Worship & Education

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In the Christian faith, everything is connected. If one were to pull on the thread of an isolated point of doctrine, say the doctrine of the Resurrection, he would find that it is connected to, assumes, points to, and fulfills a whole host of things. You can’t think about the Resurrection of Christ without also thinking about subjects like man, the nature of Christ, the doctrine of the Scriptures, creation, the Trinity, sin, death, the afterlife, etc. Everything is connected in the Christian faith. 

When we think about education and a Christian view of education, there is something underneath that needs to be hammered out before we can jump into curriculum, educational models, classroom setup and the like. Before we talk about what a successful education is, we have to talk about what man is, what a human being is, and what mankind is. What is man? What is mankind for? In God’s plan, what was the human race originally intended for? The answers to these questions will affect how a school ‘does’ education. 

In the biblical worldview, man is the Image of God. Man is to image God in the sense that he does what God does. God works, man works. God rests, man rests. God creates, man creates. The rest of creation was not given the capacity to image God to the extent that man was. Man is the pinnacle of creation and His representative to the rest of the world. 

Instead of being a ‘homo sapien’, or thinking man, as the modern view has it, in the Bible, man is ‘homo adorans’, worshiping or adoring man. What sets man apart from the rest of creation is indeed his ability to reason and think, but even more so, his compulsion to worship or give loyalty and honor to something higher than himself. To adore or desire something beyond us is uniquely human. This is why every culture, whether primitive or advanced, superstitious or secular, worships something. Pre-Christian tribes worship the creation, atheistic communist nations worship the state (think North Korea with all the religious symbolism and veneration to previous rulers). Man worships. It's not a choice of if we will worship but what we will worship. 

Worship is expressed in a variety of ways, but at the very bottom, worship is loyalty, love, and thanksgiving. Whoever is at the top of the ladder of the person or thing you are most loyal to, the person or thing you love above all else, and the person or thing you say ‘thank you’ to, is the thing you worship. Adam and Eve were to be loyal to God fundamentally and primarily as He was their Father and Creator. They were to love God by giving Him every aspect of their being. They were also to give thanks to Him for every good and perfect gift.

Jesus came to restore this worshiping function of man to us. He says that the greatest commandment is to, “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, and with all of your strength” (Mark 12:30). If Jesus Himself gives a hierarchy or places emphasis and importances on various aspects of God’s commands, the Christian should too, and by extension the Christian school. 

So what is man? Man is the Image of God created to worship. What is education? Education is the growth and development of a human being in the Image of God to be a better worshiper. Education is the instruction of a student toward the ‘telos’ or end goal of giving loyalty, love, and thanks to God as His Creator and Redeemer. During His ministry, Jesus said to the woman at the well in John 4 that the Father is seeking worshippers; not theologians, Pastors, PhDs, engineers, teachers, etc. but worshipers. Therefore, everything during the school day and school year is directed to this end. Homework, classroom time, interactions between teachers and fellow students, chapel, recess, reading good books and the like culminate in helping the student realize who God is, why He is to be worshiped, and how they live their lives as a worshiping person.