Dear Parents and Friends of CCS,
May this issue of Parent News find you experiencing the grace and goodness of God!
In this week’s post I’d like to focus on two of the 10 Distinctives of Gospel Centered Education.
These Distinctives lie at the heart of our CCS@50! Vision, and are unique to how we carry out our mission here at CCS.
I share these distinctives not to boast that we are necessarily superior to other schools, or that we do all of these things perfectly, but simply to suggest that not all educational programs come from the same perspective. This is the pathway that God has laid out for us, and we rejoice in it and celebrate its uniqueness.
Please note that these do not represent everything we do or hold to be important, but are listed either because they are not, to our knowledge, practiced at other schools, or are practiced in a singular and unique way here at CCS.
This week we’ll focus on Distinctives 3 & 4.
Distinctive 3 A deep reliance on the power of intercessory prayer.
This one made the list of distinctives not because prayer doesn’t happen at other schools, but rather because we at CCS are deeply aware of the abject necessity of this spiritual practice. In fact, we would say it is the engine of the ministry of CCS.
Many of the issues we deal with on a daily basis are deeply rooted in the struggles people have in dealing with the contemporary world, and finding their place in it.
As the years have gone by, the challenges for Corps members (our faculty and admin), students and parents have increased exponentially. We are continuing to increase our level of service in a variety of areas, yet at the same time we have become more and more convinced that Bible-saturated prayer is a necessity for us.
Prayer is the best weapon for succeeding in spite of the activity of the enemy of our souls, especially when the desired change is something we cannot directly deal with. And there is something powerful that happens when we gather to lift our most difficult issues to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the power of His presence brings hope and healing.
We are so grateful for the faithful, weekly ministry of our Moms in Prayer group, and we are actively looking for ways we can expand our prayer footprint, especially for specific people with specific needs.
Be on the lookout for new opportunities to gather and pray!
Distinctive 4 The application of the word of God to everything we do.
Every decision, every relationship, every operation, every program at CCS is bathed in the word of God. We don’t just teach students to live from a Biblical worldview; we strive to do so ourselves.
Honestly this is difficult, because living and working in the modern world is complex. Our flesh (the sin that still lives in us and others) is powerful, and the enemy of our souls (Satan) is active in opposition to God's agenda.
Yet we are working from victory to victory because of Jesus’ finished work on the cross. From this position of strength we confront and choose not to follow the powerful, yet not necessarily Biblical, voices of the world.
Next week we’ll take a look at the next two Distinctives:
Living out the gospel with joy in the midst of suffering, and
Missions as the end game of everything we do.
In the end, it is our prayer that sharing the vision that God is currently downloading will be another step toward furthering His agenda for gospel-centered teaching and learning at CCS.
May He receive all of the glory as we move step by step toward becoming a truly extraordinary school.
For CCS and the Kingdom,
Tom