Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O’Neil, is often credited with saying, “All politics is local.”

A simple truth, really, is that the most important of all elections are those of our city or township councils, mayors or supervisors, school and hospital boards, water/sewer, housing, city planning commissioners, district judges, even the local sheriff.

All of us fixed on making a global impact, through education, might do well to take the words of O’Neil to heart, and, profess that “all learning is local.”

Faith-based organizations, FBOs, insist that “we can change the world,” or, “stop poverty, defuse terrorism, bring hope, defeat despair,” and a host of other laudable but hard to substantiate claims.

Under the principle of “all education is local” we must confess “we” are not the ones who are going to change the world, end poverty, and all the rest.

Who then?

To paraphrase another politico, James Carville, running Bill Clinton’s bid for the White House, “It’s the economy, stupid.” We might say, “It’s the Children. Always was, always will be the children.”

The children. The students, or learners, school-age or not-yet-born, in existing or future schools, are the carriers and deliverers of this hope, transformation, prosperity, democratic leadership – “we” dream of and claim.

So, the challenge is this: “How child-focused are our endeavors?” “How will all that we do, actually reach and impact the child in the classroom, in the school, in the community?”

We talk “Christ-Centered” as a key definer of what is “true” Christian “schooling.”

The question remains, “Are we also Child-Focused?”

Some check points on the “Are we Child-Focused” scale might be:

1. Are the children getting good nutrition, to enhance their abilities to learn?
2. Are children drinking safe water which minimizes illness and absenteeism?
3. Do children have access to mosquito nets to cut down the n of malaria?
4. Are children safe, period? Are schools refuges against abuse and exploitation on due to gender, religion, or, even their HIV status?
5. Do children, with consent from parents/guardians, have access to HIV testing, immunizations, hearing and vision screening, all of which impact ability to learn?

I could go on…these are only a few of the most basic examples of “Child-Focused” schooling, let alone the academic, cognitive considerations.

The “uncomfortable truth” is many organizations focus “top-down” as change agents to those whom we trust will be, in turn, implementers of change for teachers and, eventually, children.

Meanwhile children are figuratively dying to access a seat in an affordable school, and/or physically dying for lack of access to the most basic health services, enough to attend school, to learn, and mature mentally and physically.

Top-Side approaches have their value, but, it matters not to a child or parent whether their teacher can afford to attend a conference, if they are too sick to learn.

The irony is that minivans filled with touring educators love to have photo ops with children in schools or orphanages, clinics, or, churches. They may even get to learn the child’s name who is sitting on their lap.

The story, and daily drama, behind that name, that face, that small frame of a child, is as much a mystery to the visitor as it is to wonder, “Why did God have me born in my country, and circumstance, instead of as this child, here?”

As we consider whether our Christian schools are, or should be more, “Christ-Centered” we cannot honestly probe of this dialogue, without coming face-to-face with this question:

“How can we promote Christ-Centered schooling, apart from insuring we are also Child-Focused?”

The challenge is: Can we commit to balancing value and resources to clean water as well as curriculum workshops? Mosquito nets as equally important as teacher mentoring? Immunizations as critical as new, instructional designs?

Could the international community dedicate a percentage of every registration to yet another global gathering of Christian educators toward a fund for insuring every child has “access” to these basic “living to learn” resources?

Could every visiting teacher, workshop facilitator, curriculum designer, volunteer work team, etc. also raise and dedicate a percentage to such a fund for nets, nutrition, or, water or immunizations?

Remember – transformation is local. It’s the children.

-Dale Dieleman, WWCS Field Director for Africa

Pictured above: a pre-school destroyed in the cyclone that hit Myanmar in May.

Many of those children became orphans after losing their parents in the cyclone or the flood. One girl I met told me “I have three other siblings. Both my parents use to work on our agricultural farm where we grow crops for sell. We were happy family. We have nothing much, but ourselves and that was enough to keep us happy. Suddenly, everything change, and here I am, with nothing. My parents and siblings are all gone.

That evening, I went to bed and when I woke up, I find myself in pitch dark, blown and thrown away by strong winds above and carried away by the flood water underneath my bodies. I shouted, but none respond. I got hit by several hard object (or I hit them) and finally, I was able to hold onto one of those and it turn out to be a palm tree. I hold on there in my refusal to be thrown by the flood and storm. I am glad I persisted or else I would have been death by now. When things calm down, I looked for my parents and sibling, but I could not find, except my younger sibling. Her body was stuck between two broken branches.

FAMILIES LIVING IN THE FABRIC OF FAITHFULNESS
Gloria Goris Stronks, Ed.D.Julia Kaye Stronks, Ph.D.

This book is written for Christians who believe that while we live on this earth we are responsible to live in ways that reflect God’s love and God’s concern for justice. It presents ideas and suggestions from committed Christian parents and children, all of whom are struggling to connect the way they live with the deepest commitments of their hearts.

Over the course of the last seven years the authors interviewed many young adults about their attempts to live with intentionality in the fabric of God’s faithfulness, to use the phrase from Steven Garber’s fine book. They also interviewed the parents of these young people in an attempt to understand the kind of parenting that was part of what led their adult children to their decisions for just living. They interviewed seventh and eighth grade students from Christian families to determine their concerns and fears.

Drawing from these interviews and the scholarly works of others, the authors present ideas about how to live with gratitude, how to develop critical thinking and intelligence in children, and how to encourage ourselves and others to work for justice in a world that is broken but redeemed.

Julia Stronks is an attorney and a professor of political science at Whitworth University in Spokane, WA. Gloria was a professor of education at Calvin College and at Dordt College and since her retirement serves Worldwide Christian Schools as the director of continuing education for teachers. It is unusual for scholars to publish books on the Internet. Both of these authors have worked with prestigious publishing houses in the past but they wanted to make this book available to parents and teachers in Africa, India, and other countries around the world who might not be able to afford the book and the shipping prices of American publishers.

Families Living in the Fabric of Faithfulness may be downloaded free of charge from the following website:

www.whitworth.edu/livinginthefabric

Our faithfulness will depend on our willingness to go where there is brokenness, loneliness, and human need. If the church has a future it is a future with the poor in whatever form.

- Henri J.M. Nouwen
Sabbatical Journey (quoted in Sojourners)

Prophets of a Future Not Our Own

It helps now and then to step back and take a long
view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it
is even beyond our view.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a small fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said. No prayer
fully expresses our faith. No confession brings
perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No
program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of
goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about: We plant the seeds that
will one day grow. We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise. We lay
foundations that will need further development. We
provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our
capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do
something, and to do it well. It may be incomplete but
it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity
for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

-Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero of
El Salvador (1917-1980)

Every time you sacrifice something at great cost—every time you renounce something that appeals to you for the sake of the poor—you are feeding a hungry Christ.

- Mother Teresa

(This post was submitted by Ron Polinder to the Dan Beeren’s Nurturing Faith blog. Ron is Executive Director of Rehoboth Christian School, Rehoboth, New Mexico.)

It was a lazy Saturday afternoon. I was flipping channels, that miserable masculine habit that drives wives out of the room. I settled on C-SPAN, where a Washington reporter, Diana West, was reflecting on her new book, The Death of the Grown-Up.

“Curious title,” I think. “I better tune in to this.” The next half hour has substantially altered how I view modern history, our culture, even my profession. We all have that experience from time to time, when a writer or speaker communicates reality so clearly, so insightfully.

West proceeded to unfold her thesis, that in the past 50 years a monumental reversal has taken place. It was gradual to be sure, seeded in the ’50s, incubated in the ’60s, and epidemic in the ’70s, “leaving a nation of eternal adolescents . . . chucking maturity for perpetual youth.”

Adolescence, a concept not even known to the human condition until 1941, when the term “teenager” first appeared in our lexicon, has now been judged by the National Academy of Sciences “as the period extending from the onset of puberty, around 12, to age 30.” The MacArthur Foundation is even more radical, arguing that the “transition to adulthood” doesn’t end until the age of 34.

West notes that until “this most recent episode of human history, there were children, and there were adults. Children in their teen years aspired to adulthood; significantly, they did not aspire to adolescence. Certainly, adults didn’t aspire to remain teenagers.”

Again, for most of time, even folks of my generation, we looked forward to moving past the awkwardness of the teenage years, and looked up to grown-ups—certain teachers, relatives, even our parents. We wondered if we could be like them.

But now this amazing turnaround, where adults are straining to be like the kids. They try to talk like them, dress like them, act like them. We all know moms well into their 30s, even 40s dressing like “Britney.” Or the middle-aged house guest who quickly dismisses a well-trained child’s greeting—“I’m not old enough to be a ‘mister’; call me Bob.”

The rise of “Adolescence” has reached religious proportions, thus a capital A. And what is more important than being “Cool,” capital C, not unlike capitalizing the Bible or Christianity. Consider how many of our youth will bow their knee to a behavior or habit that will assure their “Coolness.”

And that in turn makes it so very difficult for parents to establish appropriate boundaries for their teenagers, inclined themselves—secretly, or not so secretly—to crave “Coolness.”

If you worship the god of Cool, how can you run the risk of having your kids consider you to be “out of touch,” prudish, boring?

Given that mindset, how can a parent stand up to the foolishness of youth? So parents stick their heads in the sand rather than come to grips with MTV, which was surveyed by the Parent’s Television Council during spring break 2004 for 171 hours, tallying up 1,548 sex scenes, 1,518 unedited foul language, and 3,127 bleeped profanities.

Speaking of spring break, some parents pay for their adolescent’s plane ticket so they can take part in the debauchery and drunkenness of Cancun.

All this has enormous implications for education. Sociologist David Riesman, of Lonely Crowd fame, noted that “the educator in earlier eras might use the child’s language to put across an adult message.” Now it is “no longer thought to be the child’s job to understand the adult world as the adult sees it.”

This contributes much to the dumbing down of the educational enterprise. Teachers must constantly “stand on their heads” to retain a few minutes of adolescent attention. And if they act cool, they think they have a better chance.

Happily, there are still some teachers who understand the boundary between teacher and student, and who earn the everlasting respect of their students because of it. And students who catch on to that reality are fortunate and often more successful in growing up.

The following was written our Asia Field Director, who earlier was the director of Comprenew Academy. She provides a thoughtful description of the kinds of questions Christians face in many parts of the world. We believe that relationships matter a great deal in every aspect of our work. But at times that leaves us with questions.

Comprenew Academy was a Worldwide Christian Schools “experiment” that produced results that are challenging to me. I spoke with Jerome Able (not his real name) this weekend at his graduation open house (one of our first Academy students who has remained a part-time employee of Comprenew). I asked him how many kids in his class are going on to college. He thought I meant Comprenew Academy kids, and he said, “I think 100 percent.” I said, “What about your school, Creston?” Then he said, “Oh, that would be about 50 percent.”

Loosely, it would appear that Comprenew Academy either attracted driven students (from my experience, not really) or that our focus on their future goals really did help them make that choice to pursue higher education. However, it was not a highly evangelistic effort by any means.

That’s where my personal challenge comes in, whether the Christ-centered potential was intentional enough (and I was the leader of it so I’m not criticizing anyone but myself). Is maintaining a relationship with Jerome, who is from a militant Muslim family, valid since I have not shared the gospel with him? Yes, I have encouraged his growth as a student and human being and may have played a part in where he is now, but what matters in the long run? In eternity?

Since he is a minor and I was a teacher in his life, I didn’t feel it right to encourage him in a path that would seriously disrupt his already tumultuous family life. Comprenew was the only safe place for him, outside of school, and I didn’t want to jeopoardize that in any way by threatening his family. That must be some of the things teachers in certain places of India grapple with.

We are on our way home from the WWCS-India conference. This year the conference was held in a center in Hyderabad. The temperature was 104 degrees during the day but the enthusiasm of the conferees was almost as high. Ceiling fans helped a great deal since we didn’t have an air-conditioned meeting room.

The speakers were Charles M., WWCS-India board president; Dr. Vimala PunithaKumar, president of St. Christopher’s Teachers College; Aarti (I will fill the last name in later) a psychologist who works with children and teachers; Dr. Ken Gnanakan, widely known for his work in theology, the environment, and many other areas; and me.

In spite of the warm weather there were many who said this conference was the best one we have had. I think that is because of the teams and games arranged by Avitha. One would never think of sitting around a campfire in such weather but they did and laughed so much that some of them had trouble sleeping remembering the jokes and rest of the fun.

The really great part of this conference is that the WWCS-India board composed of Charles, Avitha, and Lillian, is now a true partner of WWS. The India board will make all decisions concerning conferences, topics, and speakers. They also will make the decisions that concern projects to be supported.

I am thrilled about this turn of events because I have such admiration for that board!

Every now and then in India I meet someone who very quickly seems as familiar to me as one of my closest friends. And when I return to India it is, in part, to meet those particular people who have become my good friends.

From time to time I have wondered how that can happen so quickly between people who are from completely different cultures. I think that Henri Nouwen gives the answer:

The vision that Jesus gives us is this: That I am unconditionally loved, that I belong to God, and that I am a person who can really trust that. When I meet another person who also is rooted in the heart of God, then the spirit of God in me can recognize the spirit of God in the other person, and then we can start building a new space, a new home, a house, a community. Whether we speak about friendship, community, family, marriage, in the spiritual world we are talking about spirit recognizing Spirit, solitude embracing Solitude, heart speaking to Heart. And where this happens, there is an immense space.