Some Thoughts at the End of a 38 Year Career in Christian School Education

Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.  Ecclesiastes 11:1

Faithful action despite uncertainty.  That is the meaning of this verse, found in the writing of an author who starts out by saying that everything is meaningless.  I think this verse is a good characterization of the thirty-eight years I have spend serving in Christian school ministry.  

Being able to attend a Christian school is a privilege that is slowly fading away. The Christian school movement blossomed from the late 1960's to the end of the twentieth century.  Then a combination of factors, including slow decline in membership and attendance of the churches and denominations that made up the constituency of the schools, the decline of the birthrate and of the number of school-aged children in the culture at large, and the inability of those within the Christian school movement itself to attract the kind of donor support necessary to keep the tuition costs affordable, combined to create a perfect storm of dropping enrollment and school closures.

We still have not seen the end of this decline.  The pandemic provided a short reprieve, creating an increased awareness among parents of the insufficiencies and issues occurring in the public school system, but that bump faded in 2025.  That year was one of the worst in terms of the ongoing decline in membership and attendance among Evangelical churches in the United States and that decline correlates directly with the decline in Christian school enrollment and the continued closure of Christian schools. 

[See the previous post in Cougar Tracks about the closure of Granger Christian School in the South Bend, Indiana area this past month.]

Unlike schools operated by denominations and denominationally-affiliated churches, the effective use of Christian school education for the specific purpose of raising up and training the next generation of church leadership, and of churches working together to support and sustain school affordability has never caught on among the scattered denominational groups and independent, non-denominational churches of American Evangelicalism.  Individual churches are left to themselves to sustain a school they may have started on their own campus, and most Evangelical Christian schools are actually independent themselves, having been started by groups of parents who saw the need and had the vision.  The level of support that Evangelical schools get in terms of recruiting students and financing the operations from the churches is way below that of the schools that are denominationally supported. 

But all parochial private schools are falling on hard times.  Here in Chicago, the Catholic diocese is making tough decisions about merging schools together and closing down those struggling to maintain enrollments.  In the Lutheran school athletic league in which MCA has participated in past years, three Lutheran schools in our general area have closed in the last two years.  When I came to MCA eight years ago, there were four Catholic schools and three Lutheran schools within this same general area of the city.  Now, there is just one Catholic and one Lutheran school nearby.  

And yet, after seventy years of operation, MCA is still here.  We've been through tough times, including recently.  Having an effective Christian school that makes disciples of Jesus and teaches them to observe all things is not what our enemy, prowling like a roaring lion, wants. But God has faithfully sustained the vision of those church leaders back in 1956 who, through the Youth For Christ movement, established both Phantom Ranch Bible Camp and Midwestern Christian Academy as ministries supported by Midwest Bible Church.  This fall represents the seventieth year of MCA's existence.  And a Christian school in an urban setting is a rarity.  

I believe what has sustained this school is its consistent commitment to its mission and purpose, its dependence on the movement, direction and guidance of the Holy Spirit and aligning its operation, instructional program and ministry to parents and students with the principles of the gospel of Jesus.  There have been practical things that have been done, like achieving the recognition of excellence through the accreditation process, and improvements in curriculum revision that have led to the reputation we have earned for academic success.  

And I think one of the most important things we have achieved is making sure that our conduct and our attitude and demeanor reflects our Christian convictions.  I once heard a speaker at an ACSI conference--I think it might have been Dr. Walter Strickland--say that Jesus told us not to hide our lamp under a bushel basket, but to put it in a lampstand where it gives light to the whole room, and that our job in a Christian school is not to light the student's lamp for them, but to show them how to light it, and it is also not to put it in the lampstand for them, but to lead them by example to do it for themselves.  

If you've enrolled your children at MCA, you are making a very worthwhile sacrifice.  I do not believe they can get a better education at any other school in our part of the city, a biased perspective, of course, but it is backed by the strong evidence of our student's achievement on academic assessments.  Our Iowa assessment scores went through the roof last year, and our eighth grade students are admitted to some of the best high schools in the city.  

It is a sacrifice, but it is a mutual one, which is why this works so well.  The teachers and staff at MCA are also making a sacrifice to keep parent's tuition affordable, and the church's contribution, which includes providing a lease-free facility as well as financial support, keeps tuition costs among the most affordable of any private, religious-based school in Chicago.  

So I consider MCA a gift to its school community, a rare blessing.  From here forward, there will be new leadership which will require the support of teachers, staff, students and parents.  Staying faithful to the mission and vision of the school, in its Christian identity will be the key to success.  

I Never Get Used to Hearing This News

I had planned on writing one more article for Cougar Tracks as a final word upon retirement.  Then, last week, while making a last visit to the South Bend area to put the final touch on our search for an apartment, I heard the news that Granger Christian School, in Granger, Indiana, just a few miles from Edwardsburg, Michigan, where we are moving, and considered a suburb of South Bend, announced that they would not open for classes this fall.  

I always receive news like this with sadness.  It has, unfortunately, become all too common among conservative Evangelical Christian school education for the past two decades.  The numbers really are staggering.  Half of the Christian schools that existed in the United States up to the year 2000 have closed in the past two and a half decades.  Of course, corresponding to these closures, enrollment in Christian schools operated by Evangelical denominations, fellowships or churches has also declined by half in the same period of time.  

Granger Christian School had existed for 55 years, and was one of the more well-established Christian schools in the South Bend-Mishawaka area.  It was operated by Grace Church, an independent, non-denominational church that occupies a second building on the same campus as the school.  No specific reason was given for the closure, except that enrollment had dropped below 100 students for the upcoming year, a principal who had been hired had decided to leave before the school year began, and the school was not financially viable.  

This is not a rare occurrence.  Over 200 Christian schools in the United States, either operated by Evangelical churches, or by independent groups of parents, made the decision at some point during the past spring or summer, not to open this fall.  That's not as many as closed each year prior to the pandemic, but it is still a significant number, indicating that enrollment is continuing to decline.  One of the main reasons for this is that the conservative Evangelical churches from which most of the students in Christian schools come, are also experiencing serious declines in attendance and membership, and the members of the millennial generation who now make up the vast majority of parents of school-aged children, are not found in large numbers among Evangelical churches.  

I do not know whether Grace Church, which operated Granger Christian for 55 years, had the means to sustain the school through this low period, or whether they determined that circumstances did not warrant investing any further resources to keep the school's doors open.  Apparently, they were planning to keep the school in operation until the leadership they had recently hired decided not to follow through. The surrounding community has had a very stable population over the past 35 years, meaning that it is aging, and there are fewer and fewer families there with school aged children, and even the local public schools have experienced a sharp drop in enrollment, as the population ages and retires. And that affects both churches and Christian schools.  

Granger Christian had also recently converted their curriculum to a classical Christian model.  It's difficult to make that kind of a shift unless all of the parents are on board with it.  There's not anything specific with a classical model that would cause a decline, but change is never easy, and there is a significant enough difference between the classical model and the traditional approach to cause some parents to pull out if they weren't on board. One of the things I've learned as a Christian school administrator is that big changes in curriculum and instruction are not easy to make.  

Understanding the commitment most parents make when they choose a Christian school that operates in the Evangelical faith tradition, it is my prayer that the families will be able to find a viable option for their children to continue their Christian school education.  We also need to pray for the teachers and staff at Granger, and for Grace Church.  This was a very difficult decision for them to make.

Does News Like This Make Us Appreciate the Blessings We Have? 

I've worked for five different schools in the 38 years I spent in Christian school education.  I was a teacher in two of them, a middle school principal in one, and the lead administrator in the last two.  Four of the five schools were ministries that were operated by one local church, and one of them was a denominationally affiliated school that used facilities on two different church campuses until they raised money and built their own, independent campus.  

Midwestern Christian Academy is the only one of the five where the school did not pay a lease or rent to the host church for use of facilities.  In every other case, the school either paid a percentage of its budget, or an annual fee to use church facilities that would have stood empty six days a week otherwise.  I believe that God blesses Midwest Bible Church for its faithful stewardship of MCA, which saves every parent thousands of dollars a year in tuition.  It is an investment in the spiritual future of the students, at a time when the youngest generations are almost completely unchurched, and unreached by the Christian gospel. 

We are also seeing the devastating effects of an attitude of consumerism and transactionalism on Christian schools.  Instead of seeing a Christian school as a mutually supportive Christian community dedicated to the discipleship of the students, parents take on a consumer attitude.  Enrollment becomes nothing more than a transaction, with parents taking the attitude that the money they pay for tuition entitles them to a specific set of transactions, or services.  This doesn't work very well, because it ignores the fact that what parents pay doesn't cover the cost of their child's education, and that the collective sacrifice of the rest of the school community, including the teachers and staff, are what make this low tuition rate possible in the first place. 

It would cost each student an additional $3,000 in tuition if MCA raised its minimum teacher salary to the entry level salary of a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.  That would be a raise to the very lowest level of public school pay.  That means that your child's teacher, by their commitment to the school, and to each parent, is handing every student a $3,000 scholarship.  But the transactional nature of the consumer attitude that has intruded into our churches and our Christian schools does not acknowledge the shared sacrifice of Christian community.  The end result of that is parents miss the point of the mutual sacrifice which sustains the school, and lose sight of its Christian distinctiveness. 

Take away the contribution of Midwest Bible Church, and the shared sacrifice of the teachers and staff, and that adds an additional $6,000 to the current average tuition of $5,500.  That's still about $8,000 less than the average private school tuition in Chicago, and almost $18,000 less than the average, per-year cost to taxpayers of a public school student's education for one year.  So the tuition and fees parents pay at Midwestern Christian, which is among the very lowest among Chicago's private schools, only covers half of the actual cost of the education.  Someone else is sacrificing to make the other half work.

In just the past eight years of my tenure, Midwest Bible Church has invested over $700,000 in the ministry of Midwestern Christian Academy, not counting the use of the facilities.  And generous contributors, many of them members of this church, some of them from the Christian community at large, have also invested over $500,000 in the school, including renovating and preserving the gym, and the window installation in the main building, in order to provide a comfortable place for students to learn and be safe.  That's an additional $6,000 per student that is not included in tuition and fees.  

So when we see another Christian school close, it should remind us of the blessing we still have, that ours remains open, and we need to renew our commitment to this shared Christian community ministry that is an investment in the next generation.