Life in Our Fishbowl: School and the Pastor's Kids

Today is our first official day of homeschooling! It's our first year and I'm super excited! So this week's posts will all be about homeschooling! Today I want to talk about Pastor's kids and school. 

It's always interesting to me to see what Pastor's families choose when considering schooling their kids. Sometimes it surprises me, sometimes it doesn't. But what I have noticed among our friends who are pastor's families, it's pretty evenly distributed between homeschooling and sending their kids to school. 

My dad became a pastor when I was 13 years old and he was looking for a church for a little over a year before God called him to a church. But I remember that some of the churches we visited were quite opinionated on whether or not the Pastor's family should homeschool. Sometimes it was a matter of whether or not the other families in the church homeschooled or not. But one particular church was very interested in my dad becoming the pastor there if my dad would change one thing. They wanted him to send his kids to public school even though all of their kids homeschooled. My dad said no to that church because he felt as though God wanted his kids to be taught at home.

When we first moved here and began our ministry, we started to meet people in the town and I will never forget meeting a couple of the school bus drivers. Their first question was "How old are your kids? We drive the in-town school buses." As soon as I told my kids ages which were then 3 and 2 - it was obvious that we would not be sending them to school on the buses. But I chose to not tell them that we were going to homeschool because I did not want the first impression of the Pastor's family to be misunderstood as antagonistic towards our public schools.

A lot of small towns have a wonderful school pride and they can often become offended at homeschoolers because they think we won't support the area schools. It's often misunderstood that ALL homeschoolers have a problem with public schools. That's not entirely true. For us, we are willing to send our kids to school, we just feel that we chose the best choice for OUR family by choosing to homeschool. 

If you've been following me for a while you know that I believe that it's important to hold yourself to the standard of God and not the standard of men or even our own standards. This applies to homeschooling as well. You can only make the decision for your family and you should not force your own opinions of righteousness on others. Homeschooling is not the best choice unless it is also God's choice.