The End to Homeschooling Part 2

It’s been awhile since I wrote part 1 of The End of Home Schooling so you may want to read it in our archives (click here) to understand the context of the following.

So, who did or should the graduates have identified with?  Our speaker gave them a few moments to ponder the question and shocked them with the suggestion that they identify with as “Kevin”, the homeless man.

 Was our speaker crazy? Had he forgotten who he was speaking to?  These graduates’ parents had sacrificed to give them the best education they knew how.  They had invested their time (teaching them formally and informally), their money (books, curriculum, etc.), had taught them right from wrong, and had read the Bible to them regularly.

But that was his point.

No one wants Kevin’s life.  No one wants to grow up in a dysfunctional family or be around dysfunctional family members.  Addiction brings pain to the addict and those closest to him or her.  But having the pedigree of the girl our speaker described may actually be a source of spiritual danger if we forget the end or purpose of home schooling. 

Around the same time our graduation ceremony was taking place, another was taking place on the East Coast.  The speaker was addressing the graduating class of the Christian high school he was years before expelled from.  I loved reading about it.  The amazing thing was that he was raised in a very loving and godly family.  His grandparents and grandfather in particular were Christian leaders on an international scale.  He attended a conservative Christian school.  In spite of all these advantages, he went off the rails and got himself into serious trouble.  He was kicked both out of school and out of his home, taken away in a police car.  He drifted for a long time.  But here he was, renewed in his faith, and speaking to students from his former high school.  The speaker was Tullian Tchividjian, the grandson of Billy Graham.

The end of home schooling in my mind is helping our children participate in a vital relationship with Jesus Christ.  You might be thinking, of course, we “know” that.  Our kids came to Christ in Sunday school, or Awana, or we led them to the Lord ourselves.  But the problem is that many of us left our gospel focus when our children accepted Christ and substituted “character development” or raising modern knights (or princesses) or establishing a Biblical Worldview in its place.  Jesus got bumped, and the above things, good as they might be, became ultimate things and took center stage in our home-schooling efforts.

The spiritual danger of having many of the above advantages is that it’s easy to shift our focus away from Christ and our daily need for His grace.  In fact, our very obedience can stand in the way of knowing Him.  A character in a book by Flannery O’ Conner put it this way, “that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”  In other words, by focusing on keeping the rules we cease seeing the Scriptures as first and foremost a revelation of Jesus Christ and often look at the Bible as an instruction manual for living the “our best life now” or something like that.   The switch is often subtle and gradual.

So, when our speaker appealed to our graduates to identify with Kevin, he was saying that humility, brought about by brokenness, leads to receiving mercy and grace, both essential to our growth as Christians.  Or, put another way by The Old White Guy, “the most dangerous thing in the lives of Christians is their obedience when they know they are being obedient, and the best gift we have is our sin, when we know we are sinning.”

Thanks for reading!
Curt Bumcrot, MRE