June 25, 2015 ISI Radio Show with Steve Schultz on “Classical Christian Education”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the planet earth listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 25th day of June 2015, and I'm honored to have for the very first time on Iron Sharpens Iron my guest

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Steve Schultz, who is the headmaster of Grace Christian Academy, which happens to be affiliated with the church that I was formerly a member of before I moved to Pennsylvania, and that is

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Grace Reform Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick, New York, and the reason that we're having

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Steve Schultz on the program today, it's more than just sentimentality that the school that he is headmaster of is attached to my former church.

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It's because it's a very unique Christian school, and in a very unique location in the

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United States. It is a classical Christian school, and we're going to find out what the benefits of that are and what the philosophy behind that is, because not all

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Christian education is alike, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Steve Schultz.

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Thank you, Chris, good to have you on the program today. And I'm going to give the website for Grace Christian Academy, just in case the time slips away from me before I remember to do it later.

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It's gcali .com, G -C -A, which stands for Grace Christian Academy, L -I, which stands for longisland .com,

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G -C -A -L -I .com, and it is located in Merrick, Long Island, New York, and first of all,

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Steve, tell us something about yourself briefly, how you came to Christ, and how you wound up as the headmaster of Grace Christian Academy.

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Okay. Well, I grew up in a traditional religious home.

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I can't say there was ever a point where I didn't believe in God, and I can't say there was ever a time when

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I didn't have warm feelings towards God, I just didn't know Him. I knew how to be a good person in a worldly sense, but I didn't know the punchline.

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And as I started to enter middle school, I started to ask questions a lot more seriously as to, you know, how does one get to know

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God better? Because there was not a doubt that He was there, I just wanted to know, how do

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I interact with Him? So, I started listening to music, and going to different friends' youth groups, and just looking everywhere that I could.

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And I remember one day, I went off to our

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Sunday school in my church, and our Sunday school teacher began teaching us about the early church martyrs, and about Martin Luther, and about individual

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Christians who had put their lives on the line for what they believed in.

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And I compared what they had, or what it appeared that they had, to what

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I had, and I thought, man, I wouldn't suffer or die for this.

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So, it caused me to wonder, what is it that they really have here? And that started about a four -year journey, and I made it all the way to my senior year of high school, without meeting the

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Lord, or without killing myself. But it was my senior year in high school that a youth group called

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Campus Life came along, and befriended me, and the leader of it began to answer a lot of the questions that I had.

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But the way that he answered those questions was by going back to the Scriptures. And I had grown up around Bibles all my life, but I never really used them.

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So, I was amazed that the Scriptures actually answered life questions that I had that were relevant.

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And so, when it came time to go to Florida for a retreat down there,

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I went. And it was the first time that I had ever heard that an individual has to come to that point of repentance.

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And that was where I decided to follow Christ, and accepted that I was a desperate sinner, in severe need of a

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Savior. And that's when it all came together for me. And really, the first thing that changed was a lot of my anger went away.

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I really didn't like people too much. And for the first time in my life, I started to feel compassion, and empathy, and sadness, even for people that I didn't like.

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Well, that's a very good thing for humanity at large, because of the fact that you're an enormous man.

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We're trying to decrease that a bit. Well, I didn't actually mean that as an insult.

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I meant that you're kind of a dangerous -looking individual. So, anyway, that began the quest.

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That began my relationship with the Lord in 1984, and to the best of my knowledge.

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And then, I got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ in college, and went on staff with Crusade.

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They sent me to New York, and initially worked with Queens College Campus Crusade for Christ.

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Did that for seven years. Worked with Hofstra's football team as the chaplain. And it was through that that I discovered an interest and an ability in teaching.

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So, I left Crusade staff and began teaching at Flushing Christian School, which is a great school, and I love it to this day.

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And I worked there for seven years, but then my wife became pregnant with our first, and I had to afford to keep them.

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So, I went into public school, and taught in public school for 11 years. And it was early on in my stint with public school that in my studies for my master's,

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I ran across this thing called classical Christian education. And I started to see the real benefits to it, and a lot of the superior elements to it, and began praying really out of faith, because I didn't see how it would ever happen.

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But I began praying that one day I would become an administrator and have a classical

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Christian K -12 over which I could lead, and all my children could go to it.

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But the way I envisioned the answer to that prayer was that I would end up going to Pennsylvania or New Jersey, where they do have classical

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Christian schools. I had never heard of Grace. And one day out of the blue, an old friend of yours cornered me after church, and he said that he had heard that the school out in Merrick was looking for an administrator.

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He described it to me, and I was like, wow, I never knew the place existed. And that weekend,

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I went in for an interview, and three days later, I had the job. So yeah. Praise God. Yeah.

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And I know that you happen to be a member of North Shore Baptist Church in Bayside, Queens, which is pastored by my dear friend of about 30 years,

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Ed Moore. And I know that it's a very similar church to Grace Reform Baptist Church in theology and doctrine.

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I think that one of the only minor differences is that you practice animal sacrifice at North Shore Baptist, I believe.

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Yes. Only on Saturday.

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I'll tell Ed Moore, your pastor, I said, hello. Well, obviously, since our main theme here is classical

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Christian education, tell us what is that, and how is it different than your average

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Christian school? I know that a lot of what I hear about Christian schools, and I don't want to put them down because I haven't thoroughly investigated each and every one, obviously, but from what

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I hear from some folks is that they're very much in some ways like your average secular public school, with the exception that they teach about Christ, and they don't teach anything that's overtly liberal to the children, evolution and things like that, that homosexuality is normal and good, and that kind of thing.

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But I've heard that they're pretty much patterned in a standard way that very much resembles your typical government school.

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But what is different and unique about classical education? Okay. Yeah, first of all, let me say that there are some really good

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Christian schools around that are not classical, and I would have no trouble sending my children there.

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But for the most part, and I think we could say that this has also permeated the church community, is that because we live in the world, unfortunately, if we are not at the top of our game, and if we don't know our scriptures, and if we're not in regular communion with the

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Lord, it's going to be easy for us to adopt the ways of the world and integrate it into our ministries.

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And a lot of Christian schools are Christian by name, but then once you get inside the doors, they follow the system that the majority of schools follow anyway.

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Hmm. So how did classical education come about, and what are some of the unique principles that govern it?

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Okay. Classical education, which is not necessarily

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Christian, although we've combined the two because they are more compatible than, say, progressivism is with Christian.

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But classical education, it goes way back to the Greeks and the Romans. And what they embraced, and although they were pagan, what they understood,

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I kind of view them as, you know, the curious children outside the church looking in through dirty windows.

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But they are seeing a glimpse of things that are actually there. And one of the main things that is central to classical education is this idea that there is a logos that holds everything together, that in the maths, in the sciences, in language, in art, you know, the aesthetics and all those things, there is a unifying force, if you will.

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And when the Christians got a hold of it, we just kind of recalibrated it and said, oh, you guys are, you know, you're talking about the logos who took on flesh.

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You're talking about Christ. So when we go to Colossians 1, we see that all things were created by him and for him, and therefore he has preeminence over all things.

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Well, going back to kind of the systematic structure of classical

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Christian education, I'm going to oversimplify this a bit. It was in the

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Middle Ages that educators took what the

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Greeks and Romans had and kind of consolidated it or classified it into two major categories.

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The first one is the trivium. The second one is the quadrivium. And the trivium is what we have in our school in grades

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K through 12. And the trivium is three parts. The first part is grammar.

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The second part is logic. And the third part is rhetoric. And classical educators basically teach children what they want to know when they want to know it.

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Or in other words, they sync material and methodology with the proclivity of the child's age.

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So we've got children who, at least in our school, here's how we break it up, is our kindergarten through sixth grade, that is our grammar school.

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And that is when children are basically astonished with the human tongue, and that's when we teach them language and grammar.

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Every subject has its own grammar, even math. The grammar that we use in math, for example, would be the symbols that we use for numbers and values.

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But you've got different grammar in history. You've got different grammar in Latin. But those formative

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K through six years are dedicated to developing that grammar repertoire in the minds of our children.

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So if you were to walk into our school in one of those grades, you would hear them doing a lot of singing, chanting, repetition, things that are basically designed to embed that grammar and those pieces of each one of those academic disciplines to memory.

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And just to give you an idea of how it works, when you think of a bill sitting on Capitol Hill, what do you think of?

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When I think of bill sitting on Capitol Hill, what do I think of? A law?

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Okay. Does a song come to mind? I fought the law and the law won.

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Well, that may actually apply to today, but no. What I'm referring to, and it's something that we all grew up with, was

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Schoolhouse Rock. Okay. Yeah, I remember that.

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Yeah. Schoolhouse Rock was a very typical, classical approach to education, where every

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Saturday you hear the same song over and over and over again. And here I am, 49, and every now and then

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I'll be wondering, is that an adverb? Or what happens to this bill now once the house has passed it?

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And all I do is I go back to those songs, and because songs stick in the memory better than other things, that was an ideal approach to memorization.

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And so what they do in the grammar school is they use things like that to string together a series of contextual markers from which they will then start to build details.

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But they've got to have those markers there first so that they can categorize, and it makes it easier for us to recall.

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Once they finish the grammar school, you know, simply put, you could say the grammar school focuses on who, what, where, when.

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It's that simple. When they get into the middle school, which we call the school of logic, that's when the children are ready, basically, to challenge every assumption that we have.

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And that's when we teach them logic. And what logic does is it changes the emphasis from who, what, where, when to why and how.

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And it brings the depth of understanding and investigation a lot deeper. And what we're trying to do through the logic stage is to equip students with the skills from which to discern breaches of logic and things that just don't make sense and things that don't work.

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And if you've ever heard kids out on the street having an argument, just monitor it for a while and, you know, your response will be that that makes absolutely no sense at all.

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And that is because we have lost a strong emphasis in our culture on logic.

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We have digressed from being an ideational culture to being a sensate culture.

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And that sensate dynamic is on the rise. And basically what we've done is we've traded in that which really makes sense, whether we like it or not.

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And we've traded it in for, you know, what feels good. And is it something that I like?

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So what the logic stage does is it tries to bring back what makes sense.

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And then we move them on to our high school, which is the school of rhetoric. And I believe it was either

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Socrates or Plato who held the belief that that age group has a proclivity to argue. Therefore, we need to teach them how to argue excellently.

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And this is when students are yearning to express themselves with passion. And that's when we teach them rhetoric.

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We teach them how to arrive at conclusions, how to develop their own opinions, how to declare them eloquently, and how to defend them excellently.

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That's great. I mean, I'm actually at the very moment working on scheduling an interview with Oz Guinness over a new book that he wrote on rediscovering the art of Christian rhetoric.

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And I don't have it in front of me, so I don't have the exact title. But I'm looking forward to that, and hopefully that will take place soon.

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But if you could continue, sorry for interrupting you there. Oh, good. No, that's pretty much, that's a flyby of what classical, the way that if you walked into our school, that's what you would see.

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Now, one thing that you might want to clarify, because I'm sure that it may have sent shockwaves to some of our conservative

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Christian listeners, and perhaps even especially Calvinists, when you said that you could walk by the classrooms and hear chanting.

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Maybe you want to clarify that. Right. Not chanting in a metaphysical sense.

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All it is, is repetition. You know, in the same sense that we say the

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Pledge of Allegiance every day. The purpose of that is to embed in our memories and to bring more aware to our consciences on a regular basis, the values that we hold as Americans.

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So just like we say the Pledge of Allegiance, we may... Is that on your end there?

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No, it sounds like a fax. Oh, okay. I'm not sure why that's happening right now, but...

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I know. The beauty of live radio. Well, it sounds like it stopped.

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Well, you know, maybe we could do is, we'll take a station break right now, and you could call back during the break and...

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You know what? We fixed it. Oh, okay. Good. I'm glad it was on your end. Yeah, it was my printer.

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I'm sorry. That's all right. Never know what's going to be connected around here. Obviously, you need some kind of technological class there in the school.

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Yeah. But can you pick up where you left off there with the... You're talking about... It's not...

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You're not doing this as a religious practice of worship, like vain repetition or anything like that. You are...

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No. This is an instructive tool, just like the ABC song. And I understand,

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I've heard that the brain a completely different part of the brain is utilized for singing, and it's connected to memory and so on.

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And I've heard that's why stutterers do not stutter when they sing.

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Right. Mel Tillis and some other people who are stutterers. I'm not even sure Mel Tillis is still with us.

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I'm dating myself here. But he never stuttered when he sang.

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And because it's a different part of the brain that's utilizing that, and which is why the old commercials used to have jingles.

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And it's amazing to me, being in the advertising industry, why jingles have gone out of use because they were invaluable to...

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I mean, I remember commercials from the 60s and 70s to this day very easily because of the fact that they were sung, the slogans.

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Right. So that's what you were referring to in regard to the chanting and to the memorization and so on.

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Yes. No, this is not like Gregorian monk chants. No. This is a mnemonic exercise, a...

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Okay. For example, if you walked into our fourth grade classroom and you looked around the crown of the room, you would see a series of eight and a half by 11 pictures that have dates underneath them.

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And when you get into our fourth grade, your main study of history is the Middle Ages. So at the beginning of the year, the kids start to learn each one of those pictures.

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And by the end of the year, they've covered almost the whole room with a whole series of events from which they can then start to hang facts.

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And when they get into the school of logic, they can start to analyze those facts and start to examine why and how.

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But they've done that by either songs or poems or...

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But devices that are used, you know, not to commune with God in a metaphysical way, but to change the memory.

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Yeah. I've said this once before on the air, but I actually entered a advertising contest in the 1980s for Hebrew National Salami.

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And I was one of the top 30 finalists after thousands of entries.

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And I actually created a rap song that I sang with a Yiddish accent on a recording.

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And I could still remember one of the lines... In fact, I'm not gonna bore the listeners with the whole song, but I could still remember some of the lines because it was a sung thing.

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And that has embedded it into my memory. And the line that I'm going to say is, go tell your brother, sister, daddy, and your mommy about Hebrew National New Miracle Salami.

25:45

Very good. But we're going to go to a break right now. If you have a question for our guest,

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Steve Schultz on classical Christian education, my email address is chrizarnsen at gmail .com.

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That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. When you email us, please give us your first name, your city, and your state of residence.

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And if outside the USA, please give us the country where you reside. That's chrizarnsen at gmail .com.

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Don't go away. We'll be right back with Steve Schultz of Grace Christian Academy as we discuss classical

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back, this is

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Chris Arns, and if you've just tuned us in, our guest today on Iron Sharpens Iron is Steve Schultz, the headmaster of Grace Christian Academy in Merrick, Long Island, New York.

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And we are discussing classical Christian education, which is very different than most of the

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Christian education you will find in private schools, and of course extremely different from the government school system.

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And we do have an email from our listeners to start with here.

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We have Christy in Clewiston, Florida, and I don't know if I'm mispronouncing that, but have you seen this type of education change children and their attitude about school?

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I'm not sure if I caught that last part. Could you say it again? I'm sorry. Yeah. Have you seen this type of education, classical

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Christian education, change children and their attitude about school? Okay.

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Let me answer it this way. I've seen children in our school change their attitude about education, whether it's the classical element, or the

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Christian element, or the small environment, or a combination of all of those, just to be honest.

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The answer is I've seen their attitudes change. I'm not sure what all to attribute it to.

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I do know that as many of our students mature and they start to see the real value of education, they see that what they are getting at GCA is very valuable and is really superior to what a lot of their peers are receiving.

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You know what? I just thought of something. Last year we admitted a student in mid -year.

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He was in the second grade. He wasn't struggling academically.

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I think he was overwhelmed with the big state school that he was in. He was struggling with a lot of the attitudes of the other kids.

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He came to us. It was the next day that his father contacted us and said that his son couldn't stop talking about what he had learned today in school.

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I know that my own daughter just finished kindergarten. She'll come home singing a lot of the songs that are used to memorize their information.

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They enjoy it. It feeds them where they're hungry.

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You get your grammar school level kids, they can memorize tremendous amounts of stuff.

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They enjoy the songs and they enjoy the hand motions. A lot of what we do is accompanied with sign language.

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They enjoy that kind of thing. We've seen children come to us who have

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IEPs or 504 plans. Those who don't know what that is, it's basically a special program that is designed specifically for them because they have a special need.

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We've seen students who have those come to us in just a matter of months be able to shed it because now they're motivated and they're in a different environment.

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If it's handled properly, I believe it's motivational. And my email address once again for questions for our guest is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. We have another listener in Ridgewood, Queens, New York, Johnny, who says classical education, even

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Christian classical education, employs the use of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian pagan gods and goddesses in the teaching of literature and are facts that are memorized in the early grammar stages.

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Should Christian education require such ungodly influences on young minds, would it lead the student to curiosity towards a false and pagan worldview?

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That's a fascinating question there and comment simultaneously from somebody who's obviously skeptical or at least a little bit leery or very leery of classical education if you want to comment on that.

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Okay, first of all, I really appreciate the question because that was one of my initial questions with it as I've engaged in it now and been part of teaching it.

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And as I have seen what the church, see the church basically in the words of J .P.

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Moreland, shot herself in the foot. We removed ourselves from our culture's battle for ideas.

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The moment that we said that which belongs to science and math and philosophy and history and basically the intellectual fields or the world of academia, somewhere we got this idea that anything that pertains to the intellect is evil and that belongs to the atheist.

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And in thinking that way, we removed ourselves from being a significant cultural influence and now we're finding what has happened as a result of that and we're trying to get back in but it's really difficult.

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That's one of the objectives that we have at DCA is to teach and train our students so that they can receive a superior education that will gain for them platforms in their culture from which they can communicate and defend the gospel.

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Now going back to teaching about the

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Greek and Roman pagan religions, the argument that I would give on that, and I would strongly defend this, is we're not teaching them to admire or to engage in or to worship anything pagan.

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In fact, much to the contrary, our entire message is to worship God and God alone. Yet, I would argue that it is crucial that our students, that any

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Christian, understand what is going on in his culture. And to understand what is going on in his culture doesn't mean that he's embracing what is going on in his culture.

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And as we teach those elements of classical education that come from the pagan

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Greeks and Romans, what it affords us is an even greater way to teach the gospel because we can demonstrate through Greek and Roman mythology what happens when man creates

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God. Excellent, excellent. And of course, you even have the

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Apostle Paul on Mars Hill with that approach. But anyway, continue. Well, you know, the bottom line is it's valuable to learn what's going on in our culture.

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And it is valuable to understand how Western culture came to be. Part of the reason that we're so vulnerable to the cults and part of the reason we're so vulnerable to really faulty ideas in our political system and in our academic system is because we don't understand the pagan thinking of the world around us.

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And again, we need to study that. We need to understand that. We should never embrace it.

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All right. Well, see, Johnny in Ridgewood, Queens, put that in your pipe and smoke it up, Al. I'm just kidding there,

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Johnny. I'm totally sympathetic with that question, though. I understand it completely. And because it is a concern of mine, we make special effort,

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I make special effort to point out this is where and this is why this type of thinking that the

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Romans and the Greeks embraced as far as pagan religion goes is faulty. And here is

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Christ's answer to it. Right. And I would imagine that it is better for children to be equipped to give an answer for those things before they venture out into the world and mingle with people who will begin to assail them with comments, questions, and accusations that they can't possibly respond to.

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Yeah. And, you know, I'm going to be honest with you. Whenever I see an interview coming up on TV with someone who represents the

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Christian community, I start to cringe before they even say anything, because nine times out of ten, they have found someone who has not done their homework, who doesn't understand the culture, who is very naive and completely misrepresents us and sets us back even further from being able to communicate the gospel.

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Yes. Yeah, you hear a lot of one of the extremes, you'll hear of somebody who all they'll talk about is love, how much they love

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Bruce Jenner and the homosexuals and so on, without giving the gospel or the need of repentance.

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Or you have the other extreme, that the media loves to parade in front of people like a circus act, like the people from Fred Phelps' cult, which is now run by his daughter,

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I believe, or at least other parts, members of his family, now that he is deceased. But that's the kind of situation you have, you're absolutely right.

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We're going to be going through our final break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air, we've got less than 15 minutes left, so if you have a question, email us now at chrisanzen at gmail .com,

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c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Don't go away, we're going to be right back with Steve Schultz and our topic,

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Classical Christian Education. Don't go away. Lynbrook Baptist Church on 225

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Earl Avenue in Lynbrook, Long Island is teaching God's timeless truths in the 21st century. Our church is far more than a

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Sunday worship service. It's a place of learning where the scriptures are studied and the preaching of the gospel is clear and relevant.

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It's like a gym where one can exercise their faith through community involvement. It's like a hospital for wounded souls where one can find compassionate people in healing.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bob Walderman, and I invite you to come and join us here at Lynbrook Baptist Church and see all that a church can be.

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Call Lynbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402, or visit lynbrookbaptist .org.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you've just tuned us in, we have been interviewing Steve Schultz, who is the headmaster of Grace Christian Academy of Long Island, which is located in Merrick, New York.

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And before we continue with the interview, I just want to make an announcement regarding tomorrow's interview.

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I hope that you spread the word that we are paying tribute to the late

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Dr. Walter Martin, who many may remember from his many appearances on the

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John Ankerberg Show. Dr. Walton Martin is also well known, or perhaps most well known, for the book that he wrote probably back in the 80s,

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The Kingdom of the Cults. And he also wrote a book, a subsequent book,

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The Kingdom of the Occult. And Dr. Martin passed away from this life into glory for eternity with Christ on June 26th, 26 years ago.

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So this Friday is the 26th anniversary of Dr. Walter Martin's passing, and we have his daughter as our guest tomorrow,

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Cindy Martin Morgan, and she is going to be paying tribute to her father, who the church owes a great debt to.

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And I'm looking forward to that myself, and I hope you spread the word about that. And once again, if you have a question for our guest today,

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Steve Schultz on classical Christian education, chrisarnson at gmail .com is the email address, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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We have another listener in Florida, Dave, and we've already addressed this, but perhaps you have something further to expand on it.

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Dave in Florida asks, how is classical Christian education different from other Christian schools?

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Now maybe if you could provide some other ways that makes classical

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Christian education unique, and maybe even Grace Christian Academy. Okay, well first of all, it's hard to lump all

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Christian schools into any one particular approach. Picture, if you will, a spectrum from the most conservative, which that end would be the classical side, to the other side, which would be progressive.

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The progressive side would be, I guess, freer, less disciplinarian, more geared towards what the child wants to learn at that particular time.

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The other end of the scale, which would be classical, would be more focused on discipline, order, systematic ways of doing things.

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But again, I think a large portion of our

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Christian schools take what the state lays out, and then they follow that.

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For example, you have a lot of Christian schools now who are adopting the Common Core.

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We are not doing that. We refuse to do that. We don't offer state tests, because we don't want the government's intrusion, and because we don't want our teachers to begin teaching for a test.

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What we focus in on is not teaching kids what to think, but teaching them how to think, so that when we're not in the room, or we're not with them, they can self -automate.

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They can go, because they now know how to learn things on their own. They know how to ask questions on their own.

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So another thing is, at the heart of classical Christian education is the way that we teach, is

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Socratic reasoning. If my youngest starts to head for the stove because she sees a pretty blue light, there are two ways that I can teach her now.

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Well, there's a few ways, but I'm going to compare two. One is, I can say, don't touch the stove.

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Now, the other way, which is the way that I choose to teach, and I've always taught her from the beginning, but this is

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Socratic, is instead of saying, don't touch the stove, I say to her, what will happen if you touch the stove?

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Now what happens, she now has a dog in the fight. She's got to process what's been said now.

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I mean, I'm sure I'm talking to hundreds of people right now who, they can picture in their mind times that they speak to their kids, and they tell them to do something, and the kid even says, yes, mom, yes, dad, but eye contact is never made.

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The brain is never engaged. That comment was just basically leave me alone, and they never respond.

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When the question is asked, and it's not asked rhetorically, it is asked with the intention of receiving an answer.

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What's going to happen if you touch that stove? She now has to process that and think through that, and what

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I'm doing is I'm kind of role modeling for her in the sense that I'm asking her the question that she needs to learn how to ask her herself.

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And then, you know, that will go beyond the hot stove. That will go into, you know, texting in the car or, you know, hanging out with the wrong boy in college, that kind of thing.

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Well, I can tell you I wish I was educated in this fashion because I wouldn't have these blisters and scars on my hands from two weeks ago.

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But we do have an anonymous listener who wants to know,

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I understand that the church that started Grace Christian Academy is a

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Reformed Baptist Church and therefore is Calvinistic. Do the parents of children at Grace Christian Academy need to be

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Calvinistic, and if not, what are the requirements of parents sending their students there?

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Okay, excellent question, and by no means. The requirement is that one of the parents has to be a member in good standing in a

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Bible -believing church. I believe, we believe, you know, the doctrines of grace and that version of systematic theology, but I also believe that, you know, my

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Arminian brothers are brothers. You know, I know

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Calvinists and Arminians who love the Lord more than probably I do. So that's not an issue at all.

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Our student body, even our teaching staff, is varied, and see, our primary objective here is to get our kids saved and then to disciple them according to God's Word.

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Our families are made aware of the Reformed nature of the church and the school's doctrine, but we do not demand that everybody agree across the board with every, you know, jot and tittle of Calvinism.

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You know, all people are asked is that they don't campaign against it. There are also two different philosophies, as you know, when it comes to the approach of education.

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We have Christian schools that will permit students that do not have any believing parent because they view it as an opportunity to evangelize the child and the parents, and then you also have the philosophy of some

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Christian parents who send their children who profess to believe in Christ to the government schools or the public schools to be evangelists themselves.

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And if you could comment on both of those two different approaches to education. Okay, first of all, the first thing that you brought up was basically a school whose main philosophy is that of evangelism.

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We do evangelize. The requirement is that the parent be a member in good standing in a

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Bible -believing church. That doesn't necessarily by any means mean that the child is saved. I tend to play it overly safe and assume that the majority of my kids do not know the

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Lord yet. And the reason that I make that assumption is because it's more dangerous to not make that assumption.

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And what I want to do is make sure that I and my fellow teachers are in their lives and constantly proclaiming to them the gospel, while at the same time we speak to them as if they are

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Christians when we speak to them from the Word. You know, different schools, there are some schools who are not evangelistic at all.

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They are completely discipleship -oriented. And in those cases, the children themselves have to have a clear testimony of salvation.

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You know, we don't go to that extreme. Although every one of our teachers is required to have a clear testimony of salvation.

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Now, what was the other? There are parents, Christian parents, that purposely send their children who have made professions of faith to the public school system to serve as evangelists.

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Well, obviously that's not the only reason they send them there. But they say, this is a good thing. Let them be salt and light there.

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They profess to be Christ. They know their Bible pretty well. They know the gospel. So there you go.

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Right. Okay. This is an opinion of mine, the opinion that I have.

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I can give good reason as to why I hold the opinion. I do see the command being given to Christians to be salt and light, to be in the world but not of it.

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I do believe that that dialogue tends to be more with adults.

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I do see that the aim of commands given in relation to children tend to be more, we as parents need to raise them in the way that they should go.

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I personally think, and a lot of this is because I've seen it too much.

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I've seen it more than not, is our kids from Christian families will go into the public school and maybe they won't be sucked into a real depraved world of sin.

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But we do see so many of them just become dull.

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And they can give you all the right answers, but there's no, rarely is there vision.

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Now, I'm not saying that exists all the time. There could very well be times when God says,

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I want that child to go to that school and I want him, because he knows the gospel, to be salt and light. And he's going to stand his ground and he's not going to be influenced by them.

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I know God is sovereign and he can do that. But when

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I'm left with having to make the decision, I'm going to lean towards,

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I'll send them in there after I've had quite a few years to raise them in the way that they should go. Now, speaking to somebody who is an athlete, you just mentioned before that you were coaching the

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Hofstra football team at one point. What about these parents who have extraordinarily gifted athletes for children?

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And they recognize that the typical private Christian school, especially the smaller ones, don't necessarily even have an athletics program, if you could comment on that.

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Right. That's true. That tends to be true. Of course, that tends to be true more here in the

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Northeast. You move out of here, you go west, you find huge programs. As far as we go, we just started the sports program pretty much when

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I got there three years ago. We have volleyball in the fall and then we have fencing in the spring.

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I definitely want to develop the sports program, but keep in mind,

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I've got three kids of my own and a lot of the way that we satisfy their need for athletics is to do so through the community.

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I understand, as you just said, it's interesting that you have a fencing program. When I went to high school in Amityville, it would not have been a good idea to put sharp objects in the hands of the students.

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Do homeschooling parents have an opportunity to partially involve their children in Grace Christian Academy or take benefit of some of what you offer without completely having their students enroll their full time?

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Okay, great question because just within the last few months, I've had maybe three or four different people come at me from different directions and ask me if we do that or if we would do that.

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I have started to look into doing that. We don't have anything that accommodates that yet.

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We're trying to figure out how we could pull that off. We don't have it, but it's on the radar and it's being investigated.

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I would like to address the homeschool situation. The majority of homeschoolers, at least in this area, tend to follow a classical model.

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The homeschool families that I know have been a real encouragement to me, but I've also become saddened at times with them when they reach that point when they can no longer educate their child.

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The child has become too advanced in their academics. Then they send their child off to a public school or somewhere else.

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Then they don't get to keep them in that classical system anymore.

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What we're trying to do is become even more well known within the classical Christian homeschool community so that when those families reach their limit and they need somewhere to send them to, they can feel safe in sending them to us.

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Now what makes the situation unique and more of a challenge for Grace Christian Academy since you're in Merrick, New York, which is in Nassau County, Long Island, which according to your statistics is the 27th largest county in the

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United States and the 97th least reached county, less than 3 % evangelical with only about 1 .5

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% estimated attending church on a regular basis, and this is your statistics say by mission standards makes

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Nassau County an unreached area people group. If you could comment on that.

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Well, you pretty much said it all. Good stats.

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You know, the missions community declares a group or an area unreached once they fall below 2 % evangelical.

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Technically, you know, by survey, we, Nassau County, are 2 .98%.

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So we're not in that category yet, but we are flirting with it real close.

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So it makes it more important to grow up the leaders of tomorrow in that community because of the fact that the

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Christian church is such a minority there. Right. If you could analogously kind of picture people standing on a cliff, and you know, proportionally, you know, you would have certain parts of the cliff that would be all filled in because you've got communities that have such a large

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Christian population. But then there would be certain gaps where you would have nobody.

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So picture a part of the cliff where you could fit a hundred bodies in there. Take 97 of those bodies out.

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You've got a gap of 97 bodies and all the people who don't know the

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Lord are headed for that cliff. And what we're trying to do is raise up a whole generation of students who are equipped to and who can see the need to stand in that gap.

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Well, we have run out of time, Steve. It's been a delight to have you on Iron Sharpens Iron, and I know that the website for Grace Christian Academy, as I mentioned before, is

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G -C -A -L -I dot com. G -C -A -L -I dot com, which stands for Grace Christian Academy Long Island dot com.

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In 30 seconds, do you have any final words? Yes. We begin everything that we do with the understanding that authentic wisdom and knowledge begins with the fear of the

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Lord. The majority of education out there does not start that way. It starts with, if you can see it, touch it, taste it, feel it, smell it, then it's viable.

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But if you can't, then you can't know it. That goes directly in contradiction to what the

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Lord teaches us and has for us. Secondly, we are wide open for enrollment, and we want enrollment because we want to train our children in the way that they should go.

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Amen, and we're out of time, and I hope that all of you listening always remember that Jesus Christ is a far greater

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Savior than you or a sinner. Please tune in tomorrow to our tribute to the late