How are we to engage in reformation today?

Kevin Swanson explains that we are called to not necessarily repeat the Reformation and address the same issues that they faced. Instead, we are called to reform the various issues relevant to and affecting the Church and family today. For instance, we are called to engage in the reformation of our children's education.

We are called to bring reformation into the education sphere – otherwise, we may lose successive generations. Today, education has been institutionalized where personal discipleship and training has been removed and parents abdicate their responsibility to train their children to other, unbelieving individuals. While the Reformation took place nearly 500 years ago, semper reformanda ("always reforming")  continues to be just as applicable today as it was then. 

Ephesians 4:21-23 (NKJV) – “[P]ut off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind.”

We don't repeat exactly what the original Reformation produced for us. We received the great heritage, but now we're called to a reformation in our era as well. The initial reformation of the 16th century did not reform the area of education, and John Knox's dying words were, beware of the universities. This is what he said at the end of his life. He understood at that point that the universities would be the undoing of the Reformation and the destruction of the Christian faith in the Western world.

We're called on now to engage a powerful Reformation in the area of education. We have to be very careful about the institutionalization of education and the Greek form of education that has been foisted upon most Christian schools and most home schools and colleges and universities today. We have to find ways now in which we bring a thoroughgoing reformation into the area of education or we will continue to lose successive generations, generation after generation. So let's bring a powerful reformation of education in which We rid ourselves of the Greek form where we institutionalize education, remove relationships, remove discipleship out of the configuration. We need to bring it back.

We need to produce the discipleship of Jesus. Jesus didn't have a seminary. He didn't set up a whiteboard in the boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee as he was teaching the lessons of faith. There was no whiteboard. There was no classroom.

There was guys sitting in a boat hanging out with their discipler. We need to focus on the issues of character and faith. We need to bring relationships back in. We need to displace this old Greek model of education with a Jesus model of discipleship. Without this former reformation of education, the church will continue to languish.

The church will continue to break down in our generation.