Christian Education Series

all the world.

In my case, Sunday School fulfilled the whole commission, for it was in a Sunday School started

in the air base where I lived as a young boy that I came to know Christ. It was in Sunday School

where I got excited about reading and memorizing the Bible. Without the influence of Sunday

School in my life I know my education would have been a tool for evil rather than for the cause of

Christ. I was anti-education most of my young life. I can identify with the boy who, when his father

asked him how he liked school said, "closed." I disliked school and considered it a bore, and

visualized the end of high school as the beginning of paradise. I could not conceive of how anybody

could deliberately waste four years of their life by going off to college.

Then in my last year of high school everything changed radically, and it all revolved around

loving God with all my mind. At the same time that I was being motivated by Sunday School to get

into the Bible, I was being motivated by a high school teacher to read world literature. She made it

so interesting that I developed a love for reading. Before this I seldom took a book home. I read

only the basic requirements to get by. Now I was motivated to read and to see how all of history,

like all of life, is related to God's Word. I fell in love with all learning because I could see how

everything that can be known can illustrate the truth of Scripture.

It was in the midst of the process of coming to love God with all my mind that I sensed the call to

the ministry. I could now tolerate the thought of 4 years of college. I went off to Bethel never

dreaming I would be student there for the next 9 years. I spent 4 in college and 5 in the seminary.

Christian education has dominated my life, and I am convinced that all Christians must be involved

in Christian education in order to obey the first commandment, and to obey Christ's final orders to

the church.

When a Christian stops learning he stops loving God with all his mind, and, therefore, stops being

what God wants him to be. There is no way to be a good Christian if you stop exposing your mind

to new light from the Word of God. Jesus said, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you

free." Truth liberates but ignorance puts you in bondage. The only way to remain free is to keep

growing in your knowledge of the truth. I already had a liberal arts education before I discovered

what liberal meant in that context. It goes back to Aristotle who divided education into liberal and

illiberal. If you teach a slave to pick cotton that is not liberal. It is illiberal education, for it makes

him a better slave, and of more value to his master. But teach him to read and write, and about

history and psychology, and you make him free to develop his own potential as a person. This is

liberal education, for it liberates and makes a man free to be more of what he is capable of

becoming.

This is the goal of the Sunday School as well. It is the purpose of all Christian education to help