Recently I had the opportunity to take a group of HCA student leaders to a Student Leadership and Community Service Forum sponsored by William Jewell College in Liberty. This was a full day of keynotes and breakout sessions, giving our students the opportunity to hear from a wide variety of leaders in the non-profit service community in Kansas City. One of the organizations there was the Youth Volunteer Corps or Kansas City, one of the organizations featured on our HCA Serves website.
What I found most interesting (and encouraging) was the conversation in the car on the way home. Apparently one of the speakers in a breakout session made it very clear that she did not come from "a faith-based perspective" in her approach to community service. Yet she made repeated references to "justice", "evil", and "right & wrong". Our students quickly discerned that, apart from a worldview that is built on absolute truth based upon the character of a sovereign God, those terms are essentially meaningless and become nothing more than opinion. I reminded them of one of the speakers from our Understanding the Times class who talks about people "stealing bricks from our worldview in order to build their own."
It is this worldview training that is at the core of everything we do at HCA, beginning with youngest preschool child to the student who will be graduating in a few months. What an encouragement it is when we get evidence like this that our students "get it"!
