What Does Success in Education Look Like?

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Well, I'm excited about my guest today. Melvin Adams is the president of Noah Webster Educational Foundation. There's so much going on in our schools right now. We really need to take a look at the culture, what's happening in our schools, and the effect of our schools is having in the culture today. We've had so many wake-up calls with parents realizing they didn't know what was being taught in schools.

Well, some school system is not even wanting parents to be involved in the school system, and I recently had the opportunity to meet Melvin at a mutual meeting where we were at an organization meeting outside of DC and got to learn a little bit about the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Melvin, I'm excited to have you with us today. Thank you for being on The Christian Perspective. Well, thank you, Chris. It's a privilege for me to join you today, and thank you for the opportunity. Look forward to talking to you. Well, same here. You know, I'm going to do something a little different, Melvin, before we get into what the Noah Webster Educational Foundation is.

I always like my audience to be able to learn a little bit about the personal level of the guest that's on. So do you mind sharing with us a little about who you are, your background, where you're from, and that kind of thing? Oh, well, sure.

Well, thank you. So I was born in East Africa. My parents were missionaries. They were doing church plants, running orphanages and schools, and so forth, in the countries of Eritrea and East Africa, up in the Horn of Africa. And for those of you who know that geography, I was born over there, raised over there, lived through the period of civil war.

And when King Haile Selassie was overthrown by the basically military dictatorships that were Soviet-backed and really helped by the radicalization of the student body, the student movement, and saw all of that firsthand, came to the States, went to college while I was in college, ended up in education, and pursued that track, took my first teaching job in 1982 out in Kansas, and taught in a few different schools and colleges here in the U.S. In the 90s, we were asked to go and help start a Christian college in the country of Ukraine. So we lived over there from 92 to 2,000. Of course, that we went over.

We had five young children at the time, and my wife was pregnant with her sixth. We, so to speak, climbed over the walls of the Soviet Union, that Iron Curtain going in. But we saw some amazing things over there and learned an awful lot, some of the best years of our lives. One of the things we saw was a society trying desperately to get out from underneath the thumb of 74 years of Russian style Soviet communism, which they're still trying to do that today. And so we saw that. What really challenged us, though, as we come back and forth to the States and when we finished up our season over there because our kids were growing up, we needed to come back to the States for their education and so forth, was just the significant things we were seeing in our country and culture. Some of the very things that I had seen developing in Africa as a kid growing up, seeing, you know, in the former Soviet Union and those very practices and policies were being advocated here in our own country. And we were just seeing a huge decline in our culture and within the church. And we really felt like God really just called us back to the States to be involved, to try to bring kingdom change here, but also just to save our country from the radicalization and socialism and so forth. So that's kind of what we're doing.

What a great testimony. You know, a lot of our younger listeners don't even remember. I guess you and I are showing our age from the old Soviet Union, remembering those times. But what a historic time to be there as the Soviet Union was falling apart and really the world changed in a way that the culture today and the generation, the younger people today don't understand what it was like at that time during the Cold War and the tensions really all over the world and for missionaries. So were you guys kind of undercover?

If you were in the old former Soviet Union era, I mean, I used to hear stories when I was a kid of people having to smuggle Bibles and being tortured. Was it a dangerous situation you all were in over there? Well, certainly when we moved over in 92 and the Soviet Union started falling apart in 91. So it was in that process. So there was a lot of change taking place.

And we went over legally and did all of our work legally. We were some of the pioneers that were going into that part of the world once the Soviet Union fell apart. And so in that sense, no, certainly have had the privilege of going into a number of other countries since that time where it was very much undercover because of the radical threats and just the total restriction against faith, morality, Christianity, I guess is the best way to put it. Do you still have contacts in the Ukraine today with the invasion that you kept in touch with?

Yes, we've got dozens and dozens of them that we talk with almost daily, former graduates, pastors of churches. And here's the thing that's exciting. And I tell you what, you know, Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And those folks have been going through hell over there. And I'm telling you, it is the church more than anything else that is rising up and is serving the people, serving the communities, not only the church inside the country, but to a huge extent, the church globally from outside coming in with all kinds of care.

And it's just always the way it is. And, you know, the church shines brightest when there is trouble and persecution. And that's when real believers in Christ stand up and become the hands and feet and voice of Christ. Yeah. And I'm so glad to see that the church is filling that mission there.

You know, and it's sad to see so many churches in the United States today that don't see the importance of engaging in the culture like they are over there. So when y'all came home, I guess you at some point, you decided to start this new organization called the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Can you tell us a little bit about why you did that?

Absolutely happy to do that. So we came back for several, we moved back to the States in 2000. And for several years, I continued working with the mission organization we were with and oversaw work in Europe and Asia, primarily in 2008, while we were living in the States, but I was still very much focused overseas, a good bit of our focus in 2008, we moved back to Virginia, where my wife's family is from. And at that time, I helped to start another organization called Renew a Nation, Renew a Nation, those three y'all put together. It is a 501c3. Our focus was to help children develop a biblical worldview. And it was intended to be an organization, an educational organization, which it really is.

Unfortunately, the broader educational movement looked at what we were doing what we were doing and said, Wait a second, you're not an educational organization, you're a religious organization, and said you need to go work with churches and stuff like that, and pretty well just close the lid on our box, as far as really having a voice and being a part of the broader educational space. And so I helped lead that organization till 2016. And that time, I stepped away from the organization was also quite heavily involved in politics in Virginia, had the privilege of serving as a member of the presidential transition team as a senior advisor in education in 2016.

And other things that I got involved in at the state party level on the executive committee level of the Republican Party was a congressional district chair and so forth. And so it was quite heavily involved in that way. But from the kind of the mixing of lit and I really just have to say this deviating quickly, I really learned the importance of engagement in the political space while we were in Ukraine.

Because I found out that the people who were governing these were newly elected leaders, they were people who were trying to form a nation state. And when we engaged with them with you with an effort to bring solutions to their need, they embraced us. And there were amazing things that God accomplished through those kinds of relationships. And I learned that, you know, as believers, we can work and work and work and work on our own, or we can work on our own with God's help and direction.

But when I say on our own, I'm talking about just with our own self or our own church or our own organization. But when you connect and collaborate and work in both government leaders, political leaders, other community organizations, and that networking, that collaboration, amazing things can begin to happen very, very quickly. Coming back to where we came to know Webster Educational Foundation, we, my wife and I were discussing, you know, all of the things that we saw going on, we felt needed to be addressed.

But there just wasn't, there wasn't that conservative, core principle voice. So we decided, you know, instead of leading with like biblical worldview, let's lead with educational terms and language. And so it's like, you know, foundational principles, core principles, best practices, and language like that, that has a widely accepted concept and is embraced in the educational space.

But then you can put definition behind that, and you can have real conversations. And so we decided in 2019, to register the organization. And we spent a couple of years laying the foundation, the framework for that, we actually went public in May of 2021. So just finished up one year as an organization. Take a quick break. And I want to continue learning more about why you started it. And then what you do at the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Y'all stick around.

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I'd like to invite you to tune in to Equipped to Be and visit ConnieYaupers.com where I share useful tips and proven strategies to help you navigate the seasons of motherhood, faith and life with confidence and joy. History was made on today's date. Stay tuned for an American Minute with Bill Federer. Today, June 20th, in the year 1632, King Charles of England granted a charter for the colony of Maryland named for Queen Henrietta Maria. Lord Baltimore sent two ships, the Ark and the Dove, to settle the colony.

Buying land from the Indians, they founded the city of St. Mary's as a refuge for persecuted Catholics, but soon extended religious toleration to all faiths. The charter reads, whereas our right trusty subject, Baron of Baltimore, being animated with a pious zeal for extending the Christian religion and also the territories of our empire, hath humbly besought leave. This has been an American Minute with Bill Federer. For a free transcript, call American Minute at 1-888-USA-WORD. Welcome back to Christian Perspective. My guest today is Melvin Adams. Melvin is the president of the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. He's been sharing his story about how his family was in mission work and they came back to the United States and saw a real need to really influence the next generation for Jesus to help them develop a biblical worldview. Melvin, you were telling us about why you started the Noah Webster Educational Foundation.

Can you tell us what you do? You were talking about how you started integrating educational terms. I assume that was because they weren't letting you in the schools with your previous organization.

Is that right? So you wanted to look like you were more of an educational organization? Well, yes, but our focus is not so much getting into the schools and developing curriculum and all that kind of stuff. As I have looked and studied education over the years, there are two key words that every area of education, whether it's public, public, private Christian, charter schools, any type, even home schools, there are two key things that drive education. One is leadership, whose ideas. The other is legislation, the laws that are passed, the decisions that are made, because ultimately those laws and decisions affect every area of education in that state.

And those laws and decisions also determine the funding appropriations. And so as we looked at that and we thought about all of the issues that are going on in education, really the direction toward the left and seeing how, and I just want to say, for decades, the left has systematically indoctrinated, starting at the university levels and then gradually, back in the time of John Dewey, and even some before, but particularly with him. And that just has grown and grown and grown until now. It permeates literally every sphere of education. Public education, unfortunately, many people that are even involved in private schools, even Christian schools, because they were taught with those worldviews, what's now commonly called woke, secular humanism, the postmodern theories, all of these things, basically challenging any concept of truth, whatsoever. And so now we have the whole transgender, the gender dysphoria, we've got increase in racial conflict.

And I mean, those are just a couple that we hear about now. But I mean, there are so many different things that just are permeating the culture. But what's happening is when those things get into a child's mind and they are being, children are sponges.

I hear terms all the time. You know, our kids are missionaries in the school. Listen, I grew up on the mission field as a missionary's kid.

We raised six children on the mission field. Missionary children are sponges, and they're going to pick up what they're exposed to. And if we're on the mission field and we are leading that whole conversation and everything that's going on, they're going to learn from us. But if we're not there, if we drop them off there, they are little sponges that are picking up everything they're being taught. And so, you know, bottom line is this. As an organization, our focus is on leadership and legislation.

We've kind of picked out what we believe to be the five major areas that affect every type of education. That's the role of instruction. It's the role of parents. It's the role of government.

It's the role of faith and morality. And it's the role of appropriations. How's the money spent?

Where is it spent? Those five issues are the big issues that affect everything in education. And so what we have done is we've really tried to focus our organization on not just shining light in dark corners, because that needs to happen, but there are many organizations that are cursing the darkness. What is desperately needed are solutions to bring us out of darkness and put us in the light to really fix some of the problems that exist.

And so our whole focus is, again, thinking in terms of leadership and legislation. Our target audience are parents, grandparents, educators, and legislators. And we try to create resources of information and other types of things that an individual can take, utilize, and bring about change where they are. Well, what are some of those resources that you're providing?

Okay. Well, we do a lot of blogs on these various topics, these five areas, a lot of blogs. So that's information. These are not just opinion blogs. They are researched and quality content that helps inform folk around these various areas in those spaces.

We do podcasts and blog casts. And so there's that kind of informative type things. We also have an online curriculum to equip candidates that are running for school board. So when, you know, it's one thing to be anger about CRT or some other thing that is bothering a person that doesn't necessarily, that may give a motivation to run, but it may not make them a good school board member. And so we have a program that really try to help, not only help them know how to put together a campaign and win a race, but also know what the role is, know what the key issues are, what they're going to face and what the laws are and, you know, and go in there with enough understanding that they can go in there and actually be a positive school board member that brings about positive change. So we do that. We do different types of summits for school board members, for newly elected school board members.

We work hard to bring together different coalitions of organizations. So one of the problems we have always in politics, but in like school board races, you know, conservatives get elected and in a year they're checking off the boxes just like the people you got rid of. And the reason is because we don't back them up. We don't help them and resource them so that they have opinions. So they've got the school board associations shouting in one ear, the teachers unions in another, their superintendents saying, we got to make a decision.

We got to have a vote this week. And so, you know, you know, they just kind of feel squeezed and bullied into going along. And so what we're trying to do is to, through a network of experts, when they contact us, give us information, here's the issues we're facing, then we can feed back really good information to them that they can take back to their school boards, back to their situations. And we are getting some very positive reports of how those suggestions from the connections in the network that we're tied to have given tremendous help and helped actually change and implement positive policies. Well, I think that is so important. I say a lot on the show, Melvin, that I think, you know, there are a lot of important races and people get excited about president and Congress and governor and all those are important. But I think the school board is probably one of the most important position in our country today.

And so many people don't vote in the school board races. So I'm so glad that the Noah Webster Educational Foundation is providing information to school board candidates across the country and helping them prepare to run for office and then when they get in office. So if somebody's running for school board right now, Melvin, and they're listening to this, how do they access that training module and the information that you have available? Well, they can go to our website. It's N-W-E-F, just the abbreviations for Noah Webster Educational Foundation, N-W-E-F dot org, N-W-E-F dot org, and they'll find all kinds of stuff there, including like under resources, there's a whole section, doesn't care what state you're from. One of the things that if you're going to be a school board member, you have to know what the Constitution and the statutes of that state have to say about education. And there's a place under resources, know your state, you click in your state, and you can get all of that information at that place. And what type of campaign information do you have available for them? Well, campaign stuff is along our homepage.

It'll like that circulates. You can also get it under off of the bar, but it's like it just says school board candidates. You click on that and it'll take you right in and you register and you can take those courses and we just feed you through.

We're constantly those. They are not totally definitive and we have that on purpose because most people that are wanting to run, they want the overview. They want to be well informed, but they don't want a PhD on the subject, right? So that's kind of the way that is designed just to give you that information. Once that happens, obviously additional information is fed then to people based on their needs and so forth. And there are plenty of other stuff that we're doing and other organizations, great content that people can pick up. But all of that can be gotten right there on the website, nwef.org. And at this point, that program, and it's designed, by the way, I will say this, we actually, the leadership institute partnered with us on that. They do the campaign training side. We do the actual curriculum side for, you know, the school board member role. We actually brought together experienced conservative leaders both at the state level and the local level from across the country and can pull together that curriculum and put that together. And that's actual training, the kind of thing where people can literally log in and we're offering it at this point for free.

Just our donors are helping to fund that. They go in, they register, and it's just like an online class with the black, the white board and the graphics and illustration and the lecture and so forth. And they can pop in. They run out of time. They can pause and come back to that point. They can go back and listen to anything as often as they need to. We try to make it as user-friendly because most people that are running for these school board seats, they're busy people, and they can't just take a day or two or whatever to go and do extensive training somewhere.

So this they can do at their own pace. And we've had hundreds of people enroll in this program. Sounds like a great program.

Folks, we're talking to Melvin Adams. He is with the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. We're going to talk about a great resource that they have available absolutely free for school board members. We'll come back with a little bit more about school board, and then we're going to jump into culture.

Stick around and be right back. The United States of America has a strong Christian heritage, but most Americans don't know the truly important role that God in the Bible played in the founding of this great nation. This Jew joined nationally syndicated radio hosts and founder of the Citizens for America Foundation, Dr. Chris Hughes, for four amazing days in our nation's capital. With Chris, you'll embark on a journey of discovering the hidden secrets of Washington, D.C., and rediscover much of America's forgotten Christian heritage. Your tour will include an up-close-and-personal look at the nation's establishment and how it's evolved over the centuries. Learn about the government and the men who helped forge this new kind of republic, one that acknowledged the creator from its very inception.

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Welcome back to Christian Perspective. I'm Chris Hughes. My guest today is Melvin Adams. Melvin is with the Noah Webster Educational Foundation. Before the break, we were talking about a great resource that they have for school board candidates. Maybe if you're listening today across the country and you're running for school board or you have a campaign that you're helping the local school board, and if you aren't, by the way, why aren't you? Because these people that are running for school board are in your own community.

They go to your churches. Their kids go to your schools. You're living there in that community, and we all need to take our school boards and our public schools back in this country.

Terrible things. Folks, if you've heard some of my shows where I talk about the sexual education curriculum that's in our country today in our schools across the country and how the federal government's paying for it and just the filth that's being taught in some public schools across the country today, that's why it's important to elect godly men and women to the school board who are hiring the principals in those schools and setting the policy and curriculum within those schools within your district. It's important that we elect godly men and women to the school board, and those races are easy to win because very few people vote in those races. There's a huge ballot drop-off from president down to school board, and the Noah Webster Educational Foundation has offered some great campaign resources, information on issues so your school board candidates can get up to speed and knowledgeable on things that are issues that are coming up across the country.

You can learn more at nwef.org, which stands for Noah Webster Educational Foundation.org. Melvin, so you're talking about what they can do to help them get prepared to run for office after somebody gets elected to the school board. Do you provide resources and training for them at that point as well? Well, there are a couple things that, again, these are developing programs, okay, but we've done a number of summits and plans to do more. There are actually, over the next year or so, be expanding out into probably several states, working with organizations in those states and basically bringing together these new school board candidates and existing conservatives and whatnot and giving them additional training from experienced folk who, school board members, who understand not only the job but can give them real-life situations of what they're going to face, issues with the school board associations, and so forth. And because, you know, most people go in, they have lofty goals and ambitions, but it's important to help them understand the likely things they're going to face that could be curveballs that could throw them off and, you know, derail them. And so trying to help them in that way, but again, one of the big areas is to create a network within the state of organizations and entities that can have their back. So, you know, we hear from school board members all the time, almost daily, with issues and questions that they're being faced. You know, their superintendent is saying we have to do this, and the attorney is saying we have to do this, and all these kind of things, and they're saying something is not right about this, we don't agree with this conceptually or whatever.

And so then what we do is we push that out to a network and people that we know have expertise in those areas, they give feedback. What does the law actually say? I mean, are these people just carrying somebody's agenda? That's often what's happening, or is this truly a law that they have to figure out how to deal with?

You know, if it's just bad policy, let's deal with the problem, what's the core problem, and what could maybe be a substitute policy that would actually achieve the end goals and needs, but not take us down further socialist-type agenda? And we are finding, we're just getting amazing results out of that. So those are things that we're working on, and so if individuals, organizations, places, and other states, if they've got interest and needs in that, they can contact us, they can contact us through the website, and we're happy to talk to them. You know, everything is, it's important that we bring the right people together in every situation, because nobody has expertise in everything, and nobody can get this done by themselves. It's about bringing together strategic coalitions who are all working toward the same goal, and then we say, okay, let's get this done in this state. And we all, it just, it comes to that point we work together on. And one other thing that's just exciting to me, and the whole Moms Movement, and there's several of them, grassroots community groups, huge momentum there, and we're starting to work with a number of those groups, and just, you know, tremendous power comes out of that.

And here's what I know. When organizations try to identify and fix problems from the top down, it never works. But when local parents and grandparents and educators and, you know, school board members, when they get involved at the local level where they see the problems, identify what's really going on, and work hard to fix them with real solutions, you know, they don't have to fix the whole system. They fix where they are. And as that happens over and over and over again, it becomes systemic change, and that's what we have to work toward.

Yeah. And we've, you know, there's so many organizations out there. I'm glad that you're bringing coalitions together, and I love what you said about moms groups. There's, you know, there are many out there, Moms for Liberty. Probably the biggest right now is Moms for America. Kimberly Fletcher, I'm sure you probably know Kimberly.

She was at that same meeting where we met. Kimberly Fletcher has done a great job of bringing mothers together across the country to engage. They are helping candidates run for school board. They're getting moms to involved in their local communities, and they're providing training, constitutional training.

I think they may have partnered with the Patriot Academy, Rick Green's group, to try to teach civics and teach moms and kids the importance of the Constitution. We have so many needs out there right now. I tell you what, let's take another quick break. Melvin will come back. We'll continue to talk about this. And how do we get to this point where we are in our culture today?

Folks, we're talking to Melvin Adams. He is the president of the Noah Webster Education Foundation, and you can learn more at nwef.org. That's nwef.org.

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Order your coffee today at shopgenerousjoes.org and even subscribe to a subscription coffee plan and never forget the coffee you love or the causes you care about. Do you desire to build family relationships that stand the test of time? Does creating a godly family seem like a daunting challenge?

You're not alone. I'm Connie Alpers, author of Parenting Beyond the Rules and host of Equipped to Be. As a mother of five, I understand your struggles. For 35 years, I have been helping families just like yours build lasting relationships.

I'd like to invite you to tune in to Equipped to Be and visit ConnieAlpers.com where I share useful tips and proven strategies to help you navigate the seasons of motherhood, faith and life with confidence and joy. The United States of America has a strong Christian heritage, but most Americans don't know the truly important role that God in the Bible played in the founding of this great nation. This June, join nationally syndicated radio host and founder of the Citizens for America Foundation, Dr. Chris Hughes, for four amazing days in our nation's capital. With Chris, you'll embark on a journey of discovering the hidden secrets of Washington, D.C. and rediscover much of America's forgotten Christian heritage. Your tour will include an up-close and personal look at the nation's establishment and how it's evolved over the centuries. Learn about the government and citizens of America who helped forge this new kind of republic, one that acknowledged the Creator from its very inception.

Know the truth about the creation of the United States of America, about the faith of the founding fathers and how Christian principles were used to establish this form of government. Visit CitizensForAmericaFoundation.com today and secure your spot to join Chris Hughes in Washington, D.C. this June. Welcome back to The Christian Perspective. I'm Chris Hughes. My guest today is Melvin Adams. Melvin is the president of the Noah Webster Education Foundation. Noah, we've been talking about—Noah. Melvin, we've been talking about—I had Noah on the brain because I want to ask you a question about him. We've been talking about the Christian perspective. We've been talking about school boards and all that, but I did want to ask you, before I get back into the meat of our culture and what's going on, the Noah Webster Education Foundation, why did you choose that name for your organization?

Great question. So, you know, for those who know history, you know, Noah Webster is widely known as the father of American education. I mean, he was the guy—he's contemporary with our founding fathers. He's the fella who put together the first American-English dictionary, the Noah Webster dictionary. He understood the importance and power of language and words and communicating.

He also put together the New England Primer, which was used for the first 150-plus years as the primary textbooks for all American students. I mean, most of our founding fathers and those first generations of Americans, all of them studied that, and it set just a very high level of standard for knowledge and morals and patriotism and all of those things that built the greatest nation on earth and then come along people like John Dewey and so forth, who systematically began to unravel all of that. But we decided to name the organization after after Noah Webster because, for one thing, if you go into his original dictionary and you look up the word education, you find a very succinct definition, and it breaks down so beautifully into those core principles that all education should follow. And if we do that, we're going to come back with a reclaimed and revitalized educational system. So it created, and you can get all that on our website, and to us that just, look, why reinvent the wheel? We don't want to go back in time and go back to the dark ages, but let's go back to those core values, those core principles that were built upon that brought greatness to this nation and the freedoms and liberties that our Constitution and our Bill of Rights and all of these things, and they really are undergirded in these principles. And so that's why we picked that name.

It gives us a great opportunity then to promote those values. And I love that, and many of our listeners might not realize the importance of Noah Webster. As you said, he was in the time of our Founding Fathers, he was a strong Christian. And I'm sure you know this, Melvin, but if you go back to the early dictionaries, it just amazes me that Christians are silent when people say that we weren't found as a Christian nation or the principles of the Bible were not used in the founding documents of this country. Even our dictionary, if you go back and look at the early dictionaries that Noah Webster produced, many of the words when he gives the definitions, Melvin, actually list Bible verses in his original dictionaries.

So he's a great guy, and I'm so glad that you honored him by naming your organization after Noah Webster. Well, Melvin, we're talking about culture in the education system. We've got a lot of problems in our education system and the culture today.

How do you think we got to where we are in the education system and our culture today? Wow, that sounds like a simple question. It's such a complex issue though. I'm going to just try to simplify my perspective as best I can. I'm a firm believer that there is God Creator as expressed in the Scriptures, the Bible, and I believe in the Trinity, you know, the whole Judeo-Christian ethic and morals. And what I believe is that the Bible is a written Word of God that really spells out those core things that are truth.

They are truth. And when we forsake those things and we shift to try to discover other truths or discredit truth, biblical truth, that always leads us down a path that can go a very long way, but the end results, you can't imagine, and they're never good. And I think people are either leaders or they are followers. And I'm going to say this, I think when the Church was leading the culture, and certainly that was, we had the Great Awakening that had taken place in this country pre-revolution, and it was that Great Awakening, that spiritual revival that swept this nation. Was there sin?

Was there evil? Of course there was, but there was this massive movement of spiritual awareness and sensitivity and the pulpits of the day were the authorities based on the Word of God. And so government sprang out of that. Leaders came into leadership with that understanding and that worldview. And so then laws were established and everything kind of surrounded off and spun off of that. Unfortunately, as time went on, and we started to see a decline in the spiritual life of the nation. We started to see disintegration and cannibalization within churches and religious organizations, and we started, instead of the Church house being the center of every community as it was 250 years ago, in the last in the last, particularly the last 50 years, really it's either the university or it's the local high schools that became the center of every community. And so that's where everything was kind of focused and driven, and that increasingly what happened there, what's taught there, kind of permeated out into the broader culture. And the churches, just almost by default, because too often there was not a clarion call of the gospel and a biblical truth resonating from the pulpit, what happened is all these other ideologies started to take their place in the broader culture until it's almost completely reversed today.

And how do we get it back? I think until we rediscover truth, we're just all stumbling through time and space. And I believe in the validity of biblical truth, and all core principles really come out of that biblical truth. And so I guess what I'm encouraging folks, particularly your audience, a Christian audience, it is time to quit being politically correct or just going along to get along. I'm not saying be in rebellion and revolt, I'm saying be Christian in your mannerisms, but discover truth and don't shy away from it.

Lift it up in the marketplace. You know, the Scripture is pretty clear. Jesus made it really clear that if we're ashamed of him, then he's going to be ashamed of us.

And I don't say that from the standpoint of, you know, arm wrestling and leverage, but there is that reality. It's like, you know, if we are committed to what we believe to be truth, and if we know it to be truth, then we have to stand there and encourage others who are trying to find truth, share the truth, share our story, share our discovery with them, and the Spirit of God will draw them to truth. And that's really where we have to start, but we have to engage in the broader culture, and we have to take and apply to where we have influence and everywhere we can so that evil forces are stopped.

Boy, that's great advice on how we as Christians and the church can be involved and help impact our culture and make a difference. As we kind of wrap up here for a couple of minutes, your organization is really focusing on the education arena. So what impact does education have on our culture, and what changes need to be made to have a positive impact? Great question.

Let me start with this. We are what we think, and we typically think as we are taught. So that begs the question, who is doing the teaching, and what are our children and grandchildren being taught? I think until we grapple with that and take ownership and responsibility in those areas, we're not going to really see change. As believers, and we can talk about the church and everything, but really the church is made up of believers.

It's me taking responsibility where I am planted, and the next believer taking responsibility where they are planted, and all of us working together. So how do we get involved? Well, because of the nature of our civilization, things are driven through media, through politics, and through education.

Those are really the three, and we can say there are others, but those three areas are very huge. And so until we engage in those areas and work to promote truth, and as we put it in our organization, core principles and best practices, until we intentionally lead in those directions and gain momentum, we're not going to see change. Now, because of the political side of things, as I mentioned earlier, the right engagement politically can bring about amazing results. So get involved, register to vote, be involved, get informed, be active, consider running yourself if that's God's calling in your life.

If not, find others who can be good candidates, and you get behind them and support them and help them. All of those things matter, and I guess then the thing that really ties it all down and helps us to know how we should go is prayer, because prayer is that counter-engagement with God that helps us know what's the next step and how should I live and how should I respond to this situation. And it's through prayer and the Word of God coming alive, the Spirit of God guiding us moment by moment that really empowers us to bring about change. Melvin, this has been powerful, and we've run out of time. I've got to have you on again, because there's so much great information that you and your organization, the Noah Webster Educational Foundation, are putting out. Folks, there is so much for you to learn. Please visit nwef.org.

That's nwef.org. Melvin, I love what you said a while ago. I was taking notes. You said, we are what we think, and we typically think as we are taught, and that's why it's so important to have an organization like yours making a difference in the educational system today. Thank you so much for joining us on A Christian Perspective, Melvin. Thank you, Chris.

It's been a privilege. Folks, thanks for listening. Listen on your favorite radio station each and every day. This is the kind of show you want to share with your friends today, particularly those who are involved in the school process and parents across the country. This show will be released as a podcast later today.

Download it and share it with your friends. Now let's get out and impact the culture for Jesus. Thank you for listening. The Christian Perspective with Chris Hughes. Learn more about impacting the culture for Jesus. Visit citizensforamericafoundation.com. This is the Truth Network.