Separate (Reformed!) Christian Education
Painting a CRC Future: Part 5
The CRCNA has long been denomination with high expectations, whether these were moral, intellectual, pietistic, doctrinal, practical, etc…
According to Bouma, all these expectations coalesce in the CRCNA’s commitment to it’s “vision”.
Call it a Worldview, a Motive, a Meaning System, this vision is thoroughly Comprehensive, Confessional, and Calvinistic. Bouma described this vision as ascetic, this-worldly, all pervasive and sectarian.” (p.48).
According to him, achieving such a high goal requires and intense commitment to our standards and some strong retention practices.
He identifies these requirements:
“That members have a very high level of Biblical and theological literacy in order to work out for themselves what these Christian principles are and how to apply them to life.”
“That members receive guidance and training in applying the CRC world view to their everyday lives. The connection between beliefs and behaviors is not automatic, obvious or a matter of simple logical reasoning. People must be trained to make such connections and to know what the connections are.”
“That members be provided social support for maintaining and applying their world view since it differs appreciably both in content and in the degree to which it is considered important for everyday life from the more common meaning systems of North America.”
“That members have access to organizations through which they can work to secure the larger corporate and social aims of the CRC vision. “
“That members and agencies be monitored in order to ensure that practice continues to be in conformity with Christian principles and that doctrinal purity remains.” “Behaviors which are difficult, which are not monitored and sanctioned tend to fall into disuse.”
Even a cursory glance is enough to spot a common theme: training is required!
Bouma’s argument in “How the Saints Persevere” is that the strength of CRCNA growth (in the 80s) was not due to attracting converts from outside, but from retaining members and their children through the generations.
There are 5 important structural factors in place in the CRCNA which made this retention possible, even as it resolutely sought the high standards of the CRC Vision.
He says,
“A closely knit community is necessary to the maintenance of belief in a meaning system that is not generally accepted in the larger social context of the religious group. But social support alone is not sufficient to keep alive the specific elements of the belief system. It is through a set of structural means that the CRC keeps alive the specific content of its conservative Calvinist meaning system” (p.53)
The first structural factor in CRC perseverance is “1. a system of separate day schools”.
1. Separate Christian Education
Recognizing that “Abraham Kuyper insisted that education and nurture were duties of the parents and not of the state nor the church” (p.54), the CRC set up schools that were not “parochial, in that they are not under direct control of the church”, but rather under the direct supervision of parents, church members, and educational professions together for the purpose of instructing the youth in the meaning system of the CRC’s Reformed Worldview.
The Synod of 1898 declared that
“Positively Christian instruction according to Reformed principles is the undeniable requisite for Reformed Christians. Not generally but definitely Reformed instruction is requisite for our children.” (Acts of Synod, 1898: 38ff)
And this is still the hope and the expectation in the CRC.
Our current Church Order says in Article 71
The council shall diligently encourage the members of the congregation to establish and maintain good Christian schools in which the biblical, Reformed vision of Christ’s lordship over all creation is clearly taught. The council shall also urge parents to have their children educated in harmony with this vision according to the demands of the covenant.
Bouma puts forward four “critical roles in maintaining commitment to the CRC and its meaning system."
They are training ground in which members, or more properly the children of members, develop those skills and acquire that knowledge required to maintain an active and vital commitment to a conservative Calvinist worldview.
They provide a major, real-life context within which the CRC worldview is taken seriously and has a taken-for-granted level of plausibility.
By virtue of the amount of time spent in a Christian day school a student has less opportunity for faith-disconfirming contacts with persons who do not share a conservative Calvinist worldview.
Supporting separate Christian education provides the occasion for making a significant sacrifice, the making of which requires powerful legitimization.
For this last point, Bouma says “one way of reducing the cognitive dissonance which is likely to arise when one pays for something twice (one’s taxes pay for “free” public education), is to increase one’s commitment to the CRC and a conservative Calvinist worldview.”
Thus the Christian day school is a powerful factor in CRC perseverance!
There are at least 2 ways in which we could undermine our future — not just the future of our denomination, but the future of the souls of our children — in regards to Christian education.
First, and most obviously, we could relax our expectations of Christian education. Myriad legitimate reasons are available for CRC members to use as rationalizations for public schooling. For everyone, Christian education requires sacrifices.
But this is a sacrifice that we should try very hard to make, for the sake of our children. Indeed, this is a call to the entire church to assist in this sacrifice for Christian education!
Raising up our children in the Christian faith is a priority that trumps every other priority, with the sole exception for our own personal faith commitment. And to that end, we cannot give our children to Babylon for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, when our children are at their most impressionable.
While it may sound a bit pragmatic, Bouma gives both a positive and negative reason for Christian education, when he describes the twin benefits of actively teaching and inculcating a Reformed Christian Worldview on the one hand, and “protecting its youth from dis-confirming contacts with those who do not share their beliefs and way of life” on the other hand. At first, this second reason may sound disconcerting… but I believe that our discomfort in the truth Bouma puts forward here is twofold. First, we underestimate the importance of the task we have before us in raising our children in accordance with the faith. (To be honest, I’m not sure it’s humanly possible to “overestimate” it’s importance!) Second, we live in a multicultural culture that promotes tolerance above all. We’re taught that “sheltering” children is a major sin. But we need to remove this fallacy from our minds! The head-on collision our children will face with secular culture is inevitable. It’s only a matter of time! But we should not exacerbate the influence of anti-Christian culture on our children! Instead, we need to be utilizing as much time as possible in developing them and preparing them for this confrontation.
The second way we could undermine our future in regards to Christian education would be to water-down the Reformed distinctives of our Christian day schools.
It’s a tall task to operate a private Christian day school when the alternative is “free” public education. One perennial temptation for our Reformed Christian schools is to lessen the influence and emphasis of Reformed Theology in the curriculum with the intention of growing enrollment by making our “product” palatable to a broader generic Christianity.
But this is not our meaning system. This is not our worldview.
This is not the CRC Vision, which we have already described as contrary to other meaning systems and challenging to commit to. Our students are already inundated by generic Christianity which is synergistic, rather than monergistic.
The continued health and growth of our denomination depends, in part, on a renewed commitment to Christian education and a hard-nosed dedication to keeping that education distinctly Reformed.