ORLANDO (FBW)—A fledgling movement among Southern Baptists to promote denomination-wide Christian education for children in elementary and secondary schools is known as “Kingdom education.” The concept was promoted at a May 11 Florida Baptist Kingdom Education Summit jointly sponsored by the Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools and Florida Baptist Convention.

Held at First Baptist Church, Orlando, the Summit — which included about 80 pastors, denominational leaders and school administrators across the Sunshine State — explored the possibilities for greater commitment to Christian education among Southern Baptists.

Kingdom education proponents said that the movement is an attempt to reconnect the efforts of the home, church and school as a unified approach to the education of Southern Baptist children against the onslaught of moral relativism and spiritual compromise so often present among public schools.

“I don’t believe we can allow the home, church and the school to operate separately, piecemeal, or guess what? We’re going to face defeat,” said Glen Schultz, director of LifeWay Christian School Resources for the SBC’s publishing house, LifeWay Christian Resources.

Schultz said that one of the reasons Christians are losing their children to secular worldviews is because of the overwhelming influence of education and media in contrast to the limited influence of the church.

“The reason the world is winning the culture war is they’ve got the influence that we don’t have. The church has become something that Christians do on Sunday mornings on their way to something else,” he said, noting that most Christians are exposed to biblical truth only a few hours per week, while education and media has virtually “24/7” access to believers.

The result of such exposure, Schultz said, is that merely nine percent of Christian teens agreed that there are moral absolutes and only seven percent believed they are based on the Bible, according to a 2001 study by pollster George Barna. Youth evangelist Jay Strack, according to Schultz, notes that 88 percent of kids in evangelical churches “will forsake the church, if not their faith, by the time they are 18.”

“What are we willing to do, what are we will to pay to make sure our kids think biblically? Or will we find Christianity as we’ve been blessed to know it in our country die out soon after our children’s deaths?” Schultz asked. “It’s an issue of how are we to educate our kids? How do we engage in this culture war? The only way we can do it is for home, church and school to unite and form a unified whole.”

Schultz defines Kingdom education as, “the life-long, Bible-based, Christ-centered process of leading a child into a new identity with Christ and developing him/her according to the specific abilities given him/her by Christ so that the child will be empowered to live a life characterized by love, trust and obedience to Christ.”

In his book, Kingdom Education: God’s Plan for Educating Future Generations, Schultz outlines nine biblical principles which characterize the concept (with selected biblical references):
• The education of children and youth is the primary responsibility of parents (Ps. 127:3; Deut. 6:7-9; Eph. 6:4).
• The education of children and youth is a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week process that must take place from birth through maturity (Deut. 11:19; Prov. 22:6).
• The education of children and youth must have as its primary goals the salvation and discipleship of the next generation (Matt. 28:19-20; Ps. 78:6-7).
• The education of children and youth must be based on God’s Word as absolute truth (Matt. 24:35; Ps. 119:89).
• The education of children and youth must hold Christ preeminent in all of life (Col. 2:3; Luke 11:52).
• The education of children and youth must not hinder the spiritual and moral development of the next generation (Matt. 18:6; Matt. 19:13-14).
• The education of children and youth, if and when delegated to others by parents, must be done by teachers chosen with utmost care to ensure that they all follow these principles (Ex. 18:21; 1 Sam. 1:27-28).
• The education of children and youth results in the formation of lifestyles or worldviews that will be patterned after the belief systems or worldviews of their teachers (Luke 6:40; Phil. 4:9).
• The education of children and youth must have a view of the future that includes the eternal perspective (Col. 3:1-2; Col. 3:23-24).

Although most pastors “amen” the principles of Kingdom education, Schultz said that he often asks the pastors, “Can you amen the implications of practicing them?”

The challenge for Southern Baptists, according to Schultz, is “making sure the faith of our fathers becomes the faith of our kids. …. Or, will they go out and blend invisibly into a culture and a world that already says the Bible is irrelevant?”