The Prep-School Ministry

An appeal to seminarians and others: “Come over and help.”

The independent secondary school in America (as “prep schools” like to call themselves these days) is in the midst of revolution. It’s not the noisy, violent, armed revolution of the collegiate world—yet. But it’s no less real. And perhaps it’s no less far-reaching.

The prep school is in the midst of a social revolution. Long the secluded and protected havens of the rich and the elite, private schools are now opening their doors to blacks, to Puerto Ricans, to the underprivileged, to students from the inner city. While attention is still focused on what an applicant’s father does (and how much money he has), more and more consideration is being given to the young person’s own entrance examinations, character references, and “potential” (rather vaguely defined). Both for the sake of their public image and because of the growing realization that every student profits from contact with others whose backgrounds differ from his own, the schools are rapidly becoming more cosmopolitan than their founders would have dreamed possible. Afro-American societies are forming in school after school, even (in fact, especially) in traditionally staid and WASPish New England. Drugs, from marijuana to STP, are readily available; some schools admit (very quietly) that as many as 60 to 75 per cent of their seniors are at least occasional users. Freedom of movement without supervision, especially into cities near the campus, is rapidly replacing an atmosphere of protectiveness and confinement. Many schools are going coed.

The schools are also in the midst of an educational revolution. Realizing that they serve less than 3 per cent of the nation’s secondary students, and faced with skyrocketing costs (heightened by the burden of subsidizing the education of those who cannot pay their own way), the private schools are finding they must justify their existence through new and innovative educational ventures. Interdepartmental course offerings, black-studies programs, flexible scheduling, the term away from school to work in a city, elimination of grades, tutorial systems, seminars, and a continual, wholesale revision of requirements have greatly altered the rigid traditional curriculum that demanded four years of English, two years of math, and so on. Long known for offering teachers an opportunity to teach without obtaining state certification, private schools remain skeptical of the necessity for education courses but place instead a growing emphasis on graduate work in one’s own academic field.

Most seriously, the independent schools are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Many were founded as denominational schools—or at least as places where religious instruction and worship could be combined with other kinds of study. Today the schools are facing pressures from within and without that force growing numbers of administrators and boards to question whether religion now has any place at all in the life of the private school. The overthrow of “compulsory chapel” that swept through the nation’s colleges and universities a generation ago is finding its counterpart in the private school today. School after school sees its student body rise in protest and file out of chapel during the Lord’s Prayer. Petitions and student editorials denounce obligatory worship and religious instruction, and chaplains resign, devote their attention exclusively to social projects, or shift their teaching into related fields devoid of religious responsibilities.

Of course, the three kinds of “revolution” are inextricably bound together. The ever-present adolescent demand for freedom finds a ready target in the early-morning chapel where dreary, lifeless prayers are mechanically repeated, often led by faculty members who are only vaguely committed to their truth or relevance. Dead orthodoxy mediated by ministerial misfits, or the super-liberalism of the “death of God” social activists that has long since written its own epitaph—these can hold little attraction for the thinking student in today’s private school. The smoldering ember of educational change, fanned into flame by student activism patterned after the heady example of the collegiate world, and fed by the tinder of years of meaningless ritual, has sparked a blaze that threatens to consume the last vestiges of “religion” at the secondary level.

And yet, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, attractively presented, backed by convincing apologetic, integrated with—but not replaced by—a lively social concern, and lived as well as preached, still has power to win students’ hearts. “Personal salvation” by itself will not do. Today’s students are too aware, too idealistic, to be taken in by something so obviously selfish. But mere social action will not do either, for they are also too aware of their own needs, and too honest to baptize with a kind of shadowy religiosity the secular activism that alters men’s conditions but not their souls.

Thus, liberalism has lost in the independent school world. Where it remains alert to the needs of the oppressed, students will still rally to its cause, though only with the query, “Why call it ‘religion’?” But where it fails to make God personally real, they will turn instead to pot and Zen and transcendental meditation.

That ritualistic orthodoxy offers no viable alternative goes without saying. Its inability to capture students’ allegiance is precisely the reason why liberalism has dominated the schools for generations.

And so the hunger goes unsatisfied, the need unfulfilled. Is there a God? What is he like? Can he be known? Can he love me? Can he change the world? Is he worth living—and dying—for? All these remain the adolescent questions, but increasingly, tragically, in the independent school, no one is answering them.

I have seen 200 students gathered from schools across New England for a “Christian conference” in which the speaker denounced Christianity as irrelevant. I have seen students so disgusted with his irrelevance that they avoided the meetings to do everything from argue together to sleep together. And yet, I have seen students at that same conference respond, in private conversation, to a simple, straightforward presentation of the Gospel so enthusiastically that their lives have been changed, and through them whole schools have been affected.

I have seen a Bible-study group grow from four members to ten times that many, coming weekly to discover anew the thrill of knowing the God who changes lives.

I have seen young men and women transformed by the good news of Christ. I have seen them go on to college, and in some cases to seminary, and I have watched them grow up and accept the leadership that usually attends a private-school background. And I have rejoiced as they have come to share in the mission of proclaiming Christ to this student generation.

Mission it is. If ever the prep-school chaplain was primarily a pastor, that day has passed. He is a missionary, an evangelist, and his field is ripe for harvest.

And so this article. It is addressed to seminarians, and to others who might be willing to consider the call of God to the independent preparatory school: “Come over and help us!”

There are chaplaincies that cannot be filled, and chaplaincies that can be filled only poorly, because the liberals who have controlled the private-school world are realizing their inability to cope with its needs and so are abandoning it. The door is wide open for evangelicals with tact and graciousness and intellectual ability to accept teaching responsibilities in every field, and, especially, to redeem the prep-school ministry.

Come over and help us reach for Christ students who will be leaders wherever they go. Come over and help us penetrate an intellectual subculture in the midst of revolution with the good news that God is not dead. Come over and help us prove that the Christ who changes lives is still Lord.

The harvest is ready. Come help us reap it.

SALT

once brilliant

good news full of tears

has spoiled on Standing

so long alone

savourless in your sun.

your frosted panes

looking out onto the Street

where the living fall

and the dead meet

have taken you

and pushed you into winter

where the renaissance

of your ghostly past

spills from the vanes of steeples

shining silently

shadowlessly

where you are drowning

leaving not even a trace.

the final Word,

the magic finger

that writes on stone

pauses

from tracing epitaphs

of those in whom there is no pleasure

and is poised waiting

in the sky.

D. R. UNRUH

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