Good Shepherd Evangelical Lutheran Church has established a Christian day school in its midst with the thought of carrying out a program of unified Christian training. In the interest of such Christian training, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church is ready to take the full responsibility of also offering what our government requires in the way of elementary education. Such Christian training aims to build up the individual child in Christian faith and thereby proposes also to motivate the child to live as a Christian in all of his present and future activities and relationships of life. The members of Good Shepherd carry out such Christian education with the conviction that in the Holy Scriptures, as God's inspired and inerrant Word, we have an infallible norm and guide for everything that pertains to Christian faith and life.
In letting God's infallible Word speak to the child through such a program of Christian education, we first of all impress upon him the Scriptural truths that all men are by nature dead in trespasses and sin and eternally lost through sin, without any ability to save themselves or to do anything that is spiritually pleasing in God's sight. These truths are not merely expounded in the direct study of God's Word, but are constantly treated as truths and are permitted to stand and function as truths throughout every phase of instruction and training in this school.
Against this humbling background of man's sin and its curses, Christian education brings to the child the joy-inspiring Scriptural truth of the Gospel, the dynamic message that God's incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, has redeemed all men from sin and its curse and won full salvation and eternal life for them as a free gift. It lets the child see this Gospel as the means through which the Holy Spirit has brought him to faith to enjoy all the blessings of salvation. It also points the child to this Gospel as the only means through which the Holy Spirit preserves him in Christian faith and constantly fills his heart with thankful love to make him able and willing to strive after those things that are pleasing in God's sight. While this Gospel is to be clearly unfolded for the child in daily devotions and in special courses which involve a direct study of God's Word, it is also to be commended to the individual child through the Christian personality, example, and testimony of Christian instructors; and directly or indirectly this Gospel message is permitted to cast its illuminating light upon all subject matter, facts, happenings, activities, judgments, principles, interests, and habits with which the child is confronted in the school's curricular and extra-curricular activities.
In such a program of Christian education, Good Shepherd School proposes to neglect nothing that is generally considered essential to a curriculum of elementary education. At the same time, our school gives attention to whatever is called for on each level of education by way of perfecting useful skills, cultivating cultural interests and social graces, promoting physical health, and developing the special gifts and talents of the individual child. Our school strives to do all these things in the conviction that they involve precious gifts of God which are to be cherished and utilized to enable the child to take his proper place and to render valuable services in the home, community, and in all other wholesome relationships in human society. To attain these objectives, Good Shepherd strives to equip its school with adequate facilities and to provide for properly trained teaching personnel.
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church is active in this educational effort because it is convinced that through the program of Christian education it is providing faithfully for the eternal welfare of its children and at the same time supplying them with the one effective motivation for using their knowledge, their skills, and their developed talents in this life to God's glory and for the service of their fellowmen.
As a contribution to good citizenship and its specific responsibilities and obligations, our Christian day school, on the basis of God's Word, strives to implant in our children a high esteem for all governmental authority as being ordained by God. Out of thankful love for their God and Savior, which the Gospel that is taught in our school inspires, children are constrained to serve and obey their government and to assist it in every way in carrying out its vital function of maintaining peace, law, and order.
