Academic excellence

{This is a repost of an earlier article. The “School-Age Parent” series will resume soon. Enjoy!}

How is academic excellence our mission as a Christian school?

I don’t mean the only part of our mission, but I also don’t mean a secondary part of our mission. It’s not spiritual first, and then academic. It’s spiritual and academic, undivided. Why is that?

First, the two – academic and spiritual – aren’t in conflict. When our nation was founded, most communities looked to their pastors as intellectual leaders as well as spiritual. They were the best educated. They had studied deeply in the leading thinkers of their day, and they knew how their faith related to, challenged, and was supported by what was found in those thinkers, secular and Christian.

A frontier revivalism came into picture and muddied the waters some. There were challenges raised about the conflict of academic learning and spiritual purity. But those seeds of conflict never overcame the simple scriptural admonition by Jesus to “Love the Lord your God with all your…mind.” (Matthew 22:37) Loving Him with all our “heart” is included in the same verse, but not without our mind. In its Old Testament roots, this greatest commandment used the Hebrew word for heart which included mind as well.

Second, the Christian school joins the partnership of home and church by the parent’s invitation to support the God-honoring nurture of our children. The school is in that partnership primarily to serve the academic purposes in growing our children into the fullness of God’s created design for them. We pursue those academic objectives without ripping them away from the connections with spiritual truth and God’s sovereign creation and providence in all parts of our lives. But we do have a unique role in growing up God’s excellent gift of intellect for our children.

Third, excellence in academics will give proper witness and testimony to the excellence of our God. He has gifted our children with their minds, and the best use of those minds will bring honor to the giver of those good gifts. Conversely, if we offer up mediocrity in education in the name of Christ, we speak insult to our God and His excellence. We desire that the good works our children will do – works of the heart and works of the mind – will bring praise to their Father in Heaven.

Finally, the best spiritual care we can take of our children will be to steward the fullness of the Lord’s gifts to them. It’s not somehow selfish or worldly for me as a parent to want the best education, the best nurture, the best preparation for my children. What is to their good is also glory to our God.

At Cambridge Christian, we take all of that as spiritual challenge and spiritual opportunity. To prepare our students as thinkers and communicators, to grow our students as godly leaders, to pursue the highest good for our children is to honor our God most greatly as a Christian school. God has brought us far in the endeavor, but we have a long way still to go. It is a way, however, in which the Lord leads, directs, empowers and provides. Academically and spiritually, we will pursue excellence worthy of the character of our God.