Intentional Parents

Making the decision to homeschool can be a lot like unraveling a sweater. Once you begin to question the established status quo in schooling and education, you almost feel like you’re pulling on a loose strand of yarn. You begin to notice more and more aspects of society around you that, up until now, you had accepted as “givens.” Before you know it, you begin to filter everything through an is-this-really-best-for-my-family-and-closest-to-God’s-original-plan mindset, regardless of how long any tradition has been around or how popular it is.

I have received several e-mails from parents who are going through that “unraveling” process with the traditional church. They have become convinced that teaching and learning take place best in a multi-generational, one-on-one setting as you walk through daily life together. They have embraced the concept that the father is the spiritual leader and shepherd of the family members. But soon they notice discrepancies between those beliefs and the way many churches today are set up: where the family is divided and each age group is isolated to do its own thing, where the father is not recognized as responsible for and capable of teaching his family the Word of God, or where man-made academic standards are regarded as more important than heart attitude or relationship with God.

So, many parents are making tough decisions about which traditional church activities they will participate in. They are trying to determine which activities will equip them and encourage them as parents to fulfill their God-given responsibility and privilege of discipling their children. Several years ago, we made two such decisions about church activities: (1) We will worship and listen to our pastor’s teaching together as a family; (2) We will not send our children to Sunday School or Youth Group.

Are we saying that every family should copy our convictions? Absolutely not. But we thought you might like to hear how we came to the decision not to send our children to Sunday School, just in case you’re wrestling with this issue yourself.

Maybe the Sunday School at your church is different, but we haven’t found one that meets these criteria:

• Does it emphasize one-on-one discipleship in everyday life instead of using a traditional classroom approach?

  We believe that learning one-on-one with us during everyday life is the best way for our children to learn; that’s why we chose to homeschool. We don’t want our children treated as just one of the crowd and expected to know all the same information and progress at the same pace as all of the other children in the class. Therefore, if we don’t think that a traditional classroom set-up is the best atmosphere for teaching school subjects, why would we use it for teaching the most important subject of all: Bible?

• Does it encourage socializing and learning from all ages rather than fostering a sense of isolation and an attitude of superiority toward just those your own age?

  Inter-generational worship is so important! And being able to get along with and learn from people of all ages is true socialization. For more on inter-generational living, see this post.

• Does it instill a high respect for God’s Word, or does it cheapen the value of God’s Word by emphasizing treats and trinkets as a reward for memorizing Scripture?

  Memorizing Scripture should be a lifelong privilege, not a trick done for trinkets. Here is the easy system we use for memorizing and reviewing hundreds of Bible verses as a family in just five minutes a day: Scripture Memory System.

• Does it promote unity and encouraging one another instead of fostering competitiveness?

  I see nowhere in Scripture that we should pit the children against each other as to who can memorize the most verses or find a Scripture passage fastest. Community, helping each other, and unity are the heartbeat of Jesus’ and Paul’s desires for the church.

• Do we know quite well and trust the people who will be teaching our children, as well as all material they will be teaching?

  I hear too many “cute” stories about children misunderstanding what they were “taught” in Sunday School. And I have first-hand experience with having to correct Biblical errors that my children picked up in Sunday School before we made the decision to pull them out. These errors were not the fault of the material being used, they were the fault of an uninformed teacher. In addition, last-minute substitute teachers or guest speakers can really wreak havoc, and chances are you’ll never hear about it at the time. It would be bad enough if a school teacher were teaching the wrong history or math facts, but we’re talking about teaching God’s Word here! How important to make sure our children learn it accurately.

• Will the material the children are expected to learn at Sunday School support and complement our plan for learning the Bible at home or fight against it?

  I guess it comes down to “What is the purpose of Sunday School?” If the purpose is to teach the Bible, we have a plan for teaching our children the Bible five days a week, plus listening to the pastor teach it on Sundays. And we can discuss what was taught because we are all experiencing it together. It’s so nice to be able to make sure the children are learning the Bible accounts in order as a part of real history, and that we can customize the “lessons” to fit our children’s knowledge of the Bible!

And therein lies the key: If you are not going to send your children to Sunday School, you must make the commitment to disciple them and teach them the Bible every day of the week at home. Please don’t remove the one without replacing it with something better! Yes, it will take work on your part. But isn’t God’s plan wonderful? As you accept the Lord’s design to teach and disciple your children, you will be encouraged and challenged to continue growing and learning yourself!

Please hear our hearts: We love our pastor! We love our brothers and sisters in Christ who make up this local congregation. And we’re thankful for the freedom in Christ that allows us to walk down the path to which the Lord has called us for His glory. Don’t be afraid of unraveling the sweater if God calls you to, but do it prayerfully and lovingly as the Lord leads you one step at a time down the path He has planned for your family to walk.

Q & A

Q: Have you found any church activities that will equip and encourage you as you disciple your children?

A: Absolutely! We love activities that we can participate in together as a family. For example, if there is an adult Sunday School class that focuses on a topic that interests us and that we would like a little help in teaching (for example, creation vs. evolution), we will attend it as a family. We have also integrated a sermon series on a specific Bible book by reading and studying the same Bible book at home during the week as a family. At another time, the girls and I attended a four-week women’s Bible study on the tongue. And we love the idea of age-integrated small groups where the children can listen to adults sharing what God is doing in their lives, share out of their own lives, and pray together with believers of all ages. These small groups are also great places for the children to make new friends of all ages.

Q: How did children learn the Bible before Sunday School?

A: Parents were responsible to teach them. You see this truth throughout Scripture and throughout history. Then in the late 1700s, Robert Raikes organized a school for poor children. These children’s parents had dropped the ball; they were not teaching their children academics or the fear of God because they themselves were strangers to those concepts. Therefore, Raikes established schools for these children to attend on Sundays (their one day off from working in factories), where hired teachers taught the children to read, took them to church, and instructed them in the catechism. However, these schools were for the poor, illiterate children with unbelieving parents. Most literate Christian parents still taught their children Bible at home through daily time in the Word. Unfortunately, as the compulsory public school attendance movement gained ground in the mid-1800s, even Christian parents eventually came to believe the lie that they were unqualified to teach their children or began to embrace the convenient idea of handing over their God-given responsibility to someone else. Now society commonly views the Sunday School as the primary agent for teaching all children the Bible, regardless whether they are from a Christian or non-Christian home.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 8:19 pm and is filed under The Bible, The Five Gifts of Intentional Parents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.