Parenting With Vision

Today's Christian Education Commentary

with Harold Naylor

When was the last time you wrote down some of your parenting goals?

Click here to listen!

Raising kids with Christ-centered hearts is the greatest challenge Christian parents will ever face. Not only that, but it is not a challenge that is confronted and won in a day, week, or even a year. Rather, it takes many, many years of diligence, consistency, and prayer on the part of parents, and even then, success is not guaranteed.

This is why writing down your parenting goals or a vision for your family is so important. As the years pass and individual challenges come and go, it is important that we keep our eyes fixed on our ultimate goal.

Choosing a Christian education is a great way to start approaching the job of parenting with new direction, purpose, and a vision that includes God at the center.

From the "Front Lines" of Christian Education

The MidAtlantic Christian Schools Association recently held its 60th anniversary convention. The convention was attended by over 1350 administrators, development officers, board members, teachers and support staff! These are the folks on the FRONT LINES of the Christian schooling movement.

Dr. Crawford Loritts, Jr., Senior Pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, GA was the keynote speaker and spoke at the convention's three general sessions.
Thursday AM: Stewardship of a Generation
Thursday PM: On Assignment from God
Friday AM: The Anatomy of Pressure

John Fedele, Executive Director of http://www.discoverchristianschools.com/ was in attendance at the convention and was encouraged by the messages brought by Dr. Loritts. "I believe each address will not only challenge and encourage you, but minister to you as well - as parents, as teachers, as administrators - as those involved in Kingdom work! I strongly recommend listening to each address and that you pray for the 1350 delegates who attended, that they might be instrumental in transmitting to this generation the convention's theme of a "A Legacy of Faith . . A Future of Hope."

Please click here to download and listen to the three keynote addresses. You will be directed to the MACSA website when you click on the link.

Children of the State

Children of the state
Don’t be surprised at socialized education’s product

Joel Belz - WORLD Magazine
Originally published November 1, 2008
Reprinted with permission

If you want a classic example of how fast a whole culture can be turned on a dime, redirected by 180 degrees, try this: Just when it seemed, through the 1980s, 1990s, and even well into the past decade, that a socialist mindset had been successfully put down in the United States, back it comes—with a vengeance.

"Free markets are better for everybody," Ronald Reagan had taught us. So we deregulated. We reformed welfare. We defeated Hillary's nationalized health care. We popularized tax cuts. We watched the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapse, and we applauded the market economy in Europe. Talk radio exploded.

And, as fallen humans are wont to do, we also abused our freedom.

Which always provides an excuse to those with socialist inclinations to argue that we need to be regulated again, that we need stacks of new rules to curb our excesses, and that government needs to be called in to make everyone behave. And that's why you find a newly muscled Uncle Sam these days shutting down big investment brokers, buying huge equity clout in traditional banks, and rumored to be ready to buy similar shares of Ford, Chrysler, and GM.

All that under a supposed pro-free market Republican administration! So nobody's going to be very surprised if under an Obama presidency there will be a redoubling of Sarbanes-Oxley, re-regulation of the airlines (and just about everyone else), universal health care, a new budget line for carbon and energy, restrictions on talk radio, and increased taxes to pay the staggeringly higher bills.

Much of that has happened, may I suggest, because we also long ago conceded the most critical territory of all. While strenuously wrestling over business and banking and health care and energy and a dozen other issues, we cavalierly handed over to the state a perpetual 90 percent share of the nation's educational interests. America regularly has about 50 million children enrolled in K-12 schools, and about 20 million more in colleges and universities—and while the pattern fluctuates a little, 90 percent of those 70 million young people regularly get a state-flavored view of reality.

Socialized medicine? Most of us recoil at the idea. Socialized airlines? Reminds us of Aeroflot. Socialized banks? When it happened last month, it terrified us.

But socialized schools? Nine out of ten of us patronize them regularly.

And we do so with na'ry a thought or concern about how such an arrangement affects next week's election, or the election after that, or the lifetime of elections to come.

I am blessed to have had parents who did look ahead. Half a century ago, my father said often: "If I fail to feed my children, the government will step in. If I don't house them, the government has programs to help. Of course, I don't intend to turn those duties over to the government. But I would much rather have the government feed and house my children than to have the government shape their minds."

That's why, if I were ever forced to become a one-issue person on the political front, my single issue would be freedom of choice in education. With a nine-to-one edge in value-shaping influence, why shouldn't the government be producing products who think government-sponsored-everything is best?

When I enthusiastically endorse the Christian school and home school alternatives, I don't do so primarily because of their effect on the electoral process. Christian education isn't about filling the registration rolls of the Republican party.

But it is about producing thoughtful and earnest citizens. The bells of freedom on every front traditionally ring more clearly where a biblical value system has been inculcated. No one should expect anything resembling such a result from secularist state-sponsored schools, which will naturally glorify the state. No one should be surprised when that's what happens.

So I say: Go get educated about what Christians are doing these days in education. Go online todiscoverchristianschools.com, a notable effort to help parents discover the good things happening on the school front. Go to hslda.org to learn about the growing impact of home schooling families throughout the nation.

It's too late, to be sure, to have much impact on next week's election. But so long as there are more kids and future generations, and so long as they have minds and hearts to shape with God's great truth, it's not too late at all to make a difference for elections yet to come.

If you have a question or comment for Joel Belz, send it to jbelz@worldmag.com.

Christian Education – an Investment in the Future

By Nancy Huckaby

The Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, TX)
Published Sunday, November 2, 2008

Christian parents understand well the responsibility they have to not only love their children, but to educate them in an environment that embraces Christ’s fundamental truths.

Many find the answer in home schooling, but for countless others, Christian schools provide the perfect answer. Christian education facilities – both elementary, secondary and higher learning – can help parents make sure their children receive a quality education, taught by dedicated and knowledgeable teachers.

Christian education is not without its critics. Some say it insulates children from the real world, or shelters them from many of the negative influences they’ll have to face in the future. On its Web site, cornerstonekingman.ca, Cornerstone Christian Academy in Kingman, Alberta, Canada, offers this view:

"The Christian school works somewhat like a greenhouse which is designed to provide optimum conditions for growth while a plant is young. Young children are protected and carefully nurtured to help them mature properly. When the time comes for them to be 'transplanted’ into a more hostile environment, they are more likely to endure difficulties and continue to thrive because they have been trained well and have developed a discerning heart."

Christian educators want to help students recognize the hostility and injustice in today’s world while giving them the tools – critical thinking skills, a core value system and a strong foundation of faith – to apply Christ’s truth to solving those problems.

Administrators know that the academic standards at a Christian school must be strong if parents are asked to make what, for many, is a significant sacrifice for the cost of attending a private school. College bound students face their own brand of challenges and for many (and their parents) knowing that the college or university they select is based on Christian principles is paramount.

Gary Ledbetter, communications director for the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention in Grapevine, offered this advice on the CollegeView Web site:

"A final benefit of Christian higher education is perhaps the most significant. The quality of a Christian college experience is higher than any other. Christian educators have an additional motivation to do their work with excellence – the call of Christ on their lives to do just that (I Cor. 10:31). Quality may also be enhanced by the emphasis on subjects and teaching deemed by God to be the first importance. A biblical focus will inform the manner, content, and even the scope of an educational experience, and Christian schools may be less influenced by cultural (or educational) fads."


Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. – Proverbs 22.6