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Southern Baptists may be abandoning public schools
Via OneNewsNow, I discovered a story by former Southern Baptist Convention president Morris Chapman that appears to call for SBC churches to begin setting up Christian schools. I now wonder if our focus in the evangelical community should shift at least in part from training our children during the transition to adulthood to placing greater emphasis on training up a child in the way he should go. I'm not advocating the neglect of what we have already established in higher education, but simply a course correction in an area that seems to have suffered neglect -- the protection and nurturing of the spiritual health and growth of children and adolescents. In far too many public schools throughout the country our children are being bombarded with secular reasoning, situational ethics and moral erosion. Chapman calls for Southern Baptist churches to cooperate in setting up "Kingdom schools" to help train their kids. In a rather incredible statement, he actually suggests they could actually help kids survive in the real world. I find that hard to believe, given my experience of being around people who spent most of their youth in Christian cocoons. |
To understand the weight Chapman's statement may carry--he played a key role in the fundie takeover (or "steeplejacking," as Dogemperor puts it) of the SBC. He is president of the SBC's executive committee, the denomination's top administrative post. Bruce Shortt, a spokesman for Exodus Mandate, thinks that this could be the start of a wave of Southern Bapitsts pulling out of the public schools. "Historically the Southern Baptist Convention has been rather joined at the hip with the public school system," Shortt contends. "But this proposal by Dr. Chapman, I think, represents the realization that the public school system is, in reality, the youth ministry for the state church of secular humanism." Now how successful such a project will be is an open question. After all, a significant number of younger born-agains with kids have abandoned the head-in-the-sand approach to raising them.
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