Beyond Good Intentions: Why Christian Schools Need Evidence of Faith Formation
by Michael Arnold: Guest Writer for the Faith Journey blog.
Abraham Kuyper’s famous declaration — “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” — has long served as a rallying cry for Christian education. Most Christian school teachers would nod enthusiastically in agreement. The harder question is: are our students nodding too?
That gap — between what we believe and what we can actually verify our students are internalizing — sits at the heart of one of the most important conversations happening in Christian schools today. It’s the difference between hoping faith formation is happening and knowing it is.
In a recent webinar hosted by the faith-based team at Faria Education Group, Kent Ezell, a 5th-grade teacher at Dutton Christian School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, made the case for why evidence — not intuition, not assumption, not hopeful optimism — is the tool that can take Christian schools from good to great. What follows are some of the most important ideas he shared, in his own words.
“The passion is there. The desire is there. I don’t know if we always have the structure in place.”
Kent has spent 25 years in Christian classrooms — as a teacher, a middle school principal, and an instructor at Cornerstone University. He describes his deep hope in a single sentence: “To journey with my students to grow to be fully devoted followers of Jesus.” It’s that clarity of purpose that makes his next observation all the more striking.
“I have not met a teacher yet who doesn’t want to integrate faith into what they do each day and have students see God in all things,” he said. “The passion is there, the desire is there. I don’t know if we always have the structure in place.”
That missing structure, he argues, is why so many schools that are doing genuinely good work are not yet doing great work. Passion without a feedback mechanism is, as Kent describes it, an open loop — energy expended without any way to know if it’s landing.
“Evidence allows us to see if faith formation is really happening,” he said. “It gives us eyes. It allows us to examine — is what we’re doing in the classroom really landing?”
The Problem: Running Without a Thermostat
To illustrate the difference between schools that have that structure and those that don’t, Kent used a metaphor that landed with immediate clarity.
“An open-loop system does not have a thermostat. It is on all the time, and it doesn’t care about anything — it just keeps going. There’s no feedback telling it it needs to slow down, no feedback telling it to turn on or turn off.”
He applied that image directly to his own teaching history. “I will tell you that I have been extremely guilty of this for probably most of my career, to be honest. It is until fairly recently that I discovered that my classroom really needs to be a closed-loop system.”
A closed-loop system — the thermostat model — has a set temperature, a sensor, and a course-correction mechanism. “What evidence does is allows us to see: are our students getting it? If not, then we need to go back and look at how we planned.”
The conviction came from experience, not theory. Kent described reviewing student exit tickets and reflection journals and discovering that what he thought had been a rock-solid lesson hadn’t registered the way he’d hoped. “I thought I had the most wonderful plans. I thought I taught it really well. I looked at the evidence, and my students didn’t get it at all.” Disheartening, he admitted — but also clarifying. The feedback told him exactly where to go back and adjust.
“The struggle piece is that it’s easy to live in this open loop,” he said. “We just kind of teach it, and we assume that students are getting it.”
A Warning Worth Sitting With
There’s a reason Kent’s framework carries more than pedagogical urgency. It carries a theological one.
“When teachers are not engaging faith into content, students are picking up a worldview,” he said plainly. “It’s not a biblical worldview at all. They’re seeing a duality — they’re seeing that faith is okay in Bible class. That’s where I engage my faith. I don’t need to engage it anywhere else.”
He described the result as a kind of “closet Christianity” — a faith that gets brought out for church and Grandma’s house, then quietly tucked away when Friday night or Monday morning arrives. “We just take Jesus and put him next to us, and then we put him in the closet when we go out with friends. It’s a duality of faith.”
For administrators and educators, the implication is not subtle. When Jesus is left out of the math classroom or the science lab, we are implicitly teaching students which rooms of their future lives he belongs in — and which rooms he doesn’t.
“Our job as teachers is to reveal,” Kent said. “It is to reveal God in all things. Students don’t naturally see God in all things. It is our job to uncover that for them.”
Clearing Up a Critical Confusion: Faith Formation vs. Faith Engagement
Before any evidence-based approach can take root, Kent argues that educators need to hold two distinct concepts clearly in mind — and he was careful not to collapse them into one.
“True faith formation is the work of the Holy Spirit,” he said. “It is how God is working in the hearts and minds of our students. Faith engagement is our work — and it’s our role that we need to do.”
The distinction matters because it protects against two opposite errors. The teacher who says “the Holy Spirit does the real work, so I’ll focus on my content” is abdicating a sacred responsibility. But the teacher who treats faith integration as a performance metric — something to check off rather than something to live into — is equally off course.
Kent also pushed back on a common informal approach to faith integration: the well-meaning but unplanned “serendipitous moment.” “I hear sometimes teachers tell me, ‘I just speak about God at the kind of serendipitous moments that just kind of come — I don’t really plan.’ And I’ve had wonderful faith engagements doing that.” He paused before adding: “But really, true faith engagement is planned out. It is planned out through effective essential questions, through objectives, and through thinking through how am I going to scaffold my students to get to the point where they’re able to answer my essential question.”
The difference between a spontaneous faith comment and a designed faith encounter is roughly the difference between a lightning bolt and a power grid. Both produce light. Only one does it reliably, repeatedly, and for every student in the room.
“We are to intentionally design,” Kent said, “and invite students in to see and to respond to God in their learning.”
The Faith Formation Flywheel
Drawing on Jim Collins’ concept from Good to Great, Kent describes a “faith formation flywheel” — three interlocking practices that, when working together, build momentum over time.
Plan — Writing faith-infused essential questions that give students a genuine, open-ended theological inquiry to pursue. As an example from his own classroom, Kent asks his 5th-grade math students: Does God care about small things? “We’re dealing with decimals, we’re dealing with fractions — there are lots of small things. Does God care about those? Does God care about the side of the hallway you walk on when you’re going to the restroom? Does God care at recess if you play football or soccer? Fifth graders don’t think about that. He does care about those small things.” That question, displayed prominently on a whiteboard, anchors the entire unit — not just the math, but the worldview embedded in learning it.
Teach Christianly — Scaffolding students toward those essential questions throughout a unit, revealing God in the content rather than tacking him on at the end. “It is my job to reveal God in that subject,” Kent said. “Social studies teachers, their job is to reveal God in social studies, in history, in things of the past — where was God in this place? When we’re reading stories, what is God’s story in this creation, fall, redemption, restoration?”
Collect Evidence — Gathering student reflections, projects, and artifacts that show whether students are actually engaging their faith — and at what depth. And then doing something with what you find. “The curriculum map should be a living document,” Kent said. “Go into your product, change those things — say what worked and what landed and what didn’t. Those maps need to be alive. You don’t do them once and call it good.”
What makes this a flywheel rather than a checklist is the feedback loop between all three. Evidence from step three informs changes to step one. The cycle repeats and deepens. “It takes a while for this to develop,” Kent acknowledged. “The flywheel takes a while. You think of a train — it takes so much horsepower just to get it to move a foot. But once it gets going…”
The Four I’s of Meaningful Faith Evidence
Not all evidence is equally useful, and Kent offered a rubric for what good evidence of faith engagement actually looks like.
Individualized. “It is really easy for teachers to get a misunderstanding that things landed if you only look at your exemplars,” Kent said. “Your best students are most of the time going to reveal good things. But really, what’s important is how is it working across all your ability students — the ones that are highly into school, and the ones that don’t really care.” Every student, he reminded the audience, is made in the image of God: “They need to be impacted by what you do.”
Intersect. Evidence should show the actual connection between faith and content — not just that a student learned the material, but that they began to see God in the material. “Evidence should demonstrate how God reveals himself through learning,” Kent said. When studying literature, does the student see how the narrative maps onto God’s master story of creation, fall, redemption, restoration? When studying science, do they see God’s sovereignty and design in the systems they’re examining?
Illustrative. “There is a lot of research that talks about how when students know what their audience is, it impacts their work and their level of deep thinking,” Kent noted. Sending faith reflections home to parents and grandparents accomplishes something important on multiple levels. “Grandparents and parents have a vested interest in this. It is why they send kids to Christian schools — those teachers are impacting their faith.” What begins as an assignment becomes a dinner table conversation, and what was learned in the classroom takes root in the family.
Impacts. The ultimate test of faith engagement is transfer — the student’s ability to take what was encountered in the classroom and apply it in a completely different context. Wiggins and McTighe’s understanding by design framework defines this as the hallmark of deep learning, and Kent sees it as equally true in faith integration. He described the moment he knew it was working: “A student took what I taught in the classroom and applied it to a conversation on the school bus home. She took our conversation about small things and used it in the back of her mind.” That, he said, “is the definition of transfer — and it’s what God wants from us.”
Faith Engagement Groups: Iron Sharpening Iron
One of the most practical ideas from the webinar is the concept of faith engagement groups — small teams of four to six teachers who regularly gather to examine each other’s evidence together.
“These groups go around and examine evidence, and they’re looking through a rubric for how a teacher’s lessons are landing,” Kent explained. “If they are landing, it is a way to celebrate. If not, it is a way for more experienced teachers to help younger ones — what are some ways you could have scaffolded this better? Maybe it’s your essential question that wasn’t as tight as it needed to be.”
The core question driving every conversation is one Kent has come to love: “What is revealed? How are your students revealing God in what you taught? And what is still hidden?”
He described these groups using the same metaphor Steve Jobs used to talk about great teams: “You put these people together, and it is like rocks in a rock tumbler. Iron sharpens iron. These rocks become smoother. And the people are just working through things together.” The process takes time — the flywheel doesn’t spin overnight — but the cumulative effect, both on teaching practice and on faculty culture, is what takes a school from good to great.
Crucially, these groups work best when they are teacher-led rather than administratively mandated. “Your role as administrators is to develop an ethos,” Kent said. “We need to jettison that notion that God just stays in Bible class, and that our faith impacts everything that we do.”
And the evidence those groups surface should directly shape professional development decisions. “PD should come from what you are seeing in evidence,” Kent said. “It should not come from, ‘Okay, this speaker’s in town, let’s bring him in.’ It should come from what are you seeing, and helping teachers do that.”
What School Leaders Can Gain
For administrators, the evidence-based approach offers something that surveys and standardized assessments cannot — a real window into what is actually happening at the intersection of faith and learning in every classroom.
Kent referenced a quote from Lou Gerstner that he finds particularly apt: “People don’t do what you expect, administrators — they do what you inspect. If you want this, evidence allows you to inspect, allows you to see what is going on. Test scores are great. MAP testing is awesome. But you need to know: are my teachers teaching Christianly in my classroom?”
He also drew on Roger Erdvig’s work on immersive biblical worldview education, summarizing the challenge simply: “If you expect your teachers to provide an immersive biblical worldview, then you need to expect their work and provide them with feedback.”
Critically, Kent frames evidence not as a scorecard but as a pastoral instrument. “I don’t believe that looking at evidence is like a number system,” he said. “I want to look at evidence of how is what we’re doing in the classroom impacting our students — as opposed to giving a questionnaire and then tallying your results.”
“It’s Not One More Thing. It’s the Main Thing.”
The webinar closed with a question that many teachers quietly carry: What if this just feels like one more thing on an already impossible list?
Kent’s answer was characteristically direct — delivered with the grace of someone who had just taught all day and still showed up to make the case.
“I will tell you it’s been teaching since 8 o’clock this morning,” he said. “I understand what teachers are going through — recess duty, the parent that calls, an IEP meeting, students calling another student a bad name. I have all that stuff, and sometimes this kind of work gets lost in all of it. It does with me too.”
But he refused to let that reality become an excuse. “To say this is one more thing is just saying you’re going to let your students develop a worldview on their own. This is why God put those students in front of you.”
He illustrated the stakes with a story about a business owner who was letting an employee go. While the other owners debated how to protect the company’s reputation, one person in the room asked a different question entirely: “How can we let this man go — because he for sure needs to go — but how can we do this in the name of Jesus?” Kent paused after telling it. “That person allowed his faith to influence and impact his work. That is the biblical worldview that we are looking for our students to have.”
Using a coaching analogy from Pete Carroll, he brought it home: “It doesn’t matter how excited and passionate I am, or how good my presentation is. What matters most is, can they take it to the game and execute it? Can they go through life and see every situation through the lens of Scripture?”
That, Kent said, is the whole point. “Evidence allows you to see what is landing and what hasn’t. It allows you to see what has been revealed — and what is still hidden. And from that, you can allow that to impact what you do the next day.”
Watch the Full Webinar
Kent Ezell’s insights in this conversation represent 25 years of classroom experience, careful theological reflection, and genuine love for students and the Church. He brings the perspective of someone who is — in the language of Dave Mulder’s Always Becoming, Never Arriving — still learning, still revising, still asking whether God is being revealed or remains hidden in his lessons.
Whether you’re a classroom teacher, a curriculum director, or a school administrator, this webinar offers a framework that is both theologically grounded and practically actionable.
You’ll come away with a clear language for distinguishing faith formation from faith engagement, a practical framework (the Faith Formation Flywheel) for integrating evidence into your teaching cycle, ideas for launching faith engagement groups at your school, and an introduction to Faith Journey — the platform Kent and his wife Reba developed — and how it integrates with Faria’s Atlas curriculum mapping platform.
About Faria Education Group
Faria Education Group serves schools around the world through educational technology spanning admissions, curriculum management, learning management, and school analytics. Our faith-based team is committed to serving Christian schools in their unique mission to integrate faith, learning, and life. Learn more at faria.org.
Michael Arnold
Michael Arnold is an educational strategist and curriculum integration specialist with over 15 years of leadership experience in education management. Currently serving as a Senior Solutions Consultant for faith-based schools at the Faria Education Group, he facilitates the implementation of mission-aligned technology solutions designed to optimize institutional efficacy and student outcomes.
Michael’s career is defined by a commitment to the advancement of independent and faith-based scholarship. He has previously held leadership roles in client relations and support management, where he supported and trained around curriculum mapping initiatives and standards alignment for private schools. His pedagogical foundation includes extensive experience as a curriculum consultant and six years of classroom instruction.
You can connect with Michael on LinkedIn.
