The authors of this book are old enough to remember what it was like to travel long distances by car before GPS, with our glove boxes filled with printed maps picked up from gas stations along the way. Today, we can all plug a destination into our phone’s map app, hit start, and we’ll get the correct directions turn by turn. Except when we don’t, of course. Sometimes because of a poor signal, new construction, or even a wrong turn we’ve made, the dreaded “recalculating” message emanates from our phones. We’ve all been there—praying that a new route appears quickly while we continue to drive without the guidance we’ve become so dependent on, often at high speeds, and flying by exits we don’t know whether we should have taken.

This moment of anxiety has become the norm for many of today’s educational leaders, when they think about the direction of their schools, career, and profession. School leadership is perhaps more challenging now than at any previous time in history, filled with both known and unknown obstacles—as well as opportunities. For Christian schools, the world of the last half of the twentieth century, when most of them were founded, no longer exists. It is not surprising that the financial and educational models that Christian schools were built on are often no longer suited to the cultural, social, and market realities of today. Whether we like it or not, this is a “recalculating” moment in Christian education. It’s time to move into new places that our trusted maps likely cannot take us.

Two authors have inspired us to think of the future of Christian schools in terms of maps. First, in Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory, Tod Bolsinger of Fuller Theological Seminary recounts the two-year exploratory journey of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark through the Louisiana Purchase as going “off the map and into uncharted territory. . . . What lay before them was nothing like what was behind them. There were no experts, no maps, no ‘best practices’ and no sure guides who could lead them safely and successfully.” 1 1 T. Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 27. Bolsinger makes the case that most challenges facing today’s organizations are similar, because they are “adaptive” in nature—meaning they “go beyond the technical solutions of resident experts or best practices, or even the organization’s current knowledge. They arise when the world around us has changed but we continue to live on the successes of the past.” 2 2 Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, 19.

Tim Elmore applies similar thinking to the field of education in his book Marching Off the Map: Inspire Students to Navigate a Brand New World. In recounting the practice of ancient mapmakers of inserting dragons or serpents into corners of the map where land had yet to be explored, Elmore explains, “Mapmakers would include a drawing like this to communicate the message: Over here—this land is a known world. But up there—we don’t know what exists. It’s unknown territory. Be afraid. Be very afraid.” 3 3 T. Elmore, and A. McPeak, Marching Off the Map: Inspire Students to Navigate a Brand New World (Atlanta: Poet Gardener Publishing, 2017), 21. Elmore uses this analogy to explain the state of schools today, where leaders need to “recognize what changes you must make to lead and equip a new generation of emerging adults who live in the corner of the map.” 4 4 Elmore and McPeak, Marching Off the Map, 22. This is especially true if we as educators have gotten used to receiving turn-by-turn directions from the tried-and-true voices in our field, whose advice worked well for times that were more stable or predictable. But now, as Elmore explains, “making new maps is an art we must learn.” 5 5 Elmore and McPeak, Marching Off the Map, 21

Fortunately, we learned something about this art in a previous two-year collaborative project that resulted in the book MindShift: Catalyzing Change in Christian Education. 6 6 L.E. Swaner, D. Beerens, and E. Ellefsen, eds., MindShift: Catalyzing Change in Christian Education (Colorado Springs, CO: Association of Christian Schools International, 2019). With the help of Rex Miller, a futurist and pioneer of the MindShift process of sector-level transformation, we learned the importance of finding outliers—those few who have already taken steps off the map, or have marched off entirely—and understanding their stories. In the process of writing the book you now hold, we visited eleven Christian schools and networks that have transformed their structural, financial, or operational models with the goals of long-term sustainability and increased missional reach. More than tweaking a practice or process here or there, these schools and networks have engaged in fundamental mindset changes about what it means for Christian schools to be future-ready.

The stakes are high when it comes to transformational decisions like the ones that the schools in our study have made. And yet as Beerens and Ellefsen point out in regard to change in Christian education, “It is a risk to try new things, to move in new directions . . . but we have reached a time in history where by not innovating we are running a greater risk than staying our current course.” 7 7 D. Beerens and E. Ellefsen, “Epilogue: To Love Is to Risk,” in Swaner, Beerens, and Ellefsen, MindShift, 125. We hope the stories and strategies in this book will inspire leaders of Christian schools to think innovatively, strategically, and above all, missionally about long-term sustainability. Reaching future generations with the love of God through healthy, thriving Christian schools is well worth the risk.

—Lynn Swaner, Jon Eckert, Erik Ellefsen, and Matthew Lee

Fall 2022