Everything comes back to the church for me. I believe so strongly in the church and it's role in us having healthy lives. That's why I talk about it so much. Unfortunately, the church around us is in such disarray that many people, even those who go regularly to it, have written it off. If Christians really believed in church and the power it has to change lives, they would not continue to allow it to be in such a sad state. They would change it. However, many think their personal spiritual life is the only important issue and refuse to get dirty in fixing the church. How selfish.
Now onto the topic at hand. As always, I could be wrong. Feel free to let me know. And I could be right. If so, feel free to change your church.
One cannot have a healthy, spiritual homeschool experience without a healthy, God-directed church. If you're just doing homeschool for intellectual reasons, then you can be successful without a good church. If you're just doing homeschool for moral reasons, then you can be successful without a good church. By moral reasons, I mean keeping your child away from the "big" sins like swearing, drinking, sexual promiscuity, and the like. We can homeschool for many reasons and be successful. But if we want to create children of God, we need a healthy church to work alongside of us in doing that. Being a Christian is not just about being intellectual or moral; it's mainly about loving those around us in the world.
Although I lean toward homeschooling, my biggest fear is creating insular children. I do not see how I can avoid that unless I am in a healthy church. A healthy church would constantly be involved in letting those in the community know that God loves them. They can do in a multitude of ways. Our imaginations are our only limit. We could be simple and visit the elderly, fix houses and tend yards of those who can't, feed those who can't feed themselves, clothe those who can't afford to, buy cars for those who need them to get a job they currently don't have, give people housing that can't afford it. Or we could be more imaginative and go around and clean public stores bathrooms, hold a big feast for the carnival workers in town, provide a free transportation service. Our imaginations are our only limit when it comes to expressing God's love to the world. But we always need to make sure that we are allowing our imagination to be directed by God.
Why the church? Why not just do these things out of my household? Because the opportunities for being loving are multiplied tremendously when more people are involved. It can become a weekly habit rather than a once in a long while opportunity. We have more ears and eyes to see the needs in the world around us. We have more resources to meet those needs. Personally, I would be lucky to be able to afford to provide a car to someone who needs one more than once a year. A healthy church would be able to do it on a regular basis if they were so led. Same thing with housing.
The reason we don't see churches tackling these great needs/opportunities around us is because we have wasted the resources God has given us. The church has not made love the most important expression of our life together. I'm not going to get into all the things that we place above it. That won't help. We need to care enough about the church and about what people think about God because of our churches so that we will help it become the center of love in our society. When the church is loving, the fear of a homeschooled child being insular is non-existent if they are involved in that healthy, God-directed church.
Watch out for the potholes.
