What do big ideas have to do with little people?

My wife and I have reared our four children to adulthood in partnership with Christian schools and through the navigational challenges of contemporary culture. So what do Christian education and culture really matter amidst the daily realities of

Colic (parental exhaustion)

learning to read with dyslexia (parental anxiety)

homegrown driving instruction and first car wrecks (parental hypervigilance)

God’s covenant grace coming to fruition in my kids (parental rejoicing/relief/reward)

boyfriends and girlfriends (parental ambivalence)

college applications/admissions/attendance (parental helicopters and growing up with your child)

and…you get the point.

Real life meets us some days with God’s gentle, gracious touch. Real life meets us other days with the tenderness of a tornado. I love my children more than I love life. I am stretched as part of my sanctification more by my children than by anything a career could throw at me.

Culture and Christian education have a lot to do, really, with the everyday life of helping children grow. There’s always a creative tension, though. Big ideas like theory, theodicy and theophany make a daily difference. But daily life calls us to respect today’s and tomorrow’s small stuff, substantial stuff, and submerge me under the tides of life kind of stuff.

I had a student I was talking with in a high school senior Worldview class about a study of Postmodernism. The unit offered an introduction to the philosophical ideas along with the practical discernment of style and substance as we gauged postmodern views in relation to biblical truths. Students had to pick two examples from high or low culture to describe to the class how they showed postmodern ideas and how they compared to Christian faith. The student told me this had been the hardest assignment she had had. I thought perhaps I’d wandered a bit too freely in some fun philosophizing. She went on to show me that wasn’t the point at all. She said it was hardest because her examples were her favorite song and favorite TV show, and she couldn’t figure out what she really needed to do about that (if anything). She was about to launch from a Christian home and Christian school onto a secular university campus, and she was engaging issues of discernment and integrity in her life, her faith and her culture. And, yes, it did a teacher’s and parent’s heart good to know that could be going on with at least some of our students.

But being serious about children, culture, and Christianity is not wrapped up in a single, simple, encouraging illustration. Will our culture today, shared with our kids, even sustain ideas and their integrity? We hear Populism, Pragmatism, Conservatism and Evangelicalism conflated, morphed, abandoned and reacquired in the course of a single ‘oration’. Bill Buckley and Chuck Colson aren’t around to opine, but George Will and Al Mohler certainly share discomfort one day and disgust another. 

I guess I find some confidence and consolation in affirming that pure intellectual palaver won’t gain much purchase amidst today’s sometime shallow and sometime substantial expectations for authenticity. Ideas do have consequences, but they better have a lived identity along with it.

I pray as we consider children, culture, and Christian education that we are unashamedly, authentically, and only-by-grace consistently following Jesus in value-ful lives, connected by relationships, and invested in community.