Discipleship Through
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION
BY RON AND TONYA GORDON
W
“ e follow a discipleship model of Christian education at our school.” As I( Ron) heard these words from a senior pastor on a recent school visit, I was interested in observing and listening over the next two days to understand how they achieved this stated mission. What we found was far from the targeted level of discipleship promoted by the school. While the parents we interviewed rated the school’ s intentionality in spiritual development as a strength, over half of the teachers struggled to vocalize what it meant to teach biblically. Students and teachers estimated the percentage of students in the upper school who knew Jesus Christ as their Savior to be less than two-thirds, with less than one-third genuinely focused on developing their relationship with Christ.
This challenge is not uncommon. With an estimated 2.7 million students leaving the public school system over the past few years, 1 families simply fleeing Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ + ideologies have become a significantly higher percentage in our Christian schools. Escaping from public education triggers a far different mindset than families proactively committing to partner with a Christian school. Some studies expect this mass exodus from the public school system to accelerate through 2030, reaching as many as 16 million students and dropping the percentage of students in public education from over 85 % to 50 %. 2 Christian school leadership and their teams must recognize that their challenge is not easing but actually intensifying as they will be faced with fighting for the very soul of their Christian schools.
When the word“ discipleship” is used in Christian education, it often sparks thoughts of teaching students about Christ and His Word in Bible class, weekly chapels, and spiritual emphasis weeks. This mirrors the typical responses we hear when parents are asked what they mean by having their children develop a biblical worldview. However, the opportunity to disciple students in Christian education programs is so much more.
Fundamentally, Christian education must be seen as an integrative approach to capturing our students’ hearts, minds, souls, and strength. This can only be achieved through a comprehensive strategy that approaches every lesson, assignment, interaction, and experience through the lens of Scripture. Unless Christian education is seen this way, we will fail to achieve our Deuteronomy 6 mandate of training our children and our Matthew 28:19 commissioning of making disciples of our students.
10 THE RENEWANATION REVIEW