What would happen to the other kids if all the Christian children were removed from public schools? The question is a familiar one. Christian parents sometimes appeal to their children’s potential influence on classmates as a reason for remaining in public education: if Christian families withdraw, who will remain to witness to the children left behind? But this reasoning risks transferring an adult responsibility onto the child. Before asking what Christian children owe their peers, parents must first ask what they owe their own children.
The concern behind the original question is understandable and reflects genuine compassion for children in public schools. Its premise, however, is somewhat misguided. First, it places a disproportionate responsibility for the evangelization of children onto other children. Second, it quantifies the number of children who would carry out the evangelization, as though they were pawns on a chessboard. Third, it shifts attention away from adults who are better formed and prepared to answer the call of the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20). Fourth, it raises the following question: how should Christian parents reconcile their responsibility to form their children with their duty to evangelize others?i
Through prayer and reflection, we have come to believe that peers often exert tremendous influence upon the faith of their peers. In our home, we often say, “peers convert peers.” Even this statement raises critical questions. What is the venue, and what are the conditions for conversion? Should Christian parents intentionally place their children in environments where they must bear the weight of defending and representing the Christian faith before peers and authorities who are increasingly hostile to its claims? To answer that question, parents must first consider the environment in which they are asking their children both to be formed and to evangelize.
The Environment We Ask Them to Enter
Public education does operate within a pluralistic and nonsectarian framework in which the pursuit of knowledge cannot be explicitly ordered toward God. Within this framework, Christianity stands alongside other competing worldviews rather than serving as the organizing principle of education. The First Amendment protects a student’s right to express the Christian faith, and federal guidance affirms that protection. But constitutional freedom is a two-edged sword. The very amendment that protects a Christian student’s witness equally protects speech that denies Christian truth, mocks Christian morality, or promotes worldviews fundamentally at odds with the Gospel. Thus, while Christian students enjoy genuine legal protections, they often do so within an environment where opposing voices are equally protected and frequently more influential.ii
Every institution forms the people participating in it. The question for Christian parents is not whether their children will be formed, but by whom, for how long, and toward what end. That formation occurs not only through formal instruction but through conversations, relationships, correction, expectations, and the assumptions that govern daily life. For a Christian child, even conversations about faith occur within this broader formative environment. Once this principle is understood, the original question takes on an entirely different character.
Children as Resources
Within the public-school environment, Christianity occupies one voice among many competing claims to truth. The premise of the original question asks parents to place their children in this formative environment for at least six hours a day, five days a week, 180 days a year, in part so that they might influence and evangelize their peers during the most vulnerable times of their lives. If common ground can be established in understanding that public education cannot order its educational mission toward the Christian worldview, then it is not a far stretch to consider a chessboard or a battleground analogy.
Children are not resources to be deployed for competitive advantage. Christian evangelization cannot be reduced to the number of believers occupying a particular environment, because love is not measured by quantity but by degrees of intensity. The question, then, is not simply how many Christian children remain in public schools, but how deeply those children have first been formed in the faith they are being asked to represent. Therefore, the comparison is not between educators and enemy combatants, but between the wisdom of preparing someone for an environment in which his convictions will be tested.
How the Army Prepares a Soldier
The US Army educates its soldiers before sending them into an unknown or hostile territory. The Army seeks to better understand the conditions under which conflict may occur and to identify opportunities to ensure a competitive advantage. Instruction begins with ten weeks of basic training, which requires direct inculcation to new recruits twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and continues through their advanced individual training programs. Once soldiers complete these initial training programs, they are considered ready to endure the unknown. However, even when soldiers are deemed ready, they continue to be entrusted to a team leader who exercises authority over no more than four other soldiers. Instruction and team building continue throughout each soldier’s career.
Comparing what is required for training soldiers to sending Christian children to public schools calls the following question to mind: why should Christian parents intentionally place their children under the daily authority of institutions whose values increasingly diverge from the Christian faith? The Army would never recruit a civilian, provide a few hours of instruction each week, and then expect him to flourish under the daily authority of seasoned soldiers from a foreign army. Instead, it immerses the recruit in a comprehensive system of formation. Every hour of the day reinforces the same mission, values, and identity. Before expecting a soldier to withstand competing influences, the Army first establishes his own convictions.
Time and Authority
Christian parents should ask whether they are applying the same wisdom to the formation of their children: by whom are they being formed, for how long, and toward what end? During the school year, children spend roughly six to seven hours each weekday under the instruction and authority of others. By comparison, the hours available for intentional Christian formation often consist of evenings, weekends, and church attendance. If formation is shaped by both time and authority, should parents willingly surrender the greater share of both during the most impressionable years of their children’s lives?
Children are not a resource to be tapped; they are people who need time and space to grow. Christian parents should therefore consider whether the environment in which their children spend the greatest portion of their waking hours strengthens or competes with the formation they are called to provide at home.
The Only Glimpse Scripture Gives Us
The principle that formation precedes mission is not merely practical. The pattern deserves consideration within the Christian story itself. Earlier, we asked what venue and conditions are appropriate for a child’s evangelization. The only scriptural glimpse into Christ’s adolescence offers an instructive point for consideration.
At twelve years old, Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem while His parents began their journey home. After searching for Him for three days, they found Him in the Temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Those who heard Him were “astounded at his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:46–47). The setting of this encounter is worth considering.
Scripture does not tell us that Jesus chose the Temple because it offered safety, but the account depicts an environment in which a twelve-year-old could speak about the Father among adults prepared to engage Him. The contrast raises an important question about the conditions of evangelization: how might that interaction have unfolded had the same twelve-year-old spoken about His Father in an environment unreceptive or hostile to His claims? We have no insight into whether Jesus evangelized His peers as an adolescent, but the only account Scripture provides of Him speaking about the Father as a child occurs within this relatively receptive environment. The episode does not establish a rule for where children should evangelize, but it does invite Christian parents to consider the conditions under which they ask their children to bear that responsibility.
So, What Other Consideration?
The Temple episode speaks to the conditions of childhood witness. Christ’s later public ministry introduces a second consideration: maturity. Jesus was approximately thirty years old when He began His public ministry. He carried the cross of salvation alone at the age of 33, not 12. He was a mature adult who fully understood His purpose and His mission. The only Gospel account of Christ speaking about the Father as a child occurs within a particular environment; His sustained public ministry belongs to His adulthood. The weight of the duty and responsibility to respond to the Great Commission requires formation, time, and maturity before one is prepared to remain steadfast under sustained pressure within a pluralistic world.
First to Know Him, Then to Make Him Known
The Christian mission has never been merely the transmission of information. Evangelization flows from union with Christ. Before Christian children are asked to explain the hope within them, defend the faith, or witness to their peers, they must themselves become firmly rooted in the life of Christ. We should pray for children in public schools while remembering that Christians are called to be set apart, to be in the world but not of it, and to prepare our children to carry the Light into the darkness in a time of the Lord’s choosing.
Christian homeschooling parents are not choosing between discipleship and evangelization. They are choosing the proper order of each, and the order matters. Formation necessarily precedes mission. Before our children can carry Christ into the world, Christ must first be deeply formed within them. We desire our sons and daughters not merely to speak Christian words but to possess Christian wisdom, conviction, and charity. Our calling is first to know God and to make Him known. The order is not accidental. The first provides the foundation for the second. Children who truly know Him will, in the Lord’s time, be prepared to make Him known.
i Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, New American Bible Revised Edition, Revised Edition (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, 2011). This Bible translation is used throughout this work.
ii Department of Education, “Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer and Religious Expression in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools,” US Department of Education, February 2026, https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/laws-preschool-grade-12-education/preschool-grade-12-policy-documents/guidance-on-constitutionally-protected-prayer-and-religious-expression-in-public-elementary-and-secondary-schools?
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