For What Life Are We Training?

I wrote a quadratic equation triumphantly on the chalkboard. “When are we ever going to use THAT?” the student asked, or rather declared, since it wasn’t really a question. Anybody who has taught children burgeoning into adulthood has faced the challenge. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: When are we going to need that? Memorize “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”: I can read it, can’t I? Diagramming sentences: When are we ever going to do that? Memorize the Office of the Keys: The WHAT? When will we have to remember that?
Teachers might be tempted to be defensive or dismissive or even sympathetic. But whether the students know it or not, and whether they are ready for the answer or not, they are posing a question to which they will have to find an answer. What they are really asking is, “What kind of a world are we growing up in where things like this are important?” And there is a corollary, “Are these things really important to the world in which we are growing up?”
Our Lutheran schools are in the position to answer those key questions and to assign them their true relative importance, and the answer is not in any way utilitarian. We don’t have to tick off seven uses for the quadratic formula and three uses for diagramming. We don’t have to justify what we teach because of the certainty that they will find a specific use for it, or because what we teach will be enough for them to cope with the world in which they will live. After all, we live in a world in which only the grace of Christ is enough.
Think of that. Jesus told Paul in the midst of his afflictions, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9). It is God’s grace that puts everything into true perspective. Make the school a cloister where the children would memorize the Bible in its entirety and it isn’t enough to win God’s favor. Teach every bit of human wisdom and it will eventually come to nothing. Heal all diseases, bestow wealth upon everyone, and it would not be enough. The world would still be broken by sin; there would still be death and judgment. Only grace is enough; only the grace of Christ is sufficient. This truth is the foundation of the Lutheran school.
Children will not earn heaven by learning the Christian faith, but they will learn about the grace of God, and they will carry with them the words by which Christ speaks to them, words of grace: “Rejoice, your sins are forgiven.” In the midst of trial, “The kingdom ours remaineth,” “Come to me you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). The message of the Christian faith is God’s grace.
Likewise, factoring polynomials is not the way to eternal life. Yet, every Christian student will be given a number of vocations in this life in which he or she will serve others, and, by grace, this service to others is counted as a gift also to the Lord. Who knows what vocation to which God in His providence will call any given student, and by that person be a blessing to others? No amount of learning is enough to earn God’s favor, but by grace everything, even the least thing we do in love and faith, is sanctified and counted as a gift to Him.
In our schools, we teach in order to prepare our children for this world, a world in which only the Grace of Christ is enough.
Edward Bryant is pastor of St. Timothy Lutheran Church in Lombard, Illinois.