By T.M. Moore

C. S. Lewis once wrote, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” That was undoubtedly a most apt metaphor in those rebuilding years following the Second World War; however, the notion of irrigating deserts doesn’t quite capture the nature of the challenge facing Christian educators today. I’d like to propose an alternative metaphor:

The task of the contemporary Christian educator is not to irrigate deserts, but to restore toxic waste sites.

Not only have the hearts, minds, and lives of those we teach been subjected to a steady infusion of poisonous teaching, but our students are still receiving deposits. Everything we teach them in the Church—whether by preaching, in Sunday schools or Bible studies, or even at the level of the Christian college or theological seminary—is tainted and deformed by the festering presence of unbelieving toxins. And while many have raised the banner of Christ and declared the turf of their lives to be “under new ownership,” they continue to be exposed to the lies, half-truths, and outright deceptions of an age in flight from God…

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