Christian Values 4 Schools

It’s official; it’s now essential to know New Testament Greek if you want to work in a church school! Or so it might appear from a new website (www.christianvalues4schools.org.uk) launched recently by the Church of England. 

Publishing a list of values for schools is nothing new. The Australian government did it a few years ago as a means of promoting a sense of common identity amongst its citizens. Every Australian school was sent a poster outlining the values list and had to display it prominently. If you didn’t, you didn’t get your annual government grant. So the Minister of Education took this exercise pretty seriously. A similar thing was done by the Government in England, except in that case the list is buried deep in a national curriculum website. Few people realise it even exists. So in England the government is a little more coy! But not so the good old C of E.

Since 2001 when the Anglican Church published its ambitious report The Way Ahead [1] everyone has been trying to work out what it means for a church school to be ‘distinctively Christian’. This new website shows one way in which this can be achieved. It lists 15 Christian values which can be adopted by church schools as the basis of a distinctively Christian ethos. My flippant remark about the requirement for New Testament Greek originates with the final value listed; koinonia. Unlike the other 14, a Greek word is used to make a point.

The unique feature of the Church of England website is that it doesn’t just list the values, but it shows how they are understood when interpreted in the context of Christian beliefs. That’s why koinonia is important. In a straightforward translation from the Greek, koinonia means community, or more accurately fellowship. But community in a New Testament understanding is markedly different from the common parlance meaning of the word ‘community’. The distinctive idea is of interdependence which models itself on the self-giving love of Christ on the cross. It goes well beyond the notion of linkage through self-interest which can underpin much thinking about community in the modern world.

Most lists of values published for schools assume the values are shared by everyone irrespective of their beliefs. The truth is, however, that what a value means can be very different depending on the religious or non-religious beliefs that underpin it. Three cheers for the Church of England for encouraging its schools to think about what makes their approach to values education distinctively Christian. This is a website worth visiting.