The Lutheran school I examined was Our Savior Lutheran Academy in Nashville, Tennessee.  Their core values are the following:

God’s Word

We are centered on the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our Savior, [sic] the Bible is God’s truth for our lives & the foundation for everything we do.

Spiritual & Educational Development

We provide a coordinated system of dynamic, appropriate, and exceptional Christian Education.

Relationships

We build on Christ to establish strong, healthy relationships within our school & community.

Servant Leadership

We empower & equip students to realize, develop, & use their God-given time, talents, & treasure to become models of service to Christ & others in the world.

Outreach

We share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with others through an intentional system of word and action.

The core values of Our Savior Lutheran School would be admirable values for any Lutheran institution.

God’s Word, both the written Word and the Living Word, needs to be at the center of our decision-making process.  One area of concern is corporate partnerships with educational institutions.  Many schools see these partnerships as the only way to obtain funding for perceived needs, but what is lost by so doing?  For instance, is exposing students to carefully targeted corporate advertising in exchange for televisions in every classroom compatible with God’s Word?

Three of the five values presented focus on others: relationships, servant leadership, and outreach.  A school that allowed these values to inform all its decisions would be strongly focused on establishing connections with its own community and with the world.  Collaboration, one of the key 21^st Century skills, would be a predominate feature there.  The example that immediately comes to mind (though it does not solely involve Lutheran schools) is the Digiteen Project.

The Digiteen Project is an offshoot of the Flat Classroom project that focuses on digital citizenship.  One team working in that project focused on creating a virtual learning environment for younger students to learn about online safety.  That project was an amazing example of servant leadership and relationship building.  As another example of servant leadership, that team of students organized their own protest when Google announced that it was shutting down Lively, the 3D virtual world program the students were using for their project.  This protest was entirely student-managed, and though Lively was still shutdown, the students demonstrated a respectful and mature response to an action with which they disagreed.

A Lutheran school that truly used these five core values to inform every technology decision would be powerfully present on the Internet, using the various tools of the 21^st Century, especially social networking, to establish relationships with individuals and communities worldwide and using those relationships to share the Gospel of Christ.  I’m imagining a school whose students are working on projects with students from around the country (or even outside of it) and sharing those projects online.  As a part of participating in those projects, relationships form between the students as they learn about each other and the communities to which they belong.  Students would also be actively involved in sharing the Christian worldview through work that is publicly posted online.

Faculty and staff would also be involved in this process as they establish relationships with remote classrooms for student collaboration.  They would be servant-leaders as well through sharing their ideas with their colleagues inside and outside of their own building.

Core values are a crucial aspect of school ministry.  What are the core values of your learning organization?

Core values can best be describe as the moral compass of an organization.  When used properly, they inform every action and decision the group undertakes, so their selection should be undertaken with careful reflection.  The recommendation is usually to make a list of values and pick the five that are most important to the organization to be the core values.

After self-reflection, I identified the following as my personal core values:  faith, integrity, curiosity, wisdom, and relationships.

Faith: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1).  For most of us, God has never directly revealed Himself to us, so faith becomes one of the defining characteristics of the Christian life.  That faith then impacts every aspect of our life, as we seek to be little Christs to the world.

Integrity: For me, integrity means doing what is right in all circumstances, even if no one ever knows.  This is a very difficult value to uphold, because not doing the right thing is often easier and has greater rewards.

Curiosity: I believe that one of the tasks God has given to mankind is to explore and understand the world He has created for us.  This task was given us when God brought the animals of the world to Adam to be named (Genesis 2:19).  Classifying something (taxonomy) is an important aspect of science.  It could be argued that much of science can be understood as efforts to classify various phenomena.

Wisdom: It is often said that just because one can do a thing doesn’t mean that one should do it.  Wisdom is being able to evaluate the consequences of a proposed action and act according to one’s values.  Put another way, wisdom is applying knowledge responsibly.

Relationships: Building relationships is a major focus of the New Testament.  Jesus commands His disciples to “love one another” (John 13:35).  In Romans 12:10, we see the admonition to “be devoted to one another in brotherly love.”  Galatians 5:13 tells us to “serve one another in love.”  Christ Himself repaired our relationship with the Father through His sacrifice on the cross (Romans 5:8).  Through our relationships we are provided the opportunity to share Christ, both with the focus of our relationships and to those who observe our interactions.

These values are my personal core values, but what about core values for a learning organization?  In the next installment of our series on critical issues, we will examine the core values of a Lutheran school.