Board Annual Planning Session

For most of the day on Saturday, your school board with Dr Daugherty was holed up in a conference room at Lake Quivira Country Club. The planning committee did an excellent job of setting up the agenda for a productive day. It started off with an hour of sharing personal testimonies with the intent of increasing the understanding of how God has developed each board member and brought them to this point in time. It was moving and challenging!

With that tone set, we then jumped into several hours of discussing and praying about where God would have Maranatha go. It was a strong consensus that we know that God is working at Maranatha and we want to stay engaged with that work. We don't have to look far for His work. That is a good thing!

As we talked about the future, one thing is abundantly clear, there will be change. We strove to gain even more unity around important matters such as finance development, personnel development, mission execution and facilities development. In my opinion we advanced that unification of mind - not uniformity of mind, but unity - so that as we work in our committees, we know we are rowing in the same direction.

Finance development - as we discussed opportunities and threats, it became clear that one of our first priorities is to "owe no man anything" as that is a clear principle in the Bible. So as we come to you with vision for moving the school forward, the first big step is eliminating debt. One motivating factor among many is that we only see more and more government intrusion into the operation of religious organizations and we want to be free financially to invest where we need to protect the school.

Personnel development - At some point in the future, faculty, staff and administration personnel will leave due to retirement, other opportunities, etc. We need to thoughtfully plan for that. We have and will continue to do so.

Mission execution - We love our mission statement. It is what we are all about. So we need to make sure we are evaluating our effectiveness in carrying it out and then making adjustments to do so even better.

Facilities development - talk about potential government intrusion, we can see a time where the government will say you can't use public facilities and grounds because you discriminate against certain type of people (i.e. whether they are Christians or gays) so you can't use our tennis courts, soccer fields, etc. So the next step in finances and facilities is to fund securing possession of land and buildings to defend against that development. Is that land at North campus, purchasing a former Shawnee Mission school, new land, etc has not been decided, but we do believe that continued energies in that investigation need to continue.

So a good day! Please remember to thank all of the guys and the lady who serve on the board for their time praying, contemplating, discussing and acting on behalf of Maranatha so that we can stay in step with our God as He carries out His ministry at Maranatha.