When you hear “world-class,” what comes to mind? A five-star restaurant. An Olympic athlete. A university everyone recognizes. At Denver Christian, we use the phrase world-class in our vision too, but we take our cue from Jesus himself as we define it.
What people sometimes miss about Jesus is that he did not become world-class by doing more, getting bigger, or being better than those around him. He redefined the measuring stick other world leaders were using. Jesus, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-7). He did not go up and to the right to be world-class. He went down, into one particular place and one particular community, making “his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). There, he healed and formed people within that specific context, then entrusted those same transformed people to carry his mission forward into the world. That is what it means to bear God’s image in human flesh: being fully present where God places you in his story.
That is the method we desire to be “World Class” at Denver Christian. We don’t chase size or prestige for its own sake. We are trying to form children, over a whole fifteen-year journey, within a specific community of families and churches right here in the Denver metro area. We strive to prepare our graduates cognitively, physically, spiritually, personally, socially, and creatively to follow God’s calling and engage their part of the world with Christ’s transforming power and love. Success looks like their ability to integrate God’s story into God’s world. This is how we measure world-class.
No doubt, this fall you have heard about our desire to grow our school’s footprint in the coming year. And this growth matters deeply to us. But building the capacity to grow to 1,400 students over the next decade is not just about getting bigger. Rather, it creates opportunities to more effectively live out our mission in our specific context: being world-class as Jesus modeled it for us: rooted in God’s context, formed by God’s story, and sending God’s people to take his story into the world.
We all long for the end of the story, when God will dwell among us in eternity. Until then, we strive, however imperfectly, to make earth and our school look more like heaven. Why? Because it’s the “world-class” pattern our Savior taught us and calls us to follow.