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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Adventist Education: No Substitutes Allowed

May we be a living sacrifice, I pray, Lord, in this time in your word that we would hear you speaking to our hearts and follow you.

Thank you, Lord, that You came and redeemed us and brought us out of darkness into light.

May we walk in it now, I pray, in Jesus' name, amen.

This morning, I want to talk with you about Adventist education, its essentials for which there are no substitute.

I'm going to start this morning with an article that ABC News reported on.

The digital age has made screens more accessible and portable than ever, and although the full implications of screen time exposure on young kids whose brains are still developing is not yet known, there's concern that screen use can affect cognitive and language development and lead to problems in school and make some mental health disorders worse.

Because of these concerns, the American Academy of Pediatrics created guidelines in 2016 for parents to limit their screen time.

Some of those include avoiding screen time for children younger than 18 months, with the exception of video chatting.

From 18 to 24 months introducing digital media by watching quality programs like PBS Kids or Sesame Workshop with children.

For ages 2 to 5 limiting screen time to 1 hour per day and quality programming with kids for ages 6 and up limiting media use and device type and ensure media use does not interfere with sleep and physical activity.

A new study from the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, published in the Journal of American Medicine Pediatrics, showed concern with evidence that brain structure may be altered in kids with more screen use.

Researchers looked at brain MRIs in 47 preschoolers and found that screen time over the AAP's recommendations was associated with difference in brain structure as related to language and literacy development.

David Anderson, a clinical psychologist and senior director of national programs and outreach at the Child Mind Institute.

It's especially important, he says, to be very cautious when using screens with young children as this study highlights as young children are in a critical developmental period.

Now I want to reference to 1 other article here to get going.

This 1 here is in Time, Wearing new research about kids' screen time and their mental health.

Now, in the beginning of the article, Jean Twinge, who's a research scientist, discovers, not much to our surprise, that if your child spends 7 hours a day on a screen, they are likely to be depressed.

But for all the data she took from the census in 2015, this is a 2016 report, we get down to the end of the report and this is what it says.

Not everyone agrees with the conclusion of Twinge's new study.

The authors appear to have cherry-picked outcome measures in terms of what results they could find that are statistically significant, says Andrew Przyblinski, an associate professor and director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Last year Przyblinski published a study that examined an older version of the same Census Bureau data that Twenge and her co-author in their new paper based on that data and concluded that the advice to limit screen time of young kids was not warranted.

It is true that there is very small and consistent correlation in many data sets between screen time and a range of outcomes, but the correlation some studies have found between increased screen time and outcomes like depression do not prove 1 is to blame for the other.

It may be that kids who are anxious or depressed are just more likely to spend a lot of time using screens.

For the research in this area to mature, people need to sort out these factors before making expansive claims.

Get your PhD in screen time use and you can sort it out.

We're living in an age where the experts don't agree with the experts, and nobody knows what's right, and nobody knows what's wrong.

So for the very first element for which there is no substitute in the raising of your children, I'm going to introduce a different subject matter.

Now I'd like to take just a few moments so you know what to do with the data because I'm not against information, but the secular paradigm of using up a generation or 2 to figure out what the past generation's problems is, or were, is a generation too late.

And we've come to a place where we've got to see to believe, and what I'm trying to show you in the first few moments of this time together is that if you want a good life, you're gonna have to discover whether or not there's a God who brought all this into existence.

And if there is, by faith you're gonna get out in front of the research cycle, and you're gonna be the people that someday they're looking at wondering how did you know to do that?

That was like that for me when I was a kid.

Back in the 70s, if you lived in the Midwest where everybody was oriented to a pretty routine schedule of life, if you grew up in a regular American home that wasn't infused with inspiration, you grew up eating hamburgers and hot dogs and everything else, and a meal without a hamburger or a hot dog or some version of what was once four-footed creature not being on your table rendered it not a meal.

So imagine what it's like when as a young man in a Christian school, my teacher who had a master's degree in parasitology and had worked in a butcher shop, Those are 2 very different ends of the same spectrum.

He's telling me stories from 1 side and from the other, and pretty soon he brings in inspiration, the story of Daniel, and I want to become a vegetarian.

Now I'm here to tell you that in the 70s in Peoria, Illinois Vegetarianism was wacky.

It was something they did on those coasts mainly the West Coast But some 40 50 years later now with parents who are getting the residual benefit.

I want to really honor my mother and father, my mother being a backslidden Seventh-day Adventist and my father being an agnostic raised in a very very very casual Catholic home.

I want to affirm them that they were willing to move with their children and take up vegetarianism, the likes of which has probably lengthened their life with the residual Seventh-day Adventist lifestyle benefit today.

Dean Ornish had not done his studies in the 70s And we were not in a position of having the fact to back up the faith But I'm here to tell you this morning God isn't waiting around for human beings to affirm with their great wisdom that which He designed into systems, hearts, and minds for the benefit and the happiness and the well-being of His children." If there's 1 thing we cannot leave out of our current discussion about where we're to go with institutions from the university size on down to the smallest homeschool or 1 room school, it's the fact that God, in a knowledge of what it's gonna take to get us home, has laid out a plan with the proper adaptations for the time and place we're in.

We're living in an age in which the devil is seeking to take our children from us.

When Pharaoh was going to let Moses go, he says, you go ahead and go, but leave the children behind.

And Moses said, No, we will take our children with us.

What will heaven be if we don't have our families intact on the other side?

Now, last week I went through a litany, lest someone should find themselves listening to this message out of context.

Not only did I find my salvation as a seventh grader at Peoria Junior Academy and a seventh day I'm in a school, not only did I find my calling in that school, not only did I find my salvation as a seventh grader at Peoria Junior Academy and a Seventh-day Adventist school, not only did I find my calling in that school, not only did I find my wife from this wonderful Christian educational system, but I want to go a little bit farther this morning and say just a little bit more.

It's not just that all 3 of the major facets of my life are built on Christian education.

It's also the fact that I am married to a teacher.

My father-in-law was a superintendent of education.

I sat on a K-12 board for almost 20 years, now called an education board, and almost every day of my life in ministry, I've had a church school attached to me, and by God's grace, walking in the narrow way, they've prospered.

And this morning, should anyone hear me speaking without that picture frame of context, you should think that somehow I had become your enemy, except for this 1 thing, is that truth is true Whether it's to friends or whether it's to foes.

And God this morning is calling us back to a greater dependence on the wisdom that will never be discovered in the annals of secular research until the cost has been too high.

This morning, I'm here to assure you, God has a plan to make us the head and not the tail.

You know how it was when you had a substitute teacher in school?

You didn't learn as much, You didn't work as hard.

You tried to get away with more, and sometimes you did.

There was that occasional substitute that really understood where the teacher who had left good lessons plans was going and where they needed to end up.

But by and large, a day with a substitute was a day that was a little bit less effective for the achievements of the fuller spectrum of learning.

This morning, I'm here to tell you like you can't leave certain things out of a recipe, There are certain things you cannot leave out of a journey with Jesus and expect it to turn out right when it comes to the discipleship of children.

There are no substitutes allowed for certain things.

The cornerstone of it all is the book education.

And there's 1 more book I wish every parent would get and read, every parent.

You put these 2 things together and you start to have a team that can't be defeated.

Now, my mother moved rapidly into second place when I was an early adolescent in that church school.

That day she took me out on the step at my uncle's house at the end of a little mini vacation which we almost never got.

There I am standing there in Sugar Grove, Illinois, not far from the deceased Broadview Academy, and she's telling me that when we go back I'm going to a church school and I'm telling her I'm looking down at her because I'm taller than she is and I'm telling her I'm not and she's looking at me with that you better remember who you're talking to look I am and you are and I want to tell you it's not many months into that experience before my teacher is now the primary person shaping my life.

My mother understood that that teacher was her friend, even though that teacher had taken over the position of greatest influence.

When it comes to working together, when a pastor and a teacher, or a parent and a teacher, I should say, work together, certainly pastors and teachers for sure as well, but slightly different setting, you begin to get the team that can't be beaten.

Now, my mother taught me that teacher was the voice of authority, and that voice was to be obeyed.

And never once, maybe occasionally, but I don't hardly remember a specific time, Did my mother ever say a word against our teachers?

My mother understood that the goal was to take this little child that actually came from her womb, who had some problems, some of them were hereditary, some of them were environment, and some of them were self-chosen by the person himself with the name Ronald Paul Kelly, Jr.

And she figured she needed as much help as she could get to get him from the ornery little child he was to an honorable adult.

And along the way she knew compromising authority would compromise the process.

Your children will endure the hands of even a not-so- good teacher but they will not endure well a divided environment.

It goes for marriage between husband and wife, and it goes for parents between parents and teachers.

I don't know how many behind-the-scene conversations my mother had with my teachers.

I found out later on she did, And I'm glad she did, because she was following a biblical narrative.

Take your Bibles and open them up to the book of Leviticus.

Leviticus chapter 19, probably the most quoted and least observed scripture in the entire Bible.

And I'm gonna do this on my device this morning.

Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart.

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Adventist Education: No Substitutes Allowed

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