The 4- to 14-Year-Old Window: Turning Children Into Evangelists in Public Schools (book excerpt)

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.truthout.org/4-14-year-old-window-turning-children-evangelists-public-schools/1329149815

When an after-school “Bible study” program called the Good News Club showed up at the Santa Barbara public school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children, she decided to take a closer look at its sponsoring organization, the Child Evangelism Fellowship, and other groups like it. Stewart was surprised to learn that there is more religion in public education today than there has been in the past 100 years. Her book, "The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children" (PublicAffairs), explores the wide range of initiatives to infiltrate public education while simultaneously undermining support for it. In the following excerpt, she investigates the source of the religious right’s new focus on children and schools.

Then at a Transform World Connections conference in September 2009, a gathering of high-level mission strategists, Bush announced a new unifying vision for missionaries around the globe. He called it the “4/14 Window.” The largest and most strategic group of people in the world, he said, are children between the ages of four and fourteen. Kids are the key to the “Great Commission,” or the theological tenet, popular in the evangelical world, that there is a mandate to convert all of humanity to evangelical Christianity.

Bush’s argument was simple and blindingly effective. He pointed out that 85 percent of conversion experiences occur to people between the ages of four and fourteen. He also said that when you get them young, you have a better chance of keeping them for life. “It is imperative that we see children and young people as a strategic force that can transform a generation and change the world,” he wrote. “Our vision and hope is to maximize their transformational impact while they are young, and to mobilize them for continuing impact for the rest of their lives.”

Bush’s ideas lit up the skies of the missionary community like a bright flare in the night, illuminating the path for evangelicals worldwide and missionaries in particular. “Political movements (like Nazism and Communism) trained legions of children with the goal of carrying their agenda beyond the lifetimes of their founders….Even the Taliban places great emphasis on recruiting children,” wrote Dr. Wes Stafford, president of Compassion International, one of the largest worldwide missionary groups, in an introduction to Bush’s 2009 book, The 4–14 Window: Raising Up a New Generation to Transform the World. “May God inspire you to join us in His battle for the little ones!”

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We must watch for these things happening in our public schools. It's down-right frightening!

[izquierdista]

1. The virus hits the young harder

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If you have the time, all of Darrel Ray's YouTube videos are worthwhile.

[Bragi]

2. Thanks, I'll buy it today /nt