How Would our Seniors Do?

THE primary aim of most Christian schools is to teach their students to think biblically, to development a biblical worldview. Central to that mission is preparing them to "defend The faith." The arguments lodged against Christianity by Burrus (click here for PDF) are not particularly sophisticated. Nevertheless, here is the question: Can our seniors provide intellectually honest, logically coherent, and theologically sound responses? If the majority of seniors who have attended our schools for at least four years are not able to effectively respond to these attacks against their faith, I would argue that we are failing in our primary mission.

As the leaders in our schools, we have the responsibility to know to what extent our students are intellectually competent to defend their faith--for the sake of their own souls as well as their witness to the Gospel. How do we know if they can respond to these and other arguments against the Christian faith? If we don't know, why not? How can we find out?

I suggest the following responses for consideration and discussion:

1) Map the Bible curriculum (there are several good tools for mapping the curriculum including, Curriculum Mapper and Rubicon Atlas) from K-12th grades to determine what is taught when and why,

2) Develop an essay or series of essays to measure your seniors' ability to respond to The 10 Reasons Why Christianity is Wrong, or similar attacks. Read the essays--are the seniors largely "clueless"? Do they respond simplistically, in so many words: "God said it, I believe it, that settles it?",

3) Discuss the results with your teachers. What is their reaction? Assuming your seniors performed poorly on the essays, how will the curriculum, teaching methods, and assessments be changed?, and

4) Initiate intensive in-service training to focus on developing teaching and assessment methods designed to dramatically improve our students' knowledge, understanding, and ability to articulate the intellectual, philosophical, and theological foundations of their faith.

Response:

How do you think your seniors would do? If poorly, why? Our schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pursuit of our core mission of helping students develop a biblical worldview. If they cannot adequately respond to relatively weak attacks, what are we doing wrong?

Do you believe any of the suggestions above have merit? If so, are you currently implementing any of the suggestions or if not, would you consider doing so? If so, which ones? What challenges do you anticipate? Do you have other suggestions to share from your school's successful experiences and practices?

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