This is the final article in our series on Christian Education. We began by defining our terms and looking at the subject historically before working through the requirements of Scripture. Then we examined Christian education in its relation to Christian warfare and the covenant of grace. Now we want to consider some consequences of Christian education and draw some conclusions.

Fred Leahy once wrote: ‘When God is left out of our thinking life becomes meaningless, pointless, worthless. When men and women are schooled in this world’s wisdom, and God and His truth are given no place in their training, the loss is incalculable and we all suffer’. What then have been the consequences of our failure to grasp this issue and provide it for our children?

1. Many have Perished⤒🔗

This is glaringly obvious in our churches. There has been a drastic thinning of numbers over the last two generations and a chief reason for this has been the effect of secular education. We have haemorrhaged children! The church has lost the children of far too many good and godly parents who tried to be faithful at home but whose teaching and example was being contradicted for the majority of their child’s life and education. Yet this was foreseen by Christian writers who faced the introduction of secular education at the end of the 19th Century. R L Dabney observed the start of this decline in his day. ‘What has been the result of secular education?’ he asked. In answer he noted, ‘In this country there is already a general revolt from the Christian Faith, even though the country is full of churches, preaching, and redundant Christian literature’. Leaving the immediate effect he went on to predict what would happen in the 20^th century: ‘Infidelity and practical ungodliness will become increasingly prevalent among Protestant young people, and our churches will have a more difficult contest for growth, if not for existence’ His contemporary, A A Hodge of Princeton, also made this stark prediction: ‘The United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and widespread instrument for the propagation of Atheism the world has ever seen’.

These men would have thought it most strange that so many people today in conservative Christian churches defend such a system of education. This is made more absurd when their predictions have proved correct. Recent studies in the US show that 75% of children from evangelical homes who pass through the public school system leave church within two years of graduating from high school or college, rejecting Christ and the Christian worldview. That is three out of every four children born into the church! On the other hand studies show figures between 75-85% for children passing through some form of thorough Christian education remaining in the church into their adulthood. That is at least three out of four children born into the church and remaining in it. As it stands in the UK many have perished and will continue to perish if we ignore the need for Christian education.

2. The Church is Weakened←⤒🔗

The result of losing two generations of children from our Church has obviously weakened our testimony in Scotland. A degree of this has been happening everywhere throughout the last century but those places that have kept hold of their children best have tended to have an associated programme of Christian education eg the Reformed churches in Holland and their sister churches in North America. A few years ago a delegate from one of these churches to our General Assembly commented that in the mid to late 19^th Century the Reformed churches in Scotland and the Netherlands were comparable in size but that today there is no comparison. Tellingly, he located the reason for this in one thing: ‘You gave your schools away in 1872 and they didn’t!’

We have been terribly weakened. Had we listened to men like Van Til and Machen in the earlier part of the 20^th Century, had we even listened to Prof John Murray in the 1970s we would have been in a much stronger position than we are now. Murray was asked in 1975, ‘How do you account for the spiritual decline in Scotland?’ He began his response by saying ‘The surrender of the young by parents to the State. This had not been so in former years’. Had we taken their wise counsel then to provide Christian education for our children we would have more young families and more children in our churches than we do today. As it stands in 2010 it is much harder to make a start and this difficulty is being used as a further reason not to do anything. However if we continue to settle for the status quo, on the basis of what we have seen up to now, it will be another step to ecclesiastical suicide.

3. Christians are Worldly←⤒🔗

A common response to the necessity of Christian education is ‘I went through the state schools and I survived’. This is an interesting response on two counts.

1. It is usually evidence that the opposite is true. It really serves to confirm how good a job the public school has done of indoctrinating us and we have not even suspected it has happened! Chris Schlect writing on the need for Christian education from the perspective of reviewing his own says, ‘In not mentioning God, my public school teachers preached a thundering sermon every day. By implication, they taught that God is not relevant to most areas of life ... with every lesson, in every class period, all day every day for twelve years, I was being taught to think like an atheist in the academic realm. And I didn’t even know that I was being indoctrinated’.
   
   This is why there are many sincere Christians who are zealous for evangelism and live a separate life as far as it goes – they don’t do the things conservative churches define as ‘worldly’ but they are worldly! They have a worldly mind socially and even on many ethical issues. When it comes to the family they conform more to the culture than to the Bible. What is the role of the husband? What is the role of the wife? Why do we have children? What do we do with them when we have them? In this very realm of education that we have been looking at much of our problem is we have become prey to a worldly mind. The world has indoctrinated the church because the church has not indoctrinated her children.
    
2. Survival is not our mandate nor a Christian philosophy for educating our children. No one disputes that a proportion of children survive public schooling, but they are certainly scarred by their experience. Meanwhile the majority were taken by the enemy and destroyed! The mandate for the education of our children is not a scarred survival – if it has become this we have set our sights far too low. Our mandate is to give our children a positively Christian education in all things, toward the development of a Christian mind. It is to train them in preparation for the time when they will stand as Christian soldiers and take on the battle in the next generation.
   
   Some object that this is what they send their children out into the system to do, to be witnesses, ‘salt and light’. But this is not how the battle is to be fought and won. As a nation we are presently at war in Iraq and Afghanistan but no one suggests that we should arm our five-year-old citizens and send them out to fight. No, they grow and are trained to be soldiers and are then sent out as soldiers to fight. Nor should we send out five-year-old, even three-year-old children into the hostile environment of a humanistic public school education and expect them to stand. This is where Christian education is vital; it is not about molly-coddling our children or keeping them unnecessarily sheltered and naive; it is a boot camp where successive generations of Christian soldiers are prepared to carry on the fight of advancing the kingdom of God in their day. It is not about survival it is about conquest!

Conclusion←⤒🔗

Martin Luther once wisely counselled, ‘I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt ... I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of Hell unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them on the hearts of youth’. His fear has become a reality, so what are we to do?

As Christian parents we need to face the issue of Christian education honestly before God and see it not merely as an option proposed to us but an obligation laid on us by God. There are encouraging signs that more and more Christian parents are coming to see this but they do not know how to address it. The great danger is that another generation passes and nothing is done; we just keep doing what we have done because we do not know what else to do. We see real difficulties and Christian parents have real fears at the thought of starting a Christian school or beginning to home-school. However, let us remember that these difficulties and fears do not disannul the principle and if we seek first the kingdom of God in this area then God will add to us all that we need. What Van Til said of ministers and office-bearers could be applied to all Christians ‘We need (Christians) who believe in Christian education not only after a fashion but with all the passion of their souls. We need (Christians) who not only say that Christian education is a nice thing, a sort of luxury, but who say and show with their deeds that they believe Christian education to be the only education that is fit for a covenant child’.