Shelburne faith column: High school Bible courses end
I miss the classroom.
For forty years I helped start school every morning. Although I never was a paid employee of our public school system, I showed up daily at Amarillo High School to teach the academic Bible course.
In my first decade there, before the state legislature enacted a curriculum guide that eradicated several of our finest courses and almost wiped out Bible, every day I taught all morning long — three periods of classes overflowing with top students.
I loved it. Nothing I got to do during my sixty years of ministry blessed me more than the time I spent each day in the classroom. The school staff and faculty accepted me as one of them.
Having them as colleagues and friends enriched my life. And during those four decades I taught hundreds of students. Hardly a day passes when I don’t cross trails with some of them now.
When I took that same Bible course in the same school in the 1950s, we learned a lot of Bible, but back then the course was more like a Sunday school lesson. It was not academically challenging. After I came on board, slowly we upgraded the course enough to offer it for college credit.
For ninety years the Bible course was taught daily in Amarillo’s high schools. Then, just a few years after I retired as one of the instructors, the course vanished almost overnight.
Without warning, state legislators who were trying to address the abuse of Bible courses elsewhere in Texas passed a law requiring state teacher accreditation for all public school Bible teachers. Our Bible teachers almost always had higher graduate degrees than most members of the public school faculty, but none of them had teacher credentials. So our Bible course vanished overnight.
Losing this time-proven, valuable program seems sad to me. Knowing that this door is now closed to us adds to my sense of homesickness for the classroom. Night after night I hear the teachers in my family chattering about what they did that day at school, and this reminds me that I’m no longer there.
What are you doing now that cannot last? Every role any of us fills will end. Inevitably.
And, in too many instances, sooner than we might expect. Joe Barnett wisely warns us, “There will be a time when the two words ‘too late’ will be too real.” The apostle Paul got it right. He said, “Now is the time.”
Gene Shelburne is pastor emeritus of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna Street, Amarillo, Texas. Contact him at GeneShel@aol.com, or get his books and magazines at www.christianappeal.com. His column has run on the Faith page for almost four decades.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Shelburne faith column: High school Bible courses end
