Hello fellow educators welcome to podcast number 53. In today’s podcast I want to share a bit of the vision and direction for Heritage Christian Schools. If you have been visiting the website at www.thechristianeducator.org and following my schedule you will know that I am just returning from a three week journey that included Australia, China and Korea. It seems like the Lord is moving us to a greater sphere of influence and I will share more about this in a minute. Last week we finished a serious of five interviews with Sarah Bennett on Home Education. I have received a number of encouraging emails indicating that we were on the right track. Even campus educators got into the act a bit with some comments on Sarah’s 5 different philosophical approaches to home education. Let me read a couple of the great comments. Just before I do, let me remind you that I am still sending our free copies of my book “Discipling This Generation for a Digital World.” I will have the details of how you can receive a copy at the end of the podcast.

Here is a comment from a mom of two of our Distributed Learning students. She has been with our school for three years now.

“Thank you Sarah for explaining the different philosophies of homeschooling so well.  I don't think I have ever heard it so clearly.  I have been a homeschooler for 6 years now and I would have to identify myself with the Charlotte Mason and Traditional approach.  Until these podcasts I really had no idea what my style was. ….”

Here is an email from one of our DL Teachers with Heritage, Anita Coulter, who has been with us since we started HCOS: “Just to let you know I thoroughly enjoyed the overview of home education philosophies that Sarah and you discussed during the last several episodes. I was thinking that perhaps it might be a good idea to have this set of podcasts on a CD and we could give them to every new enrollie or registrant with HCOS (at the Convention?). It would be great for parents new to homeschooling to know of the homeschooling methods available, realizing that it’s not necessarily to have a ‘one size fits all’ mentality. Perhaps a list of books related to each philosophy or method would be helpful, too. In the earlier days of homeschooling, parents naturally researched and sought out info on homeschooling, because they were more ‘on their own’. They formed homeschool support groups out of need, and together they read about and discussed all aspects of homeschooling, and became very knowledgeable on the teaching philosophies. I think now with distributed learning and enrolling options becoming more prevalent, parents are finding much support re: curriculum, meeting outcomes, etc. from their support teachers and online schools. I think, however, that it’s still important to encourage parents to continue to pursue their own self-education and professional development (which HCOS does through holding CHEC, monthly newsletters, podcasts, etc.). For those new to homeschooling, these excellent podcasts on practical home education methods, put on CD and given to them when they enroll, might be a great place to start and a great addition to what HCOS is already doing.”

I agree with Anita and will see if we can get to work on this. I think we can make it available at our BC Home Educators convention for sure. I just want to say thank you again to Sarah Bennett for these interviews but, more importantly, for invaluable guidance and advise that she continues to give us at Heritage Christian Online School. It is hard to believe that is was almost five years to the day that I met with Sarah and she said in my office that she “wanted to be a part of the best DL school in British Columbia.” She is a big reason why we have experiences so much success in these past five years.

If you have been a Christian for the last 10 years you will remember a little book by Bruce Wilkinson that came out in 2000 called “The Prayer of Jabez.” It was based on a very simple prayer buried in one of the many genealogies of the Old Testament found in 1 Chronicles 4:10. Now Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, "Oh that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my border, and that Your hand might be with me, and that You would keep me from harm that it may not pain me!" And God granted him what he requested. Like most of us that read this little book, I began to pray this simple prayer from time to time. Lord bless me and keep me from harm. I know this sounds a bit selfish but consider that you will never really be able to bless others affectively until you are blessed. If we are injured or marginalized by the harm that so easily attacks our lives then we will not be able to bless affectively. So I pray, Lord bless me and keep me from harm. What is probably the most significant part of this prayer is the phrase or rather, the request to “enlarge my border.” Let’s look at this request from a kingdom context. “God expand my boarders” is a prayer to expand the kingdom of God as it grows through your life and service. If God will grant you more influence in this world, if He will allow your borders to grow then His kingdom will gain more influence in this world. The word “borders” also implies authority over a greater region. As we have greater authority and influence we can see the kingdom of God grow in the lives and hearts of others. Now please understand I am not advocating some form of “Dominion Theology” here. This is the idea that the Christian Church is to somehow exert control over the systems and governments of this world. If you go all the way back to podcast number two you will remember that I  hold to the idea that we are “not of this world.” Our mission on earth as strangers and aliens is to do all we can with gospel and the love of God to influence and affect this world. But this does not for a moment meant that we will exercise ultimate control and authority over the world systems. Anyway, I said all this to say, I believe God is answering this prayer on behalf of Heritage Christian Schools and our story over the last 24 years is turning into something very exciting. God is expanding our borders.

We started Heritage in 1986 with 50 students. In these last 24 years this little school in Rutland, the blue collar area of Kelowna, has grown to over 2700 students. This number includes our Preschool, our K-12 campus program, our Distributed Learning School and our Cross enrollment program where kids from other schools can join in and take Christian courses from us. Between our two full K-12 programs we also serve over 80 funded special needs students. We have a gifted student program in the Online School. We have developed an International Student program with students coming to us from Russia, Taiwan, Korea, Germany, Mexico and Japan. We have started a unique program called Global Citizenship that takes our students into a  3rd world environment for up to 6 weeks at time.  In the last 12 months we took our kids to such faraway places as Mexico, Guatemala, Italy, Greece and France.  We have joined together with Home Educators and will host our 4th convention this year with over 800 participants. If you haven’t signed up yet go to www.bcconvention.ca. If we count the Home Schoolers that have registered with us and made us their school of record our student numbers are beyond 3000. Though our campus school has been consistently and steadily growing through the last 24 years, in the last 5 years we have begun to experience growth on an exponential scale. All of this as a result of this simple prayer, “God expand our borders.”

In the last 12 months we have expanded outside of Canada in some very significant ways. I have made several trips to Russia where we are working with a school to design Christian Online Curriculum in the Russian language. In this nation there has never been a Christian school movement and we have the privilege of working with The International School of Tomorrow and Len Stolyarchuk to help make this happen. This summer we brought Richard Bitgood, one of our Online teachers, and his sister who is also our chief curriculum enhancer, Christabelle, to train the Russian teachers how to write curriculum using public school texts and maintain a strong Christian Worldview in the course. Presently the teachers are writing a full grade 10 online program that will launch in the Moscow area in September.

Over the last couple of years our school has been visited by Educators from South Africa. As a result of these visits I was invited to Hatfield Christian School in Pretoria to talk about the possibilities of online education helping solve some of the very difficult challenges they face in their country. As a result of this visit they launched into an ambitious project to start an online school. We sent Sue Savard, our Online Course director and Christabelle, our chief enhancer, to train and prepare them for the launch of a one year pilot program. They have started an online grade 10 pilot program this February and hope to add several grades next year.

I was able to visit the orphanage our church sponsors in Kitale Kenya twice this year. This is a very exciting project. Our church has taken on almost the entire expenses for this orphanage of 30 children. When my wife and I visited this summer we saw that our kids were all going to public schools and yet there were very good Christian schools in the area. So our campus school decided to partner with the orphanage this year and sent all of the kids to the local Christian school but we faced the problem of room for our kids. So we put the funds together to build another classroom for Elim Academy and were able to enroll 15 of our kids. We still have to help them grow a bit to include the other 15 children in the upcoming years. This year we will be providing a computer lab for their high school where 3 of our boys are now attending. Several of our HCS Alumni will be visiting this May to help build and serve in the orphanage.

Wow, I am amazed at how God has expanded our borders particularly in the last year. I realize that it is not about the numbers. By giving you all these numbers, students and projects doesn’t mean we are “successful.” We could have lots of numbers and be doing the wrong thing. I am always mindful the concept I learned years ago when reading Steven Covey’s book, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. “Most people climb the ladder of success only to find it has been leaning against the wrong building.”  The numbers and the projects are not proof of our success. God will be the only real judge of that. What they do show is that our borders are expanding. It is what we do with these enlarged borders that we will have to give an account to Him of what we did within these borders. And of course, if you have listened to me very long you will know that I will always answer that we must be doing the work of discipleship based Christian Education within these borders.

Let me go a step further. If we stay on track, Heritage Christian Schools will be involved with the discipleship of a million children over the next 26 years. Now, that is a big if. It will mean that we must stay dependent upon God through the whole process. It will also mean that we will continue to walk in love to our fellow staff, students, parents and leaders. Keep in mind that I said we would be involved with, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we will be directly responsible for a million disciples. Let’s also remember that the extent of our discipleship is by degrees. It may be broad but thin or it may be deeper but limited. Keep in mind that discipleship is a big word and can mean reaching across vast numbers of people and bringing the gospel message in an introductory message or, it can mean taking students into deep transformative spiritual growth in their experience and knowledge.

As I mentioned, I just returned from a three week trip which included Australia, China and Korea. For the last year we have been working on a project that will take advantage of the world wide desire to learn English. You might want to listen in to my podcasts on Globalization and the new one world language, podcasts #35. We have been developing an online Christian curriculum that would reach students ages 12 to 20 and teach English. We have included in this program 25 hours of Skype time that we can hire our own Christian students here in Canada to speak with ESL students in China and Korea. They will be scripted conversations that will help our kids include faith discussions while assisting with language acquisition. So I went to China and Korea to begin to network and find ways to market this new endeavor we are calling The International Christian Online School. You can check it out at www.icos.ca. We included Australia in the trip to see if there would be further opportunities to grow and help the schools there with distance learning. Most of Australia is very similar to western Canada in how they fund Christian schooling and home education. We found that Christian distance learning is still in its infancy there and I think we could be a great resource for curriculum development with our online expertise.

I had a conversation with a friend recently and he posed the question, “do you think we might be addicted to growth?” This was very insightful and forced me to think this through a bit. Are we doing all this to grow and make a name for ourselves. I hope not. There is a key point in the prayer of Jabez I haven’t mentioned yet, “…that Your hand might be with me…”. If all we are doing is trying to build big institutions, fancy buildings or some sort of legacy to our name then assuredly the hand of the Lord is not with us. I am reminded of the story in Joshua where he prays and asks the angel of the Lord, are you with me or against me and the angel replies, “Neither. I'm commander of God's army.” (The Message). God is not really that interested in the growth of our institutions or our name. He is the commander and chief of His own Kingdom. If we will be about his business we will see our influence grow but it will only count if we are truly building his kingdom and doing his work. What is all the work and vision about? What am I “addicted” to? I hope it is the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19 “to go into all the world and make disciples of the nations.” I pray that God will continue to bless us and expand our borders for this cause and this cause alone.

Please email us your comments and thoughts on today’s podcast. Also if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, 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. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.