Baptist Journalist Urges Christian Parents: Pull Kids Out of Public Schools
by Jim Brown and Jody Brown
December 27, 2004
(AgapePress) - Southern Baptists are being challenged to pull their children out of public schools for "the good of Christ's church and the strength of their own commitment to Jesus."
Two years ago, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family drew both praise and criticism when he urged California parents not to send their children to state-run schools for fear they could be corrupted by a pro-homosexual agenda. While acknowledging there were many Christians teachers in the California system who were "struggling mightily to do what's right," he noted that kindergartners through high school seniors in the Golden State were being taught "homosexual propaganda" and "other politically correct, post-modern views."
Now two Southern Baptists are apparently following Dobson's lead. A resolution submitted to the 2004 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), convening next month in Indianapolis, Indiana, urges all leaders and members of the denomination to remove their children from government-run schools and "see to it that they receive a thoroughly Christian education."
T.C. Pinckney, editor of The Baptist Banner newsletter, co-authored the "Christian Education Resolution" to challenge members of the SBC about ending the influence of public schools on their children. He says the resolution came about after he and his friend, Bruce Shortt, realized the depths to which America's public schools had fallen.
"Currently the schools have gone down, down, down," Pinckney says, "both academically and in the principles of life or the worldview that they teach. I don't see how any thinking Christian today, if they really will think about the issue, can possibly leave their children in government schools."
Turning children over to government schools for seven hours a day may be an easy and inexpensive thing to do, Pinckney says, but he insists that it is not a choice that will bring glory to God. He says it is "absolutely ridiculous" for Christian parents to assert that their children can be "salt and light" in government schools.
Pinckney, a retired Air Force brigadier general, says when young people are placed in anti-Christian schools without being equipped to deal with that environment, the church ends up losing them to worldly pleasures and philosophies.
The SBC leader uses a military analogy to underscore his argument. "We do not take soldiers out of civilian life and immediately throw them into military combat without proper training, guidance, instruction, and practice in the skills that they're going to have to have in combat," he says.
SBC president Dr. Jack Graham has been quoted as saying that while he supports Christian education, he doubts that Southern Baptists will adopt a resolution urging parents to pull their children out of public schools. According to a report by the North Carolina Baptist News, Graham said in a recent e-mail that parents should make a "make a fully informed decision" about their children's education "after much prayer."
Another report says Shortt, co-sponsor of the Christian Education Resolution, feels that passage of the measure is less important to him than drawing attention to an already-growing movement of home schooling and starting Christian schools.
"We're trying to raise the issue in a general way, because this issue needs to come full front-and-center -- not just among leadership, but among the laity as well," Shortt told
www.EthicsDaily.com.
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