Tag: Seven Mountains

The Perfect Storm in Education

April 19, 2018

Over the past two weeks, we have been inundated with the news of school shootings. The most deadly in recent weeks was the shooting on the campus at Ompaqua Community College in Oregon, where 10 people were killed and nine were injured. The US has had an average of one school shooting per week since January 2012 when 20 children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary. How did we get here? What happened in America that over the last 16 years school shootings have become common place? Who broke that dam of evil? And more importantly, how do we stop the killings? 

 

Below I’ve listed three historical events that led us to this place:

  1. The Theory of Evolution Introduced in Education—In the mid 1850s Herbert Spencer proposed that education should draw on new scientific principles to make teaching more efficient as well as pleasant for the child. He proposed that learning was subject to the same laws that shaped the evolution of human beings from simple organisms could be used to shape the development of each child from the earliest moments in life to adults. Out of these concepts, came a new branch of science called child psychology. New discoveries in child learning techniques should give helpful information on how to be a more discerning and caring parent or teacher. The problem with this new branch of science was that it was founded in Darwinism/evolution. Learning disabilities in children began to take names. Eventually, the medical community came up with a myriad of diagnoses for those disabilities, which leads us to the next issue—that of drugs.
  2. Drugs—What came in the 1960s and onwards were a plethora of new drugs on the streets of our cities as well as through the pharmaceutical industries. The street drugs appealed to those who desired to check out of a materialistic culture. The pharmaceutical drugs treated children’s psychological issues as well as learning disabilities. We became a nation that medicated her children.
  3. We Lost our Moral compass Meanwhile the school curricula was steadily undergoing a major shift with the removal of the God of the Christians from the classrooms. With no concept of a creator and therefore no accountability to a higher power, no value is placed on life. When life is cheap, killing the innocent becomes prevalent. When children who grow up deprived of knowing God as a creator are legally drugged there is a recipe for disaster.

These “winds” are some of the strongest influencers that created a “perfect storm” in our educational system.

The answer lies in prayer, but not just a blanket prayer that says, “our thoughts and prayers are with you.” The answer lies with those who know God and the power of the Name of Jesus. Now is the time for believers to come together in unity, in order to pray targeted, strategic prayers that will turn our educational system and consequently our children back to God. Jesus said, “If you believe, all things are possible to him who believes.”  Let’s come together in agreement to take the Mountain of Education!

 

How We Feed our Enemy

November 21, 2016

One never expects to get insight from a drive through the Moroccan desert, but often life can surprise me in the most unlikely places! It was one of those boring drives where the scenery never changes—brown desert sand pitted with volcanic rock droning on mile after mile. All was quiet in the car—the driver and interpreter in the front, my friend Gale Sherrill and me and in the back. That’s when Driss, our interpreter, held up a local newspaper and slapped the huge picture plastered on the front page, and asked, “Do you know who this is?”

It was a Moroccan newspaper written in French. I had no clue who the gorgeous woman on the front page was. I nodded my head, “No.”

Amazing the Ideas that Come on a Lonely Road
One Road leads through the Sahara Desert

“This is a transvestite.” He slapped the newspaper again and again as he made his point. “This is what fuels all the radical Islamic groups across the globe! We think we are being modern when we promote transgender behavior, but in reality we are aiding ISIS by showing our moral decay, which feeds their drive to conquer us.”

Although we were discussing Morocco, the same is true of any country, especially the US where moral decline has progressed at an accelerated rate over the past 50 years. Driss was right. When we accept immoral behavior as a society, we invite the enemy to engage us in a warfare where we cannot win. But where did it all start? How did we get this way? I believe that the seed of embracing immoral change began in the American Educational system around 1895. That was the time John Dewey (the Father of Modern Education) began his work to transform education in America. Dewey wanted  the public schools to be the conduit to promote social change in America, and not just any social change, but social change that would separate us from any Judeo-Christian beliefs. The classroom was to be used to teach the children how they were superhuman, god like people who, with the right education apart from religion, would choose to be upright moral citizens. The new emphasis of the classroom was to be social at the exclusion of any and all Christian references or moral teaching.

In all of the seven Mountains that make up our culture, Education was the only venue seized by men with a godless agenda soon after our country’s inception. So, what do we do now that we are 125 years down the road?

  1. We must realize that we are in a cultural war. We will have to take a stand and losing is not an option.
  2. We must develop a strategic prayer plan. This has to be a new plan that will embrace spiritual warfare at a new level.
  3. We must make prayer for unity among Believers a top priority. This element alone is one of the most crucial. If we are to win, we will need the full cooperation of all who call themselves Born Again Believers.

In his resistance to Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer tried tirelessly to get the German church to resist the changes Hitler was imposing on them. The church was so divided that finally Bonhoeffer started what amounted to another denomination called, The Confessing Church. But the start was too late and never gained the approval of the leadership of major denominations. Let it not be said of our country and our generation that we could not rally the forces of righteousness against the evil tide that is trying to overtake our culture and ultimately our country.