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!

The Goal of the Christian Life

By David Hobbs

-----When Jesus came to Earth and purchased a people for Himself with His own blood, what was His plan for those people? Likewise, when Christian parents send their children off to Christian schools to be prepared for life, what is their plan for their children? Shouldn’t the goal of Jesus for His people and the goal of Christian parents for their children be the same?

-----Here are the goals of two Christian schools as taken from their websites:

The mission of ____ Christian School is to help students mature spiritually and excel academically by offering a Biblically-integrated, college preparatory program that will enable them to impact the kingdom of God by living productive Christian lives.

-----Notice that the way we “impact the kingdom of God” is by “living productive Christian lives.” (I thought we were supposed to impact the world for Christ. And if we do it best by living productive Christian [i.e. moral] lives, we should all become Mormons. They lead some of the most productive lives I know of). Here’s another:

_____ Christian Academy is an independent, co-educational, PreK - 12, college preparatory school with an educational culture built on the classical Trivium and historic Biblical Christianity. _____ provides an academic curriculum that trains students in the grammatical, dialectical, and rhetorical arts with an equal emphasis on the acquisition of the empirical and mathematical sciences preparatory to, or at the level of, College Board Advanced Placement standards. The program aims not only to equip students with knowledge of the different disciplines, but also to aid their understanding of learning as the pursuit and application of truth. The program's distinctives include Latin instruction that begins in third grade, a full year of informal and formal logic, a full year of rhetoric, the writing and defense of a senior thesis, and the age-appropriateteaching methodologies required of each subject.

Now that’s a mouthful!

-----The goal of many Christian parents, as reflected through their schools’ programs, seemingly is to out-produce the world in the field of education. Armed with our Christian principles and worldview, taking things seriously and applying ourselves, we can produce better educated and more successful (i.e. “productive”) kids than the unbelievers down the street whose kids party away their lives at Worldly U.

-----There is truth to this. I wasted my college years with drinking, drugs, bad attitudes, and general cluelessness. How I wish I could relive those college years now as a head-screwed-on-straight Christian when I could take full advantage of the opportunity offered!

-----But is that the goal of Christ? He died on the cross so we might be better educated and more together than the world? Many parents’ goals for their children are for them to be well educated, have a good career, a godly spouse, nice children, a comfortable retirement, and to be esteemed in their communities. We want them to be “good Christians,” meaning we want them to be respectable. That’s how we measure success. If we parents can accomplish that, with the help of our Christian schools and our church, then we can die happy, sure that we have succeeded in life.

-----I was not raised as a Christian. In fact I despised Christianity because I thought its message was: 1) be nice to everybody; 2) if it’s fun, it’s forbidden, 3) do unto others as you would have them do unto you (at least I got one right!).

-----When I got saved, the glorious story as told in Out of the Fire, A Life Radically Changed, The thing that amazed me most was that I could meet God for myself through Christ and have a ongoing, personal, supernatural relationship with Him. “How come they never told me about this?” I marveled. In fact I came to call it the “best-kept secret of Christianity.” In studying the Bible, I saw that that was in fact why Christ came and why He died. He wanted the same thing-- an ongoing relationship with us. Sure He wants us to be good students; He wants us to do good works and not mess up. But more than anything He wants to know us and love us and have us know and love Him.

-----Which of these two people would you most approve of? A well respected person with a good job and family who goes to church every Sunday and considers himself a “good Christian man.” Or a homeless person who lives in rags in the river bottoms, who cries out to God about the mess he’s made of his life, who has nothing and has to pray every day for food to eat and shelter from the elements. Which person has our approval? Which person has Christ’s approval? Before you answer, read Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14.

-----If the humble sinner is Jesus’ great prize, why do we make respectability and success by this world’s standards our great prize? Having met Christ for myself, I would rather live in the river bottoms and walk every day with Him than be Warren Buffet and only know about Christ and all the doctrines and theology of the Christian church.

-----If we’re saved “out of the world,” why do we go back and try to beat the world at its own game?