God in the classrooms
By Ivan Ho First written 4 Jul 2016
God is everywhere present!
The problem we have is that we tend to have the notion that God is only present during the couple of hours when we attend church on Sundays. We go to church and we expect God to show up at the time and place we set aside for Him. In our heads we know that God is everywhere present, but in practice that’s how we see God. We program God according to our busy schedules.
In fact, this notion has been subtly introduced into people’s mindsets since they were kids. Typically children were placed into Sunday schools, a Western idea which typically gathers children on Sundays to teach them knowledge of God. I have never been to a Sunday school when I was a kid nor have I taught in one. I think Sunday school can be a great idea but if it develops into a program where children can only experience God for an hour or so when their parents can worship God in peace, we are doing the children a massive disservice. This is because we only have plans for the kids for an hour a week whereas the devil is working hard to teach the children in the secular school system, music, cartoons, books, video games and what have you the whole week!
“Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday school’s meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
(Charles F. Potter, “Humanism: A New Religion,” 1930)
How many children who grow up in Sunday schools will go on to follow Jesus in their adult lives, I wonder?
Jesus says: “Don’t stop the children from coming to me.” Jesus wants to reach out to every child who belongs to Him first and the parents second. In fact, as soon as they are born, God’s presence is with them. Trouble is, so does the devil, he wants to take the kids and teach them his ways and I must say, he is working a lot harder than most Christians do!
The domain of education is now largely a secular system in which the secular humanists have been very successful in indoctrinating children and young people with their godless religion five days a week.
John J. Dunphy, in his award winning essay, The Humanist (1983), said: “The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: A religion of humanity – utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to carry humanist values into wherever they teach. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new – the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”
Surely the devil has a strategic plan for the children, but do we?
One of the greatest needs today, I believe, is to take back the classrooms for God where He belongs! We must change our mindset of confining God in our Sunday school programs and download strategies from above to influence and redesign the whole education domain for Christ!