Ben Norton, MA in missions, is a Canuck who has been in Hong Kong for eight years, six of those s the headmaster of International Christian School. He was raised in India and Taiwan as a missionary kid, and he has taught in Beirut, Lebanon.
Jeff Auty, MPhil, is a Kiwi and a chemistry teacher who is the community education coordinator at International Christian School. He previously taught at Woodstock School in North India and Eastwood College in Beirut, Lebanon.
Have you ever pondered what a “righteous” person looks and acts like? At the main entrance of the International Christian School (ICS) in Hong Kong, an excerpt from Isaiah 61:3 reads, “They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor” (NIV). It has been placed on the wall intentionally as a call and a challenge for young people to become righteous in their thoughts and deeds—for God’s glory.
The ICS motto is “Instruction for life, Commitment to Christ, Service to the community,” and we are discovering that to teach and demonstrate service requires intentionality in all we do. Throughout the school, we are encouraging our community to be serious about service. The apostle James reminds us that worthwhile and faultless religion is worked out, in part, through the way we look after orphans and widows in their distress. James 1:27 is a daily challenge, so here in Hong Kong we have decided to keep in front of us reminders to model our service after Jesus. Placed on a strategic podium in our campus, a statue of Jesus washing Peter’s feet constantly reminds us that humility is at the heart of service. The entrance to our chapel includes a wall covered in Chinese characters that relay the Beatitudes.
What we are doing at the school is similar to what Moses commanded the Israelites to do in Deuteronomy 6:6–9. He told them to put God’s commandments on their hearts, impress the commandments on the children, talk about the commandments continually, and use symbols and written words to constantly stay aware of God’s Word. We see from numerous Scriptures the need to keep our actions consistent with our beliefs. As a Christian school, we have a wonderful opportunity to teach young people how to put faith into action. One of the blessings we have in moulding students is to shape their worldview and teach them to respond to the needs around them.
At ICS, we recognize that not only the students but all members of the school need to keep learning and looking for opportunities to serve. As part of staff orientation this year, we took all the employees to Crossroads International to experience the joy of learning and the dread of poverty. It was a day spent in trying to understand what so many here in Asia experience daily, and the experience has had an impact on the way we are creating programs and working with our students.
At ICS, we believe that service is primarily about actions, so we have a community service officer who has three fulltime staff who watch for chances to serve within and outside the ICS walls. They coordinate our Week without Walls program, connect us with schools and churches, and will soon liaise with a public-housing estate under construction next door. We will be able to minister to hundreds of children and elderly right on our doorstep, and we are putting plans in place with other schools to be intentional in reaching out through evangelism, sports, performing arts, and camps.
On the elementary level, most of our service opportunities are more teacher directed than on the other grade levels. More than 300 gifts are being delivered to the children of refugees and poor families in Hong Kong. We have partnered with a local charity that supports those families, and each of our elementary children has prepared a gift for a particular child.
Our elementary students have also supported a ministry to the Karen people in Laos and Thailand for a number of years. Our middle school has a relationship with a local primary school. Our students visit the school three times each year, and they meet with younger students to read and share in English. The visits build confidence in our children and allow the other school’s students to hear native English speakers and the gospel at the same time. We are now expanding this outreach to other schools.
In the middle- and high-school levels, our Week without Walls program enables each student to serve in a setting for one week a year at each grade level from grade 6 through grade 12. These are life-changing experiences that are vital to establishing a global mentality in our students while they are learning what it means to live in a camp, face soldiers daily, live in spartan conditions, or even face penalties for sharing their faith. As we write this article, we have middle school students serving in China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Thailand. Our high school students will travel next spring to Spain, Japan, Israel, and Vietnam.
Because God has revealed what righteous behavior is, we are urging our students and faculty to loose chains of injustice, untie cords of the yoke, and set the oppressed free. It is not that difficult to share food with the hungry or to provide shelter to the homeless or even to clothe those in need, but you can’t do that without looking for chances to serve. A recent high school chapel message described what service in a Christian life should be. The speaker used the passage from Matthew 25:31–46, in which the Lord separates the sheep and the goats. When we are face-to-face with our Maker, each of us will have to answer the question, What have you done with your life? As Scripture explains, it is for times when we have seen the poor, the imprisoned, and the sick and we have responded with our hearts in loving service that Jesus will reward us. The point is that we need to learn to respond “just in case it’s Jesus” and learn to see the needs around us so that we become servants whenever there is a need.
Experience has taught us that student-initiated activities can have a much greater impact than teacher-initiated ones. So our high school principal has initiated an action-research based program we call Make a Difference—MAD for short. Make a Difference is a student-driven initiative in which high school students identify service opportunities, follow through by serving, and present the results to their peers and staff advisors. Students can do so individually or in groups, at home or in the community. Each MAD project receives the support of a teacher through the advisory programs. The program is part of our commitment to nurture service in the hearts of all ICS students and to show the students that by loving others in a spirit of humility, others will see Jesus in them.
What is critical is that students learn to serve from their hearts and that they learn to look to Jesus for ways of ministering to others. In the passage in Isaiah 61 that speaks about righteousness and that Jesus quotes in the synagogue (Luke 4), He said He came to preach good news to the poor. He said He was sent to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives. Jesus wants us to comfort those who mourn, provide for those who grieve, and bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. The Isaiah passage goes on to say, “You will be called priests of the Lord, you will be named ministers of our God…. I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and iniquity” (vv. 6, 8). Wow! Where can you find a better description of the heart of service?
As a Christian school, we must teach our students to serve from the heart. We do not want students to rush into service projects just to complete their graduation requirements. If we do it right, making service a component of graduation should not be necessary. At ICS, we do not require service for graduation, but it is one of our expected learning outcomes. We honor those students who demonstrate the spirit of service and who are MAD—Making a Difference. We trust that they will continue to serve wherever the Lord leads them and that they will in turn teach others the joy of serving.
CSE 12.3 Just in Case It’s Jesus, Go MAD