Welcome back to Term 3 and welcome to a new Messenger format. We hope you enjoy the change and continue to find The Messenger useful and enjoyable as we share just a small sample of College life at Green Point Christian College.

I was recently speaking with a parent who had been in conversation with some other families who found themselves asking the question, "What is Green Point Christian College about?". This question intrigued me, so I asked what they meant by it. The response was, "You know, is the College about sport or academics?" I then followed up with the question, "What did the families say?" "Some weren’t sure; they landed on it being a place where students are known and belong." I quite liked that answer as it captured a part of what our College seeks to do. This parent then asked me what I thought Green Point Christian College was about, and I thought I would share my answer with you.

The very core of what Green Point Christian College is, in one word, Christian. It is through the lens of being Christian that we see and do all the other things we do here at GPCC.

Now, the danger of using this one word is that we humans have a tendency to collapse things into false dichotomies and use them to define what a place is not, as well as what it is. We see this in the dichotomy above of sport-focused or academic-focused. The unstated assumption becomes that if a place is sporty, it is not academic, and vice versa.

When I use the word Christian as the core single word, I don’t use it as one side of a dichotomy; I use it as a foundation—a foundation that is large enough to carry all the other words.

Here at Green Point Christian College, because Christian is our foundation, we believe there is a place of belonging, a place for academics, a place for the arts, and a place for service. As image-bearers of God, we need all these things and more to flourish and discover and unfold the gifts we have.

As a College, we are continually seeking to be lifelong learners who seek to improve the work we do to teach and form our students well. We see the fruit of this as we continue to see improvement in the academic culture of the college. We are seeing strong participation in our sporting programs and a renewed focus on our sporting character and culture, and we are working on continuing to cultivate a culture of welcome and "having a go" in the creative arts. Undergirding all of this is the ongoing reality for us that all these things were created by, belong to, and are held together by Christ. So, the truest and ultimately most life-giving way we can approach these things is from that foundation.

So, GPCC is a Christian school. A school where students can work hard and see their gifts grow and flourish, where they do not need to have their identity collapsed into a single label, but they can build and be equipped for a rich colourful life of redemptive action. 

While we will never get every part of this perfect, I hope we never lose the part that drives all the others. Our Christianness.