Puyallup ELC Blog

As I begin my first year as superintendent of Cascade Christian Schools, I want to say how grateful Sheila and I are for the extraordinary hospitality you have extended to us. From our first days here, we have felt genuinely welcomed into the Cascade Christian community. Thank you.

As I have begun learning our schools, one thing has struck me:

Schools measure things.

Grades. Test scores. Attendance. Goals. Wins and losses. College acceptances. Enrollment. Growth.

Measurement is useful. It tells us where we are and where we need to grow. But there is something no report card, scoreboard, résumé, or ranking can measure: the worth of a person.

That distinction matters because we live in a world constantly inviting us to confuse the two.

A student gets an A and begins to think, I am the smart one.

A student gets cut from the team and wonders, Maybe I’m not enough.

Someone gets noticed. Someone gets overlooked. Someone succeeds. Someone fails.

Slowly, what happened to us can begin telling us who we are.

And adults are not immune. We can measure ourselves by our children’s success, our careers, our reputation, our productivity, or whether life seems to be going according to plan.

The gospel interrupts all of that.

Christianity does not tell us to become impressive enough that God finally approves of us. Nor does it tell us simply to look within ourselves and discover how wonderful we already are.

It tells us something far better.

We were created in God’s image, which gives every human being a dignity that achievement cannot increase and that failure cannot erase. Yet we also turned away from the God who made us. We could not repair that distance by performing better.

So Christ came to us.

He lived the life we could not live, carried our guilt at the cross, rose from the grave, and joins those who trust him to himself. In Christ, we are forgiven, welcomed, and given a new identity.

That means we do not work our way toward acceptance; we begin from acceptance. And that changes the way we approach school.

We can pursue academic excellence without making grades our identity. We can compete fiercely without believing the scoreboard determines our worth. We can correct a student without reducing that student to his or her worst decision. We can admit when we are wrong without being crushed by it. And we can celebrate someone else’s success because their success does not diminish us.

At Cascade Christian Schools, we should pursue excellence. We should expect students to work hard, develop their gifts, take responsibility, and grow in character.

But excellence makes a wonderful offering and a terrible god.

My hope is that Cascade Christian will be the kind of place where students are challenged because they matter—not challenged in order to prove that they matter. There is an enormous difference.

Grades can measure learning.

A stopwatch can measure speed.

A scoreboard can record the winner.

An algorithm can rank performance.

But none of them gets the final word about a human being.

That word belongs to Christ.

When our identity is secure in him, we are free to learn, risk, fail, grow, serve, create, compete, apologize, forgive, and try again—not to manufacture a life worth loving but because in Christ, we are already deeply and securely his.

That is the kind of freedom I hope always marks Cascade Christian Schools.

As Sheila and I begin this first year with you, we thank you again for welcoming us so generously. I am deeply grateful to be part of this community and excited for what God will do among us in the year ahead. 

Welcome back, Cascade Christian community!

It was such a gift to spend last school year walking through the book of Ephesians together as we considered what it means to be Called for a Purpose. This year, our spiritual theme takes us to another of Paul’s letters and to a simple but profound promise:

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” —2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)

The headline here is fairly obvious: when we are in Christ—when we put our trust in Jesus—we are made new.

Maybe you’ve heard or read this verse countless times, or maybe it’s brand new to you. Either way, you might be finding yourself asking, “That sounds great, but what does it actually mean?”

While the complete answer to that question certainly deserves more space than we can take up here, one thing we can say for sure is that being made new means transformation.

Think about some of the experiences in life that change us: starting at a new school, taking the first steps into adulthood, getting married, having kids. Each of these experiences can change us in profound ways, but none of them can (or should) transform us entirely. With that in mind, consider this: if those life experiences shape us, how much more should encountering Jesus radically change every single thing about us? Paul seems to be suggesting that an encounter with Jesus ought to result in transformation so profound that we should say, “new creation!”

Being made new in Christ is not simply about believing the right things and then waiting around to go to Heaven. Life with Christ is a life in which he is continuously transforming us and inviting us to participate in the new creation work he is already doing in us, the people around us, and throughout the world.

This year, we are excited to explore some of the different ways Scripture describes that transformation. We will talk about a new heart and a new identity. A new mind and a new way of abiding in Christ. A new power and a new way to live. A new mission, a new hope, and ultimately the promise of a new creation.

In other words, “made new” is not merely something that happened once in the past. It describes the life into which Jesus is inviting us.

But there is another important part of this theme: being made new is not just about us.

God does not transform us simply so that we can feel better about ourselves. We are not made new so that we can check a religious box or add “Christian” to the list of things that describe us.

From the beginning, God’s desire was to partner with human beings as his image bearers—for us to reflect his character and goodness into the world he created. Sin fractures that purpose. It separates us from God, but it also separates us from the fullness of what we were created to be.

And then comes Jesus.

Because of the perfect life and sacrificial death of Christ, we are reconciled to God. We are invited into joyful relationship with him, and from that place of security and belonging, we are sent back into the world to live as the people God created us to be. We are made new, and then we are invited to participate in what God is doing.

That happens in big ways, but perhaps even more often it happens in ordinary ones. In our families. In our classrooms. On our playgrounds. In our offices. In conversations with friends. In how we treat the person who frustrates us. In how we respond when someone needs compassion, forgiveness, truth, or hope.

Everywhere we go, we have the opportunity to live as people who have encountered the good news of Jesus and are being transformed by it.

Please join us in praying for our community this year: that our spiritual theme would go beyond a talking point or a program but would become a starting point for real impact and transformation for students, staff, families, and our community at large as we come to a deeper understanding of what it means to be made new in Christ.

As you and your family get back into the rhythms of the school year, our prayer is that you experience peace that comes from a joyful reliance on the Lord and the miraculously good news of the gospel—that we have security in the work of Jesus, and that he is making us new!