Local & Global Service - Kelowna Christian School
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Local & Global Service

Have you ever asked, “What does it mean to be a Christian?”

We want our students to engage the world. It is hoped that students at Kelowna Christian School, through the diverse experiences provided for them, will wrestle with the answers as to how they can be Jesus within their local and global community

For some Christians, there seems to exist a cloud of unanswered personal questions making the answers difficult, if not impossible to see. For example, what’s the difference between being a Christian accountant and a non-Christian accountant? If Jesus is Lord then each of our lives matter, including the work that we dedicate our lives to; so we know God has called us to engage it. To answer this simple but profound question we must consider the character of God, revealed through scripture, and how we can best reflect Him in the world we find ourselves in. We want our students to engage the world. It is hoped that students at Kelowna Christian School, through the diverse experiences provided for them, will wrestle with the answers as to how they can be Jesus within their personal circumstances. Each one of us is different, made up of different experiences and living in diverse contexts. God’s story invites us to be co-healers with Him within the context we find ourselves. We know that God’s story reveals His heart for the poor and marginalized, but what does that look like in our own lives?

WHY?

We believe that to achieve KCS’s mission of growing disciples of Jesus Christ who glorify God through a life of service to Him and others, we need to model that behavior. Over the past several years, our school has been influenced by Darryl Deboer and a program called Teaching for Transformation. During our training time with him he introduced us to this quote:

“It is nothing but a pious wish and a grossly unwarranted hope that students trained to be passive and non-creative in school will suddenly, upon graduation, actively contribute to the formation of Christian culture”
- Nicholas Wolterstorff

This quote is both inspirational and scary. In my experience as a teacher and in the church I believe this statement to be 100% true. The tension between scary and inspirational exist in the challenge that this quote presents.  Creating engaged creative students within the confines of the classroom is possible, but can be difficult. It is often beyond the walls of the classroom that we have more success in achieving this.

India will be a chance for some of our students to contribute to Christian culture or at minimum observe people that are. We have already seen this in our community, as the whole school raised $13,000 for Child of Mind in only 6 weeks. The Kindergarteners made blankets, the Elementary students wrote letters, and the Middle and High School ran fun fundraising challenges for their campus. We are taking only taking a small number of students, but our entire student body is engaged. We are excited to experience and see God’s story in India, and how we fit into that Story both while in India and when we get home.

“We are story-formed people. Our lives are first shaped by narrative, not by information. We don’t learn how to live the Christian life by memorizing facts, rules, precepts, morals, imports, exports, governments, and drains... We begin to see our lives as part of a pattern within the larger story of redemption. We long to live a life worthy of that story”
- Sarah Arthur, from Shaped by God, Robert J. Keeley.

Daryl Klassen
KCS High School Teacher