The Call to Care: Nurture and Education
A sermon by Brent J. Eelman
April 2, 2006
Abington Presbyterian Church

Acts 17: 16-31
    While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. ¹⁷So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the market-place every day with those who happened to be there. ¹⁸Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, ‘What does this babbler want to say?’ Others said, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.’ (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) ¹⁹So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.’ ²¹Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.
    ²²Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. ²³For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, ²⁵nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. ²⁶From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.”
²⁹Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. ³⁰While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’*

A topic as broad as Christian Education takes 2-4 hours to address. I only have a few minutes, so let me tell you exactly why Christian Education is important. Six years ago, when our daughter went off to college, a member of my congregation in Texas challenged me by asking: “How can you send your child 1800 miles to such a secular school that doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of God?” I responded: “Because she had good Sunday school teachers.” I went on to say that sooner or later she would have to live in a secular world, and that I had faith in the Christian nurture she received. That is why Christian Education is important.

If Luke wrote his book of Acts today, I believe that he might call this particular chapter: “Paul goes to Harvard”. It is the story of the encounter of Christian faith with the best of secular scholarship. Notice that Paul did not flee the philosophers of Greece, nor did he confront them in an arrogant and condemning way. He engaged them as a fellow scholar. Paul believed that there existed no truth apart from Jesus Christ; hence genuine faith was not threatened by any type of knowledge or truth. Genuine faith engaged it. It even used the language of secular philosophy! This encounter provides us a paradigm for Christian education and nurture in the 21^st century. We need to prepare young and old alike to live in and engage this world with its vast store of knowledge, technology and problems. Are we doing this?

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Consider: in high school I took college preparatory chemistry. The class met for four hours and week and included and additional four hours of lab time. That was 8 hours weekly times about 35 weeks, or about 280 hours. I also had an hour or two of homework each night for that class. That class gave me a basic knowledge of chemistry. It did not prepare me to work in a laboratory, nor to perform advanced experiments. My knowledge of chemistry is limited and I could not be a chemist, given that one course. Let’s consider Christian Education: the average child attends Sunday school for 12 years. Sunday school meets forty Sundays a year, and the time of instruction is about 45 minutes or thirty hours a year. There is seldom homework in Sunday school and so the average child gets 360 hours of Sunday school instruction, if she or he attends every Sunday and is on time. 280 hours prepares us for precious little in terms of chemistry… What are we preparing our children for with just 360 hours of Christian education? Will they able to deal with the temptations and the difficulties that life presents? Will they be able to deal with pain and grief? Will they be able to wrestle with ethical questions at home, at school, at the work place? This is the challenge of Christian Education and nurture. As we look to the future here at APC, we need to be center our C.E. efforts on the following:

1. Because we have a limited amount of time, we need to be able to offer the students in our Sunday school the best in terms of curriculum, teaching, and facilities. Christian education has changed in many ways… and it needs facilities to meet those changes. The other day, I counted four adult classes on Sunday morning… but there are only two rooms available for classes for adults. We also need to recognize that most Christian education and nurture occurs in the home and we need to prepare parents as the primary Christian educators and nurturers.

2. We need to fulfill one of the goals of the Plan for Ministry which reads that all members of the church need to be involved in some type of Bible study. We have a host of new classes that are being taught by talented lay people, committed students of the bible, but we have made only a start.

3. Christian education is so vast, we need to enlarge the leadership teams who plan, develop and implement our program. We cannot burn out teachers, and Christian education leadership.

4. The world has changed. 10 years ago, most of us were not using email! Or curriculum, resources, facilities nee tot prepare our children, youth and adults for this changed world. We cannot meet this challenge with teaching and learning styles, curriculum, and equipment that is not up to date. (E.g. we have a computer class-room.) We need to be pioneers in C.E.

5. We have the challenge of commitment. When my daughter played youth softball she was required to make a commitment. If she missed two practices she would be off the team. We can’t ask that of our Sunday School students! Yet faith is about commitment! One of the few places where we talk about commitment today is in the realm of sports.

Listening to Julie and Tom and their four boys this morning reminded me, once again of the importance of Education and nurture. It is truly cradle to grave here at APC and we need to ensure that it continues that way.

Let me conclude where I began…. Paul at Harvard, (Athens). Christian education, at its best, is education that encounters all knowledge and engages it. Our challenge is to teach the word of God in a manner that takes seriously this world… and engages this world with its knowledge and its challenges. It is education that prepares children, youth, and adults to wrestle with the hard issues and demands of Christian discipleship. Amen.

*The New Revised Standard Version Bible, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers) 1989.

Abington Presbyterian Church, Abington, Pennsylvania,  www.apcusa.org