Welcome to our second podcast of the school year at thechristaneducator.org. We hope to inspire, instruct and challenge you this year as educators whether you are teaching from home or a campus. Our goal is to equip anyone devoted to discipleship-based Christian education. I also want to remind you that while supplies last we will send you a free copies of my book, Disciplining this Generation for a Digital World, to anyone that sends us an email. I will have the details at the end of the podcast. Last week I spoke about the amazing journey we made into Distributed Learning and Online Education. I want to thank everyone that emailed me. I find your comments very encouraging. Because of your responses I wanted to take you all back through our Church Society’s journey into Christian Education.

Kelowna Christian Center experienced its 25th Anniversary last summer. We are an evangelical, charismatic church. If you were to boil down our key values of what makes us distinct it would be a desire for vibrant worship experiences, a balanced approach of pastoral and eldership style leadership, a strong mission’s focus and finally a passion to for discipleship. It was for this reason that, twenty two years ago, our Church began its journey into Christian education. Today we are the largest school organization run by a single Church in the province of British Columbia and will have more than 2600 students join us for some level of discipleship-based education. Our first steps into Christian education twenty two years ago came out of a belief that the family is the key institution responsible raising and discipling children and it is the Church’s role to support the family. This idea is so important to our way of thinking that our first podcast on the air was dedicated to the concept that it is a parent’s responsibility to give oversight and stewardship to their children’s education. You can still go and download it from our episodes page at thechristianeducator.org.

As superintendent of Heritage Christian School, our campus program, and Heritage Christian Online School, our home education and distance learning programs, I often find myself in the middle of the debate as to which method of education is the “best for our children and family.” In the last four years I have been told over and over that if parents were truly dedicated to their children then they would home school. I have also listened to the groans and sighs of campus school teachers as they have had home schooled children come into their classrooms ill prepared. And, after a few comments like these, people begin rolling their sleeves up, ready for a fight. Usually, the debate ends with a, “who do you think you are telling me how I should educate my children.” I have met many, many parents who are extremely dedicated to their children’s education who have enrolled them in campus schools, HCS is full of such parents, and I have meet some of the most academically prepared, socialized and stable children who are home educated. I would suggest that we find ourselves arguing over the methodology of education, not the goal and purpose of why we have chosen where and how to educate our children. 

When God chose Abraham, the father of all who have faith, God explicitly included the command to disciple his children in the way of the Lord: Genesis 18:19 (NIV), “For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just, so that the LORD will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” The New Testament is also equally clear about what a Christian parent’s chief concern should be: Ephesians 6:4 “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” So let me weigh into the argument and “tell you how you should educate your children.” The method we use, home schooling or campus schooling is only a means to an end and if we don’t keep that end in sight then we can make the mistake of exalting the method over the purpose and goal. This was the obvious mistake that the Pharisees were making when Jesus the Messiah came to them. They had become so committed to their methods of religion and their perceived positions of power that they lost site of the ultimate goal and purpose, that is, to bring the Messiah to the peoples of the earth. When he came into their midst they couldn’t recognize the very fulfillment of all they had worked for. If we lose sight of why we are doing what we are doing and become so committed to our method then we can lose the real purpose and goal that God gives us in raising our children.

I have seen Christian campus schools become so committed to academic excellence and competition that they lose sight of why they exist. They opt for the best “test scores” yet their kids have little or no passion for the things of God. They have prepared their kids for success in the world but have left out their fundamental purpose for why they exist in the first place. Jesus said it plainly in Matthew 16:26, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” The Christian school’s primary purpose must be to disciple and bring our children up follow the Lord. Does this means that academics is secondary, only if you see this exclusive to the first goal. Can a student follow the Lord into strong academics? If the answer is yes, then these goals are not mutually exclusive.

I have seen home schoolers become so committed to their family plan that they often will exalt that over the ultimate goal to disciple and release their children. We can, in the name of homeschooling, isolate our children from outside help when they need it. We can develop a fortress mentality where we see any intrusion as a direct attack upon our home or our competency as parents to raise and teach our children. Home schooling parents, like any parents, need help to raise our children. Perhaps even more so because of the complete way in which they have embraced raising our children. The home school movement have fought long and hard for the right to educate our children which has clarified and maintained an essential right in our culture. That is, to pass our values and beliefs on to our children. Let’s not ever lose sight of this. The best home or campus educators keep the goal of discipleship before them.

Let me tread just a bit deeper. What I struggle seeing as a method of education that will fulfill our commission and mandate to raise our children to “bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” is send our kids to the modern public school system. Simply because the public system is not going to have the same goal of education for our children. Again, I spent podcasts numbers two through six last year outline the significant differences between discipleship-based Christian education and government sponsored public education.

It was this dilemma that our Church began to grapple with when Don Irwin, a public servant working for the City of Kelowna and a KCC board member, began raising this issue. Kelowna Christian Center, in its third year as a church community, was affectively ministering to dozens upon dozens of young families. In 1986 the children’s and youth ministries were well over 150 kids. A few of the families were home schooling but, as many can appreciate, there were still many battles to be fought and won for home education, both with our government and our churches. Don, who had been a public school teacher in the 70’s, was commission to take the initial steps start the school.

After great debate and three revisions of our start up budget and plan, KCC entered the realm of education. The board gave the mandated to Don to start with at least 50 children which is the exact number of enrolments we had by September. We started like many other evangelical Christian schools at the time with Accelerated Christian Education (A.C.E.) curriculum. We operated the school that first year with Don and one other certified teacher and a group of very committed parents. We rented a portion of a public school building which was not being used at the time. This gave us a gym and a playing field. Over the next couple of years we continued to slowly grow with kids and families primarily from our church.

By the 1990/91 school year we had over 100 students when the Ministry of Education invited HCS to consider Group 1 status. We were up until then recognized as a Group 3 school, receiving only 10% funding for our school program. If we would embrace the Group status we could receive up to 50% of the funding that public schools received. This meant that we would have to fundamentally change key components of our educational program. First we would have to use BC Certified teachers and any parent teachers could only work in a support capacity. Second we would have to change our curriculum for most subjects. ACE is an American base curriculum and it didn’t meet the BC Learning outcome standards in several subjects. At the time, the government couldn’t see how ACE could be used to meet their outcomes, although it was never their policy to dictate which curriculum we use. ACE was later shown to be an adequate curriculum when supplemented in key areas by Canadian content. The real question we asked ourselves at the time was, and still is, I might add, if we become a Group 1 Independent school and take the government money will we lose sight of our mandate to disciple our children or could this actually help us towards that goal? Money, money, it always seems to come back to money. Our church is primarily made up of middle class and blue collar families. We also want to help the single mother and the economically disadvantaged and if we were to continue to reach out to those types of families in our school with the new standards of education, offering our kids graduation status, then we would either have to raise tuition significantly or find a way to incorporate Group 1 status. We hired several certified teachers went to a mixed curriculum of ACE, Abeka and government texts and took our journey into Independent School classification. Interestingly we also reached out to our local home school associations at the time for those families that felt we were selling out. HCS was known as a supportive school for home education and we registered hundreds of children through our school. For those outside of BC it is required that every home school student be registered with a recognized BC school.

HCS grew the next two years to almost 200 students. We changed our campus location when the school district asked for their buildings back. We built seven modular buildings and purchased three portables and expanded our teaching staff. 94/95 and 95/96 saw us plateau and decline in our enrolment and we faced some difficult financial years with a reduced enrolment and now maintaining buildings. We had joined the Associated Christian Schools International in our big change to Group 1 status and we turned to them for help. We brought in a consultant from the U.S. and he did an extensive audit of our school programs and our community’s needs. He came back to our board with two main recommendations which became a defining moment in our school’s history and the beginning of my role as the key leader in our schools. The first was, you need to build a gym. In our culture most people don’t consider you a real school until you have a gymnasium for your sports programs. Since we moved to this location we had been renting a gym from a local church. The second recommendation to our school was that we begin to lessen our denominational distinctive within our school. We were just too charismatic and this turned potential non-Charismatic/Pentecostal evangelical families away. His advised became a defining moment for me in understanding our role as an educational church. In our next board meeting I wrote a response paper to our consultant’s advice. I absolutely agreed with him. We had to build a gym to develop our educational program and grow. And I absolutely disagreed with him when he encouraged us to lessen our school distinctive. If we are going to be a church run school then we need to whole heartedly embrace who we are and the style of education/discipleship that we value and believe in as a church. If we cannot be true to who we are then we have no business being in K-12 education. There is another good Christian school in our community that reaches a broader denominational group. The board embraced my response paper and suggested that I might be the best suited at this time to give leadership for the school. We were just finishing up our church building project which I was leading at the time and, since we were going into building a gym I might be the right man for the job. So in the 96/97 school year I took over as the Pastor of Christian Education on the church side of the equation and the superintendent on the schools side.  

We did build a gym the next year and moved the school to its present location just behind Church building. This facilitated immediate growth as we now had additional classroom space. We still opened the doors to students and staff from other churches but we also worked very hard to define our distinctive as a discipleship based school. Interestingly enough, while maintaining a strong charismatic flavor to our school, we increased enrollments from outside the church and we developed academically. Another area of growth was our relationship with Independent schools in Ministry of Education. As a Group 1 school we had to go through periodical inspections. We had two of these before I took over leadership and one scheduled the first full year after I took over. These had not gone as well as we hoped and we had a number of issues that we needed to change in order to maintain our status. By our inspection in 2002/03 we had turned some big corners. Our enrollment was close to 300 students and we had some very exciting programs growing within the school. The inspection team specifically highlighted our technology programs as very innovative and suggested that we find a way to market these programs. This was a confirmation of a direction to move towards Distributed Learning which we were beginning to consider. I presented a proposal to participate in a pilot program the Independent Schools branch was conducting in DL education but was turned down by our board at the time. Nevertheless, we kept pursuing this direction and eventually the board gave the go ahead to start Heritage Christian Online School. I will never forget the school committee meeting when this was approved and one of our members stated emphatically, “If we are going to do this right, the Online School needs to be built upon the beliefs and values of campus school.” One person has put it this way, “If you could remove the confines and walls of the campus school can you imagine what would happen.” We never really could imagine that it would be as big as it has become. We have increased our enrollment by 800% in four years. I would direct you to last week’s podcast for this amazing story.

HCS has not stopped in its innovative program development. As I stated earlier, KCC is a missions church, and we have continued to look for ways we can help our children embrace a global perspective of our world. In 2005/06 we launched the Global Citizenship Program. We took 28 students for six weeks to a mission’s outpost we have built over the last 15 years in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. The students experience firsthand living in another culture and country. We had been taking kids on short term mission outreaches since 1996 but it was always too short and, in some ways, gave a skewed perspective of the people and places we would visit. In the Global Citizenship Program we take more time, specifically teach cultural differences, learn the language and have substantial opportunities for students to have long term impact and relationships. After my own son finished grade 12 he took 8 months and returned to Puerto to serve with our missionaries there. Our work outside of Canada continues to grow. We have been working in both Uganda and Kenya with AIDS orphans, paying their tuition for Christian schooling and building classrooms. We have a growing international student program with over a dozen students coming to our campus school for secondary education.

The journey is continuing as we see our graduates bringing their kids back to our school. Our alumni are succeeding in ways that will position them as leaders to the next generation. Just three weeks ago one of our alumni, Catherine Thomas was selected as Miss Canada International. Our desire is to see our become influential and known among the nations. Our Church’s founding scripture passage is Isaiah 61, the famous Gospel chapter of the Old Testament. You might remember it as the passage that Jesus read to announce his Messiahship. In verse 9 of this chapter we find our destiny as a Church community: “Their descendants shall be known among the Gentiles, And their offspring among the people. All who see them shall acknowledge them, That they are the posterity whom the LORD has blessed.”

We would love to hear from you and I deeply value your comments. If you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address.