Private Lessons

Private Lessons

In the past, evangelical Christians have turned the tide in the battle against illiteracy. We can do so again.

For children raised where drugs, violence, and ruined families reign, education may be the only way out. Yet any child, no matter how motivated, would have a hard time getting a good education in the inner-city schools described by Jonathan Kozol in Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. In dismaying detail, Kozol portrays the decaying buildings, overcrowded classrooms, inadequate equipment, and dispirited teachers.

Ideas for redressing the inequalities that exist between mostly black or Hispanic urban schools and mostly white suburban schools have multiplied. Some writers highlight the disparity in funding. Others point at the public-school monopoly, arguing that a voucher system would improve quality. Still others argue for experiments, such as all-male schools.

Such public-policy debates are crucial to the future of American education. Public policy, however, is not the only possibility. Evangelical Christians should explore private policy as well.

Early in the last century, American Christians did just that when they launched the Sunday-school movement. Sunday schools were intended to provide a basic education to poor children (and adults) who could not afford regular schooling and had to work six days a week. Education and Christianity went hand in hand; the desire to read the Bible motivated many to learn to read. (It still does.) Only after free public schools became common did Sunday schools shift their attention to more “spiritual” content.

Today many evangelical Christians are again involved with education, having launched schools in reaction to the secularization of the public system. Often, however, Christian schools aim at the children who need help least: those from white, middle-class, churched families. What about those who need education most, and have the least chance to get it?

Some urban churches, such as Chicago’s La Salle Street Church, have made education a ministry for decades. In 1963, La Salle began offering tutoring for children in the nearby housing projects. Now 1,200 kids are involved in their programs, which have spun off from the church. A scholarship program identifies promising students and pledges substantial college aid if they keep their grades up and graduate. Over 50 kids are now in college, monitored by program staff.

In Newark, New Jersey, the evangelistic Tom Skinner Associates offers students after-school training in five basic skills: education, “coping,” employability, leadership, and moral excellence. School dropouts come to prepare for the high-school equivalency exam.

In Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood, World Impact, which regards itself as a “mission society in the traditional sense,” is building a Christian elementary school. “The goal is to build Christian leadership in the community,” says principal Michael Reed, “that promotes academic excellence, knowledge of Christ, and the ability to share that with others.”

Such groups won’t wait for public-school reform. Neither will they wait for needy people to change their values, or for drugs and crime to vanish from the streets. They see education as a matter of justice: these kids deserve a chance.

They also see it as evangelism. Their involvement in education gives opportunity to teach and demonstrate integrity, family, community, morality, hope—and the love of God. This is social action close to the heart of the evangelical vision. The challenge is enormous. So are the opportunities.

By Tim Stafford.

Scaring Churches To Death?

Last year in a speech before the American Society of Association Executives, President Bush called for nonprofit associations to join together in the fight to solve America’s problems of hunger, drug abuse, homelessness, illiteracy, and the breakdown of the family by “placing community service at the center of their agenda.” The President’s plea reflected the vital role that more than 1 million nonprofit groups already play. Providing everything from prenatal care to meals for the elderly, from consumer hotlines to Bible-study booklets, nonprofit organizations employ nearly 8 million U.S. citizens. One out of every two adult Americans serves a nonprofit organization as a volunteer, giving a total of some 15 billion hours last year.

Apparently some Washington officials have missed Bush’s cue. In what management expert Peter Drucker has characterized as a “consistent, determined, deliberate attack to destroy the non-profit sector,” government bureaucracy is hiding many of the President’s “thousand points of light” under a bushel full of regulations, or snuffing them entirely.

The attack has come on several fronts. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has become increasingly “creative” in its interpretations of the tax code, to the detriment of nonprofits, explains Charles Elbaum, publisher of Association Publishing.

A push continues for changes in the unrelated business-income statutes, which would result in tax on previously exempt insurance programs and other activities. On the state level, property-tax exemptions for nonprofits are being withdrawn. In addition, nonprofits can expect yet another increase in third-class postal rates, coming all too soon after last February’s 35 percent rise.

Nonprofit groups are “scared to death” of transgressing ever more complicated laws, says Nancy LeSourd of Gammon and Grange, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm that specializes in nonprofit corporate law. In order to stay up to date and in compliance with regulations, groups are forced to divert more and more resources toward in-house experts and legal fees. Clearly, something is wrong when churches must work as hard to please the IRS as they do to please God.

Tighter tax laws and higher postal rates “just make it harder for those of us in the nonprofit sector to do the kind of thing that the administration calls us to do—that is, contribute in a voluntary way to the moral character of the country,” says John Stapert of the Associated Church Press.

Why the attack on nonprofits? In Congress’s ongoing battle with the budget deficit, nonprofits appear an easy target for “revenue enhancement” programs. But we fear the root of the attack lies with lawmakers’ failure to recognize and appreciate the full value of nonprofits’ contribution to society.

If nonprofits are to continue playing their vital role, two things need to happen. First, the public must recognize the irony behind government attacks on the part of the American community that contributes so much to so many. Second, the public must make this clear to legislators. If the government wants nonprofits to continue to house the homeless and feed the nation’s hungry, then it must give them the flexibility to develop methods of self-funding and stop asking them to solve its own budgetary problems.

Says Stapert, “We all do for free in our voluntary associations a lot of things that contribute to the health of this nation, because we care about our communities—things that we might not be willing to do for pay.” As some diners at the congressional cafeteria recently learned, there is no such thing as a free lunch. They should also learn that if someone else is willing to pick up the tab, don’t pocket the tax and ask for a tip.

By the editors.

Cynical We Fall

“It’s a season for scandal,” says the men’s magazine M, Inc. The names and the misdeeds change from month to month, but no arena of public life—law, finance, politics—goes for long, it seems, without some revelation of wrongdoing in high places. And Americans have thoroughly learned—if they missed the lesson before—that even church leaders are not exempt from a fall from grace. How shall we respond?

One answer is cynicism. From Watergate on, we have not only become more willing to talk about the failings of our public figures, we have come to expect sins in the closet. Some greeted the recent disclosures of “Rubbergate,” where members of the House of Representatives routinely overdrew their accounts in the House bank, more with snickers than outrage. We have become more jaded and less shocked by our leaders’ liaisons and improprieties. It is no surprise, perhaps, that researchers James Patterson and Peter Kim report in The Day America Told the Truth that 70 percent of Americans say they have no living heroes.

Christians, however, can ill afford to have the same cynicism about their religious leaders as Americans show politicians. Which leads to a different response: placing our confidence not in leaders, but in God. We who talk of original sin know as well as anyone about the dark side of the human heart. But we also know something about God’s sovereign ability to work through people and see his purposes fulfilled. It will take more than the outrageous spending or sexual misdeeds of famous preachers to derail the church’s forward movement.

If we forget that, cynicism could drive us even further apart as the people of God and make united witness a mere wish. In a recently completed survey on evangelism, we asked CT readers what obstacles kept them from evangelizing (watch for detailed results in our next issue). The most common obstacle cited was the prevailing image of TV preachers as “religious hucksters.”

While cynicism may make us overly wary, a false compassion could make us lower the standards we hold our leaders to. Both would be mistakes. Both would make the bad news about Christian leaders we sometimes hear even worse.

By Timothy K. Jones.

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