Homeschool population at your church?

[Jenny in GA]

During the church service yesterday, I was looking around and realizing that we are the only homeschooling family in our entire church.

 

Well, almost.

There is one other family that homeschools, but they sort of "half" go to our church. The wife goes to our church, the husband goes to another denomination, and the kids go back and forth, more often to the other denomination.

 

It's not what I would consider a small church, either. We have two services. There was a voter meeting yesterday, and there were 152 adults in attendance.

 

Probably one reason there are so few homeschoolers is that our church also has a school. I would roughly guess that about 60% of the kids in our church attend the church's school, then the rest (except us!) attend public school.

 

Anyway, I was wondering what the "schooling population" was like in your churches. Hardly any homeschoolers? Mostly homeschoolers? Does your church have its own "homeschool group"?

 

I'm also curious if there is a certain ... mmm, subtle (or not-so-subtle) comparison between schooling methods. Are people who have their kids in public school looked down upon? Are people seen as "more righteous" if they homeschool?

 

Jenny

[Gratia271]

Our church is about 25% homeschoolers. Most of my daughter's friends who attend there go to ps, but everyone is very accepting of hs, ps, or priv. schooled kids.

[Avila]

We are the only homeschooling family. Not just in our parish, but in all three parishes associated with ours. Or so I am told by our DRE every single time I have a question or need something from them.

 

Our parish has a school, and the "really good" families all attend there. Anyone not there is second tier. We are almost a non-entity, since it really is just us homeschooling.

[Tenaj]

We are the only homeschooling family in our church, however, we go to a very, very small church. There is only one other school-aged child who regularly attends.

 

When you were talking about the attitudes though, it did strike home, because even though we have the only kids, there are three public-school teachers in our small congregation and yes, there is definitely a public-school bias in some ways. One of the teachers is also a coach and is constantly after my boys to come to his school so that they can be on his teams. I always cheerfully ask if their school board has changed it's policy towards homeschoolers participating on teams :)

 

We also have a very gray-haired congregation which means that most of them have no clue what we are doing when we talk about homeschooling and most of them view it fairly suspiciously. I try to just talk very positively about our experiences. I'm very thankful that one of the "grandpas" in our congregation has a daughter with 9 children who homeschools. He understands our family very well and enjoys and encourages our kids.

 

My ds participates on a sports team with a private Christian school that is associated with a different church (not the one we attend) and I know there are homeschoolers who attend that church. I always wondered what it would be like to be a homeschooler in that situation - where the church is basically sponsering a private school. I'm sure there could be some interesting moments, depending on attitudes.

[JenC3]

We go to a pretty small church about 15-20 families. Most have 4-6 kids children and everyone homeschools or plans to. A few families are looking at sending their boys to a local classical Christian school.

[Aunty Social]

We are the only homeschool family at our church - and I'd consider it fairly large. At least, we have 3 services. The Bible study that I attend has 5 or 10 homeschool families though.

 

The attitude at church is polite curiosity. I get a lot of "I don't know how you do it. You must have so much energy/be so smart/be so organized/etc.":001_rolleyes: At least they aren't hostile.

[Melora in NC]

ALL the kids at our church are homeschooled. All five of them. We are Episcopalians in Baptist country, though, and it is a really small church. Until about a year ago, though, we did have two other families whose children went to public school, and there was never any unpleasant feeling. At the much larger church we attended when we lived in Florida, though, we were the only homeschoolers and I did get a few judgemental comments.

[TN Mama]

Our church is quite large. It's in the top 35 for attendance in the denomination in the nation. Thousands of people attend on Sunday. I only know of a handful of homeschooling families. We do not have any homeschool groups at this time.

 

I've never experienced any tension at church regarding our decision to homeschool.

[Closeacademy]

Despite the fact that we have a large homeschooling community where I live that has not been the case at church. I think that the families are spread all over. We've been to 3 churches since we started homeschooling.

 

Church #1 small church, most people related and all the kids but ours went to the church's small school.

 

Church #2 mid-sized church (150-200 people), 3 families homeschooled

 

Church #3 larger church, 2 services, maybe 5 families homeschool

 

:001_smile:

[razorbackmama]

We are one of 5 (I think) families in our church who homeschool. Our church has about 100-125 people who attend on a Sunday, so not a big place. But a ton of kids LOL.

 

I've never really gotten a vibe either way. The pastor's children go to public school, but it's because his wife works full time. Who knows what they'd do if she didn't work LOL.

[FaithManor]

Out of a church with an average attendance of 235, we are one of eight homeschooling families. The church operates a very small A.C.E. school with an enrollment of only 18 students. We have 15 homeschooled children and a couple of families with infants/preschoolers that are considering homeschooling in the future.

 

However, our previous church family (we switched to our present church five years ago), sported 900 on Sundays and we were one of only two homeschool families. We left as did the other family - the pastor's wife was a public school teacher and he eventually became rabidly anti-homeschool. We became very uncomfortable.

 

Faith

[TXMomof4]

At our old church there were about 1500 members - and about 3-4 homeschool families.

 

At our new church there are about 200 members - and 3-4 homeschool families.

 

As far as I can tell all of us use different curriculums and different 'plans'.

 

At our old church no one was against homeschooling openly, but I do know that a member complained to the elders about one of the ministers who hsed and I know from conversation that the youth group leaders wife was very anti-hsing. No one ever gave me a hard time about it though, not even my die-hard ps teacher friends. I think they knew it wasn't worth their effort.

[Punks in Ontario]

We go to a church of about 250. Nearly half of the children are homeschooled. I've been kind of surprised that so many do. BTW, in the primary age, there is only one other family that HSs. All the rest go to public schools

[wy_kid_wrangler04]

We live in a very small town (about 3000 people between our town and other surrounding areas) and our whole church are homeschoolers except for one family, but both parents are public high school teachers. We actually didnt know that before switching to that church (we had only lived in this state for 8 months at that time)

 

But not all the homeschoolers do go to our church. But yes, all the families with children there is just 1 that does not homeschool! We have a huge population of homeschoolers for as small an area as we are in!

 

Also our pastor homeschooled his children (they are all adults now with young children of their own)

[wy_kid_wrangler04]

We go to a church of about 250.

 

 

WOW! Our church has about 15 famlies and we are considered a large church for our area

[Tree House Academy]

We have a very small church in a very small town and there are 4 homeschool families including us.

[mrsrevmeg]

We are the only homeschoolers except for one kid who does a virtual school. We are outcasts, weirdos and freaks because we do not want to send our kids to the local school (where some of our church family works) because it is "such a good school". (It is not but I would not dare point out to people that the school they love so much is in the bottom 25% percent of the state that is near the bottom of the country.) We stay at this church because my husband is the youth pastor and does not want to give up on the youth.

[Blue Hen]

Anyway, I was wondering what the "schooling population" was like in your churches. Hardly any homeschoolers? Mostly homeschoolers? Does your church have its own "homeschool group"?

 

I'm also curious if there is a certain ... mmm, subtle (or not-so-subtle) comparison between schooling methods. Are people who have their kids in public school looked down upon? Are people seen as "more righteous" if they homeschool?

 

Jenny

 

We were the only homeschooling family in our church.

 

I often had to pass the bean dip..... minister was an ex-school teacher, most of the congregation were school teachers...they all knew that they were schooling the right way.......I had enough and now we do our own home-church.

 

Carole

[cathmom]

Well, there's us...and then there's us. :tongue_smilie:

[FO4UR]

Just us.

 

We are in a small church. There is a set of Grandparents of HSers...does that count? LOL

[6packofun]

We go to a S. Baptist church and so far are the only homeschoolers we know out of 150-200. :confused: The Cleveland area does not have a good support network in place for homeschoolers so many are just floating out there on their own and you may or may not run into them, LOL, OR parents automatically choose or switch to *charter* schools which have their own network, I assume.

 

Independent homeschoolers here are screwed for support, frankly, but what's new in Cleveland, the "Most Miserable City" in America?? LOL!

[MamaSheep]

I have no clue what the percentage is in my church. I don't think anyone keeps that statistic.

 

In our local congregation there are 4 families that I know of who are currently homeschooling. There's another family that I don't know well who I think are homeschooling one or two and the rest go to a charter school. Another homeschooling family recently moved away. There are...I don't really know...about 500 people in the congregation? So I guess that would be in the neighborhood of 10%. I haven't had any critical comments about it from anyone. Then again, these people have observed my children for years and are aware of some of our challenges and anyone who knows me well enough to comment on any of our parenting decisions seems to be largely of the "there but for the grace of God go I, so more power to ya, if it works for you go for it" camp. I don't know whether the other homeschool families get different input than we do.

[Dobela]

About 75% of the families that attend our church homeschool. It has to be the largest number of any church we have ever attended.

[ladydusk]

I'd guess 1/3-1/2. I can only think of 2 PS families (and one of them home-schools until high school at least, I'm not sure if their last 2 are going to go to PS or not, I'd guess not). The others send to Christian school. We almost can't walk without stepping on children at our church [grin]

[KS_]

We have an average of about 175-200 people each service and I can only think of two other families that homeschool. One family has 1 out of 3 kids at home, the other two are in PS. There was one other family that did homeschool, but the youngest kids are now 20.

[G5052]

Most who don't have kids in high school and/or are first generation Americans who really don't "get" homeschooling.

[Crimson Wife]

The parish we attended up until our move at the end of December was fairly large. I'm not sure of the "official" number of registered families, but there were 5 weekend Masses each were attended by several hundred people. The parish didn't have its own school and I'd estimate the split among the kids to be 75% public, 25% private (mostly at the parochial schools in the neighboring towns). AFAIK we were the only homeschoolers. Most of the other Catholic HS in the area made the 45 minute trek down to the parish offering the Tridentine Latin Mass.

 

I never thought I'd be making the same kind of commute but after visiting a whole bunch of parishes in our new area and not finding one we liked, we just registered yesterday at a parish 25 minutes away that has the Latin Mass. There are a bunch of other homeschoolers but I'm not yet sure what percent of the families HS.

[OnTheBrink]

We have about 375 in my church, and out of that, I think there are about 12-14 homeschooling families. My church doesn't take a "stand" on how to educate children--it's left up to the family to decide what the best choice is in that area. So, no one really looks down on anyone else for their choice.

 

We did have one family leave over homeschooling. They tried to get the pastor and elders to take a stand on the issue and preach homeschooling and their attempts failed. They left after they filled everyone's church mailbox with flyers on how homeschooling is the ONLY godly way to educate their children and when the elders asked them to stop doing that, they left in a big huff.

[momofkhm]

at our church. Of those kids, 9 are homeschooled. That's 3 families out of 15. So roughly 20%? No one thinks anyone is superior or inferior than anyone else in school choice.

[Donna T.]

We attend a small church. It's interesting. All of the children below about the age of 12 are homeschooled. The parents of these children are active in church. But, none of the older children are homeschooled. Most of these children are dropped off for church activities or come on the church van. Our pastor doesn't have children yet but he is very pro-homeschooling and fully intends to homeschool someday. Our church is getting a bit of a reputation as a "homeschooling" church and we have had a few new families visiting us for that reason.

 

But, we are not FOCUSED on homeschooling. We won't let that become a focus. Our focus in on Christ alone and every one is free to make their own choices in regards to school. I remember our family once visitied a local church and as we approached the front door a man came up to us and asked if we homeschooled. Not, "do you know the Lord?" but "do you homeschool?".

[athena1277]

Where we attended when we lived in AL, nearly everyone homeschooled or planned to homeschool when their kids reached school age. It was so great that we had so many people who felt like we do about our children's education.

 

Then we moved to VA. Here there is only one other hs family at church and their dd is in 11th grade. My dd is 1st grade, so we aren't really able to do stuff together. Everyone else send their kids to ps. Yes, I know, they are some of the best schools in the nation. So what? Doesn't mean I want my kid there.

[Oak Knoll Mom]

I'm surprised at the number of people in churches with over 1,000 people and more than one service who think they are the only ones there who homeschool. My church is that big, my husband is even an elder, but there's no way I even know everyone, much less know what their schooling choices are! :001_smile:

[nutmeg]

We have around 2500 in attendance on the weekend.

 

Homeschoolers? 7 families that I know of.

[RamonaQ]

In a church with 300+ attending per Sunday (with many families), we are the only one. There is another family that did homeschool until HS, and another family that rarely comes (perhaps they have even left the church).

[HayesW]

Our attendence is about 250 for Sunday worship services. We are the only homsechoolers in our congregation. Our preacher and his wife homsechooled theirs for a while, but put their two older children into public school this year. She still HSs her kindergartener.

[amydavis]

Our church is a decent size, with an active children's ministry and youth group. However, we are the only homeschooling family, except for one family who visits a couple of times here and there. I wish there were more...

[HeatherM2]

We are the only homeschooling family in our current church. It has about 250 members. All the other kids go to public school and we have to listen to a lot of remarks about public school being the mission field for the kids/teens. On the plus side no one says anything negative to us about homeschooling our own children and we've been approached several times on how we are good role models because our family is so close and our kids are well behaved.

[Cortana]

Our church has about 150 folks and about 10 families with school-age kids. Including us, there are 2 other families that homeschool. 1 family has their kids in a private Christian school (the kids' grandma works there so they get free tuition), 6 families attend public school (1 family the mom is a public school teacher) and the others the kids aren't old enough for school yet (1 family I know intends to do public school, the others I don't know what their plans are).

 

Our church is very supportive of every family's individual decision of how to educate their children. We've felt very supported by our church in our choice. Nobody has put us up on a pedestal for our choice, nobody has made us feel they look down on us or pity us for choosing homeschool.

[Tressa]

We are the only ones out of a good size congregation. I guess avg. 250-300 a Sunday. However, my church also runs a small school for K-8.

 

People don't really understand us. If we don't like public school why don't we put them in the day school, and if we can't afford the school why don't we put them in public school? I thought I would be used to it by now, but I am not.:confused:

[Dmmetler]

Almost none, for the same reason the OP gave-the church runs a school, so most of the families (including my DD, for K) go there. There is one other family who attends occasionally who homeschool, but they're there only rarely.

 

I will say that after our decision to homeschool trickled through the rumor mill, the church as a whole has been supportive, but we'll see what happens when August comes and DD doesn't go back.

[dani3boys]

There are 18 families in our church with school age children. Of those, seven are homeschool families, three are classical private school families and the other eight are public school families.

[Remudamom]

I think we have more homeschooled students than PS and private schools combined.

[Crimson Wife]

I'm surprised at the number of people in churches with over 1,000 people and more than one service who think they are the only ones there who homeschool. My church is that big, my husband is even an elder, but there's no way I even know everyone, much less know what their schooling choices are! :001_smile:

 

Our old church was big but homeschooling is not very common in the area (probably because the cost of living is so high & it's difficult to get by without both parents employed full-time). I belonged to both the local Catholic and the local inclusive HS support group and never met anyone in either who went to our church.

[Rosy]

We have 400+ adults, and I would guess about 25-33% of the kids are homeschooled. All of our pastors (except our youth pastor) have homeschooled and are very supportive personally but do not advocate it from the pulpit. There are a few kids in private school. Most of the non-homeschooled kids are in public school.

[Veritaserum]

There are 100 or so families in our congregation. I know of one homeschooling family besides us. There may be some kids in private school, but almost all of the kids go to the local public school. Reactions have been positive toward us, with the usual "how on earth do you manage?" kinds of questions/comments. There are at least half a dozen public school teachers (my MIL is one of them), but no one has been hostile towards us. I think the general thoughts regarding school and kids in our denomination is that our children should be mixing in the world as good examples for non-believers.

 

Religious reasons don't factor into our decision to homeschool.

[BridgeTea]

I have the only homeschooler. The other 20 or so school-aged kids are in the public school we used to use. My family shows genuine interest in their school lives, and they respectfully do the same for us (even though I'm pretty sure they think we're weird).

[vettechmomof2]

We are presently the only family BUT their is a very, very large Baptist church in the area where many of the homeschoolers in the area attend.

[Frontier Mom]

We have a medium sized church 5-600 people depending on the Sunday.

 

There are 3 homeschooling families and another that I think will be starting in the Fall. Two of us and the one starting in the Fall are all in the same small group. The other family is the children's church director.

 

I don't think anyone much cares where other people's kids go to school.

 

I'm about at the same level. We average about 680 per Sunday and we have about 3 homeschool families that are active. However, the church is about 2 miles from the county border so children go to sooo many different schools that nobody really cares. We have 4 different ps districts, private school, charter school, & home school. Doesn't really matter at our church.

[Matryoshka]

I think we're the only active members who are actively homeschooling. There's another family that was homeschooling till last year but put all their kids in school; there's two other families who are homeschooling but only attend sporadically.

 

I'm not even sure how big our church is numbers-wise. It's not a "big" church, but we do have a lot of kids. Probably 5-10 kids per grade in regular attendance, more if you add in families that don't attend regularly. When the kids are released to church school, it looks like half the congregation disappeared...

[Parrothead]

As far as I know from our church, we and two other families homeschool. Our church is the biggest in town.