Posted in Tough Questions

Shouldn’t Christians keep their children in the public schools so that they can be the salt and light and evangelise as the Lord told us to do?

It is true that the Lord told us to do these things. But was He speaking to our children? We are responsible for our children… should we then make them responsible for fulfilling this command? Our children depend upon us… should we then depend upon them to do the Lord’s work? Are we not by this expecting children to do adults’ jobs? Are we not in fact expecting our children to do our jobs?

Why are children sent to school? Supposedly it is to get an education. The NZ Ministry of Education document Education for the 21st Century (1993) says on page 12, ‘The purpose of the school system is to give students the attitudes, knowledge, understanding, and skills they need to continue learning throughout their lives.” Notice the first word in the list: “attitudes”. What attitudes will the schools be putting into students? They will not include the Christian attitude that everyone is a sinner in need of salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

If your child expressed this attitude about his teachers and classmates, he would be met with a firm lecture from the teachers about the value of all peoples’ faiths and the necessity for acceptance of different views. Your child would be told in no uncertain terms that especially during this year of 1995, the UN- declared Year of Tolerance, attitudes which divided people into Christians and sinners would simply not be tol. . . .well, you know… .they simply would not be allowed. If you expected your child to evangelise at school, he simply would not be allowed to do so.

Children are at school to take in, to imbibe the “learning experiences” going on about them, to respect and listen to their teachers and do as they say. Typically they will be outnumbered about 5 to 1 with other children who do not even attend any church. And are our children even yet regenerated by God’s Holy Spirit? Are we expecting unregenerate children to evangelise other unregenerate children? Even if they are born again, all praise and glory be to God, are they mature in the faith enough to successfully battle against the moral, intellectual, spiritual and even physical enemies they will face every hour of every day in the totally Christless and secular public school system?

Are your 8 and 9 and 10 year olds able to preach the gospel at all? Can you? Can they even recognise humanistic man-centred philosophy when it is presented to them in the classroom? Can you? The military do not send raw recruits into battle. They ensure they have had a minimum of basic training as well as a fair dose of specialist training relating to the field of battle to which they are being sent. Do you train your children in the art of evangelism and gospel presentation? If you as a parent are not or cannot or will not preach the gospel yourself to the people you meet everyday, and if you are not absolutely clear as to what constitutes secular or humanist or man-centred philosophies, and cannot readily recognise them, then is it really fair to expect your little children to do so?

And listen, isn’t the price a bit high? What if it turns out that the evil and the unrighteousness and the vanity and the pride and the materialism and immorality and the hedonism get a firm hold on your child’s heart, simply because he is in amongst it day after day? Remember, these kinds of evil are not foreign to a child’s sinful nature but are exceedingly attractive to it, and impossible to withstand if the child is not born again and strong in the Lord.

We all know the agony parents feel whose children have gone off the rails. Our job as parents is to rear our children in the way they should go, that is, to be servants and living sacrifices to the Lord God Almighty. Why then are Christian parents sometimes so seemingly eager to sacrifice their children on the altar of humanist, secular, Godless public schools? It just doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t seem right.

From Keystone Magazine
March 1995 , Vol. 1 No. 1
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz