Do Christian Schools Need a Strategic Plan?

Spoiler Alert: Yes. No. Sort of.

Image(s) generated using DALL·E, an AI image-generation tool by OpenAI.

Do Christian schools need a strategic plan?

The short answer is no.

I mean, not exactly.

Actually, yes and no.

Okay, maybe more yes than no…but not in the way you think.

Christian schools are NOT for-profit businesses with maximizing profit as their primary objective. They are nonprofit communities with a distinctly Christian mission, called to serve students and families in ways that reflect their shared confession. Their mission is not defined by the latest strategic planning model.

While Christian schools may not need a traditional, corporate-style strategic plan, they do need to plan and think strategically. Faithful and flourishing Christian schools are clear about who they are, whom they serve, how to serve them best, and how they grow and improve over time. Many, if not all, of the elements found in a good strategic plan, are relevant to the work of being a faithful and flourishing Christian school.

So maybe the answer isn’t no after all. You need to plan and strategize. It is just a matter of determining the best way to do such work. Schools need to know where they’re going, how to get there, who is doing what, and how to gather feedback along the way. When used wisely, strategic planning tools and resources help Christian schools do these things with intentionality (which is one of my favorite words when it comes to Christian school leadership).

Why Corporate Models for Strategic Planning Do Not Always Fit

Strategic planning has its roots in military tactics. Leaders design long-term strategies to achieve specific outcomes in battle. Over time, these ideas were adopted by businesses seeking to “defeat” competitors and achieve market dominance (Quick aside: There are a surprising number of education practices that have a military origin, including the multiple choice exam.). In the mid-20th century, leaders and scholars like Peter Drucker helped refine strategic planning for the corporate world, emphasizing efficiency, measurable goals, strategic thinking, and doing all these to achieve a competitive advantage.

By the late 20th century, strategic planning had spread to schools, government agencies, nonprofits, and even churches. The appeal was that they offer structure and guidance.

Alas, there’s a challenge when Christian schools adopt these models without question. Secular strategic planning often prioritizes temporal successes like market share or maximizing profits (even though newer models look at things differently). While these are valuable in some contexts, Christian schools operate with a different framework. As the banner said in the gym of one of the Christian schools where I served, “We change lives for eternity.” A Christian school’s success is measured in more than academic outcomes or enrollment numbers (although these are certainly important), but traditional strategic plans sometimes (but not always) lead us to focus on that which is most easily measured. So, the measurable becomes the priority.

In my study of hundreds of schools, I’ve seen excellent schools with detailed traditional strategic plans and equally impressive schools with simple and less conventional plans. One thing they all had in common was intentionality and a clear direction for the future. They knew their mission, who they were serving, where they were going, and why, and thought strategically about their plans and next moves.

What You Need

And yet, while Christian schools don’t need a strategic plan in the secular sense, the core principles of good planning still matter. If you strip away everything else, a strategic plan simply focuses on mapping out answers to about ten key questions and then using that map regularly. This sort of work can be quite helpful for a Christian school. Whether they call it a strategic plan or not, they ask and answer these types of questions:

1. Why are we here, and what is our mission? Where are we going and why?

2. What is important to us? What do we believe, teach, confess, value, and prioritize? [Note: This area warrants far more depth and attention than when used in a secular context.]

3. What is happening inside and outside (local community, surrounding culture, etc.) of our school? What are the joys and challenges? What are the risks, worries, concerns, opportunities, and promising possibilities?

4. Given all this, what are our next important goals and priorities? Who are the next priorities…meaning whom are we going to serve and why? How do we want to improve, and what do we want to accomplish next (this can be in the next year all the way to five or ten years from now…but some schools strategize for decades)?

5. What is it going to take for us to get these things done? How will we go about accomplishing it? Who needs to do what, when, how, and why? What is the role of each person in this work?

6. How do we keep all of this in mind and help as many people as possible be engaged in making it happen? What stories will serve as anchors for our mission, goals, and life together?

7. How do we know if we are going in the right direction and making progress? How do we create a system to track this regularly?

8. How will we ensure that we have what is needed (people, funds, partners, etc.) to make it happen?

9. What do we do when things don’t go according to plan? Do we have a plan for when parts of the plan don’t go well?

10. How will we know if we have succeeded?

Strategic planning models, used wisely, can help schools clarify their goals, align their efforts, make measurable progress, and ensure faithful stewardship of resources. The key is to adapt these tools to reflect the school’s distinct mission and values. This means not allowing secular frameworks to dictate priorities and processes.

What Faithful and Flourishing Christian Schools Do Instead…or in Addition

Notice how very little in that list of ten questions speaks to the role of God’s Word or the role of prayer. Those are not nice additions. They are fundamental to a Christian school, so they must be essential to how we plan and strategize. Just read through the book of Acts for ample examples, including the disciples gathering and praying in advance of Pentecost. Or, perhaps two of the most helpful books in the Bible when it comes to planning and strategy are Proverbs and the Psalms. Let prayer and study of God’s Word be the starting point for your school…persistently. Then, you can use strategic planning like the ten questions above in a way that serves your mission and purpose rather than becoming your mission and purpose.

Faithful and flourishing Christian schools most certainly plan. They are not aimless. They are intentional. They are reflective. They are unified. They also engage in prayerful planning that is regularly informed by God’s Word. With these fundamentals, they periodically revisit their origin story and reason for existence, ensuring that their mission shapes each decision, policy, program, practice, and priority. It never does…there is always room for improvement, but these schools have formal and prayerful plans to improve over time.

I’m a Fan of a Good, One-Page Plan

Ask anyone who has worked with me. While I may critique overly complex or rigid strategic planning processes that become the tails that wag the Christian education dog, I am a strong, even relentless (some might say fanatical), advocate for strategic plans that are simple, focused, informed by God’s Word, commended to the Lord in prayer, and deeply immersed in the mission of the organization. When done well, a strategic plan is a powerful tool to provide clarity and a shared direction, all while keeping the mission front and center. In fact, I may well talk about the strategic plan more than almost any leader you will meet. Yet, we are also working from a 5-year strategic plan that fits on the front and back sides of a single piece of paper. It is bold, strategic, flexible, immersed in the mission, simple, and inspiring enough that I (and hopefully the entire team) can get up every morning excited to help make things happen. That is my type of strategic plan.

The Real Difference

My point is this. Rather than restricting ourselves to overly rigid frameworks or trying to follow the steps defined in the latest and greatest strategic planning book, thriving Christian schools focus on prayer and discernment in their planning. We revisit core questions regularly. What is our mission? Are we serving families faithfully? How can we grow in fidelity and Christ-centered excellence? Our planning is not about control. It is about trusting God to guide and provide,,,and aligning our words and actions with God’s Word. Along the way, we commend our efforts to the Lord, seek forgiveness and wisdom, find strength and comfort, and receive direction from God’s Word as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.

Is This Just Semantics?

So, do Christian schools need a strategic plan? Some will read this and say yes, that I’m just playing with words. Ultimately, I don’t think it matters, except to say that, yes, thriving Christian schools strategize and plan. What you want to call it is up to you. However, whatever you do, let it be founded on, guided by, sustained by, and held together by being a community of the Word that regularly turns to God in prayer.

Strategic planning models and theories may come and go, but the mission of a Christian school is persistent…to glorify God, serve others, and to provide an education where God’s Word is present and prevalent...ultimately pointing all to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. By focusing on what matters most, Christian schools can flourish, not because they follow the latest strategic planning model but because they are strategic in planning and living out their mission.

Not Quite Done

By the way, I’m not quite finished with this topic, even as the article is getting a bit long. As such, look for a follow-up article next week on what a good plan has in common with Jazz music…improvisation.

Disclaimer: Do you use AI to write the articles on Substack? The ethical use of AI is an important topic. When new technologies emerge, they often evolve faster than our ability to make sense of the ethical implications. As such, I offer this disclaimer to provide a transparent picture of my own journey and approach. I’ve already made mistakes, even embarrassing ones, but I will strive to quickly learn from them and provide a transparent view of my present approach. As such, this disclaimer will be updated over time.

The full initial draft (in writing or as an audio dictation), words, and ideas for my Substack articles always come from me. From there, I often use AI for editing Substack articles. I regularly use Grammarly and/or Microsoft Word’s built-in Spellcheck or Grammar Check (both of which are a form of AI) to aid in proofreading and editing my work on Substack. In instances where I use AI for something other than background research or editing my original work, you can expect that I will cite or note it in the article.

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I continue to evolve in my experimentation with the use of ChatGPT, Grok, CoPilot (and various other ChatBot technologies) to serve as an editor for my Substack publications.

What does this mean? There are three common scenarios, though I hope to experiment with others in the future (and I will update this accordingly):

1. I write a full first draft in Word, Grammarly, or a word processor, and then submit it to the ChatBot, asking it to serve as an editor, akin to how I have one or more people edit almost anything that is published in my formal capacity. This is also similar to how editors review my manuscripts when they are submitted to a journal, newspaper, or book publisher. By the way, when I write for any of these partners, I never use AI beyond the basic spellcheck / grammar check available in Microsoft Word—not even to use and then cite it.

2. I record myself speaking on a topic and then place the recording in a ChatBot to transcribe, remove disfluencies, and provide a draft transcript that I can refine before publishing it. This is where I’ve made the most past mistakes. Because the ChatBot is transcribing, it adds its own grammatical interpretations and even takes liberty with sub-titles, organization, corrections, and adding clarifying language. As such, I’m still learning to use prompts that ensure my words, voice, style, and intent dominate—while also achieving a quality, personal, but streamlined approach to sharing ideas. Because this is an evolving practice for me, and also because it sometimes creates a final draft that can be flagged as AI-generated content, expect that when I use this approach, it will be noted at the beginning or end of the article.

3. I use ChatBots to conduct background research related to topics that I’m writing about, akin to an interactive and advanced search engine. If there are quotes or unique ideas that I include in the article, you can expect that I will give some sort of citation or in-text credit.