 Education is a lot of work, whether it's students going through grades 1 to 8 or 1 to 12, Bible Institute kind of studies, it's a lot of work to do it, a lot of work to manage it, and today we're gonna have a conversation exploring why, why is that worth it. Our guest is Paul Emerson, and Paul has been involved in both various day schools, as well as other forms of Christian education, Bible Institute, and things like that, so excited to welcome him to Anabaptist Perspectives. If our conversations can just kind of range over both of these, but let's start with the Bible Institute, you're involved with El Nora Bible Institute, and maybe just frame what's the overarching goal or purpose. I would say the overarching goal is spiritual formation for primarily directed to young people, 18 and older, we do have some older students from time to time, I guess the oldest we've had as a full-time student would have been 68 maybe, but typically it's the young people. When people hear about Bible Institute, some people think the social component is the main one, that is not how we feel, we feel that the biblical component is the main one, and so we're looking for the impact of scripture on the life of the student. So, yeah, scripturally intensive focus, is there a social part of that though, I don't know if you especially include having live instructors and so on. Yeah, there's a social component, relationships are built, faculty to students, student to faculty, student to student, certainly, and then there are what we might call purely social times for the typical Anabaptist game time for part of an evening. I guess you could think of those effects too in terms of the student's life, he said spiritual formation, what you want them to get from Bible school, and is that also a piece that translates back to, this is the church community, we want to enrich the church community by maybe mostly training individual people. Yeah, we would see ourselves as coming alongside churches and helping them in these ways. We would feel that it's an opportunity, young persons away from home, opportunity for them to examine themselves to see whether they'd be in the faith as the scripture says, and so we kind of start out with the gospel. Not doubting that they may have heard it in their churches and may have committed to Christ, but still wanting to be sure that we all understand the gospel in its full sense. And that's because you don't want to take anything for granted. I think the biggest error that we can make probably in this part of our ministry is to assume that someone is saved. I think our better assumption or our default position should be, we will assume that they're not saved until they prove otherwise. Do you want to say anything about some of the other things you do at the Bible Institute that aren't just for young people, maybe some of the seminars you run for pastors or whatever? Yes, we have seminars for ministry, training, pastoral kinds of things, and also there's a seminar each year on expository preaching. We also have a discipleship seminar, otherwise known as biblical counseling. These are week-long type of meetings in the fall. It's, again, a way we come alongside of the church and encourage ministry and others in various ministry opportunities within their church. Yeah, I like that model because it's very hard for somebody in the stage of life that a church leader is usually in. It's very hard for them to take 15 weeks or 6 weeks and do the intensive course, but if it's packaged in a week and you can speak right where they are. Yeah, let's shift a little bit to educating children more broadly, the K-12 education. Yeah, we talk about goals and so on. You want to just tell us a little bit maybe about your, summarize a little bit of the experience you had with that. Let's start with. I suppose it started when I was young in terms of an interest in education. My mother was a public school teacher who left off her teaching when she had children. In the process, left us a bit of a heritage with view to getting involved in education some way. That bore fruit after I became a minister with the idea of starting a church-controlled Christian school. I was first involved in that in 1975 and have been involved variously ever since in some aspect of education. We would see the primary responsibility for education of children resting on the parents, but we do see the importance of the community being involved, the community of faith, that is to say the local church. Either for accountability if the parents choose homeschool or for actually providing education as an extension of the home in a Christian school setting. The reason for primary education and secondary education in our thinking is not so that they can get a good job or even so that they can go to college. Though a number of them will go to college, the reason is to prepare them to be trained in reading, understanding, be able to understand the scriptures and apply the scriptures in daily life. In other words, it is more the idea that they are preparing to serve in the kingdom with the ultimate goal of doing that with heavenly or eternal view, with a view to eternity and what really will matter and what will be here a million years from now, or what they will be experiencing a million years from now rather than just the immediate 40 or 50 years that's ahead of them. Yeah, I got a sort of follow up to that. I'm just curious though. You said 1975, was that like legally difficult to start a school then? I know the earlier days the Christian school movement was that or did you have smooth sailing as far as government was concerned? Well, we were living in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at the time and there were court cases all over the place regarding Christian schools and the home school movement actually was beginning just in that time period and those parents were not particularly godly parents, they were not particularly Christian. They were actually professors at the University of Massachusetts which was nearby. They were immediately prosecuted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor by violating the truancy laws and so they had much deeper pockets than we did and as a result they actually paved the way for a certain amount of appropriate liberty in Christian education. For us, though I'm sure they did that unintentionally, however we did run afoul of a part of the state code at one point which managed to get my picture on the front of the local newspaper and so forth. We never were involved legally. The state ended up working with us to kind of bypass their own regulations to permit us to go forward with the school. Yeah, and that kind of thing has gotten a lot easier over the years legally although we don't know how long that will last. Right. Certainly could change. Yeah, back to purpose, just thinking a couple things there. Yeah, so learning to read the scriptures and that's been a Christian theme all along. Peach lots of people to read so they can read the Bible. I guess I could hear somebody say, yeah, but we learn to read the scriptures, but we learn to read by the time we're in third grade, second, third grade. Why do we need high school and Bible Institute? Yeah, that's not my perspective, but I can see the point too. While you learn to read then, hey, the rest of it can take care of itself. So why would you have a literature course in college and university? Why would you study genre and all of that and advanced studies? Learning to read may not be learning to read with understanding. And I'm not saying that scripture cannot be understood by a child. It can be. But there is a sense in which it is, as it says, new every morning. And some of that is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit and interpretation. But some of it also is understanding the depths of the language in which it is written. And so I think that's a lifelong study and formal education contributes to it. Yes, and I have certainly found that true in my life. There's learning to read as in, you know, sounding out the words. I'm looking up the words, and then there's learning to read as in, okay, actually thoughtfully engaged with what the author is saying. Most importantly, scripture. What about schools and Christian character? Because I get this sometimes from the Christian school movement, and I think I mostly agree, but it always brings up questions when it's like, well, our primary role of the school is, you know, we provide examples and we form Christian character and academics are secondary or something like that. And I guess there's two things. One is, I think the academics are important. But secondly, I'm left wondering, well, if we're about forming character, is school actually the place to do that? Or is that something done at home? I don't know, how do you think about schools as character formation? I would think that is probably secondary. Don't get me wrong. I feel that character development is very important and character reinforcement are good character reinforcement. And we would want our Christian schools to contribute to that. But I would see it more in the realm of reinforcement. I think too many times parents will send their children to a Christian school, perhaps because they haven't done a very good job themselves in character development of these children. They expect the school to fix them. And that is a terrible mistake. And the school needs to be pretty careful in accepting that situation. They should dig around in an application process and come to understand what the parents really expect. Because if the parents expect the school to fix their mistakes, it's going to be one error piled on another and will negatively affect the whole school. That's interesting because just last week, I had a conversation with a school leader where our children are going and the same conversation came out the importance of the family interview because it's like, well, is the family doing things in a way that this is actually not a school, but it's a homeschooling support organization that we as a organization can effectively partner with them if there's not enough coming from home. We can't really work with it. We need to know our parents and develop the partnership. I think that the Christian school can be very helpful in building community and helping children understand the dynamics of community, particularly where there's not a broad church community of children the same age. There are things that school can do sociologically, if I can put it that way. But the school is going to be limited in what it can do when the home is not doing what it biblically is required to do. So then my last question, and then I'll give you the opportunity if you have any other places you'd like to think thoughts you'd like to share, but just how important is it to do distinctively Christian education in terms of organizing the schools? Obviously, if you're doing a Bible institute, you're teaching the Bible, but that general learning to read, like why organize our own schools versus using public options or private school options, going to a secular university to study genre and things like that. How do you think about that? Well, personally, I'm committed to Christian education, biblical Christian education. And this is why. I think that the world in a given instance may be more intelligent than we. I think that's sort of suggested in 1 Corinthians. So we're not talking about intelligence. We're talking about worldview. How do we view the world? And the secularists views it an entirely different worldview than we do. To the point where I think we can apply a scripture that says that they don't know anything as they ought to know it. They know lots of things. They may be more intelligent than we, and probably are in many cases, but they don't know anything as they ought to know it. In other words, from a Christian biblical worldview. And those anti-biblical worldviews, which I would kind of lump all together, are infectious. We are influenced by our environment academically, particularly, because it's a matter of the mind. And therefore, I would see it's very important to have a biblical, formal biblical education, Bible-based Christian education at all levels. It may be elusive at the higher education level. But by the time you're at higher education, you're a little more equipped than a child, so things are a little different. Yes, if we've done our job as churches and communities anyhow, yeah, help equip people with that level. Yeah, it's good to flush it out. This episode actually kind of stems from a lunch table conversation we had a number of years ago. I remember asking you something about, though, why you're involved in education, and there you gave the very direct answer, well, God doesn't put, I don't think God puts a premium on ignorance. Anything else you'd like to say in closing on this episode? Well, we reflect on Colossians chapter 2, where it presents the fact that Christ is the fountainhead of all wisdom and knowledge. In essence, education is Christology in some form or other. I would take that from the text, or apply that from the text. And then church involvement would be a subset of that. And for Timothy 3, I believe it's verse 16, 15 or 16 talks about the church as the buttress. Again, it's foundational for truth. That's stretching it just a bit out of the context. He's talking about church order and so on there. But still, I think that the church needs to be involved coming alongside of parents with children and coming alongside of any effort at education, such as the Bible Institute. The church is the part of God's program that gives some regulation, some accountability, and that sort of thing. So that is how I view education in general. And that applies whether you're interacting with a private school or homeschool or educational levels. It may not be directly done by the church, the organized church, but it's accountable too. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We invite you to join our monthly partner program. Monthly partners are key to the financial sustainability of Anabaptist perspectives. Partners also gain access to bonus content, including our exclusive podcast where we respond to audience questions and comments. Sign up at anabaptistperspectives.org.