by Bill Boerman-Cornell and Neil Okuley

During a 2005 commencement address, author David Foster Wallace pleaded with the graduates of Kenyon College to be aware of and do battle with what he called our “default setting.” He argued that our default setting is thoroughly self-focused, preventing us from truly being able to see and connect with those around us. This setting guides our day-to-day choices unless we make a conscious decision to challenge our thinking.

David Foster Wallace probably did not realize that he was paraphrasing Romans 12:3 wherein Paul instructs followers of Christ “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment” (ESV). Teachers and students at Christian schools have an incredible opportunity to practice this command every day. Thinking soberly in community is hard enough but can become even more challenging when cultural diversity is a factor.

Over the last few years, we have been working on starting Unity Christian Academy (UCA), a new Christian high school in South Holland, Illinois. South Holland is an anomaly in Chicagoland, reflecting wide socioeconomic, racial, and ecumenical diversity. In starting UCA, we seek to build a flourishing community not despite diversity but because of it. Trying to bring different communities, cultures, and traditions together is hard work. Different ways of worshiping, fellowshipping, and even speaking about faith presents a great deal of potential for misunderstanding, even when we are united by belief in the same God and savior. So why should we bother?

While it has been an exciting opportunity for us to have the chance to design a school from the ground up, working to connect our school to a multitude of diverse communities has taught us some things. While we certainly do not consider ourselves experts and while we humbly recognize that we have a lot to learn, here are ten lessons we have learned so far.

1. Community through faith. We are learning to trust in God’s leadership. Early on in developing our school we became convinced that God was calling two particular people to be our head-of-school and our academic dean. While we were delighted when one of those people accepted that call, the other did not and we were deeply disappointed. Why had God led us along and let us down? It can be hard to trust during such circumstances, but it is utterly necessary to do so.
2. Community through learning. We have learned that there is much we do not yet know about bringing communities together. But we have also learned that with patience, humility, and prayer we don’t have to wait until we have all the answers to form a community. Instead, we can be a community that collaboratively learns how to be a community.
3. Community through distributed involvement. We have learned that it can be hard to see our school from the perspective of an outsider. Whether we are looking for a new principal or someone to run the concessions stand during ball games, we tend to look toward people we already trust and know. Operating on our default setting, we are liable to pass over members of our communities who are well suited for a particular job or are excited about service. It is much harder to take a leap of faith and empower new members of the community through hiring and service opportunities. As a board, faculty, and administration, we need to reflect on the process we follow to fill positions and ask ourselves if it will result in new community members getting involved. Communities flourish when new members get involved.
4. Community through food. It is interesting to consider how many of Jesus’s miracles and parables involved bringing people together over food—everything from his first miracle at the wedding at Cana to the parable of the prodigal son, who returns to his father hoping for table scraps and receives the fatted calf instead. It is also interesting to consider that Jesus’s most famous food miracles, the feeding of the five thousand and the seven thousand, involved taking the food that the crowd already had and multiplying it. Jesus wasn’t giving everyone the food he had chosen but was sharing in the food they had brought.

So when we expand the community our school serves, we should celebrate the different foods of the cultures and families represented. Providing a large amount of a neutral food (sub sandwiches, chicken, hamburgers and brats, pasta, etc.) and then asking people to bring a favorite dish results in a shared meal that helps people make connections and celebrates our differences and the things that unify us.

5. Community through diverse worship. We have learned (and are still learning) how to be open to a range of ways to worship and understand Christ. After worshiping within a particular tradition for years, decades, or generations, it is easy to think of that way of worshiping as morally right or intellectually superior, more genuine, or just better in some other way. Similarly, because we take pride in the groups we belong to, it is easy to imagine that because of where our denomination falls on a specific theological question, we are the ones with the answers.

These kinds of attitudes can give the impression to those outside our community that we think their way of worship is not as good as ours, or even that it’s wrong. With a little thought, however, it should be easy to see that God does not approve my church’s way of singing hymns and praise songs with piano and guitar accompaniment over another church’s heartfelt singing of gospel songs. We are learning to pay less attention to the theology that divides us and more attention to the love of Jesus that connects us.

6. Community through humility. We have learned that humility is important and that learning how to be humble starts with appreciating others. Once we realize that we can appreciate a broader range of food, worship styles, and leadership styles, we recognize that we do not have all the answers and neither does any particular cultural tradition. In fact, the beauty in different expressions of love and thanks for Christ can lead to humility.
7. Community through recognizing multiple cultures within us. Too often when we speak of diversity, we think only of racial diversity. But God made each of us unique, and we all have connections to countless cultures—family, nationality, church, friend communities, traditions, work cultures, the music and movies and television shows we are interested in, educational cultures, and many more. All these cultural affiliations combine to make up who we are. When we are aware that we each belong to several different cultures, celebrating a few more is easy.
8. Community through broad definition. We have learned the importance of intentionally redefining what we mean by community. What we mean when we speak of “our community,” “our constituents,” or “our school family” tends to be operationally defined. We often mean the people who are part of the community now, who have always been part of that community. When we define community this way, it is only a small step to seeing other Christians in our community as outsiders.

The Bible is clear about this topic, however. In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus says our “neighbor” is defined not by how close they live to us but by whether they are in need or can offer help. When we think of our students, perhaps we ought to think wider than the brothers and sisters and cousins and children and grandchildren of those we have taught. We ought to think in terms of all God’s children in our community whom we might serve.

9. Community through not assuming. We have learned that members of a community cannot assume they understand the perspectives and needs of other members. When we were working on curriculum development, we read Vicki Abeles’s excellent book, Beyond Measure, which convinced a majority of us that today’s rigor-obsessed schools are emphasizing homework, testing, and college admissions to the detriment of our students’ well-being. We also questioned how well these educational values aligned with the Christian worldview.

However, one member of our board pointed out that for some lower-income families, our desire to focus less on getting into the right college may be a luxury they cannot afford. For those families, the focus on excellence and hard work to the exclusion of everything else might be their children’s only chance to escape the poverty cycle and the violence, substance abuse, and hopelessness that often goes along with it. We assumed that we were on the same page, but we needed to be reminded that some in our potential school community might not see things the same way. How do we know if we are on the same page? We talk to each other.

10. Community through listening. We have learned that the best way to live in community with others is to do a lot of deep listening and spend a lot of time getting to know each other. It takes time to develop the shared experiences and shared stories that lead to a strong community. But hearing each other’s separate stories and finding ways to begin to tell the combined story of our new school are ways to start building community. When we pause, set aside our solutions and opinions, and simply listen to others, we offer grace and dignity.

Our schools all thrive on community. The communities that have been forged in Christian schools have been some of our strongest assets. If we can expand our idea of what community means and learn to be as hospitable to those outside our traditional communities as we are to those inside them, then we can really start transforming the world. God created us for connection to physical communities and to the neighbors with whom we share this space. It is our calling to expand our communities and welcome new families with the same hospitality and love we have for those who have been part of our communities for ages.

Bill Boerman-Cornell is professor of Education and English at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL.

Neil’s life has been a 19/14 year split between Van Wert, Ohio, and Chicagoland. His first experience with Christian education was as an undergrad at Wheaton College. From there, he spent ten years teaching social studies and coaching mock trial and track at Chicago Christian High School in Palos Heights, IL. In 2017, Neil jumped at the chance to help start Unity Christian Academy in South Holland, IL.