Surrey Christian School (SCS) was founded in 1964 by a group of Dutch immigrant families who were part of the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRCNA). They held a conviction that their children, and all children of Christian families regardless of denomination, should be trained up in “the way they should go” (Prov. 22:6). They believed that this world belongs to God and that their children should, from a very young age, be instructed in that reality and in the essential truth that they are made in God’s image. And they Christian teachers to help for their children to understand what that means for their lives and how they engage God’s world around them. The idea of being made in God’s image held the twofold meaning of both identity and action: children are made in God’s image—that’s who they are; children are also called to image God—that is their purpose. To this day, SCS holds to those roots and convictions and explicitly adheres to a Reformed view of the world and life, with a special focus on working to fulfill the cultural mandate of Genesis 1–3. The center point of our mission statement is “engaging God’s world,” and we strive to approach that with both rigor and curiosity. Our school’s constitution and bylaws formally include the CRCNA contemporary testimony Our World Belongs to God. This document reinforces the centrality of the ownership and “fierce love” of this world by the creator God and our calling “as covenant partners . . . to do God’s work in the world” (2).
The Changing Face(es) of SCS
Over the past fifty-five years, the demography of SCS has changed dramatically. We are located in Surrey, British Columbia, about forty-five minutes east of Vancouver. We are currently the second-largest city in BC but are projected to surpass Vancouver this decade. Surrey is considered the fastest growing city in Canada, and the vast majority of that growth is directly connected to immigration. Our city includes recent (1990s) immigrants from all parts of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe and not-so-recent (1930s to 1950s) immigrants from Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. Surrey was incorporated in 1879 and prior to that was occupied by a number of Halq’emeylem-speaking aboriginal groups. Currently, 52 percent of families in Surrey do not speak English as their first language. Surrey is host to one of the largest concentrations of South Asians in North America, the majority of whom originate from the Indian province of Punjab.
In one primary classroom there was only one student whose parents were born in Canada. While this would have been similar at the school’s founding, those parents now come from all over the world rather than from one Dutch-speaking country.
All of this has greatly shaped who SCS now finds itself to be. We are a pre-K–12 school of over 1,400 students, who represent over 140 different churches in the area. As we move into the third generation of families attending SCS, less than 10 percent of our current families attend a CRCNA church. In one primary classroom there was only one student whose parents were born in Canada. While this would have been similar at the school’s founding, those parents now come from all over the world rather than from one Dutch-speaking country.
Adapting and Changing: Steps and Missteps
Over the past twenty years, SCS has made attempts to adjust well to our new reality. We did a wonderful job of welcoming into our school new families from all kinds of ethnic and denominational backgrounds, and we were happy to have them exposed to a Reformed view of life and the world. However, while we included them, I’m not sure we did a lot to embrace them, to allow them to shape us or nuance our understanding of what it means to be human beyond our own heritage. Our staff were predominantly of Dutch heritage, and the resources we used showed limited diversity. In short, the children of these families would have had a hard time seeing themselves reflected in the artifacts, leadership, and direction of our community. We held multicultural nights where families could wear clothing associated with their heritage and share their own food with others. We ended those events when portions of our community interpreted this event more as a fun dress-up opportunity and donned garish stereotypes of other cultures’ clothing. It was intended to be all in good fun, but it was not good for genuine understanding. We made attempts to bring diversity to our board, but we often found ourselves defaulting to the safety and ease of the people we knew from the churches we had worked with since our school’s beginning. We made small steps in diversifying our staff make up, but that generally happened due to God’s providence when the “right” résumé landed on our desk, rather than due to our pursuit and intention. All the while, SCS was becoming increasingly aware that we needed to adjust our approach to more faithfully serve the kingdom of God in our changing local context.
SCS was becoming increasingly aware that we needed to adjust our approach to more faithfully serve the kingdom of God in our changing local context.
The Gift and Responsibility of Diversity
On this journey a few things have become abundantly clear: First, the denominational and ethnic diversity of our community are a tremendous gift from God. The opportunity our students have to spend their days with classmates from all over the world in the context of learning what it means to follow Jesus is exceptional. My own children (two of whom have graduated from our school) have benefited deeply from this. Their view of God’s kingdom is rich, nuanced, and thoughtful. The school has received this gift, but now we need to steward it well. We need to care for it, foster it, nourish it, and cause it to flourish. And that does not happen by accident but by volition.
We need to be intentional about knowing and caring for who we are as a school so that we can leverage our reality for the growth of children as citizens of the kingdom. Second, we need absolute clarity about where we are going. We can no longer assume that because our students and families come from a CRC background they will “get it.” We can no longer assume that because our staff come from a CRC background they “get it.” In fact, we shouldn’t have made that assumption in the first place. So now, absolute clarity and focus are essential for us—essential in how we become a community, essential in how we create programs and plans, essential in how we hire, essential in who enrolls, and essential in who leads on our board.
Gaining Clarity, Providing Clarity
We work very hard to ensure that our vision and mission statements drive everything. We point back to these statements in the midst of conflicting conversations and point forward to them in planning. We strive to align the macro and the micro with who we are hoping to be. Our vision is that we are becoming fully alive in God’s story. Our mission is that we are educating for wholeness by engaging God’s world in the servant way of Jesus. Our long-term plans are seen as an attempt to be more faithful in implementing our particular vision and mission. Our teachers no longer use course overviews or unit plans, rather they use storytelling tools that are the specific pedagogical and curricular manifestation of our vision and mission. Teachers are also challenged to design formative learning experiences that shape students to become fully alive in God’s story. When we interview teachers, we look explicitly for a fit, for a worldview that aligns well with that of the school. We have found this beyond the borders of the traditional CRC background in individuals who, through life experiences (the Spirit) and reading and studying (the Word) have come to embrace a Reformed view of life and the world. We also look for staff members who we feel are authentically on that journey themselves, who are seeking a wholeness in their faith and are stepping away from the dualisms that often shape much of North American populist Christianity. Our Strategic Plan talks about attracting, training, and retaining teachers. We now look to attract teachers to SCS from varying Christian denominations ethnic backgrounds. And we assertively train in the direction of our vision. We place all new teachers into a cohort, and we invest heavily in this group throughout the year via our director of learning. Before the year begins new teachers spend time immersing themselves in the workings of our storytelling tool and then meet regularly throughout the year with requirements to show evidence of their learning. All teachers are required to join a cohort on a cyclical basis so that each cohort contains a mixture of experienced and first-year teachers. We believe we are applying rigor and intentionality to ensure teachers understand and apply the school’s specific vision and mission to their day-to-day work.
When we begin conversations with potential board members, we spend time talking about our vision and mission, clarifying that their role would be to ensure they hold the leadership of SCS accountable to this particular way of being a Christian school.
To ensure our vision and mission play out authentically in all areas of our school requires attention, hard work, and passion. We believe our calling as a Christian school is beautiful and worthy, and therefore we work hard to bring it about it. When we tell our story (marketing), we work to be explicit about our vision and try to avoid pandering to the trends of private school “success” stories. We strive to avoid cliché private school phrases about “excellence” and “character” and subtle promises that point more toward upward mobility than to the kingdom. Instead, we try to give specific examples of our vision enacted (artifacts of learning). We believe this draws families who are seeking a place they believe is more part of God’s story and less part of the Western story of affluence and acquisition.
A Wrinkle Added
One of the biggest gifts forcing this need for clarity was the board and senior leadership’s decision to create open enrollment places at SCS. Families from other faith communities can now enroll in our school on a limited basis, providing they are a good fit. This means we explicitly state who we are and what we are about, and those families must endorse that for their children. Some of these families leave because they feel we are too Christian, and when that happens we are thankful that we are still striving to “preach Christ, and Christ crucified.” Other Christian educators have often asked me if we have moved from a covenantal school to a missional school. From the outset we rejected that over-simplistic dualism. Our purpose is not to convert or confirm students but to provide formational learning experiences in all areas of our school so that they might become fully alive in God’s story. We aim to create explicit programming and an implicit culture that forms students for the kingdom of God, a peculiar people whose hearts are oriented toward the King. In short, we strive to provide exceptionally high-quality Christian education for all students in our school so that they will be drawn and directed toward the good, the beautiful, and the true story of the world.
Diving Deeper with BIPOC
While I am grateful for what I believe to be the good work that we have done, I want to confess that the recent focus on anti-black racism has required us to stop and reflect deeply on our assumptions and practices regarding our diverse school community. In light of the tragic murder of George Floyd and the rise to prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement, I took the step of publishing a statement that lamented the brokenness of racism and stated that SCS opposed such dehumanizing acts. I felt proud of our statement. I felt proud of our stand. But then I was contacted by several alumni whose experiences did not reflect that statement. They agreed to meet with me. They were a mix of black and brown students who had experienced racism at our school—the school that passionately hopes that all students will become fully alive in God’s story. Experiencing racial slurs and being made to feel like the other do not foster the fulfillment of such a vision. It was clear that while we had good intentions, we had work to do to fully understand how to talk and act in such a way that we foster the fullness of the image of God in all our students. And so we have embarked on a more explicit journey to learn about anti-black racism: to listen, to learn about the racist tendencies that lie within all of God’s children who live this side of the New Jerusalem, and to learn new ways of being that bring even greater clarity to the idea of working to form students whose lives are oriented toward the kingdom.
I started my career in a school based out of the CRCNA that was very homogeneous, and in many ways that made much of my work easy. I generally knew my student and parent audience and could often trust their responses to situations. Working in a school with the denominational and ethnic diversity seen at SCS is much more challenging when I authentically engage that reality. It is also shaping and growing my faith more than I ever thought it could. I have learned so much from the generous orthodoxy of faith that I work with on a daily basis, and my hope is that the same holds true for our staff, students, and families. In a post-secular, post-denominational world, discourse across differences is becoming increasingly essential. I believe one of the best gifts SCS can give to the next generation is to be rooted in The Story in order to confidently reach out and embrace the image-bearers all around them.
David Loewen is currently the superintendent of Surrey Christian School and has served as head of school at two other Christian schools. He is an adjunct faculty member in Trinity Western University’s Masters of Arts in Leadership program. Loewen holds a PhD in Organizational Theory and Leadership Studies. He is happily married to his wife, Sharlene, has three beautiful children (Chloe, Olivia, and Ilyah), and cares for two rather spoiled and self-absorbed chickens.
