Home Schoolers Did It
Stick to Your Guns….And Keep Firing !
by Genevieve Smith
(Back in mid-1994, home schooler Genevieve Smith of Palmerston North, NZ, then 14, began publishing a newsletter called The Minority. The purpose was to mobilise home schooling minors into appropriate political action. Recently she wrote this account of those days.)
After publishing the first issue of The Minority I thought I would take it along to my local youth group and give copies of it to those in my Bible Study Class.
They were impressed with the newsletter but were not so sure that they could write letters to the Editor after I spoke to them of the need to fight for our beliefs. Soon the subject of smacking came up and how it was soon going to be made illegal to smack children. One girl asked if there was a letter that they could all sign in support of smacking. I volunteered to write a letter that they could all sign and then send it to two local papers and Dianne Yates (MP who wanted to ban smacking).
It was published and Dianne Yates wrote back. Her letter moved one of my friends to write back because “Dianne Yates’ thinking was off track.” Within days of our letter appearing in the paper someone wrote a reply to it.
My friends at the Youth Group were appalled. They thought that our writing a letter had been a waste of time because we had had opposition.
It was actually quite the opposite. Our letter had stirred people up. It had made them act.
Here we were, an apparently insignificant minority, moving a generation twice our age to thinking again about a very important matter. We had started a debate. So I wrote another letter and got my friends to sign it.
This time I met with opposition. One girl said that she didn’t like her friends seeing her name in the newspaper. Others said that they agreed with the letter but didn’t want to make trouble.
Even so I still got a lot of people to sign it. After the publication of this letter, Natasha received a private letter from a lady in her church. The lady, I believe, was not too impressed with the way Natasha was pushing her beliefs because, after all, we Christians are not supposed to get involved in the problems of the world. This is a very wrong way to view the world and its problems.
My father always used to say that there are three types of people in this world: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who say “What happened?”
As Christians we should be in the first group; we should make things happen and not wait for the non-Christians to take over.
The world is the Lord’s and He has given us laws to govern it by. In New Zealand at this period of time a lot of non-Christians are doing all they can politically or otherwise to change New Zealand into a completely secular (with no reference to God or the Bible) country. It is our job as Bible believing Christians, to stop this. How? Write. The pen is mightier than the sword, and when a whole body of people (even a minority) rise up in unison over a matter things start to happen!
Wheels start to turn and resolutions are made. Show that you won’t be made to back down over a matter. Write to your local newspaper, MP, or organisation.
And remember: always glorify God in everything you do.
Dianne Yates wrote:
1 — Legislation may help in one way to eliminate some of the violence in our society.
2 — Violence begets violence.
Genevieve responded:
1 — Legislation to rule out smacking will not do anything except to make a lot of new law breakers out of otherwise peace-keeping individuals. Outlawing alcohol in the “Roaring Twenties” did not stop people drinking. It simply pushed it underground.
2 — Here Dianne Yates is equating smacking with violence. However, smacking and violence are two very different things. Smacking is controlled justice and Biblical.
Keystone March 1998
Vol IV No 1
4 Tawa Street
Palmerston North
craig@hef.org.nz