New Mission - unpacked

As promised, I am going to spend some time 'unpacking' the richness that exists in our new mission and vision statements.  I'm going to do that today with our mission statement by starting in the middle - love, learn, and lead….

As the vision & mission committee and board looked at pages and pages of what parents, teachers and students valued about Christian Education, and specifically about NACE, three themes surfaced.  The first was that NACE schools were places where students and staff show love, and are loved.  From scripture, we read that the law is summed up as:  "....love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.' And, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' (Luke 10:27)   At our core, as a Christian School, inspiring students to love God is our starting point for everything else.  We also know overwhelmingly from educational research that a safe and caring environment is crucial for learning to occur.  A school in which love for God is lived out in love for others is a school that is seeking to follow God's law.

Learning needed to be central to our mission as a school.  Once loved, we can learn, grow, and develop which is central to our purpose as an educational institution.

Leading was a third theme that revealed itself as our community looked for and desired for our students to lead, to take ownership and begin to show others their faith, their knowledge, their growth in wisdom.  It isn't enough to simply be consumers of education, but students need to become co-creators. This speaks deeply to our desire as Christians to affect culture and to answer God's call on our lives to share the good news and develop His creation.

At the beginning of our mission statement, we see students, and at the end, we see together in God's world.  As an educational institution, our core service is to students, and we find ourselves squarely placed together in God's world.  As a community, we work intentionally together; not as individuals each seeking their own way forward in isolation or for self-promotion.  Our relationships are central to our work.  That we are in God's world is a testament to the fact that we state unapologetically that everything we study belongs to God.  It isn't our world, it isn't just the world.  It belongs, every square inch, to our Creator.  We are also not an island protected from the world but belong and act intentionally in it.  Our mission is not for ourselves, but for the world.

Finally, back to the beginning:  Inspiring.  God's work and world cause us awe and wonder.  Our teaching and learning need to do the same.  If we are learning to love, learn, and lead together in God's world, it needs to be inspiring if it is to be honouring to God.  

Inspiring students to love, learn, and lead together in God's world.

New Mission and Vision

After three months of work, the board is ready to communicate the first step with respect to its strategic planning work this year:  NACE's mission and vision statements.

It became clear after a few attempts over the years at re-writing these statements to reflect our current reality, that a board table is a lousy place to draft wording.  A separate committee was needed to delve deep into this work.  This past fall, a group with representation from administration, board, teachers, current and past parents, and even a prospective parent were invited to explore our mission and vision.

A mission statement needs to do a few things:  1) Tell people what you do (and why you do it!)  2) It needs to be simple, memorable, and 3) needs to reflect something about you as an organization, be specific, but not too specific...... 4) It needs to inspire and guide your organization.  In other words, it needs to be everything.  A tall order, for sure!

A vision statement is a bit different.  A vision statement should not state your current reality but projects a future desired state.  What do you want to be in the future?  If we state what we are now already, then the vision may be nice to read but does nothing to spur us forward.

Using data from the past couple of years of research in this community, specifically the 'Why' survey

The committee, over a month, worked through exercises to generate two mission statement and two vision statement proposals for the board to consider and work with.  In November, the board convened it's annual visioning meeting to discuss our past, present, and future, and to review the work of this committee.  After two months of feedback, tweaking, and re-working, the board approved the release of its new vision and mission statements.  Next week, in this space, I will unpack these statements and their story a bit more.

Until then, I'm excited to 'unveil' the NACE board's newly approved Mission and Vision statements:

Mission

Inspiring students to love, learn, and lead together in God's world.

Vision

To be the leaders in education by inspiring a diverse and unified student body to love, learn, and lead with God's grace, bringing Christ's love to the world.