How Scripture Shapes Learning at Hillcrest
Before students got too deep in their math books, studied history, analyzed a sentence, or explored the created world today, they heard from the sixth graders who stood in Chapel and reminded the middle school where all learning begins. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
The students recited John 1, a passage they have been working to memorize and understand. But this is more than a memory exercise. These words are becoming part of the framework through which they are learning to understand the world. That matters because John does not begin his Gospel with a list of rules or even with the story of Jesus’ birth. He takes us all the way back to the beginning. Before creation, there was the Word.
Before there were mountains to study, numbers to calculate, languages to learn, people to understand, or histories to record, there was Christ. “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” For young minds learning to make sense of a complicated world, there may be no more important starting point. Students understand this conviction that the world is not random from their classes at Hillcrest. Creation has an Author and truth has a source. Human beings have a Creator, and their knowledge is not simply a collection of disconnected facts; everything students study and interact with in classrooms and in real life belongs to a world God designed, ordered, and sustains.
That means these sixth graders leading chapel come to the stage after studying mathematics is discovering patterns in a world God ordered and that science is examining a creation God spoke into existence. History is the study of real people, each bearing God’s image, making choices within God’s world. Even the ability to think, reason, ask questions, create, and communicate points young people back toward the One through whom all things were made.
This is why memorizing Scripture is so powerful, and the recitation of the sixth graders is so formative. Students are not simply putting words into their minds. They are placing truth somewhere it can accompany them. Words learned alongside classmates and teachers can become an anchor when the world begins offering competing explanations about identity, purpose, truth, and meaning. God’s Word gives students something solid from which to ask their questions.
John 1 gives students a remarkably large foundation. It teaches them that Jesus is not merely one subject among many. He is the One through whom everything else exists. This changes the posture of learning. Students can approach the classroom with curiosity because creation is worth discovering. They can ask difficult questions without fearing that truth will threaten their faith, because all truth ultimately belongs to the God who made the world. They can work diligently because developing their minds is one way of stewarding what God has given them.
Today, a group of sixth graders stood before their school and recited words Christians have repeated for nearly two thousand years. “In the beginning was the Word.” Those words are becoming more than something they can recite; they are becoming a starting point. Because when young people know where the world begins, they are better prepared to understand where they stand within it.