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Welcome to Faithful and Flourishing Christian Schools. I’m Bernard Bull, and I want to talk today about the idea of mission drift. It’s something that’s gotten a lot of attention. There was a book that came out a number of years ago that garnered a lot of attention on the topic of mission drift, and it obviously frames the whole conversation in a negative.

Because we’re talking about faithful and flourishing Christian schools, my preference is that we’re talking in the positive. We’re talking about the things that we choose to do, but that invariably also includes things that we choose not to do. And the path to excellence in any domain in life does entail considering both the things that we do and the things that we don’t do.

If we want to make sure that our mission really drips from each and everything that we do, if we want to be the kinds of schools that exhibit what we believe, teach, and confess, that communicate clearly what we believe, teach, and confess, then it does entail a measure of intentionality.

If I have any criticism about modern Christian education, including myself and things that I fall into, it’s that it sometimes lacks intentionality. In fact, I think in some cases, I’ve even seen individuals think that intentionality is contrived. It’s less genuine. It’s less sincere when you do something with intentionality, and they want it to be more spontaneous, and they expect that it will just sort of happen.

And I’ve seen this happen fairly often in school settings because we’re very busy, and we have the tyranny of the urgent. There’s so much to attend to. There are so many unexpected things that come up in an individual day that warrant our time and care and attention, and that is real, and that is part of the calling. And amid all of that, it leaves little room to stop and ponder and consider what’s best.

And that’s what I want to do in this episode then. I want to talk about what are the things that show up consistently in a school that begins to fall prey to mission drift or that begins to fall prey to mission muzzling, where the mission just isn’t quite as clear as it was at a time in the past and where it’s not as evident to people why this place really exists and what it’s trying to accomplish by its existence.

And it brings me back to an article in 1991. It’s written about higher education, but I do think that it has relevance for all levels of Christian education. It’s a guy named James Burtchaell, and he published this article in First Things in 1991. And it was called The Decline and Fall of the Christian College. He does a fine job outlining nine elements of how a once distinctly Christian college or university can find itself largely a secular private institution over time.

This change is not something that typically happens overnight. It’s something that tends to happen over time with some subtle or sometimes blunt shifts that happen in the institution. And that’s where I find Burtchaell’s framework of these nine changes to be a helpful tool for consideration… [listen to the episode for the full content]

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