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.