What does it mean to teach in a way that is genuinely Christ-centred—not as an add-on, a slogan, or a unit tucked into the curriculum, but as a formative way of life?

This question has been quietly shaping my thinking for years. It has followed me into classrooms, staff meetings, professional development sessions, and conversations with educators who care deeply about their students and their faith. Again and again, I notice how easily education—Christian education included—becomes shaped by efficiency, outcomes, and productivity. We ask what works, what can be measured, and what can be completed on time. These questions matter, but they are not enough.

What if teaching is less about managing outcomes and more about cultivating lives? This tension between outcomes and formation raises a deeper question about what teaching is truly for.

Beyond Outcomes: Teaching as Cultivation

In many educational settings today, success is defined by visible, measurable results: test scores, graduation rates, productivity metrics, and quantifiable “learning gains.” Even when teachers care deeply about students as whole persons, institutional systems often push them toward speed, coverage, and performance.

Yet Christian education invites a deeper and more expansive vision. I have been learning to think about Christ-centred education not as something we “add” to our teaching, but as something we grow into over time.

Cultivation is slow. It is patient, relational, and deeply attentive to context. It resists formulas. It requires care. And it assumes that formation happens gradually, through shared practices and rhythms—not through quick fixes or perfectly designed techniques.

In my own teaching and learning, I’ve found that the most formative moments rarely come from polished strategies alone. They emerge through practices like dialogue and attentive listening, pausing rather than rushing, framing learning within a larger story, extending hospitality, and returning again and again to shared reflection. These practices don’t just shape what students know; they shape who we are becoming together.

Why Christ-Centred Education Must Be Formative, Not Additive

For some, Christ-centred education names the presence of explicitly Christian practices: Bible classes, chapel services, prayer at the start of the day, or devotional readings woven into lessons. For others, it signals a commitment to Christian morality, behavioural expectations, or character formation. Still others associate it with a relational ethos: schools marked by care, safety, and a strong sense of shared values.

None of these is unimportant. And yet, on their own, they are not enough.

When Christ-centred education is understood primarily through these markers, it risks becoming an additive model: Christ is added to schooling rather than shaping it. Faith becomes a layer placed on top of an otherwise unchanged educational vision.

What if Christ-centred education is not about adding something Christian to schooling, but about re-orienting education itself?

To place Christ at the centre is not to decorate curriculum with spiritual language or to append devotions to existing practices. It is a claim about reality, about what education is for, about what it means to be human, and about the kind of formation schools inevitably enact.

In many Christian schools, the desire to be Christ-centred is genuine. Teachers pray for their students. Administrators seek to lead faithfully. Scripture verses appear on classroom walls. And yet, even in these contexts, Christ can remain functionally marginal by being present devotionally but absent pedagogically and therefore disconnected from how learning is structured, assessed, and valued.

James K. A. Smith names this tension when he observes that Christian education often assumes formation happens primarily through what we think rather than through what we practice. When this assumption takes hold, Christ-centred education becomes a matter of correct beliefs layered onto educational structures that remain shaped by efficiency, productivity, competition, and measurement. In these cases, Christian schools may unintentionally accept dominant cultural definitions of success and simply ask Christ to bless them.

The problem is not the presence of Bible instruction or prayer. The problem is that these practices are often isolated from the deeper formative ecology of schooling: grading systems, schedules, disciplinary practices, leadership structures, and pedagogical assumptions that quietly teach students what matters most.

If Christ is truly at the centre, education itself must be reimagined.

Education Is Always Formative

One of the convictions shaping my thinking is that education is never neutral. Schools do not merely transmit information or develop skills; they shape persons. They form habits, dispositions, and desires long before students can articulate what they believe.

What schools reward, measure, celebrate, and prioritize teaches students, slowly and powerfully, what is worth pursuing. Over time, these practices shape their imaginations and their sense of what a good life looks like.

Christ-centred education, then, cannot be reduced to religious content alone. It must grapple with the formative power of everyday practices, including the pace of the school day, the structure of assessments, the nature of authority in the classroom, the stories embedded in the curriculum, and the vision of success that animates school culture.

These are not neutral details. They are the soil in which loves are cultivated.

And that, perhaps, is where the real work of Christ-centred education begins.

Formation Through Listening and Story

Last winter, I taught a course called Christian Deeper Learning: From Wonder to Inquiry to Practice. Throughout the course, we returned again and again to a simple but demanding question: What might it look like for learning to be genuinely connected to the real lives of students and the communities they inhabit?

For their final project, I invited students to take the ideas we had been exploring and apply them within their own teaching contexts. One project, in particular, has stayed with me.

Alicia Coetsee, a Grade 7 teacher at Ottawa Christian School, designed a Language Arts unit shaped by her school’s guiding storyline for the year: Our Place in God’s Story. Her classroom sits next to a retirement community—a proximity that had long felt full of possibility. Rather than letting that nearness remain incidental, Alicia asked a deeper question: What if our students learned by listening carefully to the lives of their neighbours?

She called the project My Neighbour’s Story Matters.

In this unit, students interviewed residents from the neighbouring retirement community, learning how to listen attentively and respectfully as elders shared their life stories. Students then worked to write and shape those stories, not as assignments to be graded and forgotten, but as gifts. The goal was to publish each story and surprise the residents with a written account of their lives—an act of honouring, gratitude, and care.

What struck me most was that this project was not something done to students. Alicia designed the unit collaboratively with her fifteen Grade 7 students, inviting them into the planning and shaping of the work itself. Together, they attended carefully to questions of voice, responsibility, and relationship.

The response, from both students and residents, was deeply encouraging. The unit nurtured academic growth in writing and storytelling, but it also did something more. Students practiced empathy. They learned the power of attentive listening. They encountered learning as something that binds people together across generations.

Alicia is also clear-eyed about the work still ahead. She has already identified ways the project can be refined and deepened next year. Deeper learning, after all, is never finished. It is cultivated over time.

When education is rooted in wonder, inquiry, and practice, classrooms can become places where learning participates in God’s ongoing story of connection, dignity, and hope. Examples like Alicia’s remind us what this means more broadly for teaching and learning.

Implications for Teaching and Learning

In a time when education is increasingly driven by performance metrics, standardized outcomes, and institutional pressures, it is easy to forget that teaching is not merely technical work—it is deeply formative and spiritual.

Christ-centred education is oriented by a story—the story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. This story shapes how educators understand truth, wisdom, and human flourishing. It reminds us that education is never neutral: it always forms students toward some vision of what it means to live well.

Christ-centred education invites educators to ask not only what we teach, but who our practices are quietly forming. In practical terms, this raises searching questions:

• What vision of the good life is implicit in our curriculum? Do students learn that education is primarily a pathway to status, success, or financial security? Or do students learn that it is a pathway to wisdom, service, and love of neighbour?
• What do our assessment practices teach students to value? Do they reward individual achievement above communal learning, collaboration, and shared growth?
• How do classroom routines shape students’ habits of attention and care? Are all students known, heard, and genuinely invited to participate?
• What kind of community is cultivated through our leadership practices? How do we embody the body of Christ in our classrooms? Are people valued for the gifts they bring to the whole?

These are not questions with quick or comfortable answers. They require sustained reflection, communal discernment, and a willingness to examine assumptions that often remain hidden or unchallenged.

Cultivating, Not Controlling

The language of cultivation is deliberate. Cultivation acknowledges that formation cannot be engineered or guaranteed. It unfolds within particular contexts, shaped by relationships, histories, constraints, and grace.

To cultivate a formative approach is not to control outcomes, but to tend conditions—to create environments in which faithful formation can take root. This posture resists both triumphalism and despair. It recognizes human limits while trusting in God’s ongoing work.

In the end, Christ-centred education is not about mastering formation, but about remaining faithful within it. It is about showing up with care, wisdom, and courage; tending the soil of learning; and trusting that God brings growth in ways we cannot fully see. Teaching, then, becomes not an act of control, but an act of faith.

If you’re intrigued by Edith’s approach to Christian education, consider taking an online course at the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS). Feel free to email her with any questions you may have.

References

Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009. p. 15–26.