Hello Fellow Educators,

Welcome to podcast #22. This is part 7 of a series I have been podcasting about how an educator should approach the integration of our Christian Worldview into everything we teach. I also want to remind you that we are still sending out free copies of my book, Disciplining this Generation for a Digital World, to anyone that sends us an email. I will have the details at the end of the podcast.

If you listened to last week’s podcast you would have heard an interview about the amazing experiences of our Comparative Civilizations Team as they have just returned from a two week whirlwind tour of France, Italy and Greece. They have been working with a group of students this year integrating Comparative Civilizations 12 with Christian Studies 11 & 12 and Art Foundations 11 & 12 which included this trip. These Heritage Christian Online School Educators have been teaching these subjects in an integrated format that has enabled the students and teachers to go through Western history and discover some of the important foundations to our culture and how we see and express ourselves through the arts down through the ages. Applying a Christian worldview perspective to everything they have studied meant they could see and discern the false premises and presuppositions that constitute our cultural foundations. They saw how history was dramatically altered when Christianity came on the scene and slowly restructured the paradigms of the western mindset. They saw how this clash of worldviews expressed itself in the arts and eventually in the wars of the last century. In all of this they are seeing man’s deep pride and many prejudices, they are understanding why our western culture is failing and they are discovering our only real answer to our fallen plight, the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, and did I mention they have are receiving more than a semester’s credit for this grand experience?

The goal of this project is to help establish disciples who understand their culture from a distinctive Christian perspective and then have the foresight to influence its future. The political philosopher, Machiavelli, said of the study of history: “Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.”  

As I am recording this podcast another group of students from our campus school are on a similar integrative adventure with a bit different goals. They are our Global Citizenship students who are in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. They have a historical component to their trip as they visit ancient Mayan ruins but their primary goal is to make cultural connections within a context of a completely different cultural experience through works of service. The students are studying Spanish 12, English 11, Leadership 11, Cross Cultural Missions 11 and are using skills they have developed in the areas of film, construction and computers to serve the communities they are in. In the past we have worked with the school for the disabled and helped build a soccer camp for disadvantaged youth. Our goals in this endeavour is to integrate these disciplines so that students will see themselves as global citizens who have a responsibility to reach out this fallen world. As we bring both truth and experience to the things we wish to teach our children the educational experience becomes transformative. My own son experienced this on last year’s trip and decided to spend his first year out of high school on this same mission field. He has gained a whole new vision for his life. He understands that his life is meant to be lived out in the service of the King and for others. I hope to take some time later this month and interview our Global Citizenship Director and some of his students.

Both these projects are excellent examples, not only of Christian worldview integration, but also of inter-discipline integration. They have combined various subjects as they overlap in studies and the student’s experiences. I think this illustrates for us the artificial nature of how we study in our western, liberal arts context of education. We divide and separate the disciplines of study in order to give special understanding of a specific topic. A good example of this how we teach math. Of necessity we take math out of everyday life so we can teach the necessary skills but the more complex these methods and skills become the more difficult it is to integrate it back into everyday life. This artificial dividing up of subjects is partly responsible for the lack of Christian Integration in our subjects.

The other major reason, I believe, for the lack of Christian perspective in our subjects is the subtle dualism we all have embraced on some level. Dualism is this context is the idea that we can somehow separate the spiritual from the secular, the religious from the non-religious experiences in life. The fact of the matter is that nothing is secular. Every discipline, every subject, every experience has a cause and connection that is directly related to the spiritual. Because we have divide out the spiritual in the same way we extract math from everyday life we think we have the basics of the disciplines we are trying to teach. Instead, what we have done, is created an artificial environment to teach partial facts about subjects that requires careful reprocessing to reintroduce them to God’s world. Here is an excerpt from my paper “All Truth is God’s Truth” that addresses this idea of reintegration of the Bible into the existing foundations within specific disciplines.

The Bible is not an encyclopaedia; it is a book revealing God and His relationship to creation. God does not intend it to be the only source of information in understanding “all truth” else He would never tell us to consider nature as a means of knowing Him (Ps. 19.1-6, Rom. 1:20-21, I Kings 4:29-34). In most cases teachers are not pure researchers. They take what was taught before and help pass those ideas on to the next generation. This is not to say that a teacher cannot be an original thinker, in fact, it is this inward desire for discovery that probably carried them on to this high calling. Nevertheless, teachers generally apply their views and understanding of the disciplines being taught using the existing foundations as a spring board for their perspective.

It is these existing foundations that must be scrutinized. Here the teacher must take what has been taught and said about the discipline and directly apply their Christian view of truth to the specifics. If he were teaching the physical sciences he would point out how the idea of an orderly structured universe that works upon consistent natural laws is harmonious with the Biblical view of creation. God created the universe to work within the framework of principles we call the “laws of physics.” On the other hand, the teacher would point out that these laws are not absolute and can be suspended if God so chooses. Jesus walked on water. Joshua and the Israelites needed a longer daylight (24 hours) for their victory in battle. This is how we define a true miracle. The idea of miracles is not generally accepted in scientific circles. Most scientists find it difficult to see a universe with things in it that cannot be explained or comprehended with the natural mind. Because this view of the world is implicit in most science recourses the teacher must expose it for his students and contrast this tendency with the Biblical view at every encounter.

The cultural context of where we teach has a dynamic influence on the existing foundational expectations in education. In our neck of the woods, we have mandated learning outcomes from our Provincial Government and standardized testing (more will be said about this later). These are regularly inspected and must be reached in our curriculum if we want to continue to give “BC Dogwood”  graduation certificates and, secondly, maintain our level of Provincial Independent School funding. These mandated learning outcomes are often very appropriate for a comprehensive approach towards the discipline being taught. We are instructed by the Independent School Branch of our Ministry of Education that, as religious schools, we are to reach these outcomes using our own religious curriculum and teaching methods. Nevertheless, something or rather someone other than the Bible is dictating to us what the broader scope of curriculum should be, though the details of the content are left to us. As long as we can agree with this broader scope within our educational system here in BC we can carry on an uneasy alliance. As the curriculum advances the Prescribed Learning Outcomes become more detailed as to what content should be covered.

A classic example of contrary Learning Outcomes to our worldview can be found in our Biology 11 course.  The very first set of outcomes distinctly implies that Biology cannot be understood without a firm grasp upon evolutionary theory. It is obvious that these outcomes cannot be taught from a Biblical perspective. All that we are able to do is apply ‘Direct Interaction Integration’ (see previous section II) as outlined in the following steps:

1. The concepts must be understood by the students; this can be done through the aid of the government recommended textbook.

2. The concepts must be seen in light of the Biblical perspective.

3. The presumptions in the discipline must be exposed and understood.

4. The discipline must then be taught with Christian presuppositions.

5. The interpretations of the data or phenomenon being examined should be looked at from the various presuppositions.

6. Final comparisons should be made between the two positions with careful analysis of the results of such thinking.

The government mandated learning outcomes do give us an opportunity for integration in that they outline the existing foundations of what most other students are learning in our educational system. It gives us a backdrop of comparison. As Christians we are to be salt and light to our culture. We are to be the “body of Christ” in this fallen world. In order to do this our students must interact with this world and in order to interact with the world we must have some framework of how the world thinks. As we prepare our students to engage this culture they must be versed in an “apologetic” that will not only defend what they believe but also expose the false presuppositions within the existing foundations or our cultural disciplines.

A final point of difficulty that we face as Christians is what I call “competitive comparison” or standardized testing. In order to advance ourselves within our culture we must adopt a competitive mindset. This competition works itself out through comparisons such as S.A.T.s in the US and Provincial Exams here in Canada. The prominent idea in education today is that of assessment and accountability which turn into achievement oriented standards. Recently our Foundation Skills Assessment tests became part of the public domain so that even elementary schools are now being “graded” by achievement standards. This has a direct effect on curriculum because we must spend considerable time in preparation for these tests. The tests themselves become the curriculum because we want our children to achieve high marks thus enabling them to move on to the next levels of education. How this effect Biblical Integration? We simply don’t have the time to teach what we feel needs to be taught about the subject because we have to prepare for the standardized test. This is especially true in disciplines that are more theoretically based rather than skills based such as sciences and socials curriculum. In the language arts and mathematics the testing tends more to skills but even here we have worldview implications being tested. There is no easy answer to this dilemma. As an administrator I want to “compare” well with the other schools. Parents have a somewhat misguided expectation that because their children are in a “private” school they should have better results on such testing. I also want to see my students achieve well within this system so that they may transform the system. True Biblical Integration within the existing theoretical disciplines is absolutely necessary for us to achieve this goal of transformation within culture.

Next week I hope to finish this series on the methods of Christian worldview integration.

We would love to hear from you and I deeply value your comments. If you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address.

Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.