Dear TRA Families,
The mission of The River Academy is to partner with parents in educating their children to become the next generation of Christian leaders to shape culture through faithful, wise, and joyful Christian living. Two questions I often get asked with regard to this mission statement are:
1. Why Christian leaders; are all people destined for leadership?
2. How exactly does TRA educate leaders? Isn’t this an academic institution, not a leadership training center?
Great questions - here are my answers to both.
First, why would we make it our mission to educate Christian leaders? I usually answer this question by first defining leadership. John Maxwell regularly defines leadership as “influence.” At The River Academy, we believe all of our students will be influencers regardless of where they end up in life. Whether by being mothers and fathers, or employees, or employers, we believe and desire for our graduates to influence the world for good—more importantly, to influence the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In this way, we desire every student at TRA to aspire towards influence in whatever sphere they find themselves in in their future.
For this reason, we believe it critically important to equip our future leaders with the tools necessary to influence well. Some of this is simply encouraging them to be well grounded in their faith. But some of this is also giving them specific tools like the ability to think critically and articulate themselves well. It also means that we want to give them opportunities to actually practice leadership while at TRA.
This leads to my second question: how do we actually help our students grow into leaders? As mentioned above, some of how we do this is by giving them a well-rounded education, but we also equip them by giving them opportunities to lead. Here are a few examples:
Reading Buddies. Students regularly tell me that when they were in their early years here at TRA, they had junior and senior students as reading buddies. They remember thinking to themselves, “When I get older, I can’t wait to be just like them.” Reading buddies serve as a two-way street. On the one hand, it gives our older students the opportunity to invest in students who are younger than them. It helps them get outside of themselves and serve. This is hugely helpful and important for their development as leaders. But it is also a huge blessing to the younger students. Not only do they love the interaction, but it gives them inspiration for how they want to do likewise when they are older.
All-school activities and games. It has been delightful to reinstate after school sports this year. We really missed this during Covid, and it was delightful to see students young and old all playing Eagles Nest together. This does several things to develop leadership. First, the older students can merely play to win; they do this too, but it is not their primary focus. They all go into the games knowing that their first job is to make it enjoyable for the younger students. Leadership is ultimately about putting others’ needs above our own (at least this is Christ’s model for leadership). After school sports and activities help our older students place the good of the whole above their individual desire to win.
House System. Our house system has been a huge help in developing leadership skills in students. Because students are placed in houses with ages ranging from 7th through 12th grade, the older students naturally learn to take a leadership role in their houses. This gets accentuated when students are elected to an official house leadership position, but honestly I am often most encouraged when I see juniors and seniors leading who don’t hold official leadership positions. House has been a game changer for us here at TRA in helping develop future leaders.
In the Classroom. We are educating kids who know how to organize their thoughts, work hard and develop grit, debate persuasively, and convey their convictions and beliefs winsomely. This begins in elementary with students presenting to their classmates through show & tell, oral book reports, spelling bee, and speech meet. These skills are polished in secondary classes such as logic, rhetoric, senior thesis, and apologetics.
I can’t imagine a greater calling right now than investing in the next generation of Christian leaders. Thank you for entrusting your children to us to help partner with you in this endeavor.
We love working with your children and partnering with you in this all-important mission.
Have a great week!
Eric
