A project under the Special Projects Division, Christian Reformed World Missions
1. CRWM Mandate and Strategy: Development of Christian day schools has been part of CRWM’s mandate from Synod and its ministry strategy almost from its inception. Synod has recently re-affirmed that this is part of the agency’s mandate and our foundational statements: Mission/ Vision/ Values, key strategies, and CRWM Scorecard all re-affirm our commitment to this aspect of international ministry.
2. Current Practice and Future Vision: At present, CRWM is partnering with local school organizations as well as some North American based ones to develop Christian day schools. We are involved with a number of schools in a number of ways. The variety of our international partner schools and the variety of our involvements with them are significant and make speaking about it simplistically, challenging. We also have some involvement with non-North American schools/universities which train Christian school teachers.
Without having done thorough ministry analysis on a global scale, we are aware of many challenges and opportunities for more and better ministry in this area. Some of our partner schools have significant deficiencies in crucial institutional capacity areas, like curriculum development, financial planning, board development, faculty procurement and training, etc. We are aware of needs among our partners as well as resources we have in the CRCNA to meet some of these needs. We sense we are not meeting these needs with resources as effectively or efficiently as we could.
Furthermore, our agency strategy leads us more and more into arenas of mutuality and reciprocity with international partners. We wonder what role CRWM may be able to play in connecting Christian day schools in North America with ones internationally and/or other ways of establishing and nurturing school to school partnering.
3. Structural Change and New Opportunities: When planning, budgeting, and reporting is done field by field, it is hard to get a grasp of global opportunities and challenges in any functional ministry program area. To address this, CRWM is creating a new program division being called, for now, Special Projects. This division is still in the beginning development stage but its general purpose is to lead and manage ministry from a global vantage point rather than atomistically by field or region. The development of Christian day schools has been identified as one of the key program areas we would like to address from within the Special Projects structure. As an initial proposal, the following three functions seem essential for creating a well working program:
- An analysis and evaluation of our current ministries and partnerships in the area of Christian day schools. The evaluation would be made in terms of alignment with our foundational statements: Mission/ Vision/Values, Key Strategies and CRWM Scorecard.
- Creation of a CRWM global strategy for ministry with Christian day schools and other partners which can guide us in our planning, budgeting and program development into the future.
- Implementation of the CRWM day school program as developed from the strategy.
4. Resources On Hand: We begin this new program area with significant resources already available. We have all the human resources of the CRWM structure: the program department, recruiting, promotion, etc. plus we have several career and partner missionaries with valuable experience and expertise in these areas. We have connections with schools internationally, teacher training institutions and several Christian school associations. We have a pool of resources with in the CRCNA and partner organizations like CSI and WWCS. We now have the Special Projects structure which should make development of this program easier and we have some funding set aside for Special Projects in FY 07-08 which can be used for this program.
As our new global strategy calls us to work more with partners both in North America and abroad, we expect our network of partners and involvements to increase significantly in the future. We sense there is tremendous potential here for CRWM to add value to the ministries of our international partners in this area. We are committed to collaborative efforts. We do not want to duplicate, certainly not to compete with, the ministries that others are doing well, but to find and fill our niche in the area of international Christian school partnership.
