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Previous | Next Christian school: Help from the sanctuary
Dora Dueck
 Why did we choose to send our children to Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute, a Christian school?
In attempting to answer this question, I imagine – and commiserate with – a nervous 12-year-old undergoing the “interview” to enter the school of which we speak. “Why do you want to come here,” the child is asked, “to MBCI”? In the heavy moment of silent expectancy that follows, she thinks, with some desperation, that there must be a profound reason to offer, a pious reason perhaps, something obvious. She casts anxious eyes to her accompanying parent; can one fail this question? Or can she be honest and reply: because my local junior high has a bad reputation, because my older sister is here, because my best friend is coming, because I’ve heard about your sports program? Dare she propose such ordinary reasons?
I must begin exactly this way, by acknowledging how pragmatic our decisions about MBCI often were. When we considered where our first son would attend junior high, the fact that close friends of his were also attending MBCI was a significant factor. A buffer of familiar faces seemed very important in the scary, new environment of education beyond elementary school. And it was important. Those friends helped him integrate successfully into the world of MBCI, a world he stayed in for six years, until he graduated in 1994.
When the decision came up for our second son, friends also played a role, as did familiarity with MBCI because of the sibling already there. Still later, our daughter, proud of her older brothers, never doubted that she wanted to carry on what by now seemed the “family tradition” of attending MBCI. (The second son graduated in 1997, and the daughter is now entering grade 11.)
Each of our three children has had a positive experience at MBCI. Although school in and of itself (not to mention being a teenager), has its challenges and stresses, they got/are getting through well enough. Good friends; participation in music, drama, or athletics; and decent, caring, occasionally outstanding teachers – these helped a lot. The school’s high standards ensured solid preparation for further education. Our children – and we – continued, each fall, to choose MBCI.
Does this mean we had no reasons for selecting a Christian school besides our children’s wishes or their own sense of well-being? No, there are other reasons. But it must be admitted that the sense of “fit” was a key consideration. Had they struggled at MBCI, or been very unhappy there, I’m sure we would have considered alternatives.
How we chose
When I listen to the reasons our friends give for their decisions about their children’s schooling – some for public school and some for Christian school – I hear justifications as mixed as ours. I hear, too, the same underlying approach: to choose what will be, in their wisdom or opinion, best for their own children. This reveals, I think, the particular way in which our generation tackles the task of parenting. We live in a time in which we understand ourselves to have options, and individual responsibility and freedom in the midst of those options. Even as Christians, we construct the ideas and values which drive our decisions from a range of sources, with the confident assumption that we have a fair bit of room to manoeuvre.
I am not defending this approach as superior to the older approach to decision-making, which was based within the faith community, such as the consensus that led to the founding of MBCI in Winnipeg in 1945. Individualized rather than church-centred decision-making has a positive side, because of the attention parents must give to the formation of the individual child. Nevertheless, it leaves us relatively alone with our choices.
In our congregation, equally committed Christians have reached opposite conclusions about Christian versus public education. So, we respectfully tolerate the notion of personal discernment and do not probe much, at least not together, about a philosophy of education. Clearly the MB community which sponsors MBCI and other institutions of learning feels some ambivalence about Christian education.
That’s why
I’m imagining again our fictional adolescent in her interview for admittance to MBCI. Why does she want to come to this school? She’s floundering over reasons of friends and sports and her wishes, which feel (because she’s grown up in Sunday school) vaguely selfish to her. Then she remembers. “Because it’s a Christian school,” she says brightly. The MBCI official who is interviewing her smiles kindly, and she is relieved. That’s the reason, of course!
MBCI aims to provide, according to its mission statement, “an environment that nurtures physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.” That’s a big package. And that’s where we began, wanting exactly that big package wherever it would be; we wanted health for these children of ours in all areas of their lives.
But the mission statement declares something even bigger before this commitment to the child: “MBCI is a Christian secondary school.” A Christian school. I’m struck by the profundity of that claim, by the ideal, the prayer, the gift that description entails.
“Over the last five years we’ve become more intentional about defining our place in the secondary school world,” MBCI principal Don Peters told me in a recent conversation. He explained that “Christian school” means those coming to this school can expect Christian things like (compulsory) Bible classes, chapels, prayer in the classroom, Bible readings in the Student Life Groups, and Christian teachers.
One child researches and draws a map of the ancient world showing the journeys of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Another writes a paper on the names of God. They all work their way through the book of Acts, the history of Israel, the words of a prophet. Will they remember all the details? Probably not, no more than all the parts of a leaf or all the rules of grammar. But, as a natural part of their school education, they’re working within this most important of all texts, the Bible. They regularly hear the reading of Scripture. They hear and speak prayers. These “Christian things” of a Christian school are repeating, over and over, unapologetically, what we hold to be true; they point our children to the Source of all the other learning they are doing.
Even more fundamentally, principal Peters goes on to say, a Christian school is a school based on Christian values. It means teachers have a Christian perspective, and are called to bring it into the classroom. This is a large and complex commitment, one to be defined in a great variety of real life situations.
We would be naive if we imagined that our children’s faith will not be tested in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Some make this transition from a received faith to a faith of their own easily; others struggle or resist. As parents, we pray that God will send our children, in the words of the psalmist, “help from the sanctuary… support from Zion” (Psalm 20:2). We are privileged to consider our school’s teachers as brothers and sisters in the faith, as allies whom God can use in our common concerns over the next generation. One is able to build especially well into this particular child, another able to encourage the other. They complement our weaknesses as parents. They are often much better than we (too close, too impatient, maybe too old) in helping our youth with contemporary life.
“As long as we endeavour to encourage Christian character in our students (in addition to the academic demands we place on them),” wrote former teacher Geoff Champion in the commemorative book of the MBCI Jubilee, “we struggle with forces that are not material. Sometimes these forces are difficult to pin down, and we must wrestle through them with prayer, wearing the armour of the Lord.” This, in its humility and its boldness, is the spirit of Christian education.
Because of friends, family tradition, academics, extracurricular activities, a sense of belonging. And because it’s a Christian school. These are the reasons we chose MBCI for our children.
Dora Dueck is a freelance writer and a member of Jubilee Mennonite Church in Winnipeg.
Source: Federation of Independent Schools in Canada. Data on the Yukon, N.W.T. and Nunavut unavailable. Photograph by Skjold Photos.
| Total provincial funding per pupil* |
| B.C. |
50.0% |
| Alta. |
50.0% |
| Sask. |
0.0%
or 33.0% |
** |
| Man. |
50.0% |
| Ont. |
0.0% |
| Que. |
55.0%
or 61.0% |
*** |
| N.B. |
0.0% |
| N.S. |
0.0% |
| P.E.I. |
0.0% |
| Nfld. |
N/A | |
| Total provincial school enrollment |
| B.C. |
8.95% |
| Alta. |
3.90% |
| Sask. |
1.80% |
Man. |
6.70% |
| Ont. |
4.43% |
| Que. |
9.54% |
N.B. |
0.70% |
| N.S. |
0.70% |
| P.E.I. |
0.48% |
| Nfld. |
0.88% |
| Canada |
5.67% | |
| * |
Operating costs only. |
| ** |
The Saskatchewan government funds independent schools only at the secondary level. |
| *** |
The Quebec government funds independent primary schools at 55% and independent secondary schools at 61%. |
| – Faith Today | |
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Last modified September 28, 1999.
© 1999 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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