Jamin Bradley

Location of Speech: Representative Tim Walberg’s office in Jackson at 1pm in Jackson on February 18th.

Reason for Speech: We’re asking Rep. Walberg, Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, to stop the dismantling of the Department of Education and protect Michigan’s public schools from privatization and any cuts to funding. Hear from students, educators, and other supporters on what’s at stake here at home.

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The Speech

Good afternoon friends. My name is Jamin Bradley, and I’m a pastor here in Jackson, where I oversee two churches. One is a small urban church where we’ve come alongside much of the impoverished community over the years, and the other is a church designed for those with special needs. Like you, I’ve long had a heart for the marginalized around me as I have softened my defenses so that I might hear their plight more clearly. This is the kind of work that compassionate people have always been called to, for Jesus told us to care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned—that is, the marginalized people surrounding us.

Right now, there are massive shifts around our education systems, which creates great concern that marginalized students will suffer along the way. As things change, we must ensure that the money continues to exist for our special needs students to be educated. We must ensure that the money continues to exist so that the low-income schools of our rural and urban neighborhoods can thrive. We must ensure that the financial aid that low and middle-income families need to go to college is still within their reach. With ongoing discussions about restructuring or even eliminating the Department of Education, Jesus’ concern that we care for those who are overlooked becomes our own concern. How we move forward in this time has the potential to greatly affect the marginalized among us, as the Department of Education provided hundreds of millions of dollars to schools in Michigan last year.

There are already many justice issues that need to be worked out in our education systems. Every student’s background, culture, family life, preferences, and personal baggage varies, creating the need for underpaid teachers to be very flexible with their teaching arrangements so that every student might succeed. Every year, teachers learn and implement new tactics that better educate and more appropriately grade the variety of learners in their classrooms. Education is already an immense responsibility. Let us be sure that we don’t add difficulty to the lives of educators by backtracking on what we’ve already learned, by pulling funding, and by creating an inequitable educational dynamic in which the marginalized lose access to the kind of schooling they need.

Jesus understood the importance of education. Indeed, we see his concern for education at a very early point in his life when a twelve-year-old Jesus was caught teaching professional adults who taught for a living. He further illustrated his love for teaching by traveling around and freely offering his inspired lessons to anyone who would listen. It didn’t matter if they were rich or poor, religious or unreligious, or an insider or outsider. With every engagement, he stretched and challenged the minds of his listeners so that they might see more clearly than before. He left his students with lessons that dwelt in their hearts and minds until their lives were radically transformed. And he sent the Holy Spirit to continue teaching us, and even empowered some in the church to carry appointed roles as teachers. Many churches and denominations have taken these educational narratives in the Bible very seriously and have started Sunday schools, private schools, universities, and seminaries to ensure that students are provided with a rich education that will help them to think and thrive in life.

Jesus prophetically points our eyes toward the lowly and invites us to lift them up. If we truly care about justice, as Jesus did, then the work that we are called to do should be good news for the poor, liberty for the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. May the decisions we make as we move forward from here offer our educational systems the same thing that Christ offered us. Through his education, Jesus’ students learned how to love the people around them regardless of their differences—something that education, in its truest and boldest form, should always lead us to do.

Amen.