Education

I recently made my first trip to Clearwater Christian College. Dr. Dave Burggraff asked me to come and do a three-day presentation on the book that I just wrote about having daily personal devotions. I flew into Tampa on a rainy Tuesday night just ahead of Ernesto.

Although the title of this article presents a negative connotation, my goal in writing it is one of encouragement.

Tremors are shaking the field of Christian education. Some ministries do not notice, some have heard of the shaking, some have felt it, some have felt it hard, and then some are the ground-stomping tree-shakers. The shaking is starting to grow larger and broader and noisier every year. The shaking has inspired Gene E. Veith, Jr. and Andrew Kern to write a book titled Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America.

To ask, “What is the biblical philosophy of Sunday school?” is a loaded question: the question is loaded with the assumption that the Sunday school should be there, and it is loaded with all our circumstantial preconceptions of the Sunday schools we’ve grown up attending. There is no “biblical philosophy” of Sunday school per se; no concordance search will locate the “Sunday school chapter” of the Bible, telling us how, or even that, God wants Sunday school conducted.

At the SharperIron website, there are a number of Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries represented by contributing authors, forum administrators, members, and visitors. Now that a new academic year has just begun, it might be a useful exercise for us to reflect on our postsecondary institutions and consider why they do what they do. To get started, perhaps we should ask, “What is [insert the name of a given institution]’s ultimate goal, or mission?” The purpose of this article is to generate discussion on the development of a philosophy of Christian higher education.

When we speak of the price of a Christian education, many think only of dollar signs. True, expenses have risen, and one can no longer attend a Christian college for approximately $1,000 a year as I did when I began my freshman year of college!