A Deep Dive into Our Campus Vision (Round 2)

Join us for another special episode of the Gospel-Centered Education podcast, specifically designed for our stakeholders who participated in our school’s recent campus expansion survey.

Hosts Tom and Kelly unpack the school’s "Kingdom mission” and address operational concerns. 

Tom outlines a multi-layered security upgrade—including a new perimeter fence, additional cameras, and AI-powered weapon detection software—while detailing efforts to modernize communication.

In this episode, we reinforce Community Christian School's unwavering commitment to its gospel-centered mission amidst cultural pressures.

Produced by Vance Rutherford 

Transcript

You are listening to the Gospel Centered Education Podcast, brought to you by Community Christian School in Tallahassee, Florida.

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Hello and welcome to the Gospel Centered Education Podcast. We're here for round two of the Campus Expansion Project responses to the questions. Yes. We've got a few good ones today.

Yeah, some questions have risen to the top and we've picked out a few.

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So one, the first one that I'd like to go into is, "Will CCS remain committed to being a Gospel Centered school in the future, especially as cultural pressures mount?"

Yeah, I love this question. I could talk about this literally all day, but I won't. But there's a lot to be said. We've said a lot of this on the podcast already, but I'm going to try to summarize. So that kind of falls under the "Who We Are" category.

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Last time we talked about the questions from the CEP. We talked about covenant, the covenantal model. And for those who might have missed that previous one, we encouraged you to go back and listen to that. But basically, it's that solemn agreement between two people who are Christ followers, at least one parent needs to be a Christian so that we can enter this agreement to further kingdom education with their child. So today we're going to focus a little bit more, I think, on what the whole Gospel Centered school thing and what does it have to do with the kingdom of God.(...) So we'll try to jump into this real quick. So the short answer to the question, "Will we remain committed to being a Gospel Centered school in the future, regardless of what happens?"(...) Yes.(...) Done. I mean, yes, we will. But we also realize that cultural pressures are mounting. That's the thing. And so we do realize that. And our focus will continue to be by God's grace and in His strength, the fact that remaining Gospel Centered in the sense without the Gospel, we're just a lot like every other religion. Right. Christianity has the Gospel. We can't earn our way to God's favor. And so that's the centerpiece of everything that we do.

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Also this idea that we're trying to realize a truly kingdom mission.(...) And our mission, actually, it's like if there's a target there, the bullseye of the target really is the Gospel Centered part is the little tiny bullseye. And then the other red part around that, that's the kingdom, the kingdom of God. And so I want to unpack that. I think the best way to do that is by kind of sharing what the kingdom of God is to start with.

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And so the kingdom of God, in short, is the rule and reign of God.

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So it's how God rules as king, hence kingdom, and then also how His reign extends, how far His reign extends. So the short answer, biblically, is He is in charge. He created the universe,

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was the instrument of creation. He reigns His over everything.(...) It's unlimited, the entire universe, which means everything.(...) And so the rule and the reign of God is what we call His kingdom. We know that we see parts of that kingdom in reality today.

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And there are some places where the kingdom is especially, quote, real. It's especially obvious and tangible. Other places, not so much. There's a lot more evil present,

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and it can be almost overcome that temporarily.

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But in a place where the kingdom is operating and its fullness that it can now,

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that is like a pocket of mercy. And God moves in a different way from that. What we hope for CCS is that we are a pocket of mercy, where the kingdom of God is operating on a daily basis. And by operating, we mean the decisions we make, the choices, the values we hold are biblical kingdom values, because it's not the same as the cultural values, if that makes sense.

Mm-hmm.

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So,(...) and that's, in fact, in some ways, gospel values, kingdom values, the gospel of the kingdom values, are 180 degrees different.(...) And it could be something like a big one nowadays is who decides,(...) who gets to decide stuff? Mm-hmm. And the usual answer to that is me, I get to decide, or we, my tribe or whatever, my family, my group, my online group, whatever it is,(...) or other,(...) and God would be a choice for the other.

Mm-hmm.

And the one that I would choose to say, God gets to decide, and we use the Bible as the way to interpret what He's saying about various things. Mm-hmm. But if you're stuck in me or we, it's complicated. Mm-hmm. And it's hard to have kingdom values if you really believe that I get to decide everything, or my little team or whatever it is gets to decide. So Jesus is the King, He's our authority, and therefore His Word, the Bible, is our authority. And that's a hard thing for people to get, don't you think?

Yeah.

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You're saying that CCS in terms of making decisions is going to rely heavily on the Word.

Yes, that's right. And not just the Word in general terms. It's like we believe the Word's all true.(...) It's all revealed, it's all revelation, it's all reliable, it's all authoritative.

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And there are different genres that require different interpretation skills, yes. But fundamentally, it should shape how we live on a daily basis. For example,

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what are our priorities?

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Famous question, right? Mm-hmm. Well, if you live in the South, it's faith, family, football in some order.

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Right? And so you get this, and there's a lot to be said about that, which we won't go into the details now. But what does it mean to say that God is our number one priority? Does that mean we go to church? Does that mean whatever?

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For us at CCS, we believe it means everything we do imperfectly, because we're not perfect human beings, everything we do, we try to filter through the Word. Every policy we write, we try to filter it. When we constructed the Shalom community and the ideas behind that, people have pointed out to us, "Well, you haven't lived that out perfectly."

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Yes, that's true.

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Because we're not perfect, but that is our intention, and we try to receive correction when we need to on that. Right. So the authority question, I think, is huge. The other part of the kingdom is when you're trying to do that and operate in the kingdom,

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the spiritual warfare aspect is huge.

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You can't talk about the kingdom of God being present now in part, which is a biblical doctrine,

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without understanding something about the Holy Spirit.

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It doesn't work, because the Holy Spirit and the kingdom of God are intrinsically connected, both now and later,(...) the not yet part.

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And so if one doesn't believe in the supernatural much at all, except in the abstract, the kingdom of God and being able to live the kingdom of God and understanding what the kingdom of God is and understanding the Holy Spirit will course correct internally, that's all missing.

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So now all you have is a bunch of rules.(...) That's not very helpful in the end. So yeah, so a little bit longer answer on that, but I think it's important for us to say that. So we have a couple, I thought it might be important for us to maybe share, and we didn't talk about this at any time, but maybe you can read a little bit of this and I can read a little bit. Sure. So people can hear somebody besides me this week.

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Why don't you read what the mission is of the school?

Okay, the mission is to train up young visionary leaders who are thoroughly prepared to answer the call of God whenever it comes, wherever it leads, and whatever it costs by developing renewed and skilled full minds, strong hands to serve, and burning hearts for Jesus.

Right. Excellent, right. So who gets to decide whether that's the mission statement or not?(...) Who gets to decide what the mission statement means? Yeah.(...) Well, the short answer is God's put leaders in charge of this ministry, and therefore we have the responsibility to decide what it means. The next one we'll look at is the long-term objective. We don't talk about this one very much, but I think it's very important.(...) The end game, quote unquote, of a CCS education is missional gospel-centered living in all of its applications, which means all of life, work, play, family, everything.

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We are called to form and forge, form and forge, we've talked about that in the podcast, form and forge surrendered citizens of the kingdom of God who will identify and achieve true success.

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Surrendered, by the way, is interesting because surrender, it implies there's an authority

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to whom you're surrendered.

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That's not a high value, I don't think, in our country right now, surrendering to authority in general. It's not probably our strong point at this moment. To achieve true success by living and working in but not of the world. For our graduates, we're hoping they're going to work in the world no matter what they do, whether it's full-time vocational missions or Wall Street or a small business. They're going to work in the world in some sense, and we hope that they're going to bring the light, the truth, the hope, and the compassion of the gospel wherever they go and excellence to whatever they do.

That's kind of the answer to the question, "Who do you want your child to become?" Yes. That we have on our website. That's kind of our answer to that.

That's really good and a very astute observation. That is our basic answer to that. And again, before all the critics start to rise up and go, "But nobody can really do that."

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That's why we're a gospel-centered school because we can say, "Yeah, this will never happen apart from the grace and goodness and power and courage and strength and initiative of God working out His purposes through the Holy Spirit in real time and through His Word."(...) It all fits together, and that's why it's called a kingdom with a king because it interlocks.(...) You can't have part of it. Like for example, you can't go, "Hey, I think the Holy Spirit's really cool. Yes, I hear the Holy Spirit all the time, but I don't really believe the word is actually true."

(...) No.

It just doesn't lock together. It doesn't really work for you. It doesn't make sense.

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Last thing is the societal purpose. What are we trying to do to help society? Would you mind sharing that?

Yeah, it says, "Prepare well for Christ's sure return by graduating extraordinary kingdom citizens who bloom where they are planted and approve the sector of society to which they are called for the good of people around them and the greater glory of God."

Yeah. And again, we're going to share this. We're going to put this out through the parent news article that I write, and it'll also eventually be available on the website so people can go back and read these things. But I want to say a couple of quick things about that. We do want extraordinary kingdom citizens. What do we mean by that? Does that mean perfect? No. Does that mean rich? Not necessarily. Probably not, actually. It's not a lot of rich. There are some. It's not necessarily the way it turns out. Bloom where they're planted. Yeah. We expect that wherever they get led and wherever they're called to be, they will literally bloom with the fruit of the Spirit.

I love that. We're seeing that with our alumni.

With a lot of our alumni, we've seen it over and over and over and over again, but not perfectly. Right. 100%, right? Mm-hmm. And the key there is improving the sector.

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Wherever they're working,

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they should be improving wherever they are. They should be improving their family by the strength and power of God, not in their own strength. They should be making their workplace better, whether they're called to be part of a crypto company in New York City or whether they're called to be a missionary to Iraq or whatever it is, it doesn't even make any difference because the idea, the concept is the same, regardless of what your job title is. And that is a key component. In other words, you're going to be the kingdom. You're going to live the kingdom wherever you are.(...) And that sounds easy.

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Ha.

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Because of the spiritual warfare and the enemy of our souls pushing back against that, plus the cultural issues like you talked about before, that's really hard. Yeah. It's very hard. And therefore, we need a team of people who are of the same mind. So, like, why should we encourage kids to have good friends who love Jesus? I call them Jesus friends.

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Why?

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So they can negotiate life better and feel better about themselves? Well, sure, that's part of it. But the real reason is it's hard to live for Jesus today. Yeah. It's always been hard. They're going to need support on either side of them. So a couple of Jesus friends who actually really love Jesus and don't mind talking about Him every once in a while and read the Word and all that kind of stuff, that's what we need, I think, in order to move. I agree. So that's a long answer to that. But it's a really important question. Yeah. Anyway, next question, next category, whatever.

Okay, another question that has come up is, "When will we see improvements to campus security?"

Yeah, that's a good point, right? So last time we talked about all the things we were going to do about campus security, but when will it all happen? Well, to be perfectly honest, we can't say the exact day or the even exact month at this point, but we can tell people as much as we can. And one of the things, I want to remind people, when we say security is our number one operational priority, we really mean that. We have a goal of being the most secure non-public school in the Tallahassee metro area. That's really our goal.

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And so we really want to focus on that, and that's what we're doing. So we're taking bids right now on a perimeter security fence.(...) So it's going to take a while to get those bids in. It takes longer than you might think. We've walked the campus with all of our law enforcement partners, including our software people for our cameras, et cetera.(...) And we had a great walkthrough a couple weeks ago because deciding where to put the fence is as important as the what. It looks like and all that. So I can't answer the question somebody had, which was, will we have barbed wire? No. No barbed wire, no razor wire, nothing like that. So what we hope is that we'll be able to get the contract done with the company soon, meaning in the next month or so. And then we're not exactly sure when the timing of the start will be. So I'm just being really honest and hopefully transparent as well, just to say we're not sure of exactly when, but we're that close to getting a contract signed and investing the considerable amount of money that we'll need to make that happen. So from that standpoint, that's what's going on. We also have completed our-- almost completed probably 98% our list of new cameras that we would like our partner, Corbin Security Group to security systems to help us with. So we're going to add a number of cameras, probably somewhere between six to eight cameras. And then that means we have to add another whole board because we've run out of channels on the original one. So that means we have to add the board and then in order to add the new channels, if that makes sense. And so that's important. And that will include the King's Crossing here as well.(...) We're also doing-- we're installing a bunch of new lighting as well. And again, all this will come within the next period of months. We're not exactly sure. It depends on vendors. It depends on a lot of those kind of things. But the willingness, the initiative, and the commitment is 100% there. Awesome. So hopefully that makes sense.(...) I wanted to also point out-- I didn't mention it last time. We do have zero eyes, which is an AI powered software that hooks to the cameras. So essentially what that allows us to do is to be able to see a weapon, or even a piece of a weapon that's being brandished.

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And the AI camera-enabled camera system will catch that much quicker than we-- because we're not staring at the parking lot all the time. We have cameras that are being monitored. But as far as that level of detail, the AI-powered thing will do it quicker.

Does that alert authorities? Yes.

Yeah, that's very good. So they'll be able to be contacted immediately, even before we might see it. Wow, that's great. And so which is really, really helpful, I think.

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We're getting ready to sign a new contract in July, I think it is, with Zero Eyes Corporation. I don't know of any of the schools in the city that have that. But regardless, that's what we're going to do. So that's another important thing. And then we're also doing a ground-up update to our emergency management and response manual this summer. We have a really good one. But there's just a lot of new stuff we're going to add to it. So again, all because that goal is really to be the best in our area at what we do security-wise. We take it really seriously.

That's awesome.(...) OK, another question that's come up is, what plan does CCS have to improve communication?

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Yeah, this is a perennial topic.

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I have honestly never heard of an organization where people go-- well, that's not true. I've heard of a couple of businesses where people go, the communication is amazing.

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Because I think part of that's because everyone has a different desire for education. I mean, for communication. And so education too, but communication.

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Because I mean, you get alerts on your cell phone, I bet, for something, right?(...) There's too many. OK, right? So how do you decide what you get an alert from and what you don't?

Yeah, I mean, it's just settings on my app.

Settings and what you're interested in at that moment, right? So if we're in the middle of a storm, you might set up your weather alert or whatever. Yeah, the earth storm's coming or something like that. So part of the challenge, I think, with communication is that-- and this is not meant to be an excuse, it's just true-- everyone has a different way of seeing what constitutes good education.

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Good communication. Let me say that again. Everyone has a different way of seeing good communication and defining what that means for them. So I think that's what makes the conversation more difficult. But there are a couple of things that we're doing specifically. So we realize we need to be better under communication at the end of the day. One of the things we're doing is we're-- as far as in a more global sense, we're working with the Taproot Agency here in town in order to improve the way we talk about the school. And we want to reintroduce CCS to the broader community. Because everybody is always saying, you're the best kept secret in town. We really don't want to hear that anymore. We really want it to be a not kept secret. It's not a secret anymore. So there's that. They're going to help us with tweaking our website and looking at some branding things and looking at some of the big picture and really getting the idea of who we are, like we've been talking about here, out in digestible chunks. Most people will not necessarily want to listen to me talk about who we are all the time. And so how can we get that in digestible pieces for people to understand? The second thing we're doing is we're adding this new app next year called Parent Square, which is becoming very popular in schools. And essentially, that allows people to have easier access to all things CCS.(...) And so they can pick and choose how they receive communication. So it's a much more flexible system. And a lot more is going to be coming out over the summer about that. We're going to launch that next fall. So it's pretty exciting. That's wonderful. That's kind of cool. And I think it will really help our general communication as we go on.(...) The other thing we're going to do is to schedule regular in-person communications.

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The board's been holding a lot of in-person communications. I've been having a lot of in-person conversations with people during the period of the campus expansion survey.(...) And we want to continue the spirit of that. So next year, we're going to schedule a number of face-to-face, hopefully board, head of school combination coffees at some location nearby, near school, so that we can reach people and let them ask questions and have conversations face-to-face. That's great. That's the idea. So those are three things. So the talent-- not talent, but the Taproot agency and then us with the Parent Square app, and then finally, the face-to-face stuff.

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So that's our attempt to move the communication thing forward.

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And I'm kind of proud of that in a way, because I think we're trying to be responsive. Exactly. And you as a parent, you get a lot of information, not just from CCS,(...) but from a lot of people.

Yeah.

It must get overwhelming, right?

Yeah, it does. And I think with Taproot, they would help CCS to be able to decipher how to spread the information because CCS does a lot of emails. Well, maybe there's other ways that we could be doing that.

And that's where I think also Parent Square will come in because they can choose to receive text or they can choose to receive emails, which makes it a lot easier. Because a lot of people do operate mostly with text nowadays. And they're OK with that. But I like the idea of giving people a choice. I think that's helpful in that. And they can, to some degree, customize some of those communicational things. I think also it's important to say, as we kind of-- two main points about communication. One,(...) really great communication is part of a long-term impact partnership, which we are trying to build with families. So we're going to keep working at it.

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The second thing is that communication assumes a speaker and a listener.

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So at the end of the day, there's a certain amount of initiative that has to be taken on both sides.

(...) Yeah. You did say partnership.

There is a partnership, right? It is not one-sided, right? So at the end of the day,

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what we hope is that we'll be able to fine-tune our communication to make it more intuitive so people can access it more easily. But we also realize at the end of the day, though, we have to work harder at it. And what we hope is we're saying things that are interesting enough for people to listen.

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That's the idea. So I think that's our take on that.

That's great.(...) Join us for the State of the School meeting Tuesday, May 12th at 6.30 p.m. in the CCS Auditorium. It will be live streamed if you can't make it, but if you can make it, we'll have a live Q&A. We're going to speak more about the campus expansion survey and answer other questions about CCS. We hope to see you there.

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Thank you for listening to the Gospel Centered Education Podcast, brought to you by Community Christian School in Tallahassee, Florida. You can find us online at myccs.org.