Christian Teachers are Key to Discipling Christian Students
By Liz Caddow
Mon Mar 23, 2008
The Church’s clarion call throughout history has been to spread the gospel to all people and fulfill the Great Commission making “disciples of all the nations”. In the process of discipleship, we find the essence of Christian school education, which is to teach young people to observe what Christ has commanded in Scripture and disciple them along that journey. While academic excellence is important, spiritual transformation and discipleship is what distinguishes the mission of a Christian school from its secular counterparts.
The question before Christian educators, parents, and church leaders is not, “Are our children going to be discipled?” but rather “Who will be discipling them?”. Every child is indeed being discipled, but will they be discipled by design or simply by default. Students will either carefully chisel out their life view, or merely assume the default values of the culture in which they are surrounded.
So how does a Christian school disciple students? The first and most important means is through its teachers. A teacher is the living curriculum of a school. Maybe Luke said it best in 6:40 of his gospel: “when a child is fully trained, [he] will be like his teacher” (NASB). Excellent Christian teachers understand that their students will emulate them at every turn. A teacher communicates more than facts and ideas. How a teacher simply lives his/her life has a much greater influence on students than what is simply said in class each day.
A child who attends school from kindergarten through 12th grade spends more than 14,000 hours with his teachers over that 13-year period. What messages, ideas, and worldviews are being communicated to the child’s heart and mind during this massive amount of time? Are they ideas that are in harmony with our own values as Christians or are they indifferent, even hostile, to our beliefs? If we want our students to seek God’s kingdom in their lives, we must make sure we entrust them to kingdom-focused teachers.
When seeking a Christian education for your child, choose a school whose teachers are committed to constantly renewing their own minds, developing a Biblical framework from which they live their lives. That is a school that will truly be making disciples of its students and striving to fulfill its purpose as being a part of the Great Commission.
Liz Caddow
Head of School
Trinity Classical Academy
