Christian Education (cont.)
Why We Do What We Do (cont.)
More Than Just Knowledge About God
Yet to know God implies more than just knowledge about God. The knowledge of God that is unique to Christian education is a personal knowledge that begins with repentance of sin and faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and develops through obedience to and communion with God. To know God is to be born into the family of God and to live in fellowship with Him. With this knowledge as the starting point of Christian education, the student’s attention is directed outward to the full range of natural facts and human experience, and formulations of that experience in history and philosophy and literature and art—all as reflective of the work of God intersecting with the work of man. The student develops a worldview coherent with the work of God in his life.
The work of God in the life of our students is a process of their imitating God in their character and service. It is our business as participants with God to urge them onward in this process and to provide an environment structured toward this purpose. As in secular education, the environment of Christian education is artificially selective, including elements favorable to its purpose and suppressing those unfavorable to it. We do not apologize for the prescriptiveness of the educational experience here.
Living Out Beliefs
It is our business also as educators to provide opportunities of ministry to the students, so it feels natural to them to live out their beliefs in service to God and to others. And so it is that hundreds of students have weekend ministries of various sorts, not only in the immediate area but also in surrounding states as well. We keep before all our students their responsibility to God in this matter and to a spiritually needy world.
Our Endeavor
Clearly our educational effort at Bob Jones University is a highly focused, energetic, disciplined endeavor. Because of our status as a private institution, we can operate without many of the constraints of a publicly funded institution and design policies suited to our goals without governmental interference. Students come who want what we have to give them and leave convinced that they are the better for it. We who serve here do so with great satisfaction, surrounded by human evidence that our efforts are wonderfully blessed of God.
