"The GOD-Centered Homeschool is a great resource with hands on examples for parents who want to help their children see how God is the center of each subject they study."
- Robert Bortins, CEO Classical Conversations "What an empowering book! The God-Centered Homeschool provides parents with not only the 'why' to center your homeschool around God, but also the 'how' to practically implement that in your home immediately."
- Melissa Pryer, Homeschool Mom, Illinois
"I see this issue all around us in the homeschool community. In trying to make sure we have Jesus in our [homeschool] day, He becomes curriculum rather than our curriculum growing from Him! Thank you for tackling the subject so thoroughly."
- Stacey Kirk, Homeschool Mom, Georgia
From the author: "Over the last ten years, I have had the wonderful experience of interacting with hundreds of homeschooling parents. In one role, God gave me the opportunity to ask several hundred homeschooling moms (and the occasional dad) in one-on-one interviews about their homeschooling journeys and their reasons for choosing home education. These conversations were often rich and encouraging. They opened my eyes to gracious work that God is doing in the lives of families all over the United States and Canada.
One not-so-surprising discovery that I made during these conversations is that the vast majority of Christian homeschoolers choose home education for reasons of faith. Sometimes homeschooling was chosen in order to remove the children from ungodly peer influence in public or private schools. Other times the choice was made because of disagreement with liberal agendas or anti-Christian teaching in classrooms. For some parents, the opportunity to give their children a Christian education was just too good to pass up. At bottom, what all of these parents desired is that their children receive an education consistent with biblical principles and Christian character.
How are these homeschooling families doing on reaching this aim? The results seem decidedly mixed. There are some positive steps that many Christian families are taking. Many choose to include a Bible curriculum as part of the scope of their children's education. They are careful to choose a "Christian" curriculum for certain subjects, especially science. Alongside the standard secular literature that would be found in most schools (Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Dickens), Christian homeschool parents often have their children reading Lewis and Tolkien, as well as biographies of Christian heroes and missionaries. This is all good.
Yet my sense is that most students are having very few worshipful moments during their typical homeschool day. Even with Christian curriculum, our students are far too seldom finding their hearts well up in awe towards God as they learn. Explicit connections to God are few and far between in the material and in our students' minds. Greater happiness in God is seldom an actual practical result of the day's educational activities. Though most Christian parents would agree that we should homeschool for the purpose of helping our children know and enjoy God, there seems to be a disconnect between our stated desire and our actual practice.
This is the disconnect that I pray this book will help remedy. It does not offer a full solution, but only advice from a homeschool father who has tried to think deeply about this issue for the sake of his own family and others. God gripped me some years ago with a desire to help Christian homeschoolers grow in becoming more authentically God-centered. I have found that it is all too easy to talk about being God-centered in the abstract, and much more difficult to actually put that talk into practice. It is the practice of God-centered homeschooling that this book is about."
About the Author: Justin Nale is pastor of Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church in Rocky Mount, NC. He and his wife Crystal have been actively involved in homeschooling their two sons and seeking to serve other homeschoolers for more than a decade.
