Jesus Above School

Noah Samuel Brink

Description

Jesus Above School offers a usable framework to help Christian School teachers better align their philosophy and practice with the Gospel.

All of us deeply need Jesus – not only for salvation, but in every area of our lives. This is why the gospel is good news; because there’s real hope for real need. Clinging to this conviction, Jesus Above School unpacks and applies the umbrella question, “What difference does the gospel make?” within the Christian school context, even though this will likely put many of our prevailing assumptions at risk.



Jesus Above School provides Christian educators with a clearer understanding of what it means to “do school” in light of a profound commitment to the radical gospel of Jesus. Tragically, many Christian educators are ill-equipped to adequately articulate and apply the implications of a biblical worldview in their thought and practice. As a result, many Christian schools struggle to set themselves apart as truly distinctive because they’re not aligned with the wonderfully unique truths of God’s gospel.



To help, Jesus Above School offers a framework of categories and questions which guide an organized approach to becoming more gospel-centered by shaping both what is taught and the way the school goes about teaching throughout the entire ecosystem of the Christian school culture. These categories are broad enough to recalibrate philosophies and commitments while still being nimble enough to capture the myriad issues facing Christian schools in the day-to-day.



“Private Christian schools play a vital role in American Christianity today. However, as Noah Brink observes in this important book, too many schools recognize Jesus in name more than they engage him in the educational process. Brink’s use of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy offers a particularly helpful insight into worldview education to help Christian schools do just what the book says: place Jesus above school.”



Ed Stetzer, Ph.D.

Dean and Professor, Wheaton College



“Noah Brink has issued a much-needed clarion call for all Christian schools. In this post-Covid era when many schools are experiencing enrollment growth, it is critical for all Christian educators to thoughtfully align all practices in concert with biblical truth - and we all fall short of that goal. ‘What difference does the gospel make’ is an ungirding theme in this excellent resource - a must read for all Christian educators for such a time as this. You will be challenged, enlightened, and encouraged.”



James L. Drexler, Ph.D.

Dean of the Covenant College Graduate School of Education

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Professional Growth
• Christian Living
• Christian Education
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian school
• Religious studies

Informations

• Publié par: WestBow Press
• Date de parution: 18 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781664286818
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

JESUS Above SCHOOL
 
 
A Worldview Framework for Navigating the Collision Between the Gospel and Christian Schools
 
 
 
 
NOAH SAMUEL BRINK
 
 
 

 
Copyright © 2023 Noah Samuel Brink.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
WestBow Press
A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.westbowpress.com
844-714-3454
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible® (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6642-8682-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-8683-2 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-8681-8 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022923753
 
 
WestBow Press rev. date: 1/17/2023
 
To my Dad.
For nearly five decades, your faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus has shaped the hearts and minds of your students – myself included. I’ve never met a person who has lived a more consistent commitment to a truly Christian educational philosophy. May it Never Be that the thousands of students you have taught lose sight of the Jesus you put before them.
Though you did not write this book, they are as much your words as they are my own.
Soli Deo Gloria
CONTENTS
Introduction
 
Chapter 1       Yes, They Still Need Jesus
Chapter 2       Nothing New About It
Chapter 3       Gospel-Worldview and Messy Portraits
Chapter 4       The God Who is There … in our Schools
Chapter 5       Compassionately Thoughtful, Dependent Learners
Chapter 6       The Radical Notion of Educating Whole Persons
Chapter 7       Try? There is no try; only Grace.
Chapter 8       Echoes of Edenistic Education
Chapter 9       Oh So Broken
Chapter 10     Repairing the Ruins: Running Full Speed Toward Hope and Restoration
Chapter 11     Enough Philosophizing Already!
 
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
INTRODUCTION
In Courtship with the Gospel, Christian Education, and Biblical Worldview
Fifteen years ago, one of my mentors died, leaving a huge void at Evangelical Christian School in Memphis, where I was teaching and coaching. As a result, the Head of School asked me to teach the biblical worldview course ECS required for new faculty induction. My mentor had co-created the course, but it was primarily all in his head. By God’s grace, he had asked me to team-teach the course with him the summer before he died unexpectedly. Realistically, he did most of the teaching; my contribution was a lot of notetakings and organization of the content.
Being asked to replace an irreplaceable man, I was honored, a bit scared, and certainly didn’t really know what I was getting into. I was curious and naïve enough to jump in and was quickly inspired by all I read to get up to speed. By God’s grace, I stumbled into a framework which helped me make sense of the essential categories while enabling me to explain it to our teachers.
I certainly didn’t have all of this figured out when I started developing a worldview curriculum, and I still don’t. Maybe my inadequacy might encourage you to walk through these pages with me. Quite a few years into getting my head around teaching about the Christian worldview, I’m still trying to make it accessible to people like myself: every day Christian educators longing to make sense of the world in light of their need for and gratitude to Jesus.
As I became more comfortable with the content, I whittled down the course’s skeletal framework and used it as the foundation for two other worldview classes: an adult Sunday School class and a tenth-grade Bible class. Both helped me see how the framework could be applicable to people in all areas of life and simple enough for adolescent understanding. Due to the murkiness and overuse of the concept, the lessons I’ve learned in teaching about worldview have convinced me how important simpler articulation is.
Gene Frost, former Head of School at Wheaton Academy, unexpectedly drove the worldview course’s evolution when he wrote Learning from the Best . 1 His book mentions a handful of schools which demonstrate certain best practices among Christian schools, and one of his chapters addresses Christian worldview development programs – specifically our program at ECS. The bulk of his chapter on ECS focuses on our faculty worldview course as the foundation of the other things we were doing.
While I wasn’t teaching the course when Gene started researching ECS’ program, I had stepped into the role soon after it was published and began fielding calls from educators who read his book and were interested in what we were doing. They wanted to hear more about the required twenty-five-hour course, the other pieces that had grown out of it, and the effect our initiatives were having throughout the school. Over the next three or four years, a growing number of educators came to Memphis to see the worldview course first-hand and how it began changing the school culture. Yet, it was a substantial commitment for schools to send staff to Memphis for a full week during the summer.
With Gene’s prompting, we condensed the course content so it could be digested in two days and created small workshops which welcomed Christian school leaders to Memphis during the school year to provide personal glimpses into what we were doing. After a couple years of hosting our Worldview Symposiums, I began getting requests to add more flesh to the course notes so what we were doing could be more easily accessible in a book form. That’s much of what you have here.
Whenever people heard about my worldview course, they concluded that I must be teaching about worldviews: comparing belief systems, pinpointing where they show up in our culture, and offering a response. Certainly, talking about Christian worldview requires an understanding of the different “isms” out there. So, that will pop up in these pages, but only in passing, because I could recommend many books 2 which are far better at unpacking different views. I’m much more interested in speaking toward a framework for a distinctly Christian perspective as it applies to education. While we can learn a lot by seeing things pitted against their opposites, true, good, and beautiful things are best defined by themselves. Once we form a deeper understanding of the Christian worldview, we can better make sense of the other worldviews, rather than the other way around.
While having its place, comparative worldview study isn’t what Christian schools most need right now. I’ve noticed how many Christian schools are more likely to have these comparative courses than providing the tools for understanding the Christian worldview. I find this concerning, especially considering the anemic theology oozing from many churches. We need to more simply define the Christian worldview because we’re confusing outsiders by our internal confusion. Not only do we need to provide clarity, but we must also go beyond merely informing the way students think about the world by shaping their hearts, so their desires conform to the spirit of Christ.
Similarly, this book isn’t intended to be a manual for critiquing non-Christian ways of thinking. Some people hear “worldview” and automatically gravitate toward cultural engagement, which is certainly another way the Christian worldview has been adapted. Unfortunately, for many of Christians, cultural engagement means looking at different forms of media or politics and pointing out how wrong they are or where they aren’t “Christian.” In this perspective, the Christian worldview is more of a fence than a lens.
This would be a very narrow understanding of what it looks like to live as Christians in the world. It’s similar to Israel’s years in exile, as mentioned in the book of Jeremiah. The exiled Jews stayed on the outside of Babylon and opposed it. Yet, Jeremiah trumpeted God’s desire for his people to go into their pagan culture and help it flourish. (Ch. 29) This is a large part of what it means to have a biblical outlook on the world, and I hope to raise questions to enable Christians to live in a way which brings about flourishing engagement with the world, not religious opposition to it.
While I’ve taught about a biblical worldview in multiple contexts using a framework which is broadly applicable, this book is not intended to provide a just-add-water “worldview in a box” curriculum for Christian schools. Christian schools are notorious for finding and quickly trying to implement the latest, trendiest program which another school has found successful. Rarely does this work, because a program which has succeeded elsewhere was developed over years within the culture which cultivated it. While I’d love to succeed like other schools have in their areas of strength, I also realize that what seems to flourish in another community will need to be adjusted so it can flourish in my own