Liberty’s Body of Values: Courageous Leadership

Courageous Leadership

At Liberty Classical Academy, we want our body of values to both define who we are and direct how we live. If you get a moment, look through the Body of Values section on the website and discover what it is that really defines and directs our spiritual and academic pursuits as a school. With each value comes a million different ways it can be applied to a student’s life. Our goal through the learning and living experience at Liberty Classical Academy isn’t that we tell our students what they should be or where they should go. Instead, we want to teach them what matters most and then show them how to find it and live it. 

Defined as Courageous Leaders

The challenge in making courageous leadership a core aim and priority at our school is that it requires that we first define the words we’re using. Courage is certainly a subjective term. All around us, culture is ascribing the trait of courage to anyone willing to say what they think or live how they feel. Courage is defined in one context by what someone fights against and in another by who someone marries. 

And as for leadership? Leadership is perhaps one of the most overused words in language. Influencers are called leaders. Innovators are called leaders. Athletes, politicians, and entertainers are called leaders. Those with the loudest voices or the biggest budgets are called leaders. 

What would it look like to say that our students, our graduates, and our alumni truly embody courageous leadership?

We believe that looks different for each of them. For some, it means they’re going to boldly stand for what is True, Good, and Beautiful against a tidal wave of resistance. For others, it’s going to be in the background, where no one sees but many experience. For some it will be about how they use the platforms they’re given and for others it will be about how they pass on those platforms and choose what may be presumed as a quieter path, but is what they know to be God's path for them. Yet our hope is that for all of them, it’s going to be a steadfast commitment to What Matters Most. 

And that commitment will cost them something.

Courageous Leadership as an essential piece of our DNA doesn’t mean that every Liberty graduate becomes a senator. It means that every one of them learns what matters and then learns to stand. For our students and graduates to be defined as courageous leaders, they have to be equipped with Truth that’s bigger than themselves. For them to be directed by the traits of courageous leadership, they have to know how to define it. They have to be able to measure themselves against it.

And that’s why it’s our job to give them the tools they need to think for themselves; to discover Truth and to live it out; to live as though God is who He says He is and that means they can be who He says they are. We have to give them a bigger and better definition of courageous leadership and then remind them that they’re ready to embody it in a world in need of hope.