By HOLLY MEYER
Florida pastor Melvin Adams knows a few hours of church programming every week is no match for the more than 30 hours children spend at secular schools, absorbing lessons that he says run counter to their family’s Christian beliefs.
Like other theologically conservative pastors in Florida and beyond, he decided his Nazarene church in the Orlando suburbs could do something about it. Now the inaugural semester of Winter Garden Christian Academy is underway at Faith Family Community Church, educating K-4th grade students within the church’s biblical worldview.
“We’re making disciples and we’re doing it not just on Sundays, but we’re doing it all week long,” said Adams. “I feel like we do have a leg up here in Florida.”
The state has an expansive voucher program in which taxpayers help to pay tuition for all families who want to send their kids to private schools. While that’s not the primary reason Faith Family Community and other churches are launching Christian schools on their campus, the vouchers have made it easier.
It’s not about hurting public schools, said pastor Jimmy Scroggins, whose Family Church in South Florida is launching four classical Christian schools over the next year. Rather, he said it’s about giving parents more schooling options that align with their Christian values.
Family Church is responding to an ongoing demand that rose out of heightened, pandemic-era scrutiny of what children were being taught in public schools about gender, sexuality and other contentious issues, he said. In Christian classrooms, pastors say religious beliefs can inform lessons on morals and character building, teachers are free to incorporate the Bible across subjects, and the immersive environment may give students a better chance of staying believers as adults.
A push for a Christian education reformation
“Our hope is to help accelerate this movement of Christian education. … That every Christian church with a building will consider starting or hosting a neighborhood school,” said Scroggins. “We’re not trying to burn anything down. We’re trying to build something constructive.”
Scroggins makes his case in “The Education Reformation: Why Your Church Should Start a Christian School,” a new book he co-wrote with Trevin Wax of the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board. Scroggins’ large, multisite church also is Southern Baptist.
They have company in their cause from school voucher advocates.
On the national level, for example, Family Research Council senior fellow Joseph Backholm made a similar argument in his 2020 report, “Why Every Church Should Start a Christian School,” while pushing for more public funding for private education. At the state level, the Ohio Christian Education Network launched a school planting initiative for churches in 2021.
“We believe the church has a responsibility to rise up and meet what we see as an educational crisis in the United States,” said Troy McIntosh, the network’s executive director. So far, they’ve helped start two schools and hope to add more, likely beginning as small learning environments known as microschools, he said.
Ohio passed so-called universal school choice — taxpayer money available for private school tuition without income limits — in 2023. They were part of a wave of pro-school voucher laws passed in Arizona, Florida, West Virginia and other states following key Supreme Court rulings in recent years. This year, universal school choice became an official national Republican Party policy, including equal treatment for homeschooling.
School voucher trend divides stakeholders
In addition to discrimination concerns and church-state issues, opponents worry school vouchers take money from public schools, which serve most U.S. students, and help higher-income families already in private schools.
“The problem isn’t churches starting schools. The problem is taxpayer funding for these schools, or any private schools,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in a statement. School vouchers, she said, “force taxpayers to fund religious education — a clear violation of religious freedom.”
Most U.S. private schools are religious, though not all are sponsored by a specific house of worship.
Conservative Christian schools accounted for nearly 12% (3,549) of the country’s private options during the 2021-22 academic year, according to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Private School Universe Survey. While they’re not the largest group, enrollment is growing at conservative Christian schools. Total enrollment jumped about 15% (785,440) in 2021, compared to 2019.
Melissa Erickson, director and co-founder of Alliance for Public Schools in Florida, said she has fought vouchers for years along with other policies that hurt a public school system continually villainized as the problem, even as it serves most children in the state.
“They want the benefits of the public funding without the requirements that public schools have to go through. It’s very concerning that there’s no accountability,” said Erickson, who is seeing “homeschool collectives or small individual churches that never thought of going into the education business, now going into it because there’s this unregulated stream of money.”
Churches sharing their space with school start-ups
In Ohio, McIntosh’s group wants all Ohio families to have access to a Christian education, and it backed the state’s expansive school voucher program.
“We didn’t need five Christian schools in the state — we needed 50,” said McIntosh, noting that getting a building can be a challenge for school start-ups. “We tried to take that hurdle away by sourcing church facilities that are largely unused during the week.”
Northland Church, a nondenominational congregation in the Orlando suburbs, had that unused space and decided to host a school, according to senior pastor Josh Laxton, who said in an email that he sees Christian education as a counterweight to declining church attendance and biblical literacy trends. The church invited The Ecclesial School Initiative to start a school on its grounds last year.
The Northland school is the second campus the initiative launched since its start in 2020, said Kevin Clark, founder and president. The group is creating a network of classical schools hosted by churches, expanding access to Christian education in Florida — and transforming lives.
“I thought this can’t just be a one-off solution. It needs a systematic approach to engage more families … and serve families that hadn’t really had this kind of access,” said Clark, noting Christian education is often a value-add option for more well-to-do families.
The Ecclesial School Initiative gets a shoutout in Scroggins’ book, which is being offered for free through the SBC’s domestic evangelism arm and the Association of Christian Schools International. The accreditation group represents about 2,200 U.S. schools; this summer the association said it had 17 churches in its emerging schools program.
“We are calling upon pastors to envision a generation of ambassadors for Jesus Christ, molded through Christian education,” association president Larry Taylor said in a news release announcing the Southern Baptist collaboration. He wants students to be “capable not only of engaging with the culture but also of navigating and thriving amidst secular ideologies.”
Public school vs. Sunday school
The public school-Sunday school clash has flared up before with disagreements about human origins to prayer in class, said Jeff Walton, executive director of the American Association of Christian Schools. Today, the accreditation group is seeing school growth, especially from Southern Baptist churches, and enrollment increasing among its more than 700 member schools, he said.
“It’s not an opposition to public education in principle. It’s an opposition to where public schools have gone ideologically in a lot of communities, and that frustrates Christian parents,” said Walton, noting the conflicting messages are hard on children.
The first semester is underway at one Southern Baptist church in West Virginia. South Berkley Baptist’s Christian academy, which accepts the state’s Hope Scholarship voucher, is starting off with less than 10 students and individualized learning, said pastor Patrick McCoy, who is pursuing school accreditation.
The school came about after McCoy started substitute teaching at area public schools a couple years ago. He said there he found good people, and little being taught on hot-button ideologies, but a clear need for strong Christian education.
“They’re failing in preparing them for adulthood,” said McCoy, who is worried for the future of public-school funding since he expects more parents will use vouchers for private education.
“We’ve got to attack this problem head-on,” he said. “Since they’re not doing it, somebody needs to do it.”
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
