The Core Values Series Part One
"Ministry is best done in the context of a relationship."
We started Divine Savior with a shared mission of sharing Christ’s love with our community. We knew the best way to do that was to create relationships with the people around us first. That’s why we opened a school and a church in Doral almost 20 years ago.
Education serves the needs of a community. We knew that by meeting the needs of those around us, we’d get the opportunity to get to know our community, too. In those relationships, we could share Christ’s love with students and their families. We’d get to do lots of ministry, and we’d welcome people into our church, too, as it served the needs of our community with opportunities to worship, connect, and serve.
In the past fifteen years, God has blessed our ministry. We’ve built thousands of relationships through our school and our church. We’ve also added four more church campuses and three more academy campuses to the original one in Doral.
We are now a team of nearly 150 people doing ministry together. And we’ve realized that ministry isn’t just best done in the context of relationships with students and their families; it’s best done in great relationships with each other, among the members of the Divine Savior Team.
Last year we embarked on a journey to
CLARIFY our identity
UNIFY our team
ENCOURAGE each other
IMPROVE our culture or “the way we do things around here”
The first step was clarifying and communicating our identity through our core values. The next step was to sit down with our staff in Doral to receive feedback about these values and how we could use them to make Divine Savior a great place to do ministry. Finally, we started building the structures we needed to support and encourage each other. All of the work we did was summarized in a book and presented to our Doral campus two weeks ago, before the start of this 2019-2020 school year.
Now it's time to share more of this project with our other campuses, as well as you, our Divine Savior supporters. We're excited to kick-off this series of posts with you today.
The Core Values Project is an on-going project, just like our mission. And just like it takes all of us to fulfill our mission, it takes all of us to make Divine Savior a great place to do ministry. We all contribute to our culture, and we all have a responsibility to care for one another.
“We love because He first loved us,” (I John 4:19).
May God continue to bless the ministry of Divine Savior, as we seek to share His love with students, families, and each other!