PUBLIC VERSES PRIVATE EDUCATION
You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:14-16)
I listened Tuesday morning with interest to news reports about a large American denomination. A segment of this denomination is calling for a boycott of its members against public schools. Though the denomination as a whole hasn't taken this stand, a significant and vocal faction has come to the conclusion that private Christian schools or home schooling are the only reasonable educational choices still available for Christian parents. They claim that public schools teach children that God is irrelevant.
This debate caught my attention because it illustrates the tension in which believers live with respect to the larger world. On the one hand, we are to "purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit," to "come out from them, and be separate." (II Corinthians 7:1) It's naive for us to imagine that the world's values, attitudes, and actions can't erode our faith and integrity. It's foolish to consider ourselves beyond compromise with the world. There are certainly times that believers must take a stand and choose to separate ourselves from our unbelieving neighbors.
And it's certainly in the matter of our children's education that we are most sensitive to this. It's hard to imagine placing your own child, whose only educational experiences up to that point have been in church settings with other Christians whom you know and trust, into the hands of strangers who might not share the same faith and world view as your own.
So I certainly understand the impulse to retreat from real interaction with the world, to withdraw to our Christian ghettoes and concentrate on passing on our faith to our children untouched by the influences of the world around us. It makes a lot of sense. Except that there's still the other side of this biblical tension to wrestle with: we are light, and we shouldn't think that we can hide it any more than a city on a hill can be invisible. It makes no sense for the light of God burning in us to be hidden under bowls -- Christian bowls or not.
How to live in that tension, that's the question. How to be engaged with the world without having our faith in God disengaged. How to let our lights shine in the world without allowing them to be blown out by every puff of wind. How to be, as the old slogan goes, IN the world and not OF the world.
It's not an easy tension to navigate. Anyone claiming to have easy answers is most probably not giving one side or the other sufficient weight. It's not hard to be a little bit Christian and a lot in the world, and it's not hard to maintain an ethically, morally, and politically Christian lifestyle while being nominally connected to the world. But to be fully Christian and fully engaged with the world? Much tougher.
But can we be fully Christian if we aren't fully engaged with the world?
Jesus' modeled a life firmly anchored in both the kingdom of God and the world around Him. He was always completely sold out to the will of His Father. And He was always completely aware that His Father's will had to be lived out in the context of the world around Him. To Jesus, being about His Father's business meant being in the world, being truly involved in the lives of other people. He rejected their priorities, but offered them new ones. He called their sins what they were, but offered them forgiveness. He taught them that sickness and death weren't their Father's will for them, and went around proving it. He fed hungry bellies as readily as He fed hungry spirits, healed leprous skin as willingly as He healed diseased souls. He refused to cloister Himself and chose to live in close association with sinful, violent, selfish, irreverent human beings -- many of whom thought that God was irrelevant. And yet His life was no less holy, pure, or godly for having been lived in such a profane, impure, ungodly setting.
That's the model. That's what ultimately matters, whatever decision we come to about individual questions such as education for our children: to live lives that are morally, ethically, and theologically uncompromised, but to live them in plain sight of and in close association with people who don't acknowledge Jesus as Lord. Difficult? Only because of our own weakness and shortsightedness – but not for the Spirit of God within us. The Spirit, who energized Jesus and kept Him in harmony with the voice of His Father, will do the same for us.
I personally support the public school system and disagree with the use of government funded vouchers for private schools. But I don't think the question here is really public school or no public school. The question is whether or not the church will let its light shine in the world. We can do that wherever our children go to school. And once we commit to this fundamental biblical principle, the Holy Spirit will do the rest.
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