© 2015 Christian Overman
I first met Christian Overman in 1999 at a Colorado Springs conference organized by Chuck Colson. (I also ran into an old college friend whom I hadn’t seen for 28 years since we had studied the Bible together in our dorm on the University of Michigan’s North Campus. He has since gone on to be become the editor of Touchstone magazine, a wonderful publication. That’s another story.) Anyway, meeting Christian, hale, hearty, and enthusiastic, was like meeting another old friend, except that we had never met before. We have since become very good friends, and I want you to become his friend as well. The work he does with Worldview Matters is terribly valuable. His guest blog introduces his work that “brings meaning to life.”
—Bob Osburn
Followers of Christ in the United States are coming to the sober realization that the biblical foundations for law, civil government, and family that once provided commonly accepted harbor lights for society have been replaced. An incessant move toward the secularization of society and the privatization of Christianity that took place in the 20th Century was enormously successful, being expedited greatly through elementary and secondary schools.
Some may think state schools are neutral when it comes to matters of faith. But this question of not mixing faith with education must be carefully re-examined. The question is not whether faith will be allowed to mix with education, but which faith will be mixed? The fact is, faith is being mixed with common schools today on a daily basis. It’s just a different kind of faith than the one that was mixed with U.S. schools for some 200 years. The biblio-centric faith of Noah Webster, the former “Schoolmaster of the Nation,” has been replaced by the non-theistic faith of John Dewey [his term].
My biggest concern about young Christians being indoctrinated by secularized schools, however, is not that they will become atheists. My biggest concern is that they will become Christian dualists. A Christian dualist is one who reads the Bible, prays, and goes to Church on Sunday, yet doesn’t make any significant connection between God’s Word and what goes on in the Monday through Friday work world, because they think “faith” is a personal, private matter, and the workplace is public, and therefore “secular.”
Christian dualists don’t mix the Word of God with the office or the shop because they never mixed the Word of God with biology, art and math. So why mix it now with life in the city? Building houses, selling vegetables, practicing law and driving a bus are all “secular” endeavors, aren’t they? But where exactly is this “secular” world?
Worldview Matters exists to help followers of Christ to recover from SSD, the “Sacred-Secular Divide,” and to embrace a wholistic approach to life, by restoring a biblio-centric theology of work to the educational process, from the earliest years of formal learning.
We do this by training Christian classroom teachers how to design lesson plans that will help their students to “connect the dots” between whatever academic subject they are studying, and the bigger picture of God’s purpose for that subject and how they can put that subject to good use in their God-given task as Earth-Tenders. This is the lost purpose for learning we are seeking to restore, one elementary and secondary school at a time. A number of schools in the US and abroad have become part of a multi-year training process we call the WRAP: Worklife Restoration and Advancement Project.
The training we provide is done largely via distance learning, through an on-line course called, Increase Meaning: A Wholistic Approach To Christian Education. This course can be taken for 5 graduate level credits through Seattle Pacific University, or taken independently, without credit, directly through Worldview Matters. For more on this, click here.