Purple Post

I am board president for a Charter school in urban Kansas City. My friend Stan Archie just got confirmed by the senate after being appointed by the Governor to the state school board.

We readily recognize the saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but in reality it takes a church. In a human sense it takes a healthy clan to have healthy children; in our community it takes healthy churches to raise healthy children. Yet sadly and sinfully, the village is sick and a sick generation has been produced.

In the book, The Miner’s Canary, two law school professors propose that when miners prepare to go down a shaft, they take two or three caged canaries and lower them into the mine first. The metabolism of the canary is so high it serves as early warning of a poisonous atmosphere. The canary may be inconsequential, incidental, or on the margins of the miner’s job, but if that canary dies it means there are lethal fumes building-up in the mine. Since you're not feeling me like I need you to, let me give you

AN EXPERIENTIAL EXEGESIS OF THE MINER’S CANARY

I can extrapolate from the experience of the canary to explain what is wrong in our mine.

1. Our children are high metabolism; that means they need high nurturing, high nourishment, high attention and high direction
Too many children die without a chance because they are stuck in poisonous atmospheres. They never experience the joy, challenge and expectation of growing up, because they are victims of selfish parental aspirations.
2. Our children are on the margins of meaningfulness, but while they are incidental to us they are critical to our future
Children are vulnerable in a world system that conspires against them. Satan is out to abort them, and that starts with the parents, the churches, the coaches, and the community.
3. It is our children that have the most to tell us about what is happening to our community
The canary was the loser, and yet it is the losers, the lost, and the left behind that tell us the most about how we are doing as churches. That is why Jesus spent time with two groups of people: the fallen and the poor. It is the people on the margins that show us where God is. If we can tap their experience, we can discover something about the atmosphere of the mine. But let me break a little off for you to show you how we are.
4. Many times we make the mistake of blaming the canary
Unfortunately, American society takes the attitude that we don’t need to learn from the losers—we blame the losers. We either feel sorry for them, or we pathologize them and say, Why is this canary not singing? Why is the canary failing this grade? Why is the canary sagging and bagging? We ask what’s wrong with the canary instead of correcting the atmosphere. So
5. We try to fix our children instead of changing the toxic environment
If you think the canary’s distress is caused by the canary, then you will outfit the canary with a child-sized gas mask so he can continue to grow up in a poisonous mine. The question we need to be raising is how we can stop making the canary sick. We need to read and heed the signal from the canary to fix the atmosphere in our homes and our churches, and let it spread to our community.

For the LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the LORD will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you. (Exodus 12:23)

Increasing Your Canary Consciousness #1. Protection only comes to our children when the adults understand the discipline of following directions.

There was an organization to liberation. There was an authority, an order, and orders. Moses told the elders (the authority) to go back to the homes (the social order) and anoint them with blood (the orders). Authority: Moses receives instructions from God. Order: the instructions received are given to the elders to pass on to the homes. Orders: apply that blood for yourself. So the houses that are spared are the households that are obedient to the orders because they respect the order and the authority.

You now see what’s wrong with our canaries. Our canaries are growing up in homes with no order and no respect for authority, because the homes are not obedient to God’s orders.

And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. (Exodus 12:29)

Increasing Your Canary Consciousness #2. When the adults understand the discipline of following directions, then from the same darkness will come different consequences.

The destroyer came at night. Midnight comes to all of us. Though you have the same night, if you are covered, God will bless you with different consequences and outcomes.

And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the LORD will give you, according as he hath promised (Exodus 12:25)

Increasing Your Canary Consciousness #3. Instill children with a sense of the possibilities before them in the face of impossibilities around them.

God didn’t say “if ye be come to the land." He is talking to people that have known nothing but 430 years of slavery. He is talking to generations who have known nothing but hard bondage. Yet now he says, When! So instill a sense of possibility in the face of impossibility.

Give children a sense of their possibilities in Christ. It won’t matter what home they come from or what side of the tracks they live on. We have to plant the seeds in each child of a dream that is greater than the situation they are raised in.

And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? (Exodus 12:26)

Our children are going to ask, so we need to know. Children are going to have questions, so we need to give them the right answers. Since they are going to ask, you better know, and you better rehearse what God has done. This is my purple post.

At the last board meeting I learned that our charter school was the only one in the entire state to make AYP (Average Yearly Progress, a benchmark set by the NCLB—No Child Left Behind Act) each of the last four years in a row. A lot of suburban districts don't make it. And our school is 440 K-8 students who are 65% African American, 24% Hispanic, and over 80% free or subsidized lunches (a barometer of poverty).