School, church and home: Who's actually responsible for your kids' faith?

There's a quiet assumption that sits underneath a lot of Christian parenting decisions. You find a good Christian school. You get the kids to kids church most Sundays. You pray at dinner when everyone's home at the same time. And somewhere in the background, the faith formation is happening. Someone is handling it.

David Stonestreet has been principal of Shire Christian School for long enough to know exactly how that assumption plays out. And he's watched it not work.

Member 009

Before the conversation gets serious, there's a moment worth savouring. David pulls out his original Soul Revival member card from 1994. Number 009. He's been a Soul Revival adjacent figure since the beginning — since the first Soulies meeting in a cockroach-bombed garage in Grays Point, since the paint-mixing sessions that produced the distinctly brown walls of the early meeting space, since the Belvedere Blues Band mosh pit where a young Tim was pressed up against someone twice his height and decided this was the best night of his life.

The cultural artifacts matter because they establish something the conversation keeps returning to: what it looks like when school, church and home are genuinely working together, when the relationships span decades and generations, when the people shaping your kids' faith are people you actually know and trust.

What a Covenantal Christian School Actually Is

David is quick to clarify that not all Christian schools are the same, and the distinction matters. Shire Christian School was founded by Dutch Reformed immigrants in the 1960s, people who came from a country where Abraham Kuyper, Christian theologian and Prime Minister of Holland, had secured government funding for a Protestant school system alongside the Catholic and state systems. They arrived in Australia and found no affordable Protestant option, so they built one.

The founding premise was covenantal: a school for the children of Christian families, where the teaching in the classroom aligns with what's being taught at home and at church. Not a missional school designed primarily to reach non-Christian families, though non-Christians are welcome to apply. A school built on the assumption that the home, the church and the school are all pointing in the same direction.

This has two practical implications that David considers non-negotiable. First, 100% of the teaching staff are actively believing Christians, not people who are happy to support the ethos without personally holding the faith, but people who genuinely share it and bring it into every subject they teach. Second, there is no sacred-secular divide in the curriculum. The Schaeffer influence is explicit here: there is no dichotomy between church and the rest of the week, between the holy stuff and the rat race. A Christian school that brings in a chaplain for the religious moments and then teaches everything else through a secular framework has simply relocated the car park miracle problem into the classroom.

The goal is education through a Christian worldview, not just Christian subjects, but all subjects taught by people who see the world through a gospel-coloured lens and can help students do the same.

Tim's Pro and Con List

Tim's account of choosing schooling for his own kids is worth sitting with because it's genuinely honest. He and Ros literally wrote a pro and con list. They thought about the offset, what you gain from a Christian school and what you need to compensate for if you choose otherwise. They were well aware of the dangers on both sides.

The danger of Christian schooling, as Tim names it bluntly, is the offload. You send your kids to a Christian school, you get them to kids church when you can, and therefore you don't need to do anything at home. The school does the discipleship thing. Except it doesn't, because a school that replaces the home rather than complementing it creates its own dichotomy — between school and home, between school and church — that is just as disorienting for children as any other fragmentation.

The choice of state schooling is different but real: all the teaching happens outside a biblical framework, which means parents and churches have to work harder and more intentionally to provide what the school isn't providing. Neither option is a set-and-forget solution.

Once his son was at the Christian school, Tim found himself having to challenge the assumptions Micaiah himself had brought to the decision: he thought it would be easy to be a Christian there. Tim posits that it might actually be harder. When the baseline cultural Christianity is high, when everyone broadly identifies as Christian without necessarily being passionate about Jesus, it takes more courage, not less, to stick your head above the parapet and genuinely be all-in. The vanilla Christianity of a Christian school can be its own kind of pressure toward conformity.

The Concerning Statistics

The numbers Tim pulls up mid-conversation are sobering and worth sitting with carefully.

In 2001, 75% of the Sutherland Shire identified as Christian on the census. By 2021 that had dropped to 57% — a 20 point fall in twenty years. Those identifying with no religion has risen from 11% to 34% over the same period. Weekly Anglican church attendance is estimated at around 1% of the Shire's population of 250,000 people.

The NCLS data on newcomers (people attending church for the first time, with no prior church background) tells a similar story. In 2001, newcomers represented 12.4% of church attendance. By 2011 it was 9.3%. By 2016, 7.9%. The most recent figure is 5.4%. More than half the newcomers have disappeared over two decades.

Stu's hypothesis connects these two trends. If 75% of people become Christians in their teenage years and childhood, and if youth ministry mission has been declining for a generation, the drop in newcomers follows logically. The pipeline isn't filling. And if the pipeline isn't filling, the long-term demographic trajectory of the church is not a mystery, it's a consequence.

This is where the school-church partnership becomes urgent rather than merely desirable.

Schools Graduate People Out

Tim makes a point that schools are not intergenerational communities. You clock out of a school. You graduate. And the faith community you built within a Christian school: the chapel services, the home groups, the pastoral relationships with teachers, is not a community you can return to. At the end of year 12, the door closes.

University ministries have the same problem. You embed yourself for a few years then you graduate out, with no automatic pathway into a new faith community on the other side.

This is why the school-church-home partnership isn't just a nice idea, it's structurally necessary. A Christian school can do excellent work in faith formation for twelve years. But if those twelve years don't deposit young people into local church communities that will hold them for the rest of their lives, the work doesn't compound. It stops.

The practical implication is that schools need to be modest about their role as one partner in a three-way relationship, not the primary faith community. And churches need to be actively building pathways for school graduates to land in genuine intergenerational community, not just a young adults group that will itself become another temporary stop along the way.

Have State Schools Become More Hostile?

Stu's honest answer is: yes and no, and probably not as different as people think.

He was a Christian at Kirrawee High in the 1980s. It wasn't easy then either. Some students found it funny. Some teachers were dismissive. Christianity was considered benign and slightly daggy, quaint but harmless, which at least meant it wasn't actively opposed.

What changed in the 2000s and 2010s was the cultural permission to be hostile. The new atheists gave people language for treating Christianity not just as wrong but as harmful. The culture wars made any traditional Christian position a target. Legislation around proselytisation tightened. And the Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse raised legitimate questions about whether Christian organisations were safe, questions that, whatever their merits in specific cases, were applied broadly and sometimes unfairly.

The result: fewer Christians at state schools, more restriction on lunchtime groups, less of the casual evangelism through friendship and shared space that characterised the 90s. The Kirrawee High lunchtime group on the grass, where non-Christian kids could drift in for chips and conversation without feeling any pressure, that kind of low-barrier contact point has become harder to create and maintain.

But Stu doesn't think Christian schools are the automatic answer. What he's more interested in is the partnership question: whether schools, churches and homes can be intentional enough together that wherever kids are educated, they're held by a web of Christian relationship and community that extends beyond Year 12.

Transcendence and the God Who Is Not Like Your Life

The conversation ends in territory nobody quite expected, David raises the question of transcendence.

He grew up with lofty church ceilings and liturgy that pointed upward: a God who is other, magnificent, holy. He became a Protestant and found churches that had stripped all of that out in the name of accessibility, and sometimes felt the loss of something important. The Francis Schaeffer framework he and Stu have carried for thirty years, the infinite personal God, transcendent but not distant, holy but approachable, suddenly feels like exactly what the current cultural moment needs.

Because the seeker-sensitive pitch, when you look at it honestly, was essentially: church is just like your life but with a bit of Jesus on top. Come for the excellent music, the clean car park, the comfortable seating. The implicit promise was that the church would feel familiar, and that familiarity was the bridge to faith.

That pitch worked when people broadly liked their lives and were looking for a value add. It is not working now. A generation that has pursued individual self-actualisation to the point of exhaustion, that has grown up in the attention economy and emerged anxious and depressed, does not want a church that looks like the rest of their life. They want something genuinely different. Something ancient. Something tethered.

Which is why a Greek Orthodox church that hasn't changed its liturgy in a thousand years and makes no effort to be attractive is baptising dozens of young adults. Why the local Catholic church had 26 baptisms over Easter. Why young people are seeking out the Latin mass. Not because those liturgies are inherently more true, but because they are visibly, unmistakably other, rooted in something that predates the algorithm, the wellness industry, and the infinite scroll.

The implication for evangelical churches isn't to adopt robes and incense. It's to take seriously the question of what they are offering that is genuinely different from the world. Not more user-friendly than the world. Not more entertaining than the world. Genuinely, substantively other.

David's final thought: that a student given no constraints on an assignment will waste the night paralysed by choice, but give them boundaries and they'll produce something, lands as a metaphor for the whole conversation. A generation suffocating under radical autonomy isn't looking for more freedom. It's looking for something solid to push against.

The school, the church and the home: all three, together, holding that something solid in place.

Discussed on this episode
Shire Christian School

Abraham Kuyper's sphere of sovereignty
Francis Schaeffer and L'Abri
Francis Schaeffer's The Great Evangelical Disaster
NCLS Research: How Religious Are Australians?
NCLS Research: What draws newcomers to church?
Kendra Creasy Dean's Practicing Passion

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