Member Spotlight: the Lewis family and Home School Enrichment Magazine

Two generations of the Lewis family are trying to inspire future generations of homeschoolers.

Including themselves.

Frank and Kari Lewis and their sons, Matthew and Jonathan, all Samaritan Ministries members, have been publishing Home School Enrichment Magazine for 10 years. Their goal, like other homeschool periodicals, is to get helpful information out to home-educating families. But the Lewises also want to inspire them.

They do it as a Christian family that homeschooled their own sons, who now are taking increasing responsibilities for the magazine and as parents of young families themselves. Matthew, 32, handles information technology and the website; Jonathan, 30, is layout and content editor; Frank sells ads; and Kari tends to bookkeeping and other office chores, although she’s cutting back her hours to spend more time with grandbabies.

“Our heart has been to encourage and equip Christian homeschooling parents,” Jonathan says. “We know that they often deal with practical challenges, so we want to address that side, but then many of them also just need the shot in the arm. To help people understand what the vision is all about is a big part of our vision as well.”

The Lewises started implementing that vision while working for Samaritan Ministries International. The family had met Founder and President Ted Pittenger at, of all things, a homeschool gathering in the 1990s. Ted found out the Lewises had a home computer, not a common appliance at the time, and asked if they could help him with mailings for his fledgling health care sharing ministry, which had about 100 members. Their role grew over the years as Kari designed and maintained the ministry’s first mail database and the family handled SMI’s early card-deck promotional materials. Ted was also a frequent guest at their Pekin, Illinois, apartment as he brainstormed with them about the ministry.

Eventually that apartment was full of boxes of Samaritan material, “stacked up in our living room, down the hall, in the bedrooms,” says Kari.

After moving to a house in Pekin, there was more room but more work, too, as the Lewises began printing Samaritan’s Prayer Guide, which had grown so much it had to be separated from the newsletter.

Meanwhile, the Lewises had their own businesses going. Frank and Kari edited Coming Home, a magazine which dealt with domestic matters with an emphasis on self-reliant, family-centered living. Matthew and Jonathan had created their own magazine, Our Friends and Families, which offered reprints of 19th-century literature.

Coming Home, though, started to focus more on homeschooling, and in 2002, the Lewises decided to make the leap. They incorporated Home School Enrichment in September of that year and published the first bimonthly issue in January 2003—a feat which a consultant later told them couldn’t be done.

Frank says that they had learned much, though, from their earlier efforts, especially from working for Samaritan.

“Looking back, you can see how God kind of prepared us and gave us an education in a lot of the things that we need for this business by helping Ted with Samaritan Ministries,” Kari says.

Content in the early issues was similar to today’s issues: contributions from throughout the Christian homeschool community. In addition to the print magazine, they also offer much of their content on their website at homeschoolenrichment.com.

The Lewises decided to engage in home-based education because their boys were being subjected to objectionable teaching in public school, such as evolution and revisionist history. In addition, Frank and Kari were concerned about peer dependency and had noticed that, because third-grader Matthew was coming home and teaching Jonathan everything he knew, Jonathan was getting bored in first grade.

Deciding not to wait until the following fall to start homeschooling, Frank and Kari pulled the boys out with nine weeks left in the school year and never looked back. They tried to be as creative as possible in their learning and to have fun doing it, Frank says.

“The only regret we had is that we didn’t start sooner, from the beginning,” Kari says.

The boys were all for it.

“As any parent would know, a lot of children’s attitudes obviously had to do with mom and dad’s framing of the issue,” Matthew says. “They painted it as this very exciting opportunity that was going to open up a lot of doors that weren’t open to us in public school and that it was going to be protecting us from a lot of ungodly and wrong influences.”

The Lewises kept their homeschooling low-profile at first. The practice wasn’t very common or accepted in 1990, even in Christian circles. That experience is one of the reasons they try to encourage homeschoolers through Home School Enrichment that they’re doing the right thing.

“Every single article points people toward God—why you do it,” Frank says. “The magazine is for moms and dads to show them how to raise Godly kids in everything they do.”

Jonathan and Matthew are learning how to do that themselves. Matthew and his wife, Lisa, have a 2-year-old daughter, Abigail, and a 1-month-old son, Chandler. Jonathan and his wife, Linnea, have a 1-year-old son, Patrick, and a newborn named Timothy.

“The thing I’m personally most looking forward to is watching them learn how to learn,” Matthew says. “I don’t want them to have to be taught. I want them to be able to dig and find things out for themselves. My wife and I have talked a lot about training them spiritually and trying to make sure they have a strong moral compass and the family ties they’re supposed to have. Most importantly, we want them to look to the Bible and the leading of the Holy Spirit for everything that they do in life. It excites us both a lot to think about the possibilities in store for them.”

Jonathan agreed and added that he and Linnea have found it “incredible” as they watch Patrick grow, to realize that “absolutely everything that they do has to be learned.” Jonathan also has realized that “you have to be whatever you want to teach someone else to be,” making parenthood a serious responsibility.

The Lewises want to encourage not only those Christians who are already homeschooling, but those considering it.

“Homeschooling really does work,” Jonathan says. “It has been a huge blessing in our lives and it’s working for hundreds of thousands of families across the country, producing wonderful, wonderful fruit.”

Kari says that homeschooling is a “hard, time-consuming job” that “takes commitment.” But, she and the other Lewises say, the relationships are safer and “there are just so many blessings to homeschooling that I would say it’s definitely worth whatever difficulty there is.”