I have had the opportunity over the years to be involved with the supervision of several different building projects. I was the founding Chairman of Habitat for Humanity in Kelowna and worked to build our first 8 homes. I also supervised the building program of Kelowna Christian Center in 1996 together with our Building Committee. I also oversaw the building and renovation of our Gym and School buildings for our Kelowna Campus. What does this have to do with HCOS? Nothing directly, but my experience in building has given me one of the best metaphors to illustrate our relationships within the school, families, government and chiefly the Lord in building the lives of our children.

In most building projects an architect (sometimes this may be the building contractor) is hired by the owner to oversee the entire project. He will be in charge of the entire project from design to occupancy and will have to give a complete accounting of everything to the Owner. Our Father God is the owner of all of us including our children. He has called us to supervise, design and build, according to His plan, the lives of the children He has placed under our care.. One day we will have to give a complete accounting of everything we've done in the building of our children's lives to God their Owner. We won't have to give an account for everything that they become because much of that will be based upon their own decision making. Our accounting will be about our role and decisions we have made as parents.

As the project begins the builder will possess the ability to accomplish a good deal of the building process themselves.. When we renovated our Kelowna Campus and built our gym I hired a builder who did a good amount of the work himself and with his own company. There were some areas of the building work which he or his company were not completely qualified to finish. In these cases he sub-contracted the work to an outside company. He did this with the electrical work in our building program. In this project we began to run into some scheduling issues because the electricians were not following through on schedule. As this began to create issues for the school opening on time I (the owner) did not hold the electricians responsible. I held the builder responsible. It was our builder who had selected the electricians and who was responsible for overseeing their work.

God is the owner who has "contracted" the parents to supervise the building of our children's lives. [Heritage Christian Online School] is a subcontractor in this process. We bring to the project certain areas of expertise that the contracted builder either doesn't have or doesn't want to involve his time and labor. Most families in our society sub-contract a good deal of their children's education, often to people who have no regard to the Owner's specifications or the values of the contractor. Home educators have a keen sense of their responsibility to the Owner of this project. They have taken on most of the building project to ensure that the process of raising and educating their children follows the Owner's specifications as closely as possible. Heritage's role is to add one or two components to the building while all the time maintaining a respect for the parent's ultimate responsibility and accountability in the building of their children's lives.

One more relationship should be outlined in our metaphor, the government. Whether we like it or not we have a responsibility to the government of the country where God has placed us. This responsibility should never supersede our relationship to God but when our civil government acts according to its designated purpose (Rom 13) then we are commanded to obey and submit to their authority. In the case of building the lives of our children here in BC the government has, thankfully, given us many options which include: their educational programs (explicitly secular), the Independent School Branch (still accountable to many of the government standards but free to accomplish those standards within a faith based approach) and the opportunity to be the sole educator through, simply, registering your child. It is very similar to building within a city's limits, the regional district or outside any building zones whatsoever. When building within the city's limits the contractor has to follow their regulations in nearly every decision. When they are building a little further out there are less regulations, nevertheless there are still inspections and codes that must be adhered to. Outside of these building zones there is much more freedom in the materials that will be used, the building process, what codes to follow, etc.

[Heritage Christian Online School] meets you somewhere in the middle we are building in the regional district (metaphorically). You are contracting us to help you with those tricky building codes in education called the Provincial Learning Outcomes. Our staff are trained in how to reach those outcomes. Like a building trade, such as an electrical sub-contractor, we have specific inspections and standards that we have to follow. We have a sense of accountability both to the builder and to the building codes within the jurisdiction we are building in. Occasionally, a contractor will ask the electrician to wire something a certain way contrary to the limits of the code. The electrician must then try to bridge the problem and the competing authorities he is trying to serve. He may find a creative way to wire the building serving both the builder and the codes but ultimately he must defer to the code. Rarely, but on occasion, we have had to say to a parent, I don't think we can sign off on this direction, I don't think this will meet the standards of the Provincial Learning Outcomes.. It is at these times that we will work for a creative solution to both meet the family's needs and still reach the standards that we are accountable to.

I have probably squeezed this metaphor for all it is worth. I hope that it conveys the ideals we pursue here at [HCOS]. First God is the true Owner of all things, including the children He has given us to carry on His heritage. Secondly, the parent is the chief steward responsible for the guiding, teaching and discipleship of these wondrous lives. Your school is a part of this process called to serve you, the parent, in the educational component of this process and helping you bridge the final relationship. The government is in place, by God, to give us standards (laws) in which we are to work within as best we can while all the time maintaining our first loyalty to the Owner, our Lord Jesus Christ.