I was listening to an Adventist friend talk about how much she values Adventist education. I know what it has cost her. She and her husband have taken on extra work to put their kids through Adventist schools, and I respect that. Our family has made the same kind of sacrifice for our kid, and my parents did it for me.
So it hurts me to the core when I hear about Adventists who are priced out of Adventist education because they don’t come from the right social class. That should not be the case.
Our schools are already one of our biggest evangelistic efforts. The church’s own 2024 world report counts over 10,000 Adventist schools with about 2.4 million students. Roughly 63 percent of those students are not Adventist. In that one school year, 54,097 students were baptized. John Wesley Taylor V, now president of Andrews University, wrote while he was an associate education director at the General Conference that Adventist education is “the longest and largest evangelistic event held by the Adventist Church.” No evangelistic series gets to spend twelve years with someone, five days a week.
It also helps us keep our own kids. Several North American studies have linked years of Adventist schooling with young people joining the church and staying in it. One southern California study found that 13 years after graduating, 77 percent of Adventist academy graduates were still in the church, compared with 37 percent of public high school graduates.
But in North America, fewer families can afford it. K-12 enrolment in the North American Division fell from 73,861 in 1980 to 47,925 in 2022. The Michigan Conference says most of its families now need financial help to pay tuition.
So here’s an idea. What if we moved half of the evangelism budget into education? It could go into tuition help for families who can’t pay, and into keeping small schools open. That would reach the kids who are already sitting in our classrooms, and their families.
Ellen White put it this way: “In the highest sense the work of education and the work of redemption are one” (Education, p. 30). Education is evangelism.
Sources: https://www.adventistaccreditingassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/Adventist-Education-World-Report-2024.pdf , https://www.journalofadventisteducation.org/2017.3.8 , https://www.journalofadventisteducation.org/2024.86.3.8
Photo: Max Fischer / Pexels (https://www.pexels.com/photo/teacher-asking-a-question-to-the-class-5212345/)
Head over to Adventist Today for current events, analysis, and opinion on all things Adventist.
