Beginnings

Greetings and welcome!

We are excited about the upcoming Engage conference and are so glad you have chosen to participate. Prior to the conference we invite you to explore the past, present, and future of Reformed day school education via three more emails like this one. It is the intent of our planning team that these four communications with you as an attendee will help to better equip, inform, and inspire you to participate meaningfully and fully in our conference.

Although experiencing Christian education from grades K-12 and then being a teacher and administrator for 33 years of my 40 year career in Christian schools, I (Dan) feel inadequate to tell with accuracy the story of how the Calvinist Day School education began and how it has grown up to the present day. I will simply point you to others who can tell that story better. A risk of telling a long story is leaving out important parts, characters and events and these ramblings are not intended to be the whole story by any means.

We will look at four periods of history through readings over the next weeks:

Our first set of readings will help us understand the context that Calvinist Christian education grew from and how vision, theology, geography, and ethnicity merged into a movement, first in the US and then in Canada.

The Association for the  Advancement of American Dutch Studies (or AADAS for short) focused its 22nd biennial conference on Reformed Christian day school education and one of the products of that conference was the publication of a collection of lectures entitled Dutch Reformed Education Immigrant Legacies in North America – chapter titles can be seen here.This book will be available for purchase at the Engage conference. The first essay in the book by Calvin University professor emeritus, Henk Aay, gives a great contextual/geographical starting point.

Professor/author Steve Vryhof has written a very helpful summary of the history of Calvinist Christian schools (it is his term I have adopted to describe this branch of Christian education). His chapter is available as part of a larger work on faith based education: The Praeger Handbook of Faith-Based Schools in the United States, K-12, Vol. 1 by Hunt and Carper. I could access the chapter via Google Book preview and here is the link, but I make no guarantees that you will be able to access it!  

If you have resources that may be helpful to share with others about this month’s topic, please feel free to contact me at danbeerens@gmail.com and we will add them to our next newsletter.

Sincerely,

The Engage Conference Planning Team 

Tim Van Soelen
Erik Ellefsen
Dan Beerens