I ordinarily blog on things that are broader in scope than my school context; however, an issue arose recently that God has used to teach me a lot about leadership, unity, and His heart for His people, and I wanted to share it with you. A few years back, the Lord began pressing on my heart several things about our school, things that began to impact my perspective on our long-standing admissions requirement that both parents be professing Christians. First, as long as I’ve been a believer, I think I’ve had a heart for the “underdog.” Despite the fact that my wife makes fun of me for having a “you’re alright; just rub some dirt on it, it will be fine” approach with my girls’ many grievances, I have always been cut deeply by injustice and pain, by people marginalized by life. The plight of the single mom or dad, trying to be both to their children and looking to our school to help them, has always tugged on my heart. When that parent is following and serving Jesus, even when the other has checked out and does not serve Him, I’ve wanted us to come alongside that parent and help them.
At the same time I Corinthians 12 and following, in which Paul urges the brother (or sister) who has an unbelieving spouse not to divorce him or her, has weighed on me, as well. Paul said that “the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife,” and vice versa, and, even more strikingly, “otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.” The Holy Spirit had been pressing into me about what that means for our school as a ministry coming around these families. Through these areas, as well as the changing demographics of Tyler and our country, I became increasingly moved that God was telling us that our same discipleship ministry would best be accomplished by only requiring one parent in a family to be a professing Christian, while still holding fast to the idea that both to be in favor of the distinctively-Christian focus of our school.
While I do believe that God speaks to leaders, I also believe that He doesn’t speak only to them. In fact, the older I get, the more I’m realizing that a spiritual leader’s role is to reveal what he believes God is telling him, and to share that with others, all the while praying that if it is God’s will, that the Holy Spirit will also affirm it in their hearts. In accordance with this belief, I shared these thoughts with the board three years ago. While they felt that the timing was not right to make a full policy change, they encouraged our school leadership to be just and merciful, and to not let the policy keep a family out that the Holy Spirit was leading us to have at Grace. We were to make exceptions when circumstances dictated.
We followed this course for the past three years. Recently, we have felt some tension between the inconsistency of policy and practice, and were prompted that the timing may be right for the policy to change to align with that practice. We reintroduced it to the school board, and the board decided as a group to pray about it for several months. We were praying for unity.
In the upper room on the night before He died, Christ prayed for unity. Unity among God’s people is important to Him, so important that God has staked the credibility of His message on it (John 17:21). While unity isn’t always unanimity, it is always being of one spirit, a sense of fraternity and deeply-felt community as the Body of Christ. At the end of the two-month period, the board decided unanimously that the admissions policy would be changed to reflect that at least one parent must be a believer, and that both parents must agree with the school’s Christian mission and focus, effective immediately. The Grace elder board unanimously affirmed the change a week later.
This change isn’t about me being right or wrong. It isn’t about protecting the school or building enrollment or, ultimately, even about serving our families (although that’s a big part of it). First and foremost, it’s about patiently and persistently seeking God’s face on His direction for our school, His timeless message and mission in our current context, and about that direction being not cajoled, persuaded, or coerced, but affirmed in His people through diligent prayer by the gracious hand of the Holy Spirit. I am grateful to work with and be in submission to a group of leaders who love the Lord like that and seek His face, and I am excited about the direction God will lead our school through those people.
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