A Liberal Christian Education

At seven I was in the first grade, and I attended Wyoming Valley Christian School. In kindergarten I had gotten into a few fights. I came home with a black eye one day, and the other day I sent a kid home with one. Also I had come home with some new words. One of them was “fart.” This worried my parents (my Mom moreso than my Dad) so I was off to Christian school to learn how to behave like a proper Christian boy.

WVCS was a unique school experience. There were two other kids in my grade. By nine, I was acculturated to the Christian ethos of WVCS. I’d memorized scads of Bible verses and had long and candid talks with my teachers about Jesus and his revolutionary idea of a love-centered view of the world. My faith was strong, and quite well-educated for that young age. I knew the histories of the travels of the tribes of Israel, I knew the geography of the Holy Land, I knew the stories and the messages and the meanings. But this school was also unique in the way it operated as a Christian academy in that Christ’s teachings were of utmost imperative. My teachers were open-minded, loving people. They never prescribed the ideas of the Bible to us. We talked about parables and lessons and discussed as a class what we all thought. We were encouraged to see the Bible’s message as broad, and open to question, scholarship and interpretation. I loved it, because it felt true to me, and not dogmatic. Even at nine, I had a tendency to be a bit repulsed by narrow dogma. I lacked the perspective to realize how lucky I was to be in a Christian school that did not inundate me with dogma, however. I took it for granted that this open-minded, compassionate approach was in fact what Christianity was all about.