The Official Site of Andy Boucher

written October 2009

My Summary: 

In this new economic and cultural climate, I believe that Christian education plays an even more important role that it has been given credit for in the church and even in the world of Christian education. As we move forward, I believe that Christian education needs to quickly transition from being another option of educating our children alongside the public and charter schools and homeschooling; and from an opportunity to provide better academic education and athletic state championships into a effective movement of preparing Christian students to serve the Kingdom of God both in and out of the church. Christian education doesn’t have the luxury of being mediocre or trying to be like other schools. Christian education must be unique in its target, focus, and outcomes. Christian educators must think beyond test scores, sports championships, buildings, and endowment funds (all of which are valuable and indespensible to excellent Christian education), and must focus on preparing our students to be active Kingdom leaders in a changing world. Christian students must learn to take a proactive lead in all areas of ministries both in the church and in the work place. We can no longer simply hope that our students understand how to be a physicist from a Christian perspective or a politician from a Christian perspective. They need to be blatantly instructed that Christian statisticians behave and analyze and report in this way; pastors act and live and preach like this or that, and so on.  This is just the beginning of the changes we need to make. 

In the bullet points below, I have pulled ideas and quotes from the Internet Monk's 3 blogs on the "Coming Evangelical Collapse" that I believe applly to the needed changes in  Christian education and the up and coming role of Christian education as Evangelicalism collapses.

Teaching Doctrine

Christian teachers need to teach their students so that their students are able to:

• Understand and articulate the Gospel with coherence;
• Understand and articulate the basics of the Christian faith in the orthodox form
• Understand and articulate why they should obey the Scriptures
• Understand and articulate the essentials of theology and experiences of spiritual disciplines and community
• Understand and articulate the strong core of evangelical beliefs
• Have a confidence in the Bible
• Understand and articulate how to follow Christ in a post-Christian, post-Evangelical, post-Protestant era
• Identify heresy (not just cults), relativism, and confusion within Christian doctrine
• Understand and articulate the value of Biblical authority
• Understand and articulate accurate Biblical views on the economic implications of the Gospel and Christian living and affluence and identify the difference between Biblical views and the adaptations of current cultural views into Christianity.

Teaching Ecclesiology

Christian schools need to teach:

• That church an approach to church that is more than “the pragmatic, therapeutic, church growth oriented mega churches”
• The value of the historical churches
• The basic call of the church
• The preservation and communication of the essentials of the Gospel and the church itself
• The importance of innovation, being missionally minded, being historically and confessionally orthodox
• How to be culturally appropriate

Teaching Leadership

Christian schools need to provide leadership training that:

• Teaches biblical authority and how it relates to leadership in the church
• The importance of strong Biblical leadership [Henri J.M. Nouwen/C. Clark]
• Teaches innovation in re-structuring churches and church organizations

Other Conclusions:

• With the predicted passing of the traditional seminary system, I (Boucher) see the role of Christian education as being an important baseline of preparing students to be lay and vocational participants in the church in the areas of core orthodox doctrines, practical methods of leadership, the Gospel, spiritual disciplines
• I see the role of the internship program and mentoring as being key
• Christian school can no longer produce a product that simply holds the line in the rising tide of secularism (blog 1, point 2) or simply be used by the Christian community to staff its own needs and talk to itself (blog 1, point 4)