The History of the Van Lunen Center
The Van Lunen Center for Executive Management in Christian Schools was established at Calvin College in January of 2007, courtesy of a $2 million gift to the college from the Richard D. Van Lunen Foundation. The Van Lunen Center was established to serve faith-based schools large and small across the U.S. and Canada with a big-tent philosophy, reaching out to schools from a wide-range of faith traditions, including Catholic, evangelical Protestant, Episcopal, independent Christian, Lutheran and Reformed Christian day schools. The 21 fellows selected for summer 2007 represented a wide range of faith traditions, school sizes and geographic location.
The Dedication of the Van Lunen Center was held on October 3, 2007, Calvin College. Dr. Shirley Roels, Director of the Van Lunen Center, gave the keynote address, "Heading the Faith-Full School."
Keynote Address
Dedication of the Van Lunen Center from Van Lunen on Vimeo.
Excerpt from the Dedication by Dr. Gordon VanderBrug
The Foundation’s focus is Christian schools. Why Christian schools? Because we firmly believe that Christian schools are an important element in helping to make ‘the kingdom come here on earth as it is in heaven’.
There were some things that were extremely important to us in the development of the Center. They are built into our six core values, and include developing executives who modeled management from a faith perspective, and having a program which is both collaborative and applied in its approach.
I’d like to underscore just one of the core values—the one that we have come to affectionately call the Big Tent. The importance of this core value is underscored in the graphical reference to a tent profile built into our logo.
It seems to us that within the various parts of Christendom we are particularly good at spending time at how we differ, but not nearly as good at spending time on the vast majority that we hold in common. The possibility of building a program that serves all kinds of Christian schools—Catholic, Lutheran, evangelical, Reformed and Episcopalian - and thus embodies ‘spending time on what we hold in common’ was exceptionally exciting.
We thought it would even strengthen how we all operate within our particular contexts. We did not intend to ask heads of schools to ignore their difference, but to respect them and explore them, while focusing on what we held in common. And I think that we have an excellent start to making this a reality.