Sixty-eight percent of eighth graders in the U.S. can’t read at grade level. 1.2 million teenagers drop out of school every year. And 44 percent of dropouts under age 24 are jobless. These statistics, from the Broad Foundation for Education, are grim. And the children are the ones who suffer: Not only are their long-term prospects for employment and economic stability jeopardized, they also miss out on the joys of learning and the relationships with peers and adults that develop in a supportive, structured learning environment …
Few people disagree that all this is a problem. But the solution? Well, there’s Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg giving 0 million to the Newark Public School System. There’s Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education, who is using empirical data to drive change and is taking on teachers’ unions. The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently devoted an entire issue to the role of technology, reporting that students will perform better via smart pens, video games in the classroom, and proficient Internet use. Time ran a cover story this summer in which the author claimed that summer vacation accounts for the learning gap between lower- and higher-income students. Time addressed education once again last week in “What Makes a School Great,” which emphasized the importance of hiring the right teachers. David Brooks similarly identifies teachers as the solution in July’s Atlantic.
So is it more money? Computers? Summer programs? Better teachers? Certainly each of these factors plays a role. But improving schools extends beyond policy and unions and technology. For those of us with school-age children, sending our kids to public school and developing relationships with others in the school—parents, teachers, and administrators—might be part of the solution.
There are other options, of course. If you have the funds, send your children to an independent school and/or a Christian school. If you don’t have the funds and are willing to figure it out, home school. Good reasons abound for pursuing either route. Parents have greater responsibility to their children than to the community. And some parents have real reasons to fear for their child’s safety and the influence of peers and teachers who don’t hold a biblical worldview … But before Christians withdraw from the public education system, we might consider our calling to serve our local communities. Jesus instructs his disciples to be “salt and light,” to bring his presence into the broader culture. Salt, almost invisible, nonetheless preserves food and transforms its flavor. Light allows us to see. Jesus sends his followers out so that, through relationships with others, the kingdom of God will break forth in their midst.
I grew up mostly attending private schools, and my husband teaches at an independent school. But our family finds itself wed to the public school system. Because our daughter has Down syndrome, she wouldn’t be admitted to competitive independent schools where even preschoolers must pass an entrance exam based on IQ. Some Christian schools might admit her, but they wouldn’t have the resources to provide therapy and other supports. I do have one friend who home schools all her children, including a son with Down syndrome. But I don’t feel up to the task of becoming both a teacher and therapist for our daughter. So the public school system it is, and for that, I’m grateful.
I’m grateful that our children will befriend kids who come from other backgrounds. I’m grateful for the chance to serve other families. And I’m hopeful that our presence will be a blessing, that others might “see our good deeds and praise our father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). It might be through an explicitly Christian gesture—inviting a friend to Sunday school or saying a blessing before mealtime. Or it might subtler—starting a tutoring program, helping to raise funds for the school, or serving on the PTA.
It’s easy for me to say. We live in an area with some of the best public schools in the state. A group of friends from college, however, has moved into a neighborhood where the schools are, by any measure, in disrepair. Their kids are approaching kindergarten, and they have chosen to stay engaged in their community by sending their children to the failing schools. Some of these friends have joined the local board of education. Others have become after-school volunteers. They are engaged in the messiness—the bureaucracy, the discipline problems, the teachers who are indifferent to their students’ fates. They are engaged because it matters to both their children and the health of their community. They are engaged because caring for the education and economic stability—not only of their own kids, but also of their neighbors—matters to God.
Christians have the freedom and responsibility to choose what’s best for their child. But these choices must be made in the context not only of personal gain but also of what serves and blesses others. What would happen if more Christian parents stayed with the public schools in such a way that teachers felt supported and students felt safe and able to learn? Maybe Time would run a cover story on how the church is transforming the nation’s schools, for the blessing of all.
We’ve got movies about the end of the world, about wild things, about paranormal activity, about criminals, and now about . . . megachurches? Whassup with that?
That’s exactly what Morgan Mead, a young Christian filmmaker from Indiana, wanted to know. Why are there so many megachurches, what’s the phenomena all about, and just what is their role in American Christendom? Mead pursues answers to these questions, and more, in The Alpha and the Mega, now available on DVD.
In a recent interview, Mead explained why he decided to look into the megachurch mythos . . .
“My wife and I were in Kentucky, and we were looking for a church to go to,” he told Metromix Indianapolis. “We went to this enormous church and it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I grew up in smaller churches. It was interesting to me, so I started researching. What I found is that there is a lot of disagreement about their tactics and the way they do things versus a smaller type church.”
Here’s the trailer:
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Friends for Life, a full length, live action motion picture from Grizzly Adams Productions, has been selected to receive a Redemptive Storyteller Award by the Virginia-based Redemptive Film Festival.
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The complete Love Comes Softly film series, based on the books by Janette Oke and including several directed by Michael Landon Jr., comes to DVD in a boxed set on December 1, Fox Home Entertainment has announced. The eighth and final film, Love Finds a Home, releases on Nov. 10, followed by the complete set a few weeks later.
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I’ve come to believe that an institutional church is not a safe place for one person’s confession.
Several years ago, while we were attending a small nondenominational church, Pastor Donn* announced at the end of Sunday worship that we would have a special mid-week meeting. “It’s important that all members attend,” he emphasized. “We have an important family matter to discuss.”
Most of the hundred or so members who showed up Wednesday watched Pastor Donn summon the Hickmans, respected leaders in the congregation, and their pale 16-year-old daughter, Missy, to the front of the sanctuary. He put his arm around Missy’s shoulders and told us he’d summoned us in order to snuff out gossip about Missy before it had a chance to begin.
He then asked Missy to confess her sin to us. Without lifting her eyes, the tearful, trembling young woman told us she had just found out she was pregnant. Missy’s boyfriend, the birth dad, did not attend the church and wasn’t present that night.
I couldn’t deny that the congregation rallied around the Hickmans throughout Missy’s pregnancy and into the first years of motherhood. But Missy was never again just Missy. She became Missy the project, Missy the Girl Who Got Pregnant and Stood Up in Front of the Entire Church. And while the meeting effectively cauterized gossipy tongues and rallied prayer and practical support for the Hickmans, it also served to make Missy Exhibit A whenever the church’s youth pastors gave an abstinence sermon for the next year or so.
Missy’s own Hester Prynne experience taught me that personal confession is too big to be entrusted to an entire institution. In a church setting, I think public confession should be prefaced with a spiritual Miranda warning: Anything you say may well be used against you. Your confession might easily become a shorthand way to brand you: “Jeff? He’s the embezzler.” “Cindy is an alcoholic.” “Missy got pregnant at 16.”
Anne Jackson responds to this troubling church culture in a new book, Permission to Speak Freely: Essays and Art on Fear, Confession, and Grace (Thomas Nelson, 2010). Jackson asked her blog readers this question: What is the one thing you feel you can’t say in church? The book captures the flavor of the hundreds of answers she received, ranging from, “I had an affair on my wife and I still think about the other woman,” to, “Even though I’m a staff member at my church, most of my deep and significant relationships are with people I met online,” to, “I was raped by a counselor … I thought he was a friend.”
Jackson includes her own prose and free-verse poetry on the subject of fear and confession. She details her own confessions about the sexual abuse she experienced as a teen, her addiction to pornography, and her square-peg experience as a church employee in order to give readers, as a friend of hers called it, “the gift of going second.”
Jackson’s book is a helpful response to institutional unwritten rules that are more hospitable to silence and shame than to confession. However, I was struck by the fact that most of Jackson’s confessions first occurred in the safety of one-on-one relationships. Once she experienced a grace-filled response from her hearer, she became emboldened to confess the truth about herself in more public settings, such as speaking gigs or on her blog.
Jackson’s goal is to provoke churches toward creating a culture where members can speak freely about their mess. And that’s to the good. But her own story demonstrates that public confession of individual sin is the final step in a process that must first begin with God and then move to a small, safe community of one or two others. Jackson’s admissions of sin in Permission to Speak Freely are not really confessions as much as stories about confessions that have already occurred.
A church can and should facilitate a culture of confession by making space for these stories. That space can’t be manipulated into existence (as was the case with Missy), and will not happen at all if church leaders do not acknowledge that spiritual transformation is a continuous process, not a programmable product.
But the real work of confession isn’t the work of the church. It is the work of me coming to the end of myself and telling the unvarnished truth to God and you, and of you responding with compassion—and, perhaps, a story of your own.
Michelle Van Loon is the author of two books on the parables of Jesus, and blogs at TheParableLife.blogspot.com. She has written for the women’s blog on Why Boys Fail, Hutterite communities, and church ‘volunteers’.
While Michael Moore decries the “evils” of capitalism, another new documentary champions it as a way to save the world. The New Recruits follows Joel Montgomery, a Christian from Alabama, and two other business school grads who are using social entrepreneurship to help the poor. The film documents Montgomery’s year-long quest to help rural Pakistani farmers counter an impeding water crisis using drip irrigation systems as an alternative to flooding their fields. More info at HuffPost and CBN.
