The Work of Religious Education

The Work of Religious Education THE WORK OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
By Batsell Baxter

Hopie Training
There is no way to measure the training the child receives in a good home. If a good Christian father and mother could continue the education of their children on through the high school and college years that would be a splendid thing. But that cannot be done. The father and mother do not have the time; they do not have the preparation and they do not have the equipment to give very much of the high school work or any of the college work. And so the training of the home is supplemented in the grammar school and continued in the high school and college. Where father and mother are compelled to stop, the high school or the college takes over. Father and mother have boosted the child up the ladder of learning as far as they can. Then the specially trained teacher takes over. For nine months of the year, one-half the waking hours of the day, that child is in the hands of a group of teachers. How great then is the influence of the teacher! The teacher takes the place of both father and mother.

Some Relative Values
The public school is an impressive institution. Just about everything that the sudent needs is provided for him. Even the grammar school has its library, its maps, and its science equipment, its health and recreational equipment. In high school, the lay-out for classrooms and physical training equipment and science equipment is tremendous! In college, the expenditure amounts to several thousand dollars per student. Everything that the science of pedagogy knows is provided to develop that boy or girl in every way possible. But wait—there is no outlay for religi-ous training,no provision in either the high school or the tax-supported college to teach these young men and young women how to fit in and to carry on in their relation to God and Christianity. That is all left out. The church continues to offer its one-half hour of classwork once a week to the relatively small number who will come. There is also a half hour sermon in the morning once a week—one hour a week for religious instruction. Somebody says, “Don’t they have services on Sunday night?” Yes, a few of the amen corner brethren and sisters do; but most of the young people are somewhere else. Thus, we have it! At least thirty hours a week of secular training, one hour a week per religious training—thirty to one! All of the high school and college students take the secular training—a few of them continue the religious training. Why should the young people think that the religious training is important when the older and experienced people give thirty times as much time and infinitely more money to the secular training than they do to the religious training? Is there any wonder that young people get the idea that, after all, religious training is not very important ? An Alarming Condition
That is an alarming picture, isn’t it? So alarming that some good people in the church have decided to do something about it. There is no opportunity for religious instruction in tax-supported schools except a little here and there that is interdenominational in character and utterly unfitted to train young people in the fundamentals of Christianity. In the sectarian colleges, the religious training that is offered is sectarian in character, weak and full of error on some of the fundamentals and often rotten with modernism and skepticism. From time to time a few zealous Christians have determined to do something about it. Groups of individuals have set up schools like this one where a standard secular training can be gotten and along with it as a vital part of the course the Bible can be taught by Christian teachers.

Christian Education Meets the Test
Jesus said, ‘‘By their fruits ye shall know them.” A few years ago an evangelist and a good singer down in Georgia got a whole congregation to quit using the organ and return to congregational singing. I asked the evangelist how they did it. He said, “Oh, the most practical argument against the organ or piano in worship is to sing it out of business.” Schools where the Bible is taught by Christian teachers have justified their existence over and over by their fruits. Let m,e give you the one instance. Out in Los Angeles is a college where the Bible is taught by Christian teachers. This college has several million dollars invested in buildings, equipment, and endowment. Do you know that Abilene Christian College, Harding College, David Lipscomb College and other such schools built that college? When I first met George Pepperdine, the founder of that college, he was what we would call a “Sommerite.” He thought that what we call Christian colleges were competitors of the church in religious instruction and of the state in secular training. He thought there was no place for them. Finally, he learned that such colleges are not competitors of the church but that they continue the work begun in the Christian home. One day while we were working away making plans toward the establishment of that school out there, he said this is in substance to me: “I wonder if you do not have a big question in your mind that I can answer.” I told him I did. He asked me what it was. I said I wanted to know what changed him on the question of colleges like the one we were starting to build. What made him feel that such a thing would be worth the outlay of the means he proposed to put into it. He said in substance that he had watched the boys and girls who come from Abilene, from Harding, from David Lipscomb and the others like them and he had noted that these boys and girls who came out there came to church, came to the front, and entered in with full consecration in the. work and worship of the church. It was seeing Christianity as manifested in the lives of these young people that caused him to turn millions of dollars into the building of an institution which he hoped .would be like the ones from which they came.

GOD SET THE EXAMPLE
Our Lord can use any man or woman for good who will submit to his will, but so many times he can use the trained men and women for the greatest good.

Abraham
In Abraham’s day, Ur of the Chaldees was a modern city for that day and in some respects a modern city for this day. Within the last hundred years, excavators have shown that many of the houses in Ur had their bathrooms with running hot and cold water and other facilities that not all of your houses have now. There was a good man named Abram living in Ur at that time serving God in a woild of idolatry. God wanted to train him to keep the name of God alive in a world that had turned away from God. The greatest learning of the day could be his in Ur or the nearby city of Babylon; but that training and the environment around it were contrary to the things God wanted to do with Abraham. So God took him out up the valley of one of the rivers in Mesopotamia, away to the Northwest and then to the South, away from the so-called culture and refinement and arts and sciences of the mightiest educational center of the world of that day, to a land of little learning where, crude barbarians herded their flocks and paid little attention to the strangers in their midst. When God had gotten out of Abraham’s heart the education and philosophy that was the pride of Babylonia, he began to teach Abraham and prepare, him for his work of being the Father of the Faithful, the Friend of God: to be the ancestor on the fleshly side of Christ through whom the nations of the world would be blessed by faith.

Moses
Moses was skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians. He was God’s man to lead God’s people away from slavery to the promised land. He had the home training that God had enjoined upon fathers and mothers. With that he had a state education in the world’s best schools of that day: a state education that left God completely out. With this preparation Moses set himself to his great task. His home training gave him the motive, the attiude of heart, the personal conviction; his state educational training gave him the method, the way of doing it.

Moses tried to do God’s work the Egyptian way. He failed. You know the story. He fled for his life. God overruled his mistake. God took him out of that en-vironment, out into the pasture land of Midian. God spent forty years training Moses. That was as long as Moses had been living in Egypt. After forty years of training in the ways and ideals that the state schools of Egypt could not give him, Moses was ready to do God’s work in God’s way. THE VALUE OF A GOOD SCHOOL
A babe was born into a home in Tarsus of ancient Cilicia. His proud parents named him Saul. Church history tells us that a great university, the University of Tarsus was ready with open doors to receive this young man when his age and experience would enter him in. But his devout Jewish parents passed the home university by. They sent their boy to an institution of learning in another country. All the pride and culture and learning of the Greek world was centered in Athens and so they sent Saul to Athens to the greatest center of learning and influence in Greece! No, they sent him to the south. Well, it must have been then to the University of Alexandria. In Alexandria was located at that time the greatest library on earth. They wanted their boy to have at his com mand the research facilities from all the world. No, they did not send him to Alexandria. They sent him to the seat of another kind of learning. They sent him to Jerusalem to the school of Gamaliel. They passed up the home university; they turned their backs upon the center of Greek culture and learning; they ignored the greatest library in the world. Why did they do it? Because they wanted something put into the heart of their boy that not one of these institutions had to give or cared to give. What was that thing? That was preparation for the most useful life and the most effective, life as a servant of God. Saul came out of the school of Gamaliel with honors. The religious leaders of his nation immediately offered him position and prominence. The God of heaven looked down upon the mad career of this young zealot. God analyzed his preparation, his fitness of heart, his training for a great work. Out on the highway in the middle of the day the Lord presented his proposition to Saul and explained the opportunities. Ananias taught him how to be a Christian. This young man became a humble servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. He stood before the Gentiles and the kings of earth, knowing nothing among them save the Lord Jesus Christ and him crucified. Twelve other apostles were inspired alike with him by the Holy Spirit, but Saul had a foundation—-a fundamental religious training and prepaartion that the other twelve did not have and so he could finally say, “I labored more abundantly than they all.”

Saul Teaches School
We go now to the ancient city of Ephesus, the center of learning and philosophy of the district called Asia. Paul has preached three months in the Jewish synagogue, and they have cast him out. He goes to the school of Tyrannus and in that school he reasons daily. This school work lasted only two years and so far as we know the religious part of the school died, but during that two years, the record says, “All Asia heard the word of the Lordand so it is today. The brightest minds, the most consecrated hearts from Christian homes are gathered in this and other schools that we call Christian colleges, and from these schools young people have gone out to many nations of the world to turn people from skepticism, and sectarianism and heathenism to the principles of New Tes-tament work and worhip. A college where religious education is paramount, where the Bible is the chief textbook, is a good place to send boys and girls; but let us remember that Christian education continues the training begun in the home. The boy or girl who has a good home foundation of faith in God and Christ and Christian zeal can build on that in a Christian college and do a wonderful work for the Lord. They have done it and they are doing it now and they can do it again, but the boy or girl who has gotten out of hand at home, who had practically no Christian training or in whose case the little Chrisian training that was given was practically nullified by the conditions in that home and by the lives of father or mother or both—that boy or girl has very little foundation to build on and the college that sets about to develop that young person into a strong faithful Christian character has an almost superhuman task. Sometimes it can be done and sometimes it is done, but when some young person fails to rise above the home training and example we ought not to blame the college.

Some Turn Out Bad
Sometimes a parent from an apparently Christian home complains that son or daughter turned out bad in a college where relgious influence is supreme. In that case, granting that the home was Christian, the bad turnout is not because of Christian teaching but in spite of it. One of the twelve disciples of our Lord turned out terribly bad. He became a religious wreck and a suicide; but no one blames the teaching of Jesus for the treachery of Judas. Judas was a free moral agent and people are free moral agents today. There has never been a time or a place where free men and women could not choose the good or the bad. Once in a while in spite of all the good training, somebody like Judas chooses the bad. Another one slipped. Peter did a thing one night that brought shame upon him and sorrow to his Lord, yet he repented and he and the others took the gospel to every nation of his day. The Return to Righteousness
Sometimes young people who apparently go astray and fall out of the ranks in college come to their senses later on. In a college in Oklahoma, about a quarter of a century ago, a young man was asked to leave the school because he seemed to set himself to oppose the spirit and the ideals of it. He had a spirit of independence that rebelled against the good and chose the evil. He was not immoral, he did not drink, but whatever the school advocated he was against it. But out in an environment that was hostile to good and righteousness he came to himself. The Christian training of the school welled up in his heart. He was a fighter by nature. When he looked around and found himself engulfed by an atmosphere of worldliness and drunkenness and immorality he said in substance, “I am against it and I am going to do something about it.” He sent out a call for help to the college president who had sent him home. He started a Bible Study on Sunday. In the summer they held a meeting, and he became the leading spirit of a movement for good that resulted in a strong congregation in that community, and he is still going strong for good and right. Sometimes, some of the greatest disappointments for the time being turn out in the long run to be powers for good. That reminds me that Simon Peter, who forsook and denied his Lord in the hour of trial, repented; and fifty days later led the Lord’s little army of one hundred and twenty in an assault that liberated in one day three thousand captives from the slavery of Satan and sin.

DEAD COLLEGES
For a long time good brethren have realized, to some extent, the needs of continuing the home training in Christian fundamentals. They have realized also that the state schools will not give this teaching and are not prepared to give it if they would. In the generation past good, earnest teachers and friends have started a number of Christian colleges. I recall in sadness today the name of Thorp Spring Christian College, Lockney, Sabinal, Gunter, Southwestern at Denton: these grew and flourished for a time; but they are all dead now. Why? Why did they die? For lack of building and equipment, for lack of endowment to meet the demand of Educational Association Accreditors, for lack of money to pay living- salaries to teachers; not because boys and girls did not want to go there. These colleges starved to death in the midst of wealth and plenty of it; Good men and women hung on there, hoping for financial relief which never came, taught until dire necessity forced them to close the schools and seek places where they could get enough money to live on.

Excuses for Not Giving
I want you to note some things in this regard that brethren have offered as excuses for not supporting these colleges. One is that the college might die and then the money would be lost: That’s logical, isn’t it? Suppose a babe is born into your home. You don’t know whether he is going to live or not. Thousands of babies have died: and how do you know he is not going to die? If he does, all the money and care you have spent on him will be lost; so you just lay him aside over there in a cold room without warmth or food and he does die. Well, you have saved money.

Anybody who would do that would be tried in court and condemned. He would be condemned at the bar of public opinion also. But we are not going to do that. Why? We are going to take care of that baby. Why? Because we love him. But he may turn out bad, he may land n the penitentiary. Babies have done it; but on the other hand he may live to be great and good and noble. He may live to serve the Lord and bless his fellow man; so we take the chance.

Departure from the Faith
Some good brethren who decline to support colleges where the word of God is taught to do so on this ground: the college may depart from the faith, the college may turn aside from the ideals of the founders. Well, suppose they do after years of splendid Christian service. While they remained loyal they turned out young men and women whose preaching and life turned thousands of lost souls to Christ. In a few years they can do a world of good. Let me give you an example. Abilene Christian College is loyal to the ideals of its founders. Throughout the years it has steered a steady course. Let me tell you what its rivals say: A few years ago a state evangelist arose in a Christian church convention and told his brethren in substance that his work for some months had been out in the western part of Texas and that he had very little progress to report. He said the “conservative” brthren had a college out there and the boys from that college went out preaching with pay or without, and that he could not match their youthful enthusiasm and consecration as they turned souls to Christ. The college to which he referred was Abilene Christian College. The boys and girls who have gone out from this school to serve in the name of the Master have already paid back in Christian service more than all the money which has been given to the school or will ever be given to it.

Church Departures
A little more than forty years ago we brethren in Texas saw a departure in the work of the church. In almost every instance the organ and society party was in the majority. In almost every instance we who opposed these innovations lost our church houses. One brother who had more money than Christian consecration refused to help build another one in his community. He said in substance, “No, I am not going to give anything to build another church house. Who knows that somebody won’t come in and take it away from us? They took that one. Who knows that most of the church won’t go astray and take the house with them? They did it once and they might do it again.” Suppose all the brethren of financial means in this state acted that way. But did they do it? No. Have you read Henry W. Grady’s speech “The New South?” He tells how the beaten soldiers of the South turned from Appamatox to look upon the ashes of their homes and stores and factories. He tells how with ax and spade and hammer and saw they applied their mind and muscle to rebuild their homes and their fortunes. That thrilling story of achievement is more than matched by the zeal and consecration with which the soldiers of the cross applied their brain and bodies to the task of building church houses and re-establishing a work that had been wrecked by the flood tide of innovation.

Let us go back 1900 years: Let us not forget that the church which was started by the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit and the apostles degenerated in a few hundred years and apostatized into the Roman Catholic Church. For more than a thousand years the Roman Catholic Church ruled the world and those who followed any other pattern in their work and worship did so at the risk of life and roperty. History presents a gloomy picture. Did the pioneers of the restoration movement stop on that account? Did they say “the church went astray once and if we restore it, it will do so again, so what is the use?” No, they didn’t do that. They were too consecrated to the Lord. With the sword of the Spirit these soldiers went about winning* back what indifference and lack of consecration had lost. Now, let’s go back to our schools: Thorp Springs Christian College, Lockney, Sabinal, Gunter, Southwestern. Not one of these schools de~ parted from the. ideals of the founders. Let me tell you a matter of Old Testament history: Look at the times that Israel went astray. It was the priests that led them away and not the prophets. It was from the schools of the prophets that the cry came: “Break down your idols and turn back to God.” How many voices of the priests can you find condemning the evil practices of the day and fighting under the banner of return to God? It was the voices of the prophets that thundered from every hill and through every valley. Read your Old Testament and see if this is not true.

WE ARE LARGELY WHAT WE ARE TAUGHT TO BE
Many of you people who are here today sat in the gymnasium on the old campus a little more than a month after the administration building burned and heard a man, advanced in years, a man of influence and power, say these words, “I believe that God has in the world three great divine institutions: the home, the state and the church. I believe the home is for the reproduction and rearing of human beings; that the state is to protect the life, liberty and happiness of its citizens; that the church is that institution through which human squls are to be saved and fitted for the life that lies beyond death. I believe that the pillar and support of the truth is the church and not some humanly organized missionary society. I believe that the manifold wisdom of God is to be made known through the church.” He had a few months before repudiated the use of instrumental music in worship. That man had come almost to the evening of life, that man was Brother Hall L. Calhoun. As a young man he had gone to college. Brother M. C. Kurfees had been influential in having him go to a college whose faculty believed in and practiced the use of instrumental music in worship. This young man’s convictions were changed in that school, and he came out of it preaching and practicing instrumental music and missionary societies. He went on, took the Ph.D. Degree with outstanding honors. One of the strongest debates on the use of instrumental music in the worship is the Calhoun-Kurfees debate—the debate this man had with the older preacher who had influenced him to go to that college. For many years Brother Calhoun preached and practiced what he had learned in that college, then later in life he came to see again the truth which that college had taken out of his boyhood heart. He came back to his first love and then a few months later, on our lectureship, he uttered the words that 1', quoted just a few months ago. That sort of thing has happened over and over again: only in most instances, the young man or the young woman never came back to that first love. I tell you, we are largely what we are taught to be. A good sound college faculty like that of the Nashville Bible School or Abilene Christian College today could have saved this good man so that not only the evening of his life, but the prime of his life as well, would have been given to the teaching and the practicing of the Christianity that we find in the New Testament. The Care of the Young
In 1906 Abilene Christian College was founded. I have already told you what its rivals have said of its powers and influence for good. It continues the work that Christian homes can no longer give to high school and college students who have gone away to school.

One Sunday afternoon about a dozen years ago I had preached at San Angelo in the morning. That afternoon Mrs. Baxter and I were traveling along the highway to Christoval. I was to speak at the encampment there on Christian education. As usual, we were a little late. As that big steel-bodied car roared along the highway, we were confronted with an unusual sight—a grown ground squirrel trotted out on the highway followed by a baby squirrel. It must have been mother and babe. Right in the middle of the highway the mother ground squirrel heard the oncoming car, saw it. She seemed paralyzed, not certain which way to run. The baby crouched flat on the pavement. She did a wonderful thing. She stood up straight and tall on her hind feet and raised two tiny paws in the air as she faced the car. So far as I know she knew no language, but what she said was perfectly clear, “This is my baby. Don’t you touch it.” One wheel of that heavy car could have crushed both her and her baby flat against the pavement. I) could not stop, so I guided that monster of steel so that the wheels passed them equi-distant on each side; a little way down the pavement I stopped and got out to see what I had done. Back yonder about fifty yards that mother and baby were trotting off the pavement to the side of the road. I sat down on the running board too nervous for the moment to drive on. The lives of those ground squirrels were worth only scant consideration. They would end in a few days, at best. It may be that some predatory animal ate them both that night. I have gone hunting and with almost glee watched them somersault as the charge from the gun struck its mark. The thing that impressed me that day was this—God had put it into the heart of even the lowly four footed animal to take . care of the younger generation. Every animal has the instinct to protect and provide for its young. So that old father with the hard, rough hands and swarthy, tanned face who came to the president’s desk and said, “I don’t want my children to have the hard time I had. I want to give them something I didn’t get.” That old father was speaking a sentiment that is as universal as life itself. The Beloved Son
A few years ago a boy preached a splendid sermon in one of the large churches in Fort Worth. At the close of the service an old man came almost tottering up to some of us who had sat in the audience and said, “He is my boy.” I am minded of an occasion when our Lord was clothed in the robes of glory with his countenance bright as the sun. He had learned obedience by the things which he suffered. He was ready to make the supreme sacrifice that humanity might be saved from sin. In that hour of glory the Father in Heaven said direct from Heaven, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Hear ye him.” And now, fathers and mothers, when you come close to the end of the way and in your community and in other communities your sons and daughters are carrying on in a way to make you glad and thankful, you can say, this is my son, this is my daughter, and say it with pride and thanksgiving. In those closing hours of your life the sacrifices that you have made for institutions like Abilene Christian College will seem as but little and the reward you have gained will fill your hearts to overflowing.

REVENUE
In 1932 or 1933 I sent a letter to a number of colleges and universities in the southern states, mainly Texas and Tennessee, and asked them what per cent of their running expenses was paid by their tuition and fees and the profits on the board. The answer ranged from 75 per cent to as low as 55 per cent. This did not include the cost of building and permanent equipment. The building and permanent equipment must be gotten by donations from those whom the Lord has blessed with wealth. (One man said, from those who have been cursed with riches and want to get rid of part of the burden.) From 25 to 45% of the actual cost of operating a college must be paid by donated endowment or by annual gifts or by tremendous sacrifice on the part of the teachers. For our schools to operate, our teachers have had to teach for from 25 to 50% less than they could get somewhere else, and yet the accrediting agencies have paid special tribute to the work done by these teachers. Though our schools have not had as'much material equpiment as the endowed colleges and though teachers have had to labor at a great financial sacrifice, the accrediting agencies have almost without exception, given full credit to every student who has transferred from our colleges to one of these endowed colleges or universities.

Pay It Back
Young people, we cannot pay the cost of our education. Likewise we cannot pay for the home training given us by our fathers and mothers. On Buffalo Bill’s grave out on the summit of Lookout Mountain west of Denver, Colorado, the tourists find this inscription : “Take a souvenir stone but put another one back;” and so each visitor gives back what he takes away. Young people, how much are we taking away? How .many blessings have been given us here? How many opportunities? How much equipment? What and how much of it are we going to give back? Stud-ents and former students, we owe a debt. We don’t think much of people who don’t pay their debts. Now to you older brethren and sisters; Our young people have returned home to us to be a blessing in the church and to the community. What are we going to pay back to these good people whose toil and sacrifice sent them back to us better prepared to serve us and to help us serve God?