Education for Such a Time As This

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E.A. Sutherland Education Association

Plenary Sessions

John Bradshaw

The Great Object

Our Father in heaven, we're grateful to be here in this place.

Lord, I pray that you'd speak to us through your Word and encourage us and start this conference in the way in which you mean for it to go on.

We believe that you are the great educator, we believe that your word is the greatest textbook.

I thank you for the people here tonight who have given themselves to the education of our young people for your glory and with eternity in view.

We thank you and we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

In Wiltshire, that's a county in England, 11 miles from the city of Salisbury, with its beautiful cathedral, its spire reaching 404 feet up into the sky, the highest cathedral spire in all of the United Kingdom.

About 90 miles from London, It's a fascinating place.

You'd actually say it was in Amesbury, which is a little town of about 11, 000 people.

No 1 knows what this fascinating place really is.

Read the literature, and you'll find words like thought to be, might have been, researchers have considered.

People were buried there apparently at 1 stage, so there's that.

But it appears to about everybody who looks on that this place is more than just a graveyard.

The origin of the big stones is a bit of a mystery.

Some of them were evidently sourced locally or localishly.

Others, the smaller ones but still very big, it's believed that they came from Wales, which is about 180 miles away.

So the question is, how in the world did they get this great big stones 180 miles from Wales down to here?

Of course, the bucolic setting is delightful.

First time I was there was almost 30 years ago, and I'm shocked to be able to say that, but Last time I was there was last year.

We stood in the fields around Stonehenge, and we looked, and we photographed, and we stood, and we wondered, and we said to each other, what's the point?

Now there's another little interesting place in England.

Another part of England, Stonehenge is in the southwest.

This is in the southeast, just outside the seaside town of Margate, just 50 miles in a straight line from Dunkirk on the coast of France.

In the year 1835, a man digging in a field was astonished when he pressed his shovel into the ground and the shovel disappeared.

The other man came looking and he said, my son will help.

So they tied a rope around the son and lowered him down, candle in hand, into this hole in the ground.

And when he came up out of the ground He came up with the most amazing tale When they checked out the boy's story, they discovered that beneath their feet was something that resembled a temple and it was adorned with seashells lining the walls, 4.6 million seashells.

The shelves are arranged in some fascinating patterns, some beautiful patterns.

There was No 1 in town who could say, ah, I remember a story about that.

That means if in 1835, nobody's grandfather knew about it, this thing was old.

They wondered, was it a place created by pirates where they were going to hide their loot?

Well, no, it didn't make any sense at all.

Too far from the beach, no escape passage, very elaborate.

And why doesn't anybody know about a team, it was obviously a large team of people, who did all of that digging and gathered 4.6 million seashells.

They're not strange, exotic shells that were taken there from Florida or the Bahamas or some such place.

Well, somebody thought maybe it was a Roman temple.

The current theory is that this was perhaps built in the 1100s by a group known as the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.

You know them better as the Knights Templar, a Roman Catholic organization, a military order founded in the 12th century.

So now they wonder if it was a Knights Templar temple.

If you were ever in Margate or near Margate, not that far from the White Cliffs of Dover, you might want to go and take a look at the Margate Shell Grotto in Kent, but if you were to visit the Margate Shell Grotto, you would come away from there saying to yourself, What in the world?

What's the purpose or what was the purpose of the Margate Shell Grotto?

But at the end of the day, it hardly matters.

The My Gate shell grotto is just a bunch of seashells.

But let's ask ourselves a question that really does matter.

Let me give you the perspective of a parent with a child attending high school right now.

As a matter of fact, attending 1 of the high schools represented here at this conference this week.

There are a number of things my wife Melissa and I wish for our children.

We wish for them good friends and worthy associates.

We wish for them bright futures, good careers.

We wish for them to be involved in mission work, in serving others.

We wish for them to 1 day find a spouse, God willing, who would be just the person God wants for them.

But above all, way above all these other considerations, we want our children to know and love God.

If they are sick and lonely and unemployed and can't figure out their purpose in their life, that's okay with me if they know and love God, Because then they have everything.

We are given our children for a pitifully short time on this earth.

What we want is for our children to be saved.

We love our children But not nearly as much as God loves our children God Wants for our children to be in heaven too.

And so when he gives them to us with those children he gives to parents and educators as well the responsibility of preparing them for everlasting life.

Jim Ingersoll

War!

It's a privilege to be able to be involved with young people, isn't it?

And it's kind of interesting how the Lord brings different talks together.

Did you hear a reference to the title of my talk sometime already?

So a question I would ask, do you believe we're at war?

But we're going to spend some time talking about war and how it impacts all of us, but particularly our young people.

You see what's happening there They're going away from you, right That's young people and there they go Before they reach the age 20 Over 50% of our youth will leave the church.

That's the future Actually, that's the church of today if they're not the church of today.

They won't be the church of tomorrow I'm here to tell you that So, why are they leaving Well, it goes back to this very topic.

We're at war and this war as we know it is between good and evil That's the real war And it has deep meaning for each and every 1 of us but he is after our young people.

And the interesting thing is the war began in heaven of all places and there was war in heaven.

Those words in itself are a conundrum and there was war in heaven and the great dragon was cast out that old serpent called the devil and Satan which does what deceives how much The whole world.

The con man that Came about in heaven Was and is so good That he actually talked a third of the angels out of the very presence of God Now you got to be good to do that A third of the angels out of the very presence of God.

He talked our first parents out of the Garden of Eden And he will talk us and our young people out of our salvation.

The war actually is for the mind you see because in heaven they didn't have Machine guns and hand grenades they didn't have bombs It was a battle for the mind.

And whatever happens there manifests itself throughout the rest of the world and all the outcomings of that.

There we go Satan invents unnumbered schemes To occupy our minds that they may not dwell upon the very work with which we ought to be best acquainted He knows that with him how much?

That is the ball game, that is everything right there depends on his diverting minds from Jesus and his truth.

Unnumbered schemes, whatever it takes to distract us.

Proverbs 23 7 what a man thinks in his heart what?

I keep jumping ahead with 2, I can't hold that down I guess.

So whatever goes on in up here that makes us up who we are.

The minds of our young people need to does it in so many ways today.

Our kids are surrounded more so than ever before From the time they get up until the time they go to sleep at night, they are surrounded with these voices that hammer them all day long.

What to think, where to go, what to say, what to wear.

Being bombarded by these voices trying to guide our young people, and us of course as well.

Screen time is a big thing these days, right?

I mean, when we look at it, I can have screen time wherever I am.

And young people have screens with them pretty much wherever they go nowadays.

They can be in the same room, text back and forth.

It's a weird thing, But that's what they do.

And I put those little kids there at the bottom for a reason.

Have you ever watched an 18-month-old baby play with an iPad?

Before they even know what screen time is, it just gives them something they want to have or something to do.

And then, you know, kids can be wherever nowadays with their phones, but you know, they have the computers in their rooms.

And parents have no clue where those kids are going and what they're doing many times.

I can have my phone and I can go anywhere in the world I want to with that phone.

I can talk to people, I can text people, I can go online and I can see all kind of things.

I can ask Siri all kind of messages, you know, and gives me the information.

And then music, of course, music's a part of the smartphone.

It seems to me I remember something about Satan and music.

Choir director, that's kind of what I've heard, you know, through the years.

And I don't know about you, but music moves me probably as much or more than anything else.

Good music can have a huge impact, or bad music.

And it's an interesting thing about young people.

I watch them going down the street or in the mall or whatever.

They're just walking down the street, you know, doing their tunes, you know.

Music, very important in influencing our minds.

Average kids today get 7 and 1 half hours of screen time daily.

Or really, actually, they do what they call multitasking.

And I've come to believe that that's the case now may not be in your home But a typical kid will wake up in the morning.

And and what do they do with it Tax yeah, see who's alive who's going out there and as they're texting and kind of getting ready it occurs to them, oh man I still have homework to do.

So they're over there hammering away, they probably have their tunes going or they're texting on the side and the television's playing over there.

All these things happening at the same time.

And did I mention that that was outside of school?

And nowadays, Many schools are now having what they call one-to-one programs where every kid has their own device.

Of course, that's going to be more directed, thankfully.

And then television, and it's probably more now.

But the last time I checked, by the time they're 18, kids have watched over 17, 000 hours of television about 3 hours a day And at 1 time I used to think that our kids Adventist kids didn't watch that much television But I've come to the conclusion that I'm wrong Just about every home you go into there's a television in the living room, there's a television in the bedrooms, there's a television in the kitchen, because you've got to stay on top of the news, you know, you can't just wander from 1 room to the other and not be in touch.

So there's a television in just about every room of the house these days.

So that kind of thing is happening in the lives of these kids every day.

Ken Caviness

Faith and Science

Our topic tonight is faith and science, or perhaps it's faith versus science.

In fact, in my notes, in my appointment, in my calendar, I have a different subtitle for this presentation tonight.

And I hope to share a number of these ideas with you.

But let's start with this faith versus science.

And this is something the Lord has placed a burden on my heart to talk about.

I am a Christian and a scientist, And if I don't talk to both sides, then I'll be sort of schizophrenic maybe.

But this is an issue that I have had to live with for many years.

So I teach physics at Adventist University not too far from here in a small department.

We're only 3 full time in the department.

But over the past several years, I'd say it's about 20 now, I have been tasked with teaching a course called Issues in physical science and religion.

This is where we think about what does it all mean?

Not just do science, but the implications of science.

How does this fit in with the rest of our view of the world?

Besides 3 full-time professors, we have a number of part-time professors.

I'm trying to get my notes here to appear in sync with the notes on the screen.

And this will take just a little bit of rocket science.

So much of the material that I'll be sharing with you, both today and tomorrow, grew out of this course, Issues, where we think carefully.

And I think there should be more courses like this, where we not only study a topic, but see how does this fit with my Christian experience.

Out of this has grown some presentations that I've given.

And not all of these were on the same continent.

Some presentations in Switzerland, in Argentina, Moldova, Germany, and not all in the same language, which I have to mention because that's become 1 of my major hobbies, studying human languages.

I like computer languages too, but human languages.

So I've heard some various languages amongst us at the cafeteria.

And I'm hoping to slip up to some of you and ask what language you're speaking.

Even if I don't understand it, I'm fascinated by languages.

So My own hobby, language learning, has taken me to being able to survive in 6, but probably just enough to make mistakes.

So, If anyone wants to try out other languages, I love speaking something besides English.

These presentations in turn led to a recent sabbatical.

In the fall of 2015, my wife and I had the privilege of going to the Adventist campus outside of Kiev, Ukraine.

So in the course of all these different activities, I have had the privilege to think carefully about faith in science.

If, well, let's start with this common, well-known expression.

And actually that's an apocryphal statement.

It wasn't quite the way it happened in the actual Apollo 13 mission.

There were words similar used by John Swigert calling back to NASA mission control.

But in the movie Apollo 13, Tom Hanks said it this way, Houston we have a problem.

And that expression has gone into the public consciousness.

So it has also not only been widely used, but it's been modified.

And some of these images I pulled off the net I just found were too cute for words.

Or the 3 puppies trying to get through the door at once.

They feel with Houston, or let's say with science and technology, with all the modern conveniences we have, we have no problems left.

This may not be our view, but there are people who have this view of the world.

I would say that is a tremendous statement of faith.

Such faith in science that some people would give up other beliefs because, oh, this disagrees with science, so therefore it's not true.

That really gives me pause, that 1 faith, a faith in the efficacy of science, would then permit people to abandon other faith.

So maybe there is room to have a little suspicion of science because, oh, we might lose our faith.

In fact, there are people, some dear saints, who would not only view science with suspicion, but would encourage young people to better choose another field of study, because this is just too dangerous.

And this just highlights the possible controversy, that we see religion on 1 side, science on the other side.

And in fact, there are other illustrations to kind of highlight this problem.

For instance, this 1, a flow chart of science.

Now, you can't see, you can't read it, so let me just give you some highlights here.

Start with get an idea, perform some experiments.

And we will use this theory to better understand the universe.

And then we'll use it to do more experiments and study further.

This is the plan of science, how it's supposed to work.

Now maybe this new evidence, I'm approaching the bottom of the flow chart, maybe this new evidence will cause me to reconsider my theory.

Now if it makes me reconsider, you see I have to go back up to the top.

That's where the arrow goes right back up.

And we may not always do this, But this is how science is supposed to work.

Now, I'm ashamed to say that some of my colleagues in science view faith this way.

Lisa Beardsley-Hardy

Learning From Work

It's a great privilege for me to be here with you and greetings from the Adventist world of education.

Altogether we have over 8, 000 Seventh-day Adventist schools that are part of the yearbook, the organized work of the church, over 100, 000 teachers, and we are educating nearly 2 million students, just shy of 2 million students.

And I just was in Brazil with 2000 very enthusiastic Brazilian teachers.

It's wonderful to see how the church embraces the work of education there and supports it very directly.

Where the church supports the work of education, we have a young church.

And where we distance ourselves from the work of education, the church ages.

So I was glad to be there and I'm glad to be here as well.

I'm going to be sharing with you from a presentation that has had a lot of challenges, there we go, on learning from work.

Why do we as the Seventh-day Adventist Church offer education?

First and foremost it is to redeem and restore the image of God in students and to prepare them for service in this world and the greater joy of service in the world to come.

And we all know this quote but this is key for our philosophy and why we should have work.

This past annual council, 2016, the annual council which is the General Conference Executive Committee, about close to 500 people from around the world are there annually to conduct business of the church such as to vote changes to general conference working policy, to vote new appointments and so on.

In 2016 the special theme for 2 days before the annual council begins was on education, Adventist education.

And they voted during annual council 10 objectives to strengthen education.

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A Faithful Priest

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