Sep 6, 2022 | Care Conversations
Student Leadership 7
When we recognise that leadership involves and serves the community and operates in a pluralistic manner it becomes a strong witness to the way that God intends His people to live.
People working together model the unity for which Jesus prays. Our living and working together in harmony and collaboration wonderfully points to the unison of the Godhead and the unity that God intends for His people.[1]
Team-based leadership will provide multiple opportunities to show a community of care, support and accountability. The team will reflect the Biblical virtues that arise from our understanding of the nature of God. The team should operate with love and grace and have many opportunities to practically show the fruit of the Spirit.
Discerning the mind of Christ is not something that is to be left to an individual person. With a team approach there can be a richness of differing perspectives discussed respectfully.
Team engagement is also a way to develop future leaders.
The Book of Proverbs tells us that
“In an abundance of counsellors there is Safety… Success… and Victory.”[2]
I think maybe we’ve now made a case against the single, autocratic, all knowing, all powerful unilateral leader.
Maybe we’re almost ready to try to define leadership?
Let’s try a few possibilities. Firstly, a generic, but I think Biblically informed, statement:
“Leadership clarifies purpose and direction and enables a community to use their complementary gifts to work towards an agreed goal”
Leadership clarifies and determines purpose; it moves communities forward towards a goal that is determined by the beliefs and faith of the community. There is a direction and goal in mind. The community is engaged, leadership has a strong enabling function, recognising the giftedness of all constituents and ensuring that the community moves not only with a strong purpose, but also harmoniously.
Does this first attempt at a definition satisfy the principles and understandings that we’ve set out so far?
How does this begin to impact how we see Student Leadership and its development?
Blessings
Brian
[1] John 17:20-26
[2] Proverbs 11:14; 15:22; 24:6
Sep 6, 2022 | Teachers Talking
Talk 4: Shocked by Grace
The movie ‘Babette’s Feast’ was based on a story by Isak Dinesen and is about an austere Christian religious community founded by the local minister in a remote 19th century Danish village. The minister’s two deeply religious daughters, Martine and Filippa, both had opportunity to leave the village to marry, but in response to their father’s objections, spend their lives caring for him.
Many years later he is deceased and they preside over a dwindling but faithful elderly congregation. In the 1870’s, a French refugee from the Franco-Prussian war, Babette, arrives at their doorstep with a letter recommending her as a housekeeper. For the next 14 years she serves them willingly without pay because they can’t afford her wage but they are kind to her as part of their household. Babette’s only link to her former life is a lottery ticket which a Parisian friend annually renews. One day she wins the lottery of 10,000 francs. She decides to spend it to prepare a delicious feast for the sisters and the small congregation on the occasion of what would have been the pastor’s 100th birthday. More than a feast, the meal is a sacrificial outpouring of Babette’s appreciation to the sisters for their kindness to her. She tells no-one she has spent her entire winnings on the meal, which will be a sumptuous French dinner. Due to their austerity, they agree to eat the meal but not speak of its pleasure. As they partake of the extraordinary food and drink, Babette’s generosity and gifts break down the congregations’ distrust and superstitions. Old wrongs are forgotten, love for one another is re-kindled and redemption of the human spirit settles over the table. The sisters are astounded when they discover that Babette had spent all she had.
Like Babette, we are recipients of grace, called by the Lord to lavish His grace on those we serve. Our life belongs to Christ and the pursuit of autonomy cannot be our way in the world. Resurrection speaks of new life where people can return to a right-minded view of life that sets them free. This is the life we unfold to the students, for the coming of the Gospel brings a vision of a new world, a different world, one filled with a sure hope that Christ is making all things new.
In a post-truth culture, students in our schools often lack not only belief in the basic truths of the Christian faith, but the categories to think about a Biblical world view. It is so important that the culture and curriculum of the school is permeated by the Christian faith in all aspects. In this way the community invites them to dwell in a story that turns the world upside down and sets it right way up. Students who live out their faith over the long haul into adulthood are able to steer their way through the existential issues of life because they have “woven together beliefs and behaviour into a fabric of faithfulness.” [1]
The learning community is to be characterised both in the class and beyond by teaching and learning that is designed to engage the head, heart and hands of the students towards the quest for the Kingdom of God. If our goal is to raise disciples of Jesus who love God whole-heartedly and their neighbour as themselves, then we are to nurture a moral framework within the class that reflects the Kingdom of God. The strange world tells our students to follow their own desires and be true to themselves, but following their own disordered loves leads to frustration and broken relationships. Decisions about both big life issues and small ones become a moral choice, when they are taken against satisfying one’s own inclinations, in order to faithfully obey a norm or standard. For God has built wisdom into the nature of the way life is designed to be lived.
Planning learning needs to provide students in age-appropriate ways, opportunities to investigate, explore and reflect on different worldviews and ways knowledge can link to their life experiences and understanding. The art of questioning that promotes thinking about ideas and their consequences lead to deeper learning. Critical thinking that enables students to be discerners of what is good, wise and right, anchored in God’s truth, builds their capacity to critique the culture in which they live. Service, opportunities to participate in the school community and beyond, enables students to experience putting others first and sends the message that authenticity is not self-focused but other-focused. As citizens of another kingdom, we identify not just as individuals, but as a people belonging to God. Love is the deepest way of knowing because it engages reality other than itself. This is the new world where Christ is Lord.
Let us consider ways we can train our students to be people of true justice, where there is injustice, to care for the needs of the poor and marginalised and to be those of truth in a world of lies. We must grapple with our students through their existential issues with a Christian apologetic and a deep active faith that interacts with the real world.
May these words encourage you in your faithful ministry to students, for you are the aroma of Christ. Let us shock this strange new world with the grace of the new creation.
“God gives us His Spirit who will enable us to proclaim and demonstrate the truth about Jesus, the truth that doesn’t fit into the old world but makes ultimate radical and renewing sense of the old world … Part of the challenge of following Jesus is to learn the difficult, dangerous but beautiful art of speaking fresh, healing truth into the world that often still seems to be ruled by Caesar’s agents.” [2]
“For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.” (2 Corinthians 2: 15)[3]
Grace and Peace
TEC Team
[1] Steven Garber, The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behaviour”, (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 18
[2] Nicholas Thomas Wright, (Broken Signposts-How Christianity Makes Sense of Our World, 2020), 151, 154.
[3] NIV
Sep 6, 2022 | Wens Pen
Can Planning Inhibit Grace?
There are many aspects to life which are inherently good. But it seems that we have the knack of taking those gifts from the Creator and using them in a way that is not good.
Planning can be one of those aspects to life, even in our school contexts. We need to make our plans and we need to follow through with our preparations. That is being a good steward of the resources that God gives to us. In our schools, that includes being intentional about what we propose to do in our classes, each and every time.
Eugene Peterson explains it this way in his introduction to the book of Numbers. He acknowledges that we need relational help to live in Godly community, but he also notes that we need planning:
We need organizational help. When people live together in community, jobs have to be assigned, leaders appointed, inventories kept. Counting and list-making and rosters are as much a part of being a community of God as prayer and instruction and justice. Accurate arithmetic is an aspect of becoming a people of God. (The Message, NavPress, 2022, p.222)
But when does such planning become an inhibitor to grace? Perhaps it is when we stop listening to the circumstances in which people find themselves. Perhaps it is when we stop listening to God. Perhaps that is when we no longer can discern when we are working to the spirit of the law or the letter of the law.
The Apostle Paul expressed it this way:
Galatians 5:4-6 I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love. [The Message]
Can this really happen in our classroom and schools? Yes, and easily. When we are more concerned with the form of something rather than its essence, we can fail to discern what is right and wrong before God – that includes what is right and wrong about what we teach and how we teach it.
It is why us teachers can become too quickly caught up with the latest technique for our classrooms and turn it into a ‘must have’ way of doing something. Many times, these latest ideas are but a part of truth which take the position of being an absolute. This is a path to idolatry, and does not allow us to discern, through prayer and mediation on God’s Word, what is just and merciful.
At those times we do not express faith through love – we express a restrictive teaching type of Pharisaism. Let’s pray for the grace to do more of the former, and for the wisdom to know when we are sliding into the later.
Amen.
Blessings,
Stephen Fyson
