The first “Christian” book that I read in 1974 or 1975 as a teenager was Charles Sheldon’s 1896 novel In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? I think I need to read that book again because I may have been so attentive to some superficial Christian issues that I failed to notice more substantive matters the book raised. I only learned today that Sheldon endorsed the Social Gospel movement that his book inspired under the leadership of Baptist pastor and seminary professor Walter Rauschenbusch. I learned this after hearing this story about Sheldon’s ministry as a pastor in Topeka, Kansas…

“Upon learning that black children were woefully behind their white peers in academic achievement, partly because many of their mothers worked during the day to help support their families, Sheldon set out to establish the first African-American kindergarten west of the Mississippi to provide early-childhood care and better education. Among its graduates was Elisha Scott, who went on to law school with Sheldon’s help and later gave the name Charles Sheldon Scott to his son, a future lawyer who in 1954 successfully argued the Brown vs. Board of Education case before the United States Supreme Court, effectively ending school segregation in America.”

[from John Knapp: How the Church Fails Business People (and what can be done about it), page 149]

When people are really doing what Jesus would do, public schools would have all the resources they need to nurture, teach, and inspire their students without the teachers themselves sacrificing as much as many of them do to make it happen.