You will hear two reoccurring themes in our podcasts:First, we will always be finding ways to include the concept and commission of discipleship.  We equate Christian education with discipleship as it is used in the New Testament. In fact, if we are not truly discipling our students then we are probably not giving them a Christian education.  How you understand discipleship will shape everything about your educational programs. Discipleship-based Christian education has very specific and deliberate goals and methods. It is often completely opposite to that of a secular education. I will have much to say about this in the upcoming podcasts.  

The second theme that will permeate all of our podcasts is that parents have been given an enormous responsibility in the oversight and stewardship of our children’s education and ultimately their lives. I see this part of the family mandate that God has given to us. You can hear this echoed throughout the Bible. One of the main reasons God made His covenant with Abraham was stated in Gen. 18 where God says about Abraham, For I know him, that he will command his children and household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord,.. all the way to the New Testament where Paul exhorts us to bring up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. This commission and responsibility was not given to the state to provide some form of public school system nor was this commission given to the Church in the New Testament to provide a Christian school system. Not to say that the civil government or the church don’t have a role to play, they do. I am superintendent of Heritage Christian Schools which are fully accredited with BC Ministry of Education as Independent schools and our schools come under the authority of the Kelowna Christian Center Society – they are all church run, even our home education programs. Every parent will one day have to give an account to Lord as to how they supervised or perhaps delegated their child’s education.I become keenly aware of this sense of responsibly as a young man.

I became a Christian at the age of 20 and over then next couple of years I began to pursue training in the ministry. I intentionally got involved with children’s ministry so that I could learn to relate to children. It was at this time in my life that I sensed God’s call to work with children. When looking for a wife I looked for a women that would relate well to children. One of my deepest concerns was how care and education of the children I ministered to in church was so easily passed off to the public school system. We had two hours a week with these kids and the government educators had 35! Christine and I committed ourselves to find a school that would support our values and beliefs. If we couldn’t find such and institution then we would home school. Fortunately our Church, Kelowna Christian Center had a vision for Christian education and we were able to work together in the education of our kids. I say work together because, even though we have an excellent institution here, the responsibility for oversight was never taken from us. We may have “sub-contracted aspects of their education to “specialists,” or trained teachers, but we were still in the position of authority and oversight. I use the word sub-contractor very deliberately. Over the years I have run a number of building projects for both our church and school. I have hired a job foreman who acted as a site supervisor. He had the direct responsibility of making sure the building went up according to the plan. He would hire subcontractors to do the majority of the work, especially in the areas of construction he did not specialize in. He would subcontract the electrical to an electrician. As the building foreman he had a general idea of how the electrical would proceed but the details he left to the electrician. If the electrician didn’t do a good job or wired the building wrong I wouldn’t go to him I would approach the foreman and hold him responsible. He would have to find a way to fix the problems. This is the same way we need to think about our children. The parent is much like this foreman with the delegated responsibility from the owner to build these lives according to God’s plan. We may sub-contract a school institution to help us with the education of our children but this still does not relinquish the responsibility we have to give oversight to each and every area in the child’s development.

I came across this quote recently from, Michele, a single mother in Minnesota. She became a mother inspite of the protests of the child’s father who was demanding she get an abortion. They parted ways and she has raised her son completely on her own and presently homeschools her son. Michele went on to College to pursue a career in education and in one of her first job interviews it came out that she was homeschooling at which point she knew she wouldn’t get the position.  Her is her response to the pressure she felt in that interview:“Being a parent makes my child's education my responsibility. It is my responsibility to choose what education I think is best for my child. It is my responsibility to make sure my child receives the best education possible. It is my responsibility to re-evaluate these decisions and make changes as needed. It is even my responsibility to decide if homeschooling isn't working for us anymore and to send my child to school if this were to ever be the case. These are all responsibilities that I was well aware of and joyfully took on when I became a parent.”Needless to say she did not receive the job. I don’t know if Michelle is a believer but I wish every Christian Parent could fully understand what she understands about her responsibility as a parent.

I also wish that every campus school administrator and teacher would recognize the truth that Michelle articulated so well. When we see this we don’t assume the role and authority that God intended for parents.  Any good administrator or teacher knows that the more parents are involved in the education of their children the more successful those children will be. In the book By Anne Henderson, Evidence Continues to Grow, she outlines with prolific statistical evidence, the positive impact of parental involvement "is beyond dispute" (p. 1). "Programs designed with strong parental involvement produce students who perform better than otherwise identical programs that do not involve parents as thoroughly, or that do not involve them at all"

Both as a teacher and as an administrator I have both admired and been mystified by which parents show up and which ones don’t show at parent teacher interviews at our campus school or which parents are the first to get involved in school leadership. Needless to say it is the parents of the quality student’s who are the first to step up.

I understand that teachers, like everyone else, don’t like people looking over their shoulder when they work, particularly parents who can become very intrusive in what they are trying to do in the classroom. I can imagine how difficult it is for an electrician who has a job site foreman that knows enough electrical to always be questioning and directing the installation. But, if that electrical sub-contractor wants to keep working for this foreman he will have to give a respectful response, recognizing his authority in the job site. If we don’t first appreciate the unique authority and perspective that the parent has for their child then we will find ourselves resisting a greater authority and eventually it will move our schools closer to the attitude of government schools.  US Federal Court Judge, Melinda Harmen illustrates this attitude when she warned, “Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.” God forbid that Christian schools ever usurp this God ordained role of the parent. As a school administrator I have to constantly evaluate the “parent friendliness” of our institution. Certainly, the teacher is responsible for what happens in their classroom, just as the principal is responsible for the school environment as a whole. But we can never forget who will answer to Lord Jesus for the life of each child and we have to find ways to help and facilitate this responsibility in the heart and hands of parents.  We are just the sub-contractors.