> Time to educate our own again <

A call to a change in thinking regarding the education of our young

This article, formatted into 4 short ‘chapters’, suggests a change in thinking I suggest is needed in the NZ Church regarding how we view and engage with the discipleship of our young.

It’s target audience is Christian parents and Christian leaders.

So you know where it is going – it is not promoting home-schooling or Christian schools. It is about how we, as families and churches, understand the discipleship of our youth and children within culture. As culture changes, so much our approaches in Christian discipleship.

Something that is true

The Jesuits said, ‘Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man’ –  repeating a saying hailing back at least as far as the Greek philosopher Aristotle.  Hitler copied a time-tested pattern of socialism by taking state control of education and made it free for all. Through this he could indoctrinate the thinking of the children, and a generation later they were his. It doesn’t matter what side you are playing for – the education of children is important!

A parents job

In our Christian understanding, the responsibility for discipling children in the Christian faith rests with the parents.

“These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

Deuteronomy 6:6-9

A faith-community’s responsibility

But what about children and youth from non-Christian homes? If they attend a Sunday school or youth group, logically the responsibility rests with the Christian community they are part of. My understanding is that this is where our cultural ideas of having ‘youth groups’ in our churches came from. The original idea was outreach – rather than the discipleship of youth from Christian families.

The current against the Christian view of live, care and love is increasing.

• If schools say that a boy isn’t a boy even though he is one biologically (i.e. sex doesn’t define gender), how many years before children accept this to be true, and a sex change the best thing – despite the statistics we aren’t told about that suggest otherwise (like 18 or 20 cases of gender dysphoria in the young self-resolving by 20, while the alternative of gender change yielded a 50% suicide rate prior two age 23)? How long before she embraces views that differ to her parents?
• What about abortion being ok – and any critique of it considered ‘judgemental’ or ‘anti-woman’?
• What about Euthanasia? Most University students vote Labour or Greens. Why and how has our education system come to affirm a given political view?
• If schools say all types of sexuality are equal while the Bible instead esteems monogamous heterosexual marriage, what would cause a Christian youth to believe the Christian view – other than faith? What is the rationality of it – if any? That is what education is about!
  • What difference would seeing all the statistics on broken families, and the affect this has on us, make?
  • Might the idea that monogamous marriage is sacred make sense if they saw that it was about more than the rights of the couple involved – but instead also the rights of children to grow up on stable homes for the sake of their own mental and emotional wellbeing (quite apart from a myriad of other societal implications this has).
  • Might an understanding that confining sex to marriage in what was a male-dominated society actually served to protect women help? Might an understanding of the suffering resulting children would endure due to having non-committed father in a broken society help?
  • Might the law of love begin to make sense then?

For a current example, ‘Inside Out’ is a school program designed to teach children LGBTQ values. The challenge we face, however, is not just the principle of treating people who are different to us with grace. That’s a no-brainer to most of us. Tolerance is not what this programme is about. It is about moral dominance – to control and secure ascendancy in any conversation about morality in connection with all these things. This is about telling us their definitions of right and wrong with the full expectation that we must comply, or else!

This is very different to teaching tolerance!

It also denies all intelligence, because moral definitions come from our religious worldview. Religion is therefore the actual topic being discussed!

The pointed question is this: Will a diversity of opinions be accepted regarding the promoted diversity of sexualities if we agree to treat all people equally and with love?  

I personally don’t think they are interested in tolerance or care or respect for all. They have a view. They are claiming they are ‘right’ – all while without any rational basis for that claim (as morality is relative if there is no God). It’s about winning, and it’s about power!

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Tolerance

It is not intolerant to disagree with someone.

Tolerance is about how we treat people irrespective of how much we disagree.

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How long will our children and youth stand when picked on by students and teachers for being ‘intolerant’ because they believe something different to the woke  teacher, who’s own views have been established by nothing more than the peer pressure of an education system and public media – who will kick them out of the ‘in group’ if they don’t comply. So they’ve complied.

Or – for the younger teachers, how long will youth stand in their own convictions and thoughts when in opposition to teachers educated in a university that has not allowed discussion of differing views on all manner of things to even exist, leaving them inept philosophically – while also feeling genuinely angry at people who think differently to themselves (because those people are judgemental and narrow-minded, in case you didn’t know. We’re trying to help them think more broadly and to be less racist).

…And if the school says that evolution explains our existence, how long will the student last when demeaned for being ‘un-scientific’ – despite the absurdity of that statement – noting Christianity established scientific method and endeavour in the way we know it today; …while also noting that it’s claimed absolutely everything including time, space and matter came from nothing without a first cause; …while also noting that first life is supposed to also have somehow come about from nothing despite it’s unimaginable complexity; ...while also noting that there is still no viable mechanism for an evolutionary process in the first place (because adaption doesn’t explain species-types, and we now know mutations can’t explain their ‘creation’ either because, while rare positive mutations are possible, they do not create the intelligent information that is necessary for an upward developmental process to exist. (The information problem is an exorbitant problem.) So the theory current sits within science with no suggestion regarding it’s most important evidence, and these above points are surely core material for any assessment – yet will go without notice in a classroom, while any who dare to ‘disagree with this science’ are demeaned.

The resulting problem understood

A person of faith is therefore stereotyped as being lacking in intelligence, and also as relationally intolerant. They are a sub-human both intellectually, and socially. What do you think this will achieve?

Despite the success of some churches in youth ministry, the overall pattern is still one of decline. Our estimates, based on the feedback of pastors’ groups in 2015 and 2016, were that youth ministry is attending 1/3 to ¼ of what it was 25 years ago.  Godtalk.nz was our solution – to address one area of deficit in outreach focus, and conversational equipping for it. It’s met a need – but the need is bigger.

The overall situation is likely to get worse too. Persecution of youth, and pressure upon youth and children to confirm to dictated ‘norms’ in moral opinions and the like… …is fast becoming our reality. So, what is the path forwards?

The change I suggest: It’s time to take responsibility to educate our children in more areas than we have, and with greater diligence than we have.

My point here is about how we think about discipleship, and the kind of effort and competence we bring to it.

We have delegated the responsibility of education to our schools. We trust schools with it.  This is fine for math and reading – but are they really competent now when it comes to discussing religious worldview (how people see the world) and all the global, moral and other ethical matters that arise from these foundations? Things that relate to ideas of truth affect philosophy, history, morality, sociology and more. These topics are always with a bias. This is unavoidable – and in our schools that bias is going to be that of the teacher, coming from the ‘religious lenses’ they have chosen, or been given!

George Barna, an American cultural researcher, tell us a child’s worldview (view of the world) is established by age 14.  In most churches and families, we aren’t even discussing issues like the above until youth are aged 14.

The reason for considering a change in approach in view of continuing trends is clear.

We need to engage with young people as educators on a range of topics – and to do this by the time they are 13 or 14 years of age. To do any different is to surrender them to the whimsical fads of our public education and media, which are then enforced by natural means through the resulting social pressure.

Might it be time to take more seriously again the idea of actually educating our own children ourselves in some core things?

In case it hasn’t been noted – Iwi are doing this. They run waananga / houses of learning, to teach young Maori things they know public education will not teach.

I venture to say that the Church has done it throughout history too – as also do Muslims, to preserve their own cultural and religious values and practices.

Discipleship is not only about the study of Scripture alone. Discipleship is about the study of Scripture for application in the context of our world today! In this sense all pulpit peaching should be ‘prophetic’ – bringing application from timeless truths to our current context. This is a very important point.

• We need the Bible in one hand, and a newspaper in the other.
  • Or – put differently, we need a Bible app on one page and a few news apps on the another.
• We have to help our children and youth understand the society they live in through the lenses of their faith – before the changing viewpoints of that world become their lens!
• They therefore also need to understand that other points of views do exist – and not just what those viewpoints are, but also why those who believe them believe them. This is about learning to discern what might be true – or false.
• This implies that we discuss the ‘philosophical’ concepts of God – with a view to developing an understanding of how this, in-turn, relates to ideas about the existence of truth and morality, as well as ethics, tolerance, equality, freedom, interpretation of history – and more.
• …and this needs to be done while they are still young!

Keywords

The keyword for a disciple is ‘choice’. We make choices to honour God.

The key word for a disciple-maker is ‘intentional’. We intentionally seek to educate through a variety of means, to produce measurable change.

CHAPTER 3 – Examples of how we could approach education on world-view matters

This short chapter is not a list. It’s is reflections – to inspire thoughts of a list (aka your chosen ‘curriculum’)

The importance of marriage to a society:

Those with LGBTQ values want not only to define some moral values – but to control the conversation. In the face of this we might firstly be wise to promote heterosexual marriage as a viable option for starters! The benefits aren’t hard to find (as contrasted with the ‘broken marriage’ narrative, that suggests there is no point, as marriages are nearly all doomed anyway… Why do church people feed that narrative? Why not work tell the good stories – and build legitimate hope?).  This could include intentionally educating our young on various reasons that might exist for this choice – just as our schools and media are doing, but with a different set of agendas in mind.

I remind the reader – none of this discussion is about tolerance. We are tolerant already! We respect the rights of individuals to choose lifestyles that are LBGTQ – and even H-M (heterosexually married). The issue here isn’t’ tolerance. It is the right to hold a moral view, and the legitimate reasons that there are behind the existence of different moral views.

We need to demonstrate the benefits of certain choices, and also the logic of these choices on the basis of sound data where it exists in relation to the social, emotional and mental consequences of our choices for ourselves, as well as for our societies as a whole.

Regarding training our young how to deal with the growing intolerance of their society: 

If tolerance is said to be about accepting certain viewpoints ‘because no sexual morals actually exist’,  then our children and youth also need to be taught not only why we might believe sexual morals do exist (as one example), but also

1. what intolerance is, and then,
2. the conversational skills Jesus modelled with which he (i) engaged with interested people, but (ii) merely sought to intrigue the disinterested with stories, while (iii) fully deflecting the hostile through questions (or silence).

Without this training they are going to be incapacitated. This training isn’t yet part of our ‘corporate culture’ as churches – so they won’t yet learn this by ‘osmosis’ from the rest of us. We need to lead a change – which is to say, we need to make a decision together (nationally as Christians) to prioritise this area of learning and training!

Youth and older children could also benefit from a small bit of understanding on some big-picture things. For example, regarding the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. This was penned by Eleanor Roosvelt (American Presidents wife) with a group she chaired. As a Christian she was delighted to bring Judeo-Christian values to the world, and under the name of ‘secularism’ Christian values have indeed spread widely.

Secular historians like Tom Holland affirm the reality of dynamic – though not specifically in these words.  The challenge is this: Without an objective view of morality, some rights will invariably end up contradicting others.

• Because the word ‘God’ is not included in this declaration, moral values are left as subjective – meaning they can be changed however it suits us.
• Muslims understood this quickly, which is why the OIC met in Cairo in 2002 to create their own Declaration of Human Rights, while rejecting that of the UN – and with considerably different moral boundaries in some areas.
• Because of this, changing sexual morals are on a collision course with religious freedoms in the West. This is the point that needs to be understood. Then we understand why – and from where,
• The only solution is tolerance – which is why taking RESPONSIBILITY for education is so important, because public media and education aren’t going to educate people about things that don’t benefit their own goals and values. And the real challenge is that those promoting these new values are intolerant! They only want to ‘win’ – which to them means convincing or forcing everyone to admit that morality is disconnected from sexuality. Only through understanding this do we have a framework for understanding the current debate, so as to engage with it wisely. (We need to defend the freedom of religion – because it is now in direct conflict with new moral values related to sex, and the ‘liberal’ side has no basis for fixed morals or ethics, so they have no motivation to tolerate any view that is different to their own. Tolerance is the solution we need to argue for.

Regarding morals – children and youth also need to understand why all morals come from religion. Our youth and children need to be taught this.

Children can understand profound things – but only if their teachers understand those things enough to explain them simply. Making disciples involves becoming an educator!

In view of some application: What do you think?  

While schools can do math and literacy,  has the time come for us to be more involved in values, origins, purpose, charity, truth, morality, philosophy, history and reason?

What would happen if we decided to educate our own children with intelligence again?