Christian Education — Unit 1: Why Christian Education?

A boy was ordered by his father to quit reading his Bible. He slipped it aside and read it despite his father's objections. One day the father caught him reading the Bible and snatched it away and threw it into the fire. The father noticed, however, that the boy was smiling. He said to him, "Why are you smiling?" The boy answered, "Why, I was just thinking that you cannot burn this in here," and he pointed to his heart.

That is the place where Christian Education stores its treasure. Not on a shelf where a hostile father can find it. Not in a curriculum binder where a distracted student will lose it. In the heart, where the Holy Spirit places it and where the fire of trial cannot reach it. The whole purpose of Christian Education is to put the Word of God into the hearts of learners in such a way that the world can never take it out again.

From childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures.

Welcome to the Christian Education course at Chapala Theological Seminary. This course is built on a simple conviction: the local church has a teaching ministry as old as the Old Testament home, as urgent as the Great Commission, and as effective as any sermon ever preached. Pastors preach. Teachers teach. The two are not in competition; they are in partnership. The pulpit and the classroom are the two lungs of the local church, and a church that breathes only with one of them is short of breath in everything it does.

You are reading a course that was written by two voices. The bilingual textbook from which the heart of this course is drawn was published in 1993 under the byline "by Dr. Wayne Cook, Professor of Preaching, with Andi Cook." Andi was my wife. Her specialty was Christian Education, and most of what you will read from Unit 2 forward is her work. Her training included the Master of Religious Education from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and the completed oral examinations for the Doctor of Education from the same school. She served as a journalist for the Bogalusa Daily News. She delivered children's sermons in our church for many years. She wrote ten works of biblical fiction. The pedagogy in this course is hers; the framing of this opening unit is mine; the conviction underneath both belongs to the Lord who told Timothy to remember from a child the holy scriptures.

This unit is a foundation unit. The next nine units will move from who is the teacher (U2) through Jesus your model (U3), the learners (U4), the learning environment (U5), teaching aims and the lesson plan (U6), methods and strategies (U7), question, case study, and experiential study (U8), Bible learning activities (U9), and the capstone unit on the children's sermon (U10). All ten units share the same conviction Paul wrote to Timothy: that the Holy Scriptures are teachable, holy, able to lead to salvation, inspired by God, and profitable for every part of human life. This unit takes those five facts about the Scripture and uses them as the five reasons Christian Education exists.

CTS Editorial Note (2026): Christian education is more than finishing a syllabus. Learners should be able to tell what a passage says, explain its central message, and describe how it applies to life. The classroom may be a church, a home, or an outdoor gathering; the aim remains faithful understanding and Christian formation. Ask students to restate a central truth in their own words and identify a passage supporting it. Their answers help the teacher see what has actually been learned.

Paul writes to Timothy, "and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures" (2 Timothy 3:15). On his mother's side Timothy was a Jew; his father had been a Greek. From his earliest days Timothy was trained to know God's Word by his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois. The Jews tried to so imprint the law on the mind of their children that they would sooner forget their own names than the law of God.

That conviction is the founding conviction of Christian Education. The Bible is teachable. It can be taught to children. It can be taught to teenagers. It can be taught to adults. It can be taught to the elderly. It can be taught at any age and at any level. The simplest five-year-old can grasp the truth that God loves me, and the most senior scholar can spend a lifetime unfolding it. Both are doing the same thing: receiving what the Holy Spirit teaches through the same Book.

We as parents have a responsibility to teach our children about God in the same way Eunice and Lois taught Timothy. Our influence is great whether for good or for bad. In a home where the parents read the Bible to the children and are members of the church, it is a very natural thing for the children to be in church. Proverbs speaks here in the register of general wisdom rather than an ironclad guarantee: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6) describes the normal pattern of a life well-trained, not a formula that removes a child's own will. Some children raised by faithful, godly parents do walk away for a season or for good, and when that happens it does not automatically mean the parents failed. Still, the pattern the proverb names is real and worth pursuing with everything a parent has: early, faithful training shapes a life, and even a child who wanders far often carries God's claim on him for the rest of his days.

Charles L. Allen at five years old

Charles L. Allen, the great Methodist preacher, said he was five years old when he went forward on the invitation. Some would say he was too young. Allen replied, "It was not too young for me." He wanted to live like Jesus as nearly as he could and was dedicated to Him the best that he knew. Remember that Jesus said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14). The ages of five or six might be too early for most, but the vast majority of believers today made decisions for Christ by their early teens or before.

This is why Christian Education matters. The child who has known the Scriptures at an early age is going to be ready when God calls. The teacher who teaches a four-year-old in Sunday school may be planting a seed that will save a life forty years later in a hospital room or a prison cell or a battlefield. The lesson is not wasted. The lesson is the seed. Christian Education exists because the Scriptures are teachable from the cradle to the grave, and because every age in between is fair game for the Spirit of God.

Paul tells Timothy he has known the holy Scriptures. A literal translation of the phrase is sacred letters. The suggestion is that young Timothy learned his Hebrew alphabet by spelling his way through the Old Testament. The word holy means different, set apart. The Bible is different from every other book, even from books about the Bible, because it has been set apart by God.

This is the second reason Christian Education exists. The book we are teaching is not just one good book among many good books. It is the one Book that survives every effort to destroy it. The history of opposition to the Bible is long, but a single famous example tells the story.

Voltaire's house

Voltaire was the most celebrated wit of his century, a man whose pen reached every literate household in Europe. He is widely quoted as having predicted that the Bible would soon be forgotten and consigned to history's dustbin, though the precise wording commonly attributed to him cannot be traced with certainty to his own writings. What is documented is this: within decades of his death, his former home in Geneva came to be used, in part, to store Bibles distributed by an evangelical Bible society. There is a sermon in that arrangement. The haters of the Bible come and go, with all their wit and all their reach. The Bible itself outlasts them.

"The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God shall stand forever." (Isaiah 40:8)

Why this matters in the Sunday school classroom

Every other curriculum a teacher might use is going to be replaced. The reading textbook in your child's school will be revised in five years and discarded in ten. The science textbook will be obsolete before your child finishes high school. The history textbook will be rewritten as new generations rewrite their preferences. None of those textbooks is bad in itself; they are just not holy. They are not set apart. They are perishable.

The Bible is the one textbook a teacher will never have to apologize for in twenty years. Its message in 2046 will be the message it had in 46 AD when Paul wrote to Timothy. The Christian teacher works with the only material in the entire educational enterprise that is guaranteed to outlast its student. That gives our work a weight and a permanence that the secular classroom cannot match.

Paul says the Scriptures "are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" (2 Timothy 3:15). Notice carefully what Paul does and does not say. He does not say the Bible saves. The Bible is not a magical book that we touch to be healed or that we keep on a shelf to ward off evil spirits. He does not even say believing the Bible saves. Satan knows the Bible chapter and verse, and Satan is not saved.

The Bible leads to salvation. Salvation itself comes through faith in the Christ whom the Bible reveals. Timothy was raised on the Holy Scriptures in a godly home. Yet it was not until Paul led him to Christ that Timothy was personally saved. The Christian teacher's job is to be the Paul who leads the Timothy from the Scripture to the Christ. The Scripture is the bridge; Christ is the destination.

How does the Scripture do this leading? Not by argument and not by entertainment, but by quietly placing itself in the path of an honest reader and waiting. The Word of God, once it gets into a hand or onto a page open before a willing mind, has its own way of working. One simple story makes the point.

A Chilean beachcomber

A man in Chile was walking along the seashore in the days following an earthquake and a tidal wave. The wave had washed all kinds of debris up onto the beach — lumber, wreckage, household objects. Among the debris he found a few wet pages of a book. He picked them up out of curiosity, dried them, and read them.

What he read troubled him. He read them again. He could not rest until he had obtained the rest of the Bible from which those few pages had come. He read the whole of it. Not only did he become a Christian, but he devoted the rest of his life to distributing the Scriptures in the forgotten villages of northern Chile. The few pages on the beach became a lifetime of ministry to people whom no missionary society would have reached.

Notice the path. A wave placed the Word in his way; the Word did the rest. No missionary was present. No tract had been deliberately delivered. The Spirit of God simply used a few wet pages on a Chilean beach to bring a man from idle curiosity to lifelong ministry. That is the kind of work the Christian Education classroom is in. The teacher hands the Word out, week after week, lesson after lesson, and the Word does its own work in the heart of the learner. The teacher is the wave. The Spirit is the One who turns the page.

Paul writes, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Timothy 3:16). The Greek word translated given by inspiration of God is theopneustos — literally God-breathed. The world has had many religious books that men believed were inspired. The Gnostics had their own fanciful books. Early heterodox groups like the Marcionites and the Montanists had their own writings. Muslims have the Qur'an. Latter-day Saints have the Book of Mormon. But all those books are man-made. The sixty-six books of the Bible are God-breathed.

In 2 Peter 1:21 we find out more about this inspiration. "for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." Men of God did the writing, but the Holy Spirit carried them along. Peter wrote like Peter; Paul wrote like Paul; James wrote like James. Each style is different, but the same divine purpose stands behind all of them. God could take each man and use his personality to accomplish His own ends.

This is what makes the Christian classroom different from every other classroom. The teacher in the Christian Education room is teaching from the only book in the room that does not deceive its reader. Every other voice in the student's life — television, schoolmates, internet, advertising, even the well-meaning relative — is going to bend the line a little to make the line look right. The Bible refuses. The Bible says what it says, and what it says is straight from the breath of God. The teacher's own authority is a borrowed authority, real only insofar as he faithfully hands on what the text itself actually says, not whatever he might personally make of it.

This is why the Christian teacher does not need to apologize for the authority in the room. We are not propagating an opinion. We are not selling a perspective. We are unrolling a scroll that the Holy Spirit dictated and that nineteen centuries of believers have tested. When we say to a class, "This is what the Bible says," we are saying something the secular teacher cannot say of any textbook in the building. The authority of the room is not us. The authority of the room is the breath of God.

Paul completes the sentence: the Bible "is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Timothy 3:16–17). Four profitable uses are listed; one final purpose is given. Christian Education exists to serve all four uses and to deliver the final purpose.

1. For doctrine (teaching)

Anytime a Sunday school teacher is with students, Bible teaching should be going on. The classroom is for content. Some people say, "Well, I needed the Bible when I was younger, but I can do without it now." How wrong they are. Adults need the Word of God more than children, because they face greater temptations and make more decisions. The teaching ministry of the church is not a children's hour with a juice break. It is the formation of a believer at every age.

2. For reproof (rebuking)

The Scripture helps us find our faults. The mirror is not flattering. Hebrews 4:12 says "the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword… a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." A Bible-teacher's work is partly to wield that sword in love. Faults that are never named never get fixed. The Christian classroom is the safest place in the world for a faithful rebuke, because the rebuke is followed by the next two uses.

3. For correction

All of our beliefs and theologies and traditions need to be checked against the Bible. If they contradict the Bible, they are to be refused. The Christian Education classroom is where the believer learns to lay his own opinions next to the Scripture and let the Scripture be the ruler. Many lifelong believers have grown up under faithful preaching and never been taught how to correct a wrong belief by the open Bible. The classroom is where that skill is learned.

4. For instruction in righteousness (training)

Do you want to know what is right and wrong? Find the answer in God's Word. The Bible alone has changed criminals, political leaders, scientists, bankers, laborers, religious leaders, housewives, and people from every walk of life. No textbook in the secular curriculum claims that effect on a single human being. The Christian Education classroom is the place where that transforming power is unleashed in the lives of ordinary believers, week after week, lesson after lesson, until the man or woman of God is perfect — the word means complete, mature, fully equipped — and thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

Five facts. Five reasons. The Bible is teachable, holy, able to lead to salvation, inspired by God, and profitable for the whole life of the believer. Take any of those five away and Christian Education collapses into something else — entertainment, opinion, philosophy, group therapy, club. Keep all five and Christian Education becomes what it has always been at its best: the Spirit of God using the Word of God to do the work of God in the heart of the learner.

The unit began with a boy whose father threw his Bible into the fire. The boy was smiling because he knew that the words of that Bible were already inside him, in a place his father's hands could not reach. "You cannot burn this in here," the boy said, pointing to his heart.

That is the hope of the Christian Education teacher. The lesson plan we work over this week may not seem to do much. The five-year-olds we teach may seem to remember nothing. The teenagers we lead may seem to be daydreaming through every Sunday. The adults in our class may seem to come more for the coffee than for the Word. None of that is decisive. The decisive question is whether the Word of God is being placed where it cannot be burned.

Andi spent her ministry doing this work. She wrote children's sermons most of which we no longer have on paper, but which lived in the hearts of children who are now grown men and women. Some of those children's sermons are bound into Unit 10 of this course. Many more lived their whole life span between her hand and the heart of a six-year-old, and have done their work, and have gone where good seed goes.

The course you are about to walk through is, in a real way, her course. The pedagogy is hers. The seminary training is hers. The teaching ministry was hers. The bilingual structure carries her name on the certificate alongside mine because she earned it. From childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures. She knew them. She taught them. She trusted that the Spirit who breathed them would do His work in the children to whom she handed them.

Welcome to Unit 1. Pass this examination, and we will meet Andi's voice in Unit 2 as she introduces the most important element in the teaching-learning process: you, the teacher.