [00:21:17] This is about 1970. Came in one day and he read an article from the newspaper about some Amish men in Kansas who had been thrown in prison because he refused to send his children to public school. Some of you may even know him. I don't know. He read that story. Finished, and he said, now students, what do you think? I raised my hand. I said, Mr. Dolly, I think that a man has a right to train up his children the way he chooses to. [00:21:55] He dropped his paper on the floor. I didn't know what he was going to say. Had he said, well finally somebody in this room has an opinion about something I got straight A's the rest of the year I didn't think I earned them But I don't tell this story so much about myself as to underscore [00:22:25] War. If you don't have categories of what's right and wrong, there is hardly any reason to get excited about anything. There really isn't. Think back to the Civil War. Historians will say to you that there are a couple of reasons for the Civil War. There was a battle over states' rights, there was a battle over slavery, and then there was Uncle Tom's cabin. Why do they say, then there was Uncle Tom's cabin? [00:22:59] How many of you read the book? How did you feel when you were done with it? I'll tell you how I felt. Angry. You mean to tell me human beings could treat other human beings that way? Now, I was raised in a nonresistant home. But I suspect that if I had not had training about nonresistance, that kind of story would have brought out the fight in me fast. Why? It was moral in content. It was making a declaration in story form of what was right and what was wrong. [00:23:35] And it aroused the passion of a generation and set this whole nation aflame in a war. Well, I of course am not asking that we teach in such a way that people rise up to fight. But let us teach in such a fashion that these little children, the people who come into our classrooms, into our Sunday schools or wherever Will leave with a burning in their heart for what God is doing in the world [00:24:09] And may they have the internal resolve to stand up and be counted for what is right More about that on another evening or hour I'll lose my thunder for then so I'll stop there on that point but I just point out to you pennies, people, politics, purpose and passion and may God raise up a generation that is passionate if you'll give me leave just for a couple of minutes I'll finish up with a passage two passages from Deuteronomy [00:24:40] if you'll turn back to Deuteronomy chapter 32 actually I'm just going to take the time to look at one this evening 32 in verse 2 My doctrine, Moses says, shall drop as the rain My speech shall distill as the dew As the small rain upon the tender herb This has become my personal verse as a teacher [00:25:15] If you have an NIV version there, which I don't have here I still like the King James mostly. You would read there that the word doctrine is interpreted as teaching or is understood as teaching. My teaching shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew, as the small rain. I believe in the NIV it says it's the gentle rain upon the tender herb or something similar to that. You get the idea. [00:25:45] Now the reason this has become my verse is because teaching is hard work and you get tired. I don't know how many teachers are here, but I do know that when it gets about February the 12th, it's about February the 12th. It takes all of your wit and charm to keep things going, to keep things moving, okay? And you begin to even feel a slump in yourself. [00:26:19] That's when I turned to this kind of verse, and I'll tell you why. It occurred to me one time that there's some contrast in the Bible. And the contrast I often use here, and I hate to use it because it sounds like I'm not speaking well of Elijah. But contrasting the ministry of Samuel and Elijah would get at this verse. If we took the time to read from Samuel, there's one very interesting verse that tells you he went from this city to this city to this city to this city teaching. And he did that for 20 years. [00:26:53] Teaching Israel. And when you read the book of Judges and the book of Samuel, you realize that under the ministry of the prophet Samuel, the teaching ministry, the nation of Israel went from a nation with no king every man did that which was right in his own eyes to a nation who at least began to know something of what God wanted of them and eventually of course David came again I don't say that it was a perfect nation [00:27:24] I just say it made some headway if you fast forward and you go all the way up to the time of Elijah which is quite a few years later Elijah is probably my favorite Old Testament character. I'm not sure, but I think maybe. I love to read those stories. I love to tell those stories. I used to just love when my children were little, and still I do. I get these grandchildren, and I like to tell the story of Elijah. It just raises fire in your bones, right? When he raised up his hands to heaven, that fire fell from heaven. [00:27:55] What occurred to me that maybe there's a lesson here. Have you ever thought that maybe someday some preacher would come and stand behind this pulpit and preach and there would be a great revival and everything would just change? That's happened. Don't ever hear me, don't hear me throwing cold water on the idea. But I have lost the hope that that is the real way forward to strong communities 50 years from now [00:28:30] I really have Listen, if you think you can out-revival Elijah, will you go ahead and try? You would think that surely if we had all gathered on whatever the highest hill is around here somewhere And one of the brothers here had called us all up there along with all the town people and there was a contest and the men of this world tried their best to pull something off and it didn't happen [00:29:02] and then don't you know the men of God gathered around that altar wherever it was and they lifted up, they put that bullock on there, they lifted up their hands to heaven and fire fell from heaven that surely all of Indiana would repent that night and it would surely spread all over America, wouldn't it? Well, go read the story. Israel was already in decline. It's just a slight blip. It kept straight, straight on down. [00:29:37] Now, I'm still blessed mightily. The story of Elijah is being told over and over and over again. I love to tell it. But my point is, it kept going straight down. Look at our verse again. My teaching shall drop as the rain. My speech shall distill as the dew. As the small rain upon the tender herb and as the showers upon the grass. That's my teaching. If there is one verse in the Bible that has kept me in the teaching profession for 30 years, it's this one. [00:30:14] Because what we need is, we don't need the thunder shower, we need the gentle rain We need that teaching day in and day out We need preachers who teach the word of the Lord We need teachers who teach the word of the Lord We need people, men of God and women of God who do this day in and day out And I am quite sure if the seed is sown in that way There surely will be a harvest day. [00:30:46] That's why I'm still a teacher. And I again am not insinuating that everybody needs to be that, but I will say this. Everybody needs to get behind the teaching program in the community. And we all need to pull together so that in fact, year after year, the rain falls. And waters the land. Waters our homes. waters, waters are churches, waters are families, and lo and behold, we hardly can even tell how it happened, but up shoots a son, and up shoots a daughter, and then a grandson, and then a granddaughter, and some of them are teachers, and some of them are preachers, and some of them are construction people who know how to serve the community, and some of them, I don't know what all they may be doing, but mind you, they're serving God, and the community is pulling together in good direction. [00:31:43] Now that is a vision that I have refused to give up on. I really believe that God wants to do a work in our day among our people. And if we will in fact make the investment at every level, I believe God will do that. Let's pray.