A Successful Christian School

By David Hobbs

What is the measure of success of a Christian School? To look at many of their websites, you would think it was the percentage of their graduates who went on to college somewhere. “Eighty percent of our graduates went on to college.…” We are so taken by statistics. How about the school’s graduation rate? Or how about the percentage of the teachers with higher degrees? “Eighty-five percent of our faculty have advanced degrees…” Are these the measures of a successful Christian school?

Our church was visited last weekend by the students from a post-high school discipleship program called Generational Leadership from Maple Valley, Washington. These kids were on fire for the Lord. They were happy, they spoke of the things they had overcome and the joy they had found serving Jesus. It was great having them in the service.

One thing that stood out (though it wasn’t really a surprise), was the number who testified they had been raised in a Christian home, grown up in church, gone to Christian schools, but had never met Jesus for themselves. They knew all about Him, had lived moral lives, prayed over their meals, probably went through countless devotions and said many prayers, but had never had a personal, life-changing encounter with the Lord until they went to this program.

So what is the measure of a successful Christian school? Or a successful church youth group? To keep them happy with activities and pizza? Make them better students of Aristotle and Latin than public school students? Prepare them to be successes in this fallen world—good jobs, families, faithful contributors to their local church? Are all these the true measures of success? Or is success bringing them to know Jesus? Not know about Him, but knowing Him, meeting Him, encountering imHim in a way that revolutionizes their lives.

As you can see from my book Out of the Fire, A Life Radically Changed. I was an atheist in high school and college. I tried to talk Christians out of their faith. But when I met Jesus, it turned my life upside down and inside out and set the course of the rest of my life. The world would not say I was successful. I lived in a Christian commune for 5 years on $4 per week, then painted houses and sold insurance for most of my life. The world would sniff in disdain but I could care less. I found everything I was looking for and much more besides. I live in relationship with God who has me writing books, preaching, blogging, singing, praying, yes and even suffering trials to increase the coming glory.

Is that what we want for our young people? Or do we hope they will merely get enough of Jesus to have a lower divorce rate than the world? Or to have higher SAT scores? Or produce more PhDs per capita?

Any graduate from a Christian high school who goes on to college without knowing the Lord and being truly born again will graduate from college a humanist and a secularist. George Barna has tracked it: something like 80% of entering Christian freshmen will lose their faith while in college. (And I have to think the 20% who don’t lose their faith are those who are the most grounded in it.)

The colleges and universities in this country are set up as indoctrination centers for liberalism and secularism. And yet a college education remains the goal of way too many Christian schools and parents. Why do we have this obsession to throw our kids away to the world?

As I was watching and listening to the on-fire young people from the Generational Leadership program  I found myself thinking, “We need a thousand such young people, 10,000, 100,000! With kids like these, we could turn this culture and this country around! Here is the future of the church!” But instead of putting our young people in a program where they will meet Jesus, get healed of the brokenness of this world, and then become a force for turning this world to Christ, we trade that all in for hoped-for worldly success in what we call “higher education.”

The Bible says, “love not the world nor the things of the world.” Wouldn’t that include worldly success? Yet we’re sacrificing our young people on that very altar of worldly success by sending them off to ungodly colleges where most of them will be turned into successful heathen, much as the Israelites sacrificed their sons and daughters to Baal. Wasn’t it for the same reason? To ensure a good harvest and fertile fields? Isn’t that the mammon Jesus said we couldn’t serve if we wanted to serve Him?

I plead with Christian educators and parents to rethink this thing!