500-year lessons

David Misner’s classroom at VFW Post 2618 in Brookhaven, Miss., looks like a typical homeschool co-op. An American flag hangs in the corner, and tidy rows of metal folding chairs line up four to a table. Moms stand along the back wall. A seventh-grader digs through a dazzling backpack in search of a pencil.

The words on the whiteboard—post tenebras lux—aren’t par for the course, though, at least not most semesters. Believing this year’s 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation warranted something special, the co-op’s organizers hired Misner, a seminary graduate with an affinity for church history, to bring Martin Luther to life. And to explain Latin phrases.

“After darkness, light,” he calls out, and students hurry to scribble the definition in three-ring binders. It lands somewhere next to notes they’ve taken about big words like sacerdotalism and even bigger questions: How did Germany’s culture produce both a Luther and a Hitler? Are the five solas at risk today?

The Brookhaven co-op is one of many educational settings across the country expanding this year’s teaching to mark the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Christian schools focus on the spiritual and theological implications, while teachers in secular environments emphasize societal impacts. The challenge for educators who wish to mark the true significance of 500 years of sola fide? Finding ways to communicate both.

In the VFW’s makeshift classroom, Misner has introduced Roland Bainton’s classic Here I Stand to a new generation and presented papal bulls to Baptists and Pentecostals. “If students grasp the lessons of the Reformation, they’ll be better equipped to face today’s culture,” he said.

Here are four ways schools are teaching and have taught about the Reformation, from four different areas of the United States.