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Home education is not fundamentally about taking classes at home instead of in a school building. The value of homeschooling is actually its role in the greater process of family discipleship. Parents are responsible for training and discipling their children, and homeschooling can be a significant enhancement to that process. However, we have found over two decades of working with families that many lack a clear understanding of biblical family discipleship principles. Our overall mission is to turn the hearts of kids to their parents, the hearts of parents to their kids, and the hearts of both to the Lord, that families may be strengthened for sacrificial service in excellence. To help further this mission, we are committed to helping families and churches better understand and apply biblical family discipleship principles.

In discussing family discipleship, the first problem we typically find is that families—even those from strong churches—often do not fully understand the biblical objective of raising a child. Many families are raising their kids to be "not disobedient", which means that the kids are not in active rebellion and they generally conform to the cultural norms of the home and the church. However, "not disobedient" is not the Bible's standard of discipleship. Furthermore, the goal of educating our children should not be just that they become acceptable students so they can get good jobs so they can raise their kids to perpetuate this cycle, without higher purpose. The true biblical goal of raising and educating our kids is that they would be zealous ambassadors for their King, pouring all they are and have into serving God sacrificially in excellence all their lives.

The second and larger problem is that families often don't understand the biblical process for discipling kids. Families in the church today often use a "hopeful osmosis" approach to raising kids, with the thought that by having family devotions, being in a good church, participating in a good "youth group", and homeschooling, our kids will absorb enough good things and that they will turn out okay. This process falls short of biblical discipleship. In the Bible, discipleship is an active process, like athletic training.

The approach to child-raising we often see tends to produce kids whose faith is in their minds but not so much in their hearts. The fact that more than half of our "Christian" kids leave home to live lukewarm lives with little impact for the Kingdom, or even turn away from their faith after they leave home, should urge us to return to Scripture for a better understanding of God's intent. The Bible does not lead us to believe that kids raised to godliness should be so ineffective or be turning away in such large numbers. The Potter's School understands part of our calling to be to address this problem by restoring family discipleship to a biblical foundation.

Our approach to restoring family discipleship is straight from Scripture. The goal is to instill godly excellence (the biblical word for "virtue" actually means "excellence") into our kids' hearts. Families often do not understand the biblical principles involved in instilling standards of excellence through grace, and so we shy away from high standards because we do not want to raise works-oriented kids. We help families understand the theology and application of how to instill excellence through grace into not only a kid's mind, but also his heart.

Since all standards (morals, laws, rules, performance measures, and such) derive their validity and priority from the authority that sets them, it turns out that one of the biggest reasons we parents have trouble instilling godly standards in our kids' hearts is that our kids do not understand what it is to honor authority in the fullest biblical sense. Most families teach obedience, and even respect, but families often do not understand the depth of biblical honor for authority. This hinders our efforts to get our kids to embrace authority's standards. We help families understand the theology and application of what it is to fully honor authority.

In Scripture, God never grants authority apart from assigning responsibility. Authority is ordained by God to execute specific responsibilities—part of a larger concept sometimes referred to as headship. Most families do not understand the doctrine of biblical headship, so we often find ourselves trying to teach kids about authority without a biblical foundation of responsibility. Today even in the church we have accepted the notion of "adolescence"—typically a period of increased self-governance (authority) without a corresponding increase in responsibility—as normal. This missing foundation of headship responsibility being modeled and taught in the home and church hinders our efforts to teach kids to honor authority in their hearts. We help families understand the theology and application of the foundational principle of headship responsibility.

Finally, the most fundamental application and expression of headship responsibility in God's created economy is the family itself. Ironically, families often do not understand the biblically ordained purpose of the family, particularly as it relates to the mission labor assigned to Man. As a result, we are often raising our kids apart from a biblical context of co-laboring together in God's plan. Without establishing the proper "training ground", we are hindered in true biblical discipleship. We help families understand the mission purpose of the family, and help them understand how co-laboring in that purpose strengthens the family as it makes the mission more effective.

We have formatted this broad scope of biblical topics into a series of discussion seminars. Each of the seminars includes in-depth study of Scripture made personal by examples from two decades of experience working with teens and families. We offer this series of seminars overseas and in the U.S., and we have a related series for teens.

If you are interested in finding out more about our family discipleship series or in scheduling us to present the seminars, please contact the director.