A Note on This Post: The framework and insights presented here draw substantially from Dr. Mark Witwer's webinar Nurturing Faith in Christian Education and his book Teaching Christianly. This article synthesizes his analysis into actionable principles for educators and school leaders. The full webinar is available to view on-demand here.
When Academic Excellence and Spiritual Formation Feel Like Competitors
The question comes up repeatedly in faculty meetings across Christian schools: Do we have time for spiritual formation if we're focused on academic rigor? The tension is real—there are only so many hours in a day, and parents expect measurable academic results. But this question rests on a false assumption: that academic excellence and spiritual formation are fundamentally at odds rather than potentially aligned.
One of the most important questions Christian educators face is whether classroom instruction can actually shape students' faith, or whether spiritual formation happens only in chapel, youth group, and service days. Dr. Mark Witwer—who spent four decades as a science teacher, curriculum director, and school administrator, and now teaches at Knox Theological Seminary—argues that this assumed split is misleading. It obscures what becomes possible when teaching is deliberately structured.
"Academic excellence and spiritual formation don't have to be in tension," Dr. Witwer explains in his webinar Nurturing Faith in Christian Education. "When you understand them rightly, they actually reinforce each other—not through add-on programs or devotional moments tacked onto class time, but through the way you teach your subject."
The key insight is that these goals don't require sacrifice. They require alignment. Educators don't have to choose between them; they have to understand how they work together and build their practice around that relationship.
The three principles below come from Witwer's framework. Each is grounded in theology, supported by research on how people learn, and concrete enough to actually implement. Together, they shift how we think about instruction—positioning it as central to spiritual formation, not separate from it. They also acknowledge the real obstacles schools face in making this work.
Idea 1: Teaching Well Is a Means, Not the End
The Theological Foundation
Matthew 22:37–40 contains a passage that should reshape how Christian schools think about their purpose. When a lawyer asked Jesus which commandment was greatest, He answered with what we call the Great Commandment:
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind... And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
What's striking about this answer is what Jesus doesn't mention. He doesn't list academic achievement. He doesn't reference test scores or curricular standards. Instead, He says that the entire body of Scripture—all of God's moral and spiritual teaching—rests on love. Love for God and love for others.
This commitment forms the foundation of Christian education. Not the elimination of rigor, but its reorientation toward what actually matters.
At the center of Witwer's thinking is a distinction that sounds simple but proves transformative in practice: Academic excellence is the means. Love for God and neighbor is the end. When these get confused—when academic achievement becomes the ultimate goal—Christian schools have lost their way. They're optimizing for something intermediate rather than something ultimate.
This doesn't mean lowering academic standards or abandoning rigorous curriculum. Christian schools should maintain strong, intellectually solid programs. Rather, it means recognizing that instruction shaped by Christian principles is already positioned to serve deeper formation. The intellectual and spiritual dimensions of learning aren't competing for the same hours. They're actually part of the same work, when you understand it correctly.
Obstacles and Honest Complications
This reorientation doesn't happen smoothly in most Christian schools. Teachers often trained in secular programs or conventional education schools learned to separate academic content from moral formation. Retraining that instinct requires real investment in professional development—something many schools struggle to afford.
Second, the pressure to deliver measurable academic results is genuine. Colleges expect strong GPAs and test scores. Parents are paying for college prep. These expectations don't measure spiritual formation, and schools that focus heavily on faith integration without delivering strong academic outcomes may face parent concerns and enrollment challenges.
Third, talking about "love for God and neighbor" as a unifying educational aim assumes people share theological understanding. In denominationally diverse Christian schools—or ones serving families with varying faith commitments—articulating this vision clearly enough to guide actual teaching decisions without alienating community members is genuinely difficult.
What This Means in Practice
Despite these obstacles, real progress is possible. For school leaders, this reorientation has clear implications:
- In hiring: Are you asking candidates how their discipline deepens students' understanding of God's character and His call to justice—or just whether they can teach content and manage classrooms?
- In curriculum review: Do you expect teachers to explain not just what they're teaching, but why—in language that connects to faith and human flourishing?
- In leadership and professional development: How regularly do you return faculty attention to your school's theological purpose? This should happen consistently—not just during mission revisions.
For individual teachers, this requires asking a more demanding question before designing each unit: What do I most want my students to understand about God, about human dignity, or about their calling to serve—and how does my content serve that?
This kind of reflection is exactly where curriculum mapping tools become valuable. Atlas lets you document these connections at the unit and lesson level, creating a record of the reasons behind your instructional choices. When you map your semester this way, you can ask the right question: Are we actually building toward love for God and neighbor, or have we drifted into just covering content?
Idea 2: Instruction Must Engage the Imagination, Not Just Transmit Information
The Cognitive Science Problem
Here's something research and neuroscience both confirm, but many Christian schools overlook: Believing correct theological statements doesn't produce spiritual transformation.
Philosopher James K.A. Smith makes this case forcefully in You Are What You Love. His argument challenges a common assumption in Christian education: that teaching students right theology combined with moral exhortation will make them people who love God and neighbor. The research suggests it doesn't work that way.
Cognitive neuroscientist Paul Zull's work on learning explains why. When you transfer information through lectures or textbooks, you're mainly activating language and working memory—a narrow band of the brain. But lasting behavior change, real engagement, and the formation of lasting values and identity require something more. They need the emotional centers, the reward systems, and the parts of the brain connected to imagination and meaning. Research is clear: People retain more, change behavior more, and stay engaged longer when learning connects to significance and purpose rather than when information is just delivered as facts.
This is why you can have a student ace an exam on Christian ethics while acting selfishly. And why another student, shaped over years by a teacher who helped them see God's character in chemistry, history, or literature, carries that way of seeing into adulthood—even through challenges to their faith.
A Four-Decade Case Study in Imagination and Formation
Witwer's career shows this principle in action. For four decades, he taught science—biology, chemistry, earth science—in Christian schools. Throughout that time, he kept returning to one consistent organizing idea, woven through all his units:
Nature reveals the wisdom and genius of God.
This wasn't something he added to lesson plans as an afterthought. It wasn't a devotional moment tacked on at the end of class. It was the lens through which he taught everything. When students studied cellular respiration, they encountered a system of remarkable design. When they analyzed plate tectonics, they saw both stability and purpose. Year after year, unit after unit, students encountered the same big idea in different contexts: God is brilliant. His creation shows it.
Years later, a former student told him something striking. His faith had been seriously challenged in college. But he said this: "Those big ideas about God's character in nature may have saved my faith. Not because we answered every question, but because you shaped how I see the world."
Obstacles to Imagination-Centered Teaching
This kind of teaching faces real resistance in Christian schools. First, many teachers trained in conventional subject-area pedagogy struggle to identify what truly captures their own imagination in their discipline. Professional development often treats subjects as content to deliver rather than as domains of genuine wonder. This leaves teachers unprepared for this kind of imaginative work.
Second, teaching that engages imagination takes more sophisticated lesson design, more varied assessments, and more time for student exploration. This adds to resource pressures schools already feel. Teachers may worry about falling behind in content coverage.
Third, schools face pressure toward efficiency metrics—content coverage, test performance—that don't measure imagination-engagement. A teacher investing serious time in exploring big ideas might fall behind in content coverage, creating tension with administrative expectations.
What This Means in Practice
These complications are real, but the principle applies across every subject:
For English teachers: What genuinely captures your intellectual imagination about literature? The way authors reveal human moral complexity? How stories show redemption? When you can articulate what you find meaningful in your subject, you offer students something much more valuable than content. You offer a vision of how meaning works.
For mathematics teachers: Yes, procedural skill and problem-solving matter. But what engages your imagination about mathematics itself? The elegance of how abstract symbols capture truth? The way patterns reveal order? The responsibility that comes with understanding systems that affect lives? When students see that you love mathematics because it reveals something true about how the world works, they start looking for that truth themselves.
For history teachers: You're not just narrating events chronologically. You're exploring the recurring human drama of moral choice—injustice and courageous resistance, failure and redemption, the slow arc toward justice. When students understand that you teach history to show them how to love their neighbors and pursue shalom in their own time, they stop seeing it as irrelevant.
The underlying truth stays consistent: Formation comes before and goes deeper than information. Teaching, done right, is about helping students see—and awakening their sense of wonder, their longing, their intuition that the world holds meaning.
How Atlas Supports This Work
Curriculum mapping serves a real purpose here. Atlas lets you step back and see whether the big ideas you care about are actually being reinforced across your units, or whether you're only engaging students' imagination sporadically. More importantly, it creates space for the reflection that deepens teaching: Which learning experiences genuinely captivate students? When do students show evidence of seeing rather than just comprehending? Where could you reinforce the big idea more intentionally?
When you document your learning experiences in Atlas—the discussions, investigations, activities that actually engage students—a pattern emerges of where imaginative thinking is happening. Assessment Tracking becomes particularly useful here. When you document which assessments ask students to wrestle with meaning—to connect learning to deeper principles, to human worth, to their potential calling—you start seeing patterns. Is imagination-engagement concentrated in certain units or courses? Are some classes still operating in information-transfer mode? This visibility enables intentional, school-wide work rather than relying on individual teacher initiative.
Idea 3: What Gets Graded Communicates Your Actual Priorities
The Nonverbal Communication Problem
Communication research shows something important that every Christian school leader should understand: when what you say and what you actually do conflict, people believe what you do.
You can deliver eloquent talks about faith-integrated learning. Your mission statement can emphasize spiritual formation. You can tell students that their character matters as much as their GPA.
Then you give an assessment that measures only content knowledge—and you've just sent a much louder message than any words can.
This is Witwer's most sobering insight, and also his most actionable one for leaders.
In Christian schools, we typically position spiritual formation as the context for academics—something that happens in chapel, small groups, and service days. Meanwhile, the things you actually grade—tests, essays, projects, quizzes—measure only cognitive learning. The structure itself communicates what really matters, regardless of what you say.
The unspoken message gets through loud and clear: Spiritual formation is nice, but it's not really part of the academic work. It's extra. Optional.
This doesn't just create confusion. It actually undermines what Christian schools are trying to accomplish. It reinforces the false split that Christian education should dismantle—the idea that faith and intellectual work are separate things.
Obstacles to Assessment Redesign
Changing assessment isn't simple. Teachers often weren't trained in how to measure something like spiritual or relational growth. Teacher preparation typically focuses on testing factual and procedural knowledge. Adding dimensions like meaning-making and faith requires both new thinking and new skills.
Second, assessments directly affect grades, transcripts, and college admissions. Parents and institutions want to know exactly what's being measured and how it will impact students' records. Adding less-standardized measures of spiritual growth raises fair questions about consistency and fairness in grading.
Third, in theologically diverse schools—or ones serving families with different faith commitments—you face a delicate challenge: How do you assess spiritual formation without overstepping into indoctrination? What counts as growth in love for God in a community with varied beliefs? This requires careful thought.
What This Means in Practice
Witwer offers a solution that's both elegant and doable: Add a recurring element to your assessments—across tests, projects, and assignments—that asks students to explain how their unit learning connects to greater love for God or neighbor. Grade it generously. Start small. Do it consistently.
Why this works:
- It redirects student attention during learning. When students know this question is coming, they start watching for connections throughout the unit—not as an afterthought, but as they're learning. The thinking becomes part of the learning itself.
- It signals what you actually value. The moment it appears on a grade, you've communicated that this matters. The grade doesn't have to be huge, but its presence sends a powerful signal.
- It's sustainable. You're not overhauling your assessment system. You're adding one thoughtful prompt to what you're already doing.
- It works across subjects. A chemistry teacher asks: "How does understanding this process deepen your appreciation for God's design or your responsibility as a steward?" A literature teacher: "What does this character's choice reveal about human dignity or redemption?" A history teacher: "What does this moment teach us about justice, courage, or how we navigate moral complexity?" The structure stays the same while the content fits each subject.
The real power isn't the grade itself. It's the habit of thinking relationally that the repeated question builds. When students expect the question, they practice watching for connections. That practice—deliberately connecting academic content to questions of meaning and calling—is the actual formation work.
The Leadership Dimension: The Hardest Work
For administrators, Witwer is direct: Only leadership can create conditions where this kind of teaching becomes normal.
Individual teachers may catch the vision. Some already teach this way instinctively. But culture—the shared values and practices that define an organization—emerges from decisions only leaders control:
- Hiring: Are you asking whether candidates understand that excellence and spiritual formation belong together? Are you hiring people who can do this?
- Schedules: Do teachers have planning time to think deeply about how their subject serves formation, or does the schedule force constant content coverage?
- Professional development: Are you training teachers in faith integration, or just in classroom management and content delivery?
- Meeting agendas: How often do faculty meetings return to your school's theological purpose? This should happen regularly—not just during mission revision.
- Budget: If curriculum mapping gets no funding, faith-integration training is underfunded, and teachers have no time for assessment redesign, you've answered what actually matters—nonverbally.
- Accountability: Do you explicitly ask teachers to integrate faith and learning, or is it treated as nice-to-have?
- The good news: you don't need a complete overhaul. Consistent leadership attention to what matters most—sustained over time—gradually reshapes culture.
How Atlas Enables This Work
This is where curriculum mapping becomes a leadership tool, not just a teacher tool. When teachers document their curriculum in Atlas and mark where spiritual formation happens, you gain visibility into something that was previously invisible: Are we actually pursuing faith-integration consistently, or only sporadically? Which departments do this deeply? Which ones are still treating it as optional?
More importantly, Assessment Tracking lets you see whether your actual assessments align with what you claim matters most. This visibility is powerful: Across all our courses, are students regularly asked—and graded—on their ability to connect their learning to faith and character? Is this happening across disciplines, or just in certain areas?
This visibility enables better questions in faculty meetings:
- "What learning dimensions are we actually measuring in our assessments?"
- "Where do we see spiritual and relational learning being formally assessed?"
- "How could we expand this without creating impossible workload?"
- "What training would help teachers design these assessments well?"
The key point: Atlas doesn't create new work. It makes existing work visible. That visibility then enables the leadership decisions necessary for real cultural change.
The Integration Question: A Strategic Framework for Leadership
The three principles above aren't separate recommendations. They work together as connected parts of one strategy. As you think about this in your school, consider how they build on each other:
Principle 1 asks: What's the ultimate aim of Christian education? (Love for God and neighbor, with academic excellence as the means)
Principle 2 asks: How do you actually nurture that aim? (Through learning experiences that engage imagination and perception, not just information transfer)
Principle 3 asks: How do you know you're actually doing it? (Through assessments that ask students to connect their learning to faith and meaning)
These three work together at every level of your school:
- In strategic planning: Are your published learning outcomes explicitly aligned to the formation of love for God and neighbor?
- In curriculum design: Are teachers mapping not just content, but the big ideas and experiences designed to engage students' imaginations?
- In assessment: Do your formal assessments measure not only academic mastery, but also students' ability to connect their learning to faith and calling?
- In professional development: Are you helping teachers understand their subject as a domain where faith formation happens?
Atlas supports this integrated work. It lets you document curriculum at the unit and lesson level, articulate the big ideas driving your teaching, and track where assessments ask students to integrate faith with academic content. In practical terms, it makes visible—for both individual teachers and school leaders—whether your actual practice aligns with your stated mission.
Toward Implementation: Acknowledging Complexity While Permitting Progress
The vision described here is ambitious and won't happen easily. Aligning excellence with spiritual formation, engaging imagination alongside rigor, restructuring assessment to measure what matters—these are substantial undertakings. They require change not only in individual teaching but in structures, norms, and sometimes in hiring decisions.
These changes also require real investment. You'll need time for professional development, curriculum redesign, assessment work. You'll need to invest in tools like curriculum mapping. You'll need leaders who keep this vision front and center even when other pressures push for attention. This takes years, not months.
But progress doesn't have to wait for perfection. A single teacher can restructure their unit planning around the big ideas that genuinely capture their imagination. A single department can examine its assessments and ask: Where are we asking students to think about love for God and neighbor? A single leader can add one question to each faculty meeting: How does this decision align with our deepest purpose?
But—and this is crucial—individual effort isn't enough to transform culture. Culture comes from consistent leadership attention, structural support through budgets and schedules, accountability, and visible commitment from those in authority to what actually matters. That leadership work is essential. The good news: it doesn't require starting over. It requires consistency and clarity about priorities, sustained over time.
The tension between academic excellence and spiritual formation gets resolved not by choosing between them, but by understanding they're part of the same work. When educators and leaders grasp that integration, they can build systems—in curriculum, teaching, and assessment—that make it real.
Watch the Full Webinar
For a deeper exploration of these ideas—along with Dr. Witwer's stories from four decades in the classroom—the complete webinar is available free.
Watch Nurturing Faith in Christian Education Webinar →
This webinar is part of Faria's growing series of resources for faith-based educators. New sessions release regularly. The full recording is free and available now.
About Dr. Mark Witwer
Dr. Witwer has spent four decades in K–12 education as a classroom teacher, curriculum director, and administrator. He's now an adjunct professor at Knox Theological Seminary and author of Teaching Christianly (ACSI Purposeful Design)—a concise, theology-grounded resource for teacher training and professional reflection. ACSI also offers an online course built around the book.
Resources & Further Reading
Key Works Referenced:
- Teaching Christianly by Mark Witwer (ACSI Purposeful Design)
- You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith
- The Art of Changing the Brain by Paul Zull
Scripture Referenced:
- Matthew 22:37–40 (The Great Commandment)
Research on Learning & Formation:
- Zull, J. E. (2002). The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. Stylus Publishing.
- Smith, J. K. A. (2009). You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Brazos Press.
- Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-Learning and the Science of Instruction (4th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.