Last week I posted a fun and thoughtful “schools out forever!” post for students. Thinking of the end of term got me to thinking about the teachers. Although I have done youth work and subbing in Christian environments, and work some with Christian colleges, most of my teaching has been in the secular university classroom. I very much enjoy sitting at the edge of culture, engaging students from various backgrounds with the core questions of what it means to be human. I am a fan of the liberal arts college.

My partner, by contrast, is teaching in a small Christian school. Neither of us would have seen it coming, but the creativity and generosity of this community slowly drew us in. First we enrolled our son there for Kindergarten. A quick visit showed us that it was clearly the best of our neighbourhood programs. Then Kerry started teaching part-time. Before long, she was a full-time member of a Christian teaching staff. She and Nicolas walk together to Immanuel Christian School each day, and have done so for the last five years.

Our school turns on its head the stereotype that exists for Christian schools. While it is academically strong, ICS’s strength is not in a chained-to-the-desk perspiration-driven intellectual climate. Instead, Immanuel’s strength is creating an environment for education. It is fun, engaged, and responsive. Each child is treated like an individual. Children at ICS are not being prepared for the world. The school is their world. This task is treated with the kind of seriousness that engenders the greatest fun possible. I have heard stories of harsh, rigid, anti-grace schools before. We are happy to be part of a school that, despite what it lacks in sports or size, gains much in a diverse community with curriculum that hints back toward a classical styled education.

Not every teacher, however, will teach in this kind of environment. Most secular schools are much larger, with budgets that create difficult tensions for teachers and administrators. Often in mouldering buildings or on new campuses that they cannot afford, large class sizes and a limping curriculum are unsuited to meet the needs of one of the least literate generations since WWI.

Most teachers will not land in a school like Kerry’s. If there is any root in reality to the stereotypes, even Christian teachers in Christian schools will face barriers that at times seem insurmountable. So I wanted to give a word of encouragement to Christian teachers in secular schools—and any other student, teacher, parent, pastor, priest, legislator, or community volunteer who happens to be peaking in.

When thinking about teaching in public schools, Christians often feel a crisis on two fronts. First, they feel like they may be compromising by teaching curriculum that they don’t trust. In the older grades this is poignant as a Christian teacher will be teaching science based upon evolution, offering vocational advice based upon economics rather than calling, and discussing sex ed based upon… well, that’s the question, isn’t it? What is our sex ed based upon?

Some of sex ed is after school special material, reminders of personal space and boundaries and risks, which is good. Other parts are rooted in science and research, which is excellent. But some of sex ed comes in a moralistic tone that shows that the curriculum is about the educator–or about the school board–and not about the student. I remember in my grade nine calls a female teacher arguing with a male student about what boys experience waking up. The teacher finally ended by saying, “well, this is what it says in the book, and I have a husband, so I should know.” I looked at the male student and thought, “well, he’s a boy, perhaps he knows.”

Sex ed can be a steeplechase. I remember the moralism of the consent conversation when I was subjected to sex ed. Now that “no means no” curriculum is considered damaging as we move to the “yes means yes” mode. My concerns about the “no means no” religion when I was a kid was brushed aside by teachers, and I’m glad that we are now moving toward a safer place. But none of these sex ed classes deal with the hidden reality of all these messages: how do we as individuals struggle with how we have divorced intimacy and sex? That’s a discussion worth bringing out into the open, though most teachers would feel terrifyingly unqualified to host that dialogue.

Christian teachers at the younger years still feel some of these pressures, but from a different angle perhaps. The hot-button issues are usually books that school boards make kids read in their reactionary intention to satisfy the morality-of-the-month crusaders. Today, books where Sandy has two dads will be absolutely essential to a child’s formation. Tomorrow, it will be books where Sandy’s parents a vegetarians in a world full of meat-eaters. I’m not against moralistic books, but as C.S. Lewis doubted a good book could be written by bureaucrats at the ministry of education, I doubt that these bureaucrats can select a good book—especially when the fleeting social moods are the foundation of that choice.

Deeper than the hot-button issues, teachers feel stuck by the system at early ages. Often they feel wedged between curriculum that shoves Sandy through a grade before all the standards are met, and curriculum that is so individualistic that Sandy is never corrected or formed in any way. Some of the teachers I know spend all evening, most every evening, doing their best to re-form the curriculum to meet the individual needs of 28 children, but spend much of their day updating an app dashboard that informs parents every 15 minutes of how their children are doing.

Christian teachers who see children as made in the image of God are going to struggle. Being made in the image of God, the teacher knows that we are all individuals and that we learn and discover our world in different ways. Yet part of that discovery is formation—occasionally painful, often frustrating and disappointing, the teacher’s role in forming a child is not to protect the child from harm. No, our job as teachers is more like gardening, where we simultaneously feed the roots, weed out bad influences, and trim for growth.

We see by this last paragraph that Christian teachers don’t just feel compromised by curriculum, they also feel limited in how much their core beliefs can inform their work. I know teachers that are terrified that their students will find out that they are a practicing Christian.

There are some areas where “Christian” is synonymous with anti-science, anti-history, misogyny, bigotry. The most dominant picture of Christians in the media would lead an alien to presume that Christian earthlings are anti-environmental pedophiles with God Hates Fags t-shirts who believe that God put dinosaur bones in the mud of creation as a sort of colossal joke. Watching the media struggle with the local Christian response to the Charleston church shooting shows how far the gap is between what Christian life is on the sidewalks and how it is portrayed on the screen.

I remember in high school our science teacher was pushed by some students on the question of God and creation. He was very anxious to respond, and said it very carefully: “Personally, and this is just my belief, I think that evolution needs something like God to make it work.” As far as I know, his job was not in danger. But some teachers feel that insecurity. I don’t mean the extremes, like where a “Christian” teacher won’t teach a gay kid or where a “Christian” principal cancels a school dance because of interracial coupling. I’m talking about the normal stuff, like when a curious child asks about God or religion or what it means to be a person.

A lot of teachers are terrified—afraid they’ll get trapped in a downward spiral of a system that pretends to diversity but can’t handle disagreement, and concerned that they will be asked to compromise too much.

So I feel for these teachers.

Personally, I feel comfortable teaching evolution or sex ed, and I think I give space to students in the classroom who have different feelings on these issues. I try to make the conversation about them, not me (and my beliefs). When it comes to vocational advice or delivering curriculum, I secretly inculcate my students with this message: you are valued, and when you do something creative you tap into the great rhythm of a universe that bends toward creativity. That’s a fancy way of saying, “you are made in the image of the Creator, so be creative and know you are loves.” I subversively work to instill hope. Hope is very counter-cultural.

I think there is great power to be in the position of a teacher. Especially in the earliest years, we are charged with the social and intellectual formation of our students. For the Christian, social and intellectual formation is a spiritual and moral matter. We can bring blessing and hope into the lives of little ones—lives that often face not blessing and hope but grit and gloom.

I was reading a series of letters that C.S. Lewis wrote to Rhona Bodle, a teacher of deaf children in New Zealand. She had become a Christian reading C.S. Lewis’ books, and was in the zeal of her early faith. That meant for Rhona a desire to do the best for these children who, in the 1950s, faced such poignant challenges. Part of her early faith response was doubt about the kind of restrictions I talked about above—what she called “restraints.” I think she wanted to talk about her faith in the classroom, but knew that she couldn’t. Here is Lewis’ intriguing response:

The restraints imposed on you by ‘secular education’ are, no doubt, very galling…. But Christian teachers in secular schools may, I sometimes think, do more good precisely because they are not allowed to give religious instruction in class. At least I think that, as a child, I shd. have been very allured and impressed by the discovery–which must be made when questions are asked–that the teacher believed firmly in a whole mass of things he wasn’t allowed to teach! Let them give us the charm of mystery if they please (May 20^th, 1953 letter).

My advice is complex, a careful pathway of teaching the core of Christian beliefs of love and hope and grace without the words, and allowing the students to guide the discovery. Lewis’ advice is simpler: live your worldview consistently, and the testimony of your integrity may be a greater witness than all your words. The phrase, “Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words” is probably misattributed to St. Francis of Assisi. Still, somebody said it, and it is an important reminder to those of us who live in times of worldview tension—the lion dens of culture.

When we are living in these lion dens, it is sometimes difficult to know when to speak and when to be still. Even the approaches of Esther and Daniel in the Hebrew Bible are dramatically different. But Lewis’ advice will always work.

So my encouragement to Christian teachers in secular schools is that you can have an impact, even with the restraints on your faith that this culture requires. Trust that “the charm of mystery” may help mitigate some of the damage our school system causes—for all its good. This approach of trying to live authentically among our students may even go further to help the slow transformation of culture that we all desperately need.

After all, didn’t we all become teachers because we secretly knew that teachers change the world? No matter where we are located, that’s something we all share as teachers.