Throughlines Dan Meester

Beauty Weavers Child of God Creation Keepers

Gospel Walkers Community Builders Humble Beginnings

By Dan Meester

One Gallup area school is looking a lot more colorful these days. Thanks to some new artwork that helps clarify its vision for education, Rehoboth Christian School is providing teachers, students, families, and supporters around the country a visually impactful way to remember what the school is all about. The pictures are part of Rehoboth’s throughline project—one aspect of its recently adopted approach called Teaching for Transformation (TFT for short).

The TFT approach pushes Christian schools to think deeply and intentionally not only about the faith-filled content of their academics, but also the faithforming practices for both students and faculty. As part of becoming a TFT school, institutions are asked to wrestle with 10 different throughlines—biblical themes that they want their students to live out and their teachers to incorporate into learning experiences across grades and subjects.

Schools receive a stock set of 10 throughlines as a starting point, but like any change initiative, the engagement is richer if each school “makes them

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their own”—choosing ideas, titles, and images that reflect the specific cultural context of their institution. At Rehoboth, that process naturally pointed the staff to words and images that resonate with the school’s many Navajo and Zuni students. For a whole year, staff met to consider, select, and revise the throughline ideas that they wanted to weave into their curriculum and have students embody as servants of Jesus Christ.

Each throughline appears in four languages—Navajo, Zuni, Spanish, and English and includes an explanation of what it is intended to mean. FatherDaughter Rehoboth art teachers, Elmer Yazzie and Autumn Newell, then took those written ideas and turned them into paintings that would reinforce their messages and deepen their meanings even more. When the final results of this project were shared with the faculty this fall, it was clear that the school was onto something special. To spread the excitement, Rehoboth used the images to create the calendar it sends out to volunteers and supporters of the school all around the world, as well as sets of greeting cards available for purchase.

You’ll find samples of the artwork here, but to learn even more about Rehoboth’s throughline project from the people who helped create them, visit www.rcsnm.org/schools/ throughlines.cfm. You’ll find explanatory videos about each theme and an opportunity to order prints, calendars, and greeting cards of your own.