Though Kairos Academy Pathfinders is a brand new venture, the founders have dreamed together of starting a uniquely Christian university with a strong STEM program for over 20 years. However, we have come to recognize that Jesus Christ's Church needs far more than just a single college to help her accomplish her mission of making disciples.
Even over 20 years ago, when we were imagining a university, the idea of Kairos has always involved shaping students as disciples of Christ with academic work as merely one of four facets of their education. Genuinely Christian education consists of learning to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. The present vision for how intentional living can be made into a Body-of-Christ-wide venture puts flesh on those bones in a new and profound way.
Academic education that is not rooted in pursuit of our destiny in Christ (purposeful discipleship) inevitably drifts toward the emptiness we see in education today. Both secular and Christian schools generally pursue the training of the mind in a vacuum. By ignoring the whole person they fail to equip whole persons.
Parents are often fooled into seeing Christian schools as looking better than public schools at equipping the whole person. Yet all too often these schools fail their students more profoundly than do public schools. How can that be? Their students believe they have received a truly Christian education when they often have merely received a secular education with a Christian sounding veneer. Tragically, such students end up inoculated against real discipleship – possessed of an education that is almost entirely devoid of real contact with God and real growth as believers except for that which happens in spite of the fundamentally worldly design of the departments, classes, etc.
Kairos Academy Pathfinders will equip churches to equip parents to disciple their children. We will provide the tools and training so that parents can show their children what it means to love the Lord with their whole selves. They will be able to provide their children with a high-quality academic experience that is placed in the proper context so that they can use the fruits of that education wisely and well.
Young people have been leaving the church in droves. Many come to be convinced by peers, by teachers, and by the media that the world has more to offer them than does the church. We believe that intentionally showing young people what it means to live better in Christ is the single most powerful antidote to this contagion. Those who know from experience what it is to see God change their lives are far more likely to follow Him all the time, and to stand firm in Him when life gets ridiculously hard, than are those who merely know the right words to say.
At Kairos Academy Pathfinders we seek to catalyze the emergence of generations of resilient, wise, and whole followers of Christ who are able and eager to use all that they are and all that they know to forward the Kingdom of God in the earth. This is our intended contribution to the Great Commission.