On August 25, 2013, I had the privilege to interview noted homeschool speaker and author, Israel Wayne. He is an outspoken proponent for the homeschool movement and teaches Christians that home education should be considered an extension of our God given parental duties. Mr. Wayne also states that homeschooling should not be done so that we can produce smarter and more conservative minded children than their government school counterparts. Rather, homeschooling should be done for the express purpose of cultivating a biblical worldview in our children, leading them to the blood stained cross of Jesus Christ and bringing God the glory He is due. Our interview was aired during the Cross Encounters Radio program and can also be heard at Sermon Audio by clicking on the link below. I pray you take the time to listen to this interview. Whether you are just considering homeschooling or you are an experienced pro, I believe Israel Wayne’s insights will be a blessing to you.
public school
The erosion of parental rights.
Sermon of the week: “The Sufficiency of Scripture and the Gospel” by Paul Washer.
We who home educate, oppose youth ministries, believe Christians should dress modestly, etc. are often accused of believing this way of life makes one a Christian and makes one holy. And of course, we deny those baseless charges of “legalism” but nevertheless, the accusations are still hurled at us.
This is why I’m pleased to present this Thursday’s sermon of the week entitled The Sufficiency of Scripture and the Gospel. Paul Washer (a home education proponent and youth ministry abolitionist himself) proves that not everyone in this camp is a legalist, and to those in this camp who may tend to lean that way, he does for them in this sermon as he did for the lukewarm in his famous Shocking Sermon from 2003 (found here).
Paul Washer addresses the notion that these wonderful family oriented ideals (along with manners, modesty, etc.), albeit beautiful and virtuous and good, they in and of themselves do nothing to save a man’s soul. And he did this at a conference sponsored by the National Center for Family Integrated Churches.
This is classic Paul Washer.
How “socialized” government school kids “interact” on the bus.
It’s pretty bad when a local news station has to get involved in a matter like this because the school won’t help to put a stop to the violence perpetrated against a four-year-old girl.
You can see the video and read the article here.
If this is the Lord of the Flies socialization I keep hearing that my home educated kids are missing out on, then I think they’ll be just fine.
Pay no attention the the government education professionals behind the curatin.
Here is a quote from a great article by Bruce Shortt writing for WorldNet Daily:
“Of course, evidence of catastrophic educational failure is always dismissed by highly trained education professionals by alternately screeching ‘socio-economic status’ and ‘demographics.’ These phrases are the education establishment’s equivalent of squid’s ink: When cornered by inconvenient facts, shouts of ‘socio-economic status’ and ‘demographics’ usually allow highly trained education professionals to create confusion and slip away quietly from embarrassing revelations about what they have done to the children entrusted to them.”
Read the entire article here.
Public school field trip to a mosque.
Shocking video. As if we needed one more reason to home educate our children.
DefCon is now on FaceBook.
Defending Contending has finally joined the world of social networking. We are now on Facebook and you can ‘friend’ us here.
Second-grader sent home and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation for drawing a crucifix.
After a class was instructed to sketch something that reminded them of the Christmas holiday, one student drew a crucifix. Apparently, however, according to the godless government-run public school, not only did Christ’s birth have nothing to do with His birth (like they know anything about theology anyway), but it also warranted this child’s removal from school and necessitated a psychological evaluation. Read more about this shocking story from Massachusetts.
Welcome to a brave new world.
Not content with lowering the educational bar, one public school was selling grades.
Yet one more reason to support your local home school: a public school in North Carolina was actually selling grades. It reminds me of the Roman Catholic organization who sells indulgences; but I digress.
Here’s a quote from the news article:
“To my mind, it’s the integrity of the educational enterprise that’s at stake here,” said Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics.
I’m sorry to report, Daniel, but you’re a little late. The integrity of government education was lost a long time ago.
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When I would yell at my children, I was teaching them that they didn’t have to do what I said whenever I said it, just when it was important enough (or I was mad enough) to raise my voice. What’s worse, I was undermining my wife’s authority in the home because she wasn’t as big and scary and didn’t have as deep a voice as me. Thus my word (thundered through the house) became the standard for eliciting obedience. We do not want our children to do what we say with conditions attached. We want them to obey, period. Learning not to repeat ourselves, not to yell, not to call the offending child by all three of his or her names, but to speak in clear, level tones and follow through with consequences for every act of disobedience has completely transformed our home.
– Voddie Baucham
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Any mother who walks into the average American church with six or seven children will tell you, the pagan, secular humanist culture at large is not alone in its negative attitude toward children. Moreover, look at the divorce rates among Christians compared to those of non-Christians, and you will see that our attitudes about and commitment to marriage is anything but exemplary.
– Voddie Baucham
Working moms.
The U.K.’s Daily Mail has posted an interesting article entitled So Should Working Mums Feel Guilty?
Although the mother interviewed wasn’t as penitent as I expected her to be, she did reveal the dirty little secret feminists won’t tell you: Mother’s who work away from home end up feeling like they missed out on the most important thing about motherhood . . . raising their children.
It may seem strange to some, but it is only recently that I have felt able to acknowledge that mixing work and children comes with its downsides. Why did it take me so long? Part of me doggedly believed I had to stick to my ‘line’ – that work gave me independence, adventure and, of course, money. But I have to admit that another part didn’t want to examine what the effect of more than 20 years of working motherhood had had on my children.
The mother goes on to say:
It’s obvious, perhaps, but what I give them now, which I rarely could before, is my attention.
And:
But maybe my 20-plus years of working motherhood is not such a great thing to crow about after all. I wouldn’t deny any other woman the chance to step into my working-day stilettos, but I would whisper: ‘Are you sure that it’s the right thing to do for everyone – children and husband included – and not just you?’
But just when you thought this story would have a redemption-type ending, it’s evident that the cycle will continue with her daughter when her daughter says:
My mother’s parenting was, in some ways, unorthodox. She instilled in me an appreciation of my own independence from an unusually young age. I was never asked whether I had done my homework each night and that is the way I liked it. . . . In fostering a sense of autonomy, she also showed great respect for my privacy. I am never asked irritating questions about boyfriends, a plight suffered only too frequently by many of my friends. I knew girls at school whose mothers had only them on whom to focus, pressuring them to achieve the best grades, get into the most prestigious universities and even to acquire the most appropriate boyfriends.
The daughter continues:
I respect a woman’s choice to take on the role of mother full time. It is, of course, one that comes with many challenges and infinite rewards. However, while I expect to take more time off work than my mother was able to when my children are small, I plan to have a career, too. My mother has started to question her life choices, but I defend them wholeheartedly. A trip to Egypt last year and various spa visits over the past few years have been testament to the fact that our relationship is a good one.
You can read the whole article here.
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See also:
Voddie Baucham’s sermon Biblical Womanhood.
The Berean Wife’s article Feminism Has Made Women Unhappy.
Other articles from the Daily Mail feature on DefCon under the posts The Attack on Men and Fathers and Not Dying For the Sins of Her Father.
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According to researchers, between 70 and 88 percent of Christian teens are leaving the church by their second year in college. That’s right, modern American Christianity has a failure rate somewhere around eight (almost nine) out of ten when it comes to raising children who continue in the faith. Imagine the alarm if nearly 90 percent of our children couldn’t read when they left high school. There wouldn’t be room enough at school board meetings to hold all of the irate parents.
– Voddie Baucham
Sermon of the week: “Whoever Controls the Schools Controls the World” by Voddie Baucham.
Hold onto your hats. Your sermon of the week is a scathing blow to the concept of government education by Voddie Baucham entitled Whoever Controls the Schools Controls the World.
Baucham clearly lays out the argument against Christian parents subjugating their parental responsibilities to the Godless, Marxist behavioral engineering centers known as public schools.
All Christians who have or are expecting to have children need to hear this message. And those who currently have their kids enrolled in government schools may squirm in their seats during Baucham’s message, but this is a message that you simply must hear.
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Many object to homeschooling or private Christian schools based on the fact that God has called us to be “salt” and “light” and to evangelize the world. Ironically, this is precisely why we chose homeschooling. The Great Commission states: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I command you” (Matthew 28:19-20, emphasis added). How is this likely apart from Christian education? How can I effectively “make disciples” of my children if I send them off to the government school forty-five to fifty hours per week? The Nehemiah Institute, The National Study of Youth and Religion, and the Barna Report have shown us clearly that our children do not even understand–let alone obey–all that the Lord has commanded. Moreover, how can our children evangelize our government schools if they don’t know what they believe and why they believe it? Not to mention that all of the evidence currently points to the fact that our children are the evangelized, not the evangelists, in our nation’s schools. They are the ones being carried away by every wind of doctrine. . . . The Nehemiah Institute continues to demonstrate year after year that Christian children in government schools who actually retain anything close to a biblical worldview are the rare exception and not the rule. . . . Let me be clear–I applaud men and women whom God has called to teach in government schools. These people are front-line warriors, and they need to be right where they are. However, there is a big difference between sending fully trained disciples into enemy territory and sending recruits [children] to our enemy’s training camp. If we do the latter, we shouldn’t be surprised when they come home wearing the enemy’s uniform and charging the hill of our home waving the enemy flag.
– Voddie Baucham
Public school: Be afraid, be very afraid.
“Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state.”
– Adolf Hitler
“Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
– Charles F. Potter, Humanism: A New Religion 1930 p.128
“I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being… The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbor’ will finally be achieved.”
– John J. Dunphy, The Humanist, Jan. 1983 p.26
Yet another benefit to homeschooling your children.
Ingrid has reported on her blog Hope in Laodicea of yet another example of problems with the public schools. It’s examples like this that contributes to homeschooling’s growing popularity. Trust me, these kinds of incidents happen more often than you think. In fact, here’s another one.
Christ Alone Wyoming 