The Tribune

By Bishop Simeon Hall

Most Christian denominations in our Bahamas must be credited with promoting Christian and secular education with distinction.

The Anglicans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Methodists, along with others, have historically been the Christian motivators in the top private schools in the Bahamas. While all private schools with a denominational foundation have fostered Christian and secular education, one or two schools gave their blessings to the social and class prejudices which prevailed, especially during the 1950s and '60s.

Education of any kind is an effort to bring out what is in a student. Christian education makes the proposition that the bottom line to the human existence is that we are spirit beings seeking to be human and not the other way around. Thus, any and all efforts to bring forth the best in each of us socially, mentally and vocationally ought to be built on the premise that we were made by God and we are miserable and incomplete until we reconnect with Him.

Christian education seeks to remind us that our personal view of ourselves and other reflect our vertical view of our Maker and Creator.

Christian education underscores the truism that we are more than arteries and capillaries - we are in fact created beings who are called to reflect our Supreme Creator.

Christian education asserts that if we are descendants of a lower animal being then we will condescend to that germinal lower form rather than ascending to the highest calling which our Supreme Maker has breathed into all humans.

Christian education seeks to remove all social, economic, even religious barriers which impede the elevation of the human spirit and the churches' efforts to establish God's Kingdom here on earth.

Let me be specific. The Jordan Prince Williams Baptist School and the Bahamas Baptist Bible Institute were started when our colonial Bahamas perpetuated acute racial and class distinctions on which several denominations "sprinkled holy water". Thank God that we have passed that stage in our history and these walls have been destroyed.

Our Baptist Bible Institute, for more than 60 years, has sought to train ministers and lay persons to promote Christian awareness. Under the umbrella of the Baptist Institute, the class for which I am personally responsible is called "The Call and Science of Christian Preaching".

Christian persons - young and old, men and women - who sense a call to proclaim the Gospel, are active participants.

For the last eight years some 400 persons have passed the ten-week session.