Jul 27, 2021 | Care Conversations
Is a School like a Family?
Last week we considered whether our schools should be seen as “Second homes for children”.
Family appears to be foundationally important in God’s plans. At the beginning of Creation, it is God who points out to Adam, that it’s not good for him to be alone; he needs family. It’s God who points us to our final home as part of His redeemed family – we will be joyfully, and eternally, in the family of God. Between Genesis and Revelation there are many narratives involving families. Matthew introduces his New Testament account by detailing genealogies and families.
David was never more kingly, never greater in leadership, than when he exercised mercy and hospitality to Mephibosheth and his family. He showed in this compassionate action that families are inclusive.
The welcoming of Mephibosheth into David’s family is based upon David’s desire to “show the kindness of God.” (2 Sam 9:3) This is a notable situation because Mephibosheth was seen by others as someone who should not be included; he is a member of the family of Saul, thus seen as an enemy and he is “lame in both feet” (2 Sam 9:13) thus seen as a liability.
Families are welcoming and inclusive. Biblical Christian education communities need to be these sorts of families.
Simon Sinek is the contemporary “famous name” in Leadership development. He maintains that businesses that run like families are more productive, more caring, more positive places to work. (Sinek, 2014)
In relation to our fellowship, we often ask “To which Church family do you belong?”
If this idea of “family” is helpful to our understanding of our schools, then we need to consider the ways that families operate.
A home is a place of security, love, challenge, serving, discipline, nurture; hospitality and much more. Let’s explore some of these things.
Grateful to be part of an eternal family
Brian
Reference:
- (2014, June 11). Why Good Leaders make you feel safe, Simon Sinek. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmyZMtPVodo
Jul 27, 2021 | Wens Pen
Hello Everyone
Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty. Isaiah 61:1-3. As children, one of our favourite toys was a kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscopes are made up of angled mirrors and coloured glass fragments, crushed beads, confetti, and shreds of ribbon, all housed in a cylindrical barrel. When the barrel turns, the fragmented pieces move and reflect unique, beautiful patterns in the rotating mirrors. When we think about life, although the world is a place of beauty, love, joy, laughter, and delight, it is also a place of mess. As the kaleidoscope of life turns and the fragmented pieces of disappointment, heartache, difficulty, pain, and suffering all rotate in the barrel of time, Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty and uses the things that can break us to change us to reflect His image.
The very fact that Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty is a miraculous gift. The biggest mess our humanity faces is the deep ditch of sin and separation from our maker. We forget that this is a ditch we could never have gotten out of apart from Jesus. We can get so used to hearing the story of Jesus and the incarnation that we lose sight of the monumental act of love on the part of Jesus to save us from our ravaged, sinful state. It is almost inconceivable that the Monarch of God’s kingdom, Jesus who is perfect, would join us in this mess to save and restore us. In exchanging His glory for human mess, He got down into the dirt and squalor of human wreckage as an act of sheer love. So, He knows the mess firsthand. As a by-product of His saving act, Jesus keeps getting in our mess every day and turns our ashes into beauty.
What a tender, beautiful, love-smitten Saviour we have. He takes every tangled mess of heartache and mends the frayed edges. He kneels with us in our private ‘Gethsemane gardens’ when we plead for Him to ‘remove this cup’ and intercedes when words fail us. He walks with us on our hidden pathways of failure and redirects us into His passage of grace. He gets into the fiery furnace of suffering with us and soaks us in His love and faithfulness. He takes the fragmented pieces of disappointment and rebuilds us into fine vessels. He gets into the deep well of loss and pours His healing balm upon our tattered hearts. Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty and as all the messy pieces in our lives continually move, He takes our mess, refines us and creates new patterns of beauty that reflect His character in us.
So, friends get your ‘beauty for ashes’ on today.
Best days to come.
Wen
Jul 20, 2021 | Hope_Tina
The Light and Inspiration of Christian Contentment
I have recently been reading through the books of 1 and 2 Kings and it has been quite confronting to read about the perpetual failure of the majority of Israel’s kings. Israel, under the leadership of God’s appointed kings were to tell and live out an alternative story, God’s story. Their call to covenant faithfulness as a nation was to be the punctuation mark of God’s truth, the glow of His light in a darkened world and the pathway of hope and redemption in the face of the pathogenic nature and effect of sin. They were called to be content in the covenant of grace with their God and to be His beacon of light and hope, thus inspiring pagan nations to turn to the living God. But the kings were discontent, and corruption defined their thrones and “they did evil in God’s sight”, causing God’s light to be dimmed. They were not content to live God’s way but allowed the allurement of the idolatrous practices of the godless nations to set their course. The whole world was alienated from God, but God called Israel out to be a light to the nations by living counterculturally, thus showing the world what God was like. Isaiah 42:6. Discontentment caused God’s light in Israel to be blurred, dull and uninspiring.
As I read about the journey of the kings in relationship to Israel and Judah, it dawned on me that there is a dotted line that connects living in contentment with God and being a light and an inspiration to the world. The discontent of Israel’s kings drove them to live in the same dark space as other kingdoms. They told the same story of corruption and hopelessness as the surrounding nations. The light of God’s kingdom that was supposed to shine through them and be an inspiration to the pagan nations was overshadowed by their discontent and choice to live like their neighbours. The only time they honoured God’s purpose and call to be a holy Nation was under the reign of the kings who intentionally lived in contentment, trust and honour to God. For example, king Jehosaphat, King of Judah walked in faithfulness with God. He was content and did not covet the way of life of other kings and nations. One day, he was given news that a great army from the surrounding countries was coming to attack them. He remained positioned in contentment, inwardly and intentionally submitting to God even though his circumstances were overwhelming. He was afraid, but he set his face towards God. He led Judah to pray, fast and worship and made a powerful declaration “Lord, God . . . are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you. . . If calamity comes upon us, . . . we will stand in your presence before this temple that bears your Name and will cry out to you in our distress, and you will hear us and save us.” 2 Chronicles 20:5-9. Contentment in his God ruled his heart and actions. He was an inspiration.
Today, God’s story continues and as Christians we are called to be the fragrance of Christ in the earth (2 Corinthians 2:15), and His light on the hill, (Matthew 5:14-16), as we live in contentment with Him, even though we are living in unprecedented times where the world remains in the grip of fear and threat. Nations are still lost. Christians living in this post-Christian, twenty-first century culture are still called to be God’s light. The same dotted line connection between Christian contentment and God’s light remains today, as it did for Israel. Contentment in God is a unique state that enables Christians to be that light on the hill in a world that lives under the dark blanket of separation from their Creator.
Christian contentment is a very powerful testimony to the truth of our faith. The threats of pandemics, warfare, Nation-to-Nation hostility, political tensions, racial hatred and the shifting sands of philosophy and culture that moves us closer to godlessness, can all be firing their deadly arrows and the grenades of terror can be going off, but the Christian can be found content and wholly trusting in God’s sovereign control. That is compelling and appealing in a lost world.
Christian contentment is the light and inspiration of hope. The light of Jesus that shines through contented Christians will inspire others to ask questions and be attracted to the life of faith? “How is it possible to be content amid a world that peers into the face of hopelessness every day as hopelessness peers back with the piercing eyes of lostness and meaninglessness?” Christian contentment! Right there, in that space is the light and inspiration of God.
Our call to be content in God remains the same as it was when God created Adam and Eve as original-image bearers. Being transformed and learning to be content in Jesus allows us to reflect His image to the world. Christian contentment as a defining feature of God’s children becomes a light to the world as God’s story of hope and redemption is told through that lens.
If God has put His people on display to the world and “contentment is a force on your soul pulling you upward toward Christlikeness,” (Davis, 2019)[1] then, contentment as a marker of godliness will be a light to the hope of the Gospel. It will be the unique characteristic that inspires others to want the Light; to want to know Jesus.
Friends, being content in Jesus is a powerful apologetic for God’s truth because it is a lived reality in a disorientated world. What does a light do? It shines brightly and illuminates the pathway ahead. Light and hope are radiant attractors that point to Jesus but never more powerfully than in Christians who live in contentment.
Blessings
Tina
[1] Davies, A. (2019), The Power of Christian Contentment, BakerBooks.
Jul 20, 2021 | Care Conversations
Series Introduction: Biblical Christian Schools and their practices
We spend a lot of time building a Christian perspective or world and life view into our curriculum. But how does or should, our faith inform our everyday practices in schools and classrooms?
1. A Second Home
During our ministry with schools in Indonesia, we were involved with a major analysis, and ultimate revision, of our Mission and Vision Statements for the schools and universities in our group.
Amongst the original statements was a short “motto” which said, “A second home for your children”.
Our general consensus was that this little maxim had served its purpose and our language should now reflect a more mature, sophisticated and thoughtful approach to our understanding of Biblical Christian Education. How wrong we were!
Our school families and, overwhelmingly, our students argued passionately and strongly that we maintain this succinct phrase; so, we did.
A sense of “family-ness” is at the heart of Biblical Christian community.
As educators in Biblical Christian communities, we echo Paul’s words:
But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. (1 Thess 2:7-8)
We create a false binary when we suggest that education in our schools should be either rigorous or relational. It must be both. That’s the way that families operate. We purposefully engage our family members in opportunities for growth and development in the context of loving one another.
It seems obvious that in our schools, we must be seeking the highest of standards and expectations along with ensuring the most genuine giving of self and sharing of life.
Understanding family and seeking to reflect the Fatherhood of God into our communities is foundational to our understanding and practice.
Blessings
Brian
Jul 20, 2021 | Teachers Talking
Called to be a Teacher
In 1978, my first teaching post was to Bourke High School. On opening the letter, I went from stunned silence to disbelief. But, yes, it was true and a harsh reality for a person who had grown up in the beach city of Newcastle. On arrival, I discovered the Baptist Church had been praying for twelve months for a Christian teacher to be appointed at the school. As a relatively young Christian, I had a clear call from the Lord to teach and now He had planted me in the place of His choosing. My re-orientation to see my teaching role as a vocational gift had begun. At this stage, I didn’t know how my faith related to the task of teaching and learning but had a desire to serve the Lord. This placement seemed to be a mismatch in my eyes. So, the question I had to begin with was ‘who is the teacher that teaches?’ for teaching the Jesus way is an autobiographical process – the teacher is the method.” (Beech, 2015, p. 7).
Teaching like any other human activity, emerges from who we are. Our sense of personal identity and calling and most importantly our view of God will be deeply influential on how we fulfil our educational task. Os Guinness, the Christian writer, defines calling in this way. “Calling is the truth that God calls us to Himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism and direction lived out as a response to His summons and service.” (Guinness, 2003, p. 10) Throughout History, the call of God upon the lives of men and women have brought the most complete re-orientation of life and inspired works of faith in the most difficult and challenging circumstances. All of us have a calling to count for God in His wonderful creation.
The 1986 USA Teacher of the year, Guy Duod, who wrote the classic “Molder of Dreams” believed that there was no higher calling than to teach children. Henry Brook Adams said that a teacher affects eternity and can never tell where the influence stops. In Bourke, I learnt there is no richer meaning in life than to receive and live out your calling. The Lord was primarily concerned about conforming me to the image of His Son and through this experience He showed me aspects of my character that He was renewing. My Heavenly Father showed me that He had gifted me to teach and that I would be truly myself in the place of His choosing. He had called me along the line of my giftedness for service and this calling would sustain me in the most challenging of times.
In 1987, God called me to Christian Community High School (now Regents Park Christian School), where He began to open up the wonder and riches of an education unfolded through the lens of God’s Story. Some teachers may feel that they have almost stumbled into Christian education as they applied for a job in a number of schools and were employed by the Christian school. In the providence of God, He has placed you there for a reason and it is so important to affirm that you are called by the Lord for His Spirit enables us to love the learners, love learning and love bringing them together to bless our students. The rediscovery of calling is critical for our students in a world that tells them they will have at least 10 jobs in 5 careers, many of which haven’t been invented yet. What a privilege it is to model to them what it means to be called and find one’s ultimate purpose and direction for living. We can set them in a direction aligned to their giftedness.
Our influence on students is enormous as we spend so much time engaging with them that who we are and what we do eventually permeates into their hearts and minds and shapes who they are. For Jesus said, ‘when a student is fully trained, he will be like his teacher’ (Luke 6:40). For truly we are called to be moulders of young lives as His Spirit works in and through us.
“You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (2 Corinthians 3:2,3)
Grace and Peace
TEC Team
References
- Beech, G. (2015). Christians as Teachers. Wipf and Stock
- Guinness, O. (2003). Rising to The Call. Thomas Nelson
