Apr. 28, 2008 - Homeschool Conference 2008
Last weekend was our area's 2008 homeschool conference. Every year as the conference approaches I complain about how far it is, the driving time, gas money etc.... but every year I am 100% glad I went. This year was no exception - the conference even made up for the outrageous gas prices. Our keynote speaker was Voddie Baucham, who is one of the best if not THE best speakers we've had. He stepped on quite a few toes (acutally, I kinda like that in a speaker ) but gave everyone an awesome vision of what our families are designed to be and the power of parents who are committed to educating their children - not only in the "academic" arena but in the spiritual.
One of his main points is that we should not be following the herd and shuffling our kids off to the various youth ministries and expect that to turn them into mature Christians. It seems odd that even the majority of homeschooling families, who think it's the parents' job to educate their children, delegate the teaching of the most important things - the things that are of real eternal consequence - to whoever happens to be filling that spot at their local church. What's up with that? We look at the public schools' academic failure rates and say they are broken, but we look at the youth ministries' failure rates of 70 - 80% (the percentage of young adults who leave their faith by the end of their freshman year of college) and don't make the connection.....
Not to trash all youth ministry or those who send their kids to any youth programs, but maybe we need to think about this???
Mr. Baucham has a blog at http://www.voddiebaucham.org/vbm/Blog/Blog.html and a great book entitled "Family Driven Faith - Doing What it Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God" (no, I'm not getting commission!)
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