New School Year

New School Year

Monday, 31 August 2009 09:59

Today we stand at the starting line of a new school year - a time of great anticipation, enthusiasm and promise. It has been a good summer, a good time of refreshment and relaxation, but now students, parents, teachers and the broader Eastern Christian School community alike know that it is time to start school anew.

As we stand at the starting line, I want to reflect on the incredible partnership between parents, the broader Eastern Christian community and those of us who are privileged to work with students at Eastern Christian as our life's calling. God has given us an awesome responsibility, a gloriously high calling, and an incredible opportunity to be an influence for His Kingdom such as few others will ever have.

2009-10 represents the second year of our accreditation review by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. Last year a team of parents, students, community members and faculty members working on this project spent a lot of time thinking about our mission and vision. Members of the team spent many hours drafting a very carefully worded document that captured the essence of our mission. Our beliefs were organized around our aspirations in three areas - engaging the minds of our students, nurturing their spirits and, through that process, transforming the world. Click here to read our mission statement.

Every day in our school, we think a lot about how we engage the minds of our students. Last spring, we worked to develop a set of challenging goals for each of our students in literacy, numeracy and leadership. We have developed a profile of the attributes that we aspire for our graduates to demonstrate as they conclude their education at Eastern Christian. More importantly, we are constantly challenged to ask our students the essential questions that help them explore learning and knowledge in the context of the eternal perspective of the Creator and author of all knowledge.

Through our work, we have an impact on our students' minds.

We know that there are few things that have a more profound impact on young people's spiritual development than the example set by people that they respect. We have an awesome responsibility in this area- over the next ten months, our students will spend 30 hours or more each week with their teachers - frequently more time than they will spend with their families, their pastors, their youth leaders, or just about anyone else.

In his excellent book on Christian education, Between Memory and Vision; The Case for Faith Based Schooling, author Steven Vryhof quotes from a speech by John Westerhoff in which Westerhoof observed, "By the time children are twelve years of age, they have spent more hours in school than they have spent with their families and religious community combined. Indeed, it would take seventy-five years of attending church and church school regularly to equal the school's influence in the first twelve years of a person's life."

What an awesome responsibility! There is no doubt that, through our work, we have a significant impact on our students' hearts.

Lastly, we think a lot about transforming the world - talk about an incredible influence! At first glance, this is an incredibly audacious goal - but also a goal that is entirely Biblical, succinctly stated in Ephesians 2:8-10, our spiritual theme for this year. Our mission is indeed to transform the world by preparing the students that God has entrusted to us to be the hands of Christ in a broken and bleeding world. We have seen examples too numerous to count of the work done by our students and graduates to transform the world - in areas as diverse as caring for the poor and weak at home and abroad, leading institutions of great influence in our society, and in preparing future generations of young Christians to do likewise.

Truly, there can be no higher calling, no more critical mission, than preparing the young people that have been entrusted to us to lead lives of service that will transform the world!

Thank you for empowering us to act as your partners in this critical mission of preparing your children to live lives of Christian vision and influence. Thank you for joining us in this awesome responsibility, this gloriously high calling and this incredible opportunity to be an influence for God's kingdom.