Home Missions
You can tell a great deal about a people based on who their heroes are. A people who love Hector and Paris are more likely than not going to be a people with a fondness for war. Those who adorn their walls with pictures of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, one should expect, are sports fans of the highest degree. Those who name their cats Dickens and Doyle probably have an affinity for English authors, and those whose dogs are named Christie and Dorothy probably like mysteries. With the exception of the ancient war heroes, each of these qualities could certainly describe me. There are times, however, when I have had my better moments.
We have been sent, sent to see to the deadly earnest business of raising up godly seed, or raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We’re on a mission from God.
Like many families, though not enough, when I was growing up my own family from time to time welcomed missionaries into our home. My father’s best friend from seminary, Don McClure, followed his father into the interior of Kenya. When he visited our house he came well supplied with both slides and stories. Our vanilla white walls in rural western Pennsylvania were graced with images of tribal Kenyans, complete with those neck stretching rings, and other assorted adornments of a strange and distant culture. Don would tell us of the deadly snakes and the lions, not that he visited at the zoo, but that would visit the village where they served. It made perfect sense to me that my father nicknamed his friend Tarzan. Don’s father would eventually be martyred in Kenya, the victim of communist rebels.
Though I did not dream of becoming a missionary, probably because I was all too familiar with my own failings, missionaries since that time have been in my mind sort of superhumans, Christians that were a breed apart. A dozen years ago, as I was setting up shop planting Saint Peter Church and starting the Highlands Study Center a college friend of mine was shipping out for Namibia. I told him I was jealous, that he had the far more glamorous calling. In the last dozen years he has had his car stolen several times, and been beaten by local thugs. The only beating I’ve received has been to my reputation.
We are wise when we honor those who make these kinds of sacrifices. We are foolish, however, if we sit in our suburban homes pining away for the adventure, the romanticism, and the grave, high calling of the foreign missionary. We have the same high calling. It is a wicked parochialism that sees the perishing souls on a distant continent as somehow less valuable than others. It is a cruel trick of the devil to see them as more valuable than our own, and those of our children. We have been sent, sent to see to the deadly earnest business of raising up godly seed, or raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We’re on a mission from God.
There is, I’m afraid to concede, a growing divide within the homeschool community. We are becoming, sad as it may seem, victims of our own success. As homeschooling has become more socially acceptable, more people are homeschooling for social reasons. As homeschooling has become more safe, more people are homeschooling safely. As homeschooling has become more successful, more people are homeschooling for success. We need to get busy checking our motives. One way to do that is to check our heroes.
If, for instance, our walls are bedecked with sports posters, it may well be that we homeschool so we can spend more time in the gym with our children, or at the country club. If, on the other hand, Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are our heroes, we may be homeschooling so that our children will get better SAT scores, to get into the most prestigious college, to then get into the most prestigious business school.
If, on the other hand, we have been blessed with the missionary spirit, then our goal in homeschooling is the redemption of souls. If we recognize that we have been sent, then our goal in homeschooling is the encouragement of disciples. If, on the other hand, we understand our own calling, we will pray that our homeschooling labors will create apostles, literally, those who are sent. That is, we will be able to rest when we see that we have instilled in our own children their mission, to raise up their children, our grandchildren, in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. It’s time to check our heroes. It’s time that our aspirations for ourselves and our children be measured by the Word, rather than the world.
It may well be that God is even now sending trouble our way. Storm clouds are gathering in California. Weather patterns have shown that these tend to move eastward. Even this trouble, however, should it prove to have any power, is from God’s hand, sent by His power, for the well-being of His saints, including His littlest saints. Let us, in all things, give thanks to the one who sent His Son, and now sends us, for all that He sends. And let us go the mission field He has given us, looking neither to the left nor to the right. Let us raise up home missionaries, for the sake of His kingdom, for the pursuit of His glory.
©2009 Homeschooling Today magazine, Nehemiah Four, LLC