Allow me to first introduce myself and share a small part of my personal story because it––and its resulting connection to the good folks of Converge––is an unusual one.
I am a full-time kindergarten teacher who accidentally became an author of two books, one of which became an unexpected bestseller. You read that correctly. I did not plan to become an author. I was trained as an elementary educator at Wheaton College and I spend my days in the joyous albeit chaotic presence of five-year-olds.
But I, with my father (the world-renowned New Testament scholar Scot McKnight), co-authored two books about power abuse and creating cultures of goodness. Together we wrote A Church Called Tōv and our recently published book Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church Into a Tōv Culture. If it’s not obvious, the topics of our books are far, or perhaps not so far, removed from education.
We wrote because we watched sorrowfully in 2018 as the elders and executive pastor of our former church––Willow Creek Community Church in the suburbs of Chicago––publicly denied the truth about its senior pastor. The Willow Creek headline was personal because the sexual allegations made against Bill Hybels came from friends of our family. We knew the accusers to be truthful and would not collude to destroy its senior pastor as the church deceitfully and maliciously claimed. But most importantly, we wrote because we envisioned a better way for an institution to respond to crisis––a way of truth and compassion and goodness; one that would resist abuse and instead promote healing for the wounded.
The Willow Creek story was personally painful and disorienting. I had never before witnessed a church intentionally deceive its congregation, and I naively assumed the masses would agree with the victim and whistleblower’s call to truth and repentance. Instead, sides were taken, anger erupted, and I lost friends because of what I publicly spoke and wrote in defense of the victims. But again, these self-protective responses that ignored and further traumatized the wounded are what led my father and me to write A Church Called Tōv together. We wrote about Jesus’s goodness and his compassionate care for the hurting.
Despite the pain and enormous loss from those months in 2018, my soul today remains hope-filled because I understand this: An institution’s toxic responses are not who Jesus showed himself to be. Instead, the gospels are full of Jesus’s truth and of his goodness and of ways he cared for the wounded. They tell of his faithful presence with the lost and hurting. They tell of his compassion and of the ways he healed people and freed them from sin and illness. And as a teacher of the school’s youngest students, this overwhelms my heart with thankfulness: Jesus told the little children to come to him. Because he is good.
He is tōv.
The key word here is that beautiful, three-letter one that appears in both titles of our books: tōv. Tōv is an ancient Hebrew word that means “good” or “goodness.” In fact, if you open your Bible to the very first page of the book of Genesis, there you’ll read tōv seven times:
Light is tōv,
land and sea are tōv,
plants are tōv,
day and night are tōv,
sea animals and birds are tōv ,
land animals are tōv.
God saw all that he had made and it was very tōv.
The word tōv follows more than 700 times in the Old and New Testaments, and I’ve learned again from my father that it is hard to overstate the importance of goodness as one of the Bible’s greatest moral categories. Tōv should shape our entire lives as Christians because God himself is tōv. Everything God created is tōv, and everything God does is tōv. Jesus is our tōv shepherd. Our Bible is the good news––the book of tōv. Tōv is God’s design for all of creation, forever. So because tōv should shape the entire life of a Christ-follower, that means it should also shape teaching, learning, and leading within classrooms and schools.
And this is where my two deepest passions converge––teaching and tōv. I believe tōv teaching flows from a person’s character; one that is day by day, hour by hour attentive to the Spirit. Your character is who you are as an educator. As a tree’s fruit expresses the character of the tree, so teaching and leading expresses your character. This I’ve learned and witnessed since I began advocacy work six years ago: A person’s character has more influence than their talent and skill. Related to education, your character has a deeper influence on your students and in your school than your lesson planning or classroom management skills or leadership ability ever will.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting educators discard best practice or ignore evaluations from administration. (I will be evaluated in this my twenty-sixth year of teaching, and I still get nervous when my principal walks into my classroom to begin taking notes and ranking my performance.) But what he sees in my practice is important. I will try to absorb my principal’s feedback and implement his suggestions.
I will also tell you this, however: My most effective moments as a teacher have been those when I am by God’s grace attentive to the Spirit, submitted to his goodness and love. My most effective moments as a teacher occur when by his grace, I’m attentive to being courageously tōv, which leads to more intentional and faithful presence with my students. In these moments, I am by the grace of Christ a gentler and more patient teacher. I look in my students’ faces and delight in them and their endless comments, and I love them more freely. I cannot rely on myself to be tōv and faithfully present but I can do this: I can rely on the life-changing goodness and faithfulness of God. I can ask for his help in surrendering to his Spirit even in my classroom.
Because remember––tōv should shape our entire lives as followers of Christ. Goodness is not a part of our character that gets shed upon arrival at school. God designed tōv to follow us into school and into classrooms and to permeate them. It should anchor us and guide us; it should influence and shape our decisions and our responses and our conversations and our relationships. We don’t always get it right and there’s grace for that, but tōv should be what a follower of Christ strives for, always.
I end with this: Who you are determines what you do. And what you do starts with who you are. A tōv person will do tōv things because goodness is stored within the heart. Courageous goodness matters to God. I look forward to seeing you at Converge 2025. Until then––be tōv!
