Friday, March 21, 2014

Can Anything Good Come Out of Bakersfield?

The Christian community in Bakersfield and beyond is failing to train its children to out-think and out-live the culture. Many have noticed that today we are suffering a serious loss of Christian leadership in the arts and sciences, especially in the places of influence in our society.

This is my eighth year in Bakersfield and I have found that it is a city with a low community self-esteem. We have all read the articles and heard the statistics from various sources. We hear that Bakersfield is last among the cities in the state for academic performance. We hear that it has the worst air quality in the U.S. We also hear that we have abnormally high rates of poverty and gang activity and obesity. I even read an article recently that said that we are the least literate of the cities of the country. And all of this amid the arid and almost unbearable heat that can last for an unrelenting four months. I suppose it is easy to see why San Diegans look their noses down at us.

There is a recurring theme in the book Intellectuals, in which Paul Johnson notes that many progressive intellectuals "love humanity in the abstract, but not human beings in particular." The Christians of Bakersfield seem to invert that idea; they love human beings and are wary of humanity.

What I see in Bakersfield impresses me as much as any feature of any city anywhere. While San Francisco can boast in its artistic excellence and eclectic population, and San Diego can boast in its pristine climate and eclectic population, Bakersfield can boast in its loving people and the things those people do to make the world a better place. I see a large population of committed Christians in Bakersfield; people who are the salt of the earth. These are people who feed the world! They are people on balance who make good things that better the lives of their fellow human beings. They have as a rule established stable families committed to larger principles than mere world mastery and wealth. People here still think in terms of fidelity to country, community, family and, above all, to God. Of course, what I just wrote is a punch-line to many of the enlightened progressives living in places like Palo Alto or La Jolla. But it's not the first time that people thought nothing good could come out of Nazareth!

Which brings me to my point. And here I must be delicate but truthful. In my time in Bakersfield, I have noticed that the received vision for our little Christian school in town is not so nearly as grand as I thought it might be. Since we live in a community that clearly does not value higher education (at least as a general rule), I wonder if perhaps some of that perspective finds its way into the families of our school.

The community expectations of our school seem to have been rather meek. A private Christian school in a place like Bakersfield should of course be relatively better than the public schools, which generally means that it lacks gangs, cussing teachers, racial tensions, messy families, bad behavior, bad programs, etc. And it should also include a kind of moral education in the Christian faith, at least a very rudimentary one that will keep kids in the faith. The education it provides need not to be anything fancy, as many of our students will probably just move directly from high school into trade schools or the workforce.

Of course the school's official vision does not align with that expectation. Those who built the school seemingly aspired to something bigger than a merely functional trade high school in an agricultural area, and this vision is articulated with no deficiency of elocution in our vision and mission statements. We want students to soar and not merely to stay grounded. Perhaps, in short, that is the disconnect. Perhaps some of the families of this community are looking to us for a good nominally Christian educational grounding. And we want to stir up a cauldron of intensity that prepares Christian physicists or journalists or statesmen or college professors; the next generation of Christian thinkers.

And now I come to the primary purpose of this meandering post. I want to issue a challenge to the families of this community. I would like to see us build the finest Christian high school in the country! Why can't Bakersfield be on the cutting edge of education, sending exceptionally trained young Christian intellectuals into the finest colleges and universities in this country, who will go on from there to articulate a Christian perspective on the arts and sciences from the lofty heights of the most influential positions in society?

Let Bakersfield Christian be a training ground for young men and women to learn the time honored intellectual heritage of their faith and also to be expertly instructed in the arts and sciences so as to reclaim the miles of lost intellectual ground abdicated by prior generations of Christians who spurned the life of the mind in favor of a kind of subjectivist experiential Christianity.

It is high time! We possess the resources. Let us build this thing together, in Bakersfield, and now. This is an urgent matter! Let us be proud of the hard-working Christian community with which God has providentially blessed us. And let us show the world what this Christian agricultural community can offer in the way of bright young men and women who can compete with the best of any other community in the nation, in whatever the subject.

Our leaders to this point are to be applauded for their work in improving the overall excellence of the school's programs. They would be the first to acknowledge that much work remains to be done, such as development of the fine arts program, athletic program improvements, increases in overall technological excellence and work to continue to attract and retain the best teaching and coaching talent available.

It seems to me that it will require the whole Christian community of Bakersfield, supporting this good work in various ways, to finish the work set before us. To this point there have been remarkable people of vision and generosity whose sacrifices have built this school. But for us to move from a good school to a great school is going to require a community wide acceptance of, and participation in, our challenging vision, especially from the churches in Bakersfield.

Let me close with a story: Recently I received a letter from a former student who graduated from BCHS in 2009. She went to a prestigious private university in Southern California. During her time there, she said that her professors were constantly amazed by how much she knew and by how well prepared she was for the rigors of college. She was even asked on more than one occasion what school she went to. She boasted, "Bakersfield Christian High School."

Bakersfield, let us be proud of that! And let us send more of them into the world, so that they can "appear as luminaries, holding fast the word of truth"(Philippians 2:15,16) in this this dark and post-Christian world. And let us do it because the love of Christ impels us to love lost people in need of truth!