Part 2. “Navigating Difference”
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honour one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour, serving the Lord.
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practise hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another.
Romans 12:9-16a
August and September are enrolment season at our school. Currently, we are in the very last days of interviews for enrolments in 2020 for Prep and Year 7. We’re basically full for these two entry points for 2019, 2020 and things are tightening up for 2021. As we have been saying publicly for some time now, so as to ensure we don’t miss out on enrolling members of current families not yet “on our books”, early planning is the best approach. What an amazing season of blessing we are in! Praise God for the way he is building our community, as we seek to glorify him as a College.
I have the immense privilege of meeting every new family. I am blown away by the remarkable testimonies that are shared in those interviews. Remarkable, not because they are spectacular necessarily – although, some are narratives that only God could have written – but remarkable because they consistently remind me that God “bothers” with each one of us – extends his love through the words and actions of others and reveals himself to us in a saving way. The creator of the universe has bothered to consider me … let me just ponder that for a moment … it is mind blowing, each and every time I hear another example of it. As we enrol families, we align around three things – Christ is saviour, the Bible as truth and our desire to be God’s people in godly community.
As I pointed out in the last newsletter, as a result of our approach to enrolment, we enrol families of active and discernible faith from a vast array of churches – I describe it to friends not associated with our College as the “best of ecumenical” – seeking to find the highest common denominator in all that we do. One of the exciting things about this reality for us, and the most daunting at the same time, is how we handle times when our theology / our interpretation of the Bible / our experience of faith in Jesus / our encounters with God’s people … do not line up. Put another way, when we feel a lack of unity, when we misunderstand, when we feel hurt, when we actually think someone is genuinely wrong – that they have misrepresented what we might consider to be a non-negotiable of our faith.
It is daunting for those of us who don’t enjoy conflict. It is confronting for those of us who don’t want to admit we may not know, or understand, as much about our life, and how our faith informs it, as we thought we did. It can elicit a flight response when we just don’t want to engage with a tricky concept. All of this is reasonable, and understandable.
Another way of looking at it is that it can be exciting. Some of us get a thrill from the opportunity to learn more, to investigate more deeply. (I’ve always found this to be hard work, but worth the effort). It can be a chance to understand others more deeply, to hear how those in other church groups have wrestled and worked to resolve issues that our own faith communities haven’t needed to/haven’t had time to process through. It can be deeply challenging, dare I say confronting, occasionally destabilising, but (with a hopeful heart) an opportunity to grow deeply in our understanding of who God is and how he reveals his plans for us and those we love.
In my role, I get to work with some exceptionally gifted colleagues. I find myself in the company of giants in the Christian world; they are parents and students at our school. I have learnt that God uses all of these influences in my life to grow me further. As I engage with them, increasingly I feel the prompt to ask questions. I’ve been reading a lot about question asking.
One author (Michael Bungay) uses the following (reasonably) self-explanatory headings to describe how healthy question asking leads to deep understanding. They are these:
- The Kickstart Question
- The AWE “and what else” Question
- The Focus Question
- The Foundation Question
- The Lazy Question
- The Strategic Question
- The Learning Question.
His point is simple – intention is everything in the conversation. Ask one type of question and you do yourself and the person you are with a disservice – dishonouring your collective capacity to come to an understanding of one another. You need to ask lots of different types of question, to get to know the person, their thinking, their heart and their actions.
Actually, it seems a little like Jesus and the woman at the well; Jesus and the Pharisees; Jesus and those who needed healing. Head – heart – hands – hmmm, we might be onto something here 😉
educating 4 life, too 
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