Pipes and Reservoirs

Originally posted by Tim Challies on his blog:  Challies.com
Click here to view the blog.

Tim writes: Yesterday I began reading Michael Emlet’s CrossTalk: Where Life and Scripture Meet. Just eight pages in I had to stop and reflect on this quote. Though targeted primarily at those who are in vocational ministry, I immediately saw its application even to my task as a father. - or (Nancy adds) as a Christian School teacher.

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A temptation in ministry is to think that just because we prepared a Bible study, a sermon, or a discipleship appointment (or wrote a book like this!), we are deeply engaging with the God of the universe. But that’s not necessarily true. It’s easy in ministry to live more as a ‘pipe’ than a ‘reservoir.’ That is, it’s easy to live merely as a conduit to others of the transforming truths of God’s Word, rather than as a changed and transformed reservoir who overflows with lived-out gospel truth. You wouldn’t imagine cooking meal after meal for your family without sitting down to enjoy that nourishment, would you? To paraphrase James 1:22, let’s not merely be hearers or speakers or counselors of the Word, but doers, first and foremost.

Equipping Teachers - A Balancing Act

Is the Picture in Balance?
Originally posted on Nurturing Faith (Christian Schools International)
April 20, 2009

Do your teachers know Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erikson better than Cavaletti, Stonehouse, Fowler, and Dean? Are your teachers as equipped to nurture student faith as they are to help students reach academic success? Do your teachers possess a common foundation in distinctively Christian philosophy and classroom practices that nurture faith? Do you believe that a high quality faith-integrated, truth-revealing curriculum is the highest need in schools that bear the name Christian?

Do you have a plan to equip your teachers to nurture faith? Perhaps a start is take 5 minutes at your next faculty meeting, ask them how they have been equipped in the two ways shown below, and then discuss the results.

Equipping for Academic Instruction
List the top 5 ways your teachers have been equipped to help students reach academic success.
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Equipping for Faith Nurture
List the top 5 ways your teachers have been equipped to encourage student faith development.
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5.

Spread Too Thin: The Peanut Butter Syndrome in Christian Schools!

Are You Spread Too Thin?
How to THRIVE and not merely SURVIVE as a Christian school!
Originally posted by Dr. Barrett L. Mosbacker
The Christian School Journal

I recently read an interesting article by the CEO of Yahoo! titled The Peanut Butter Manifesto. For the purposes of this blog article I want to focus on the following statement from the memo because it is instructive for us as school leaders.

"We [Yahoo!] lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics ...

I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."

The Christian school movement is not particularly healthy. Based on recent statistics that I have seen, the number of Christian school and overall enrollments are stagnant or declining.
Although there are external forces beyond our control that affect our schools, many of our problems are self-inflicted.

One of our self-inflicted wounds is similar to that articulated by the CEO of Yahoo!--we are often not strategic in the allocation of our tangible and intangible resources and as a consequence we are not offering a substantial marginal value to our current and potential clients. I am referring to our parents a clients because notwithstanding our missions as Christian schools, our parents are essentially paying clients who make economic calculations in deciding whether to enroll or re-enroll their children in our schools.

If our schools are to survive, much less thrive, we must stop "spreading the peanut butter too thin." We need to think far more strategically. Where should we place our resources? What is the basis for our decision? What programs should we eliminate? What programs should we add? The the marginal value of our schools been stagnant or declining?

These are important questions that we must answer with ruthless honesty.

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Christian School Journal.