What Makes a Christian School Christian

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What Makes a Christian School Christian Dr. Boyd Chitwood Psalm 24:1 – “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” The Christian school is an educational community which in belief, word and deed testifies to this truth. Further, grateful proclamation is given to the redemptive reality that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. As a learning community, such truth is not only proclaimed, but taught, understood and cultivated in and among faculty, students and parents. In partnership with the home and the church, the Christian school pursues for its students the fullness of God’s created intent for each child. Doing so with excellence, we give good testimony to the character of our great God while also doing the highest good for our children. Our capacity to learn is a gift of His common grace, His own Logos expressed in our rationality which can correlatively grasp the sense and pattern of that which He has made. Our call to learn is by invitation to partake of His beauty and His goodness, but is also by propriety an obligation to grow in knowledge of His glory so that we might praise Him all the more. There is learning and teaching in conscious pursuit of God, as well as learning and teaching in ignorance of Him or rebellion towards Him. There is, however, no baldly secular learning because our very intellectual capacities are testimony to His presence, His sovereignty and His grace. The Romans 1 character of God’s world and ourselves as His creation does cry out, to enlighten or condemn us. From these admittedly ‘high-flying’ foundations of a philosophy, I do see a number of practical correlates and applications. While education is not salvific, it is part of our obedient response to the Cultural Mandate to permeate and rule creation as His under-shepherds, and even as regents under the hand of the High King. In direct contrast to today’s educational landscape, the believing educator has a world to share with his pupils which ‘holds together’ in the unity of its Creator. We are not subjected to the withering irrationality and creeping hopelessness of a world of utter fragmentation, with truth, depth and reality itself called completely into question in the Postmodern milieu.

© 2011 Boyd Chitwood. All rights reserved.


For the Christian school, that education is offered by believers called to this ministry by God, and responsible to Him for their service. It also, though, is a ministry which can only be pursued in partnership with the home and the church, parents having that responsibility before God for the education of their children for which they invite us to join hands in a shared endeavor. In the Christian school, we also must not slide into usurping the proper role of the church, even when for some of our students that role is not being vigorously upheld in their lives. We continue to pursue that fullness of nurture and teaching for the child, but we cannot be something as school which God has ordained from His church. Our children are growing up in a world which wants to tell them that the world is all there is. You live as happy as you can, and then you die. Or maybe there’s something called spirituality, and you pretty much make that up for yourself. To grow up and succeed, you learn how the world works and you learn how to play the system. In a nutshell, that’s why teaching kids from a Christ-centered worldview matters so much. Our children are being taught a worldview, or maybe several different ones. They will grow up seeing the world through a certain set of eyes. Our children can believe there is real truth, a sovereign God, sacrificial love and honor that’s worth paying a price for. Or they can practice living as if they are the gods of their own lives. Then hope will be a trick, and faith will be folly and love will be a cotton candy dream. And life may have some happy spots, but it won’t have meaning, and it will bring a lot of suffering, too. And the all-powerful, yet all-loving God who made and saves us will be denied the glory that is due Him in our children’s lives. Sin will win that battle. Never the war. Christ has made that victory clear. But in the lives of our children, sin and the will of the Prince of this world will win a pitiful, yet horrific battle for those young lives. Again, that’s why teaching our kids from a Christ-centered worldview matters so much. Teaching and loving and nurturing them that way in our families, in our churches and in our schools. No chinks in the armor. No mixed messages about some mixed up idea of truth that can be split up and changed with the circumstances. These are the distinctive works and high calling of the Christian school.

© 2011 Boyd Chitwood. All rights reserved.


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