Florida pastor Melvin Adams knows that a few hours of church programming each week cannot compensate for the more than 30 hours children spend in secular schools, absorbing lessons that he believes contradict their family’s Christian beliefs.
Like other theologically conservative pastors in Florida and elsewhere, he decided his Nazarene church in the Orlando suburbs could do something about it. Now the inaugural semester of the Winter Garden Christian Academy has begun at Faith Family Community Church, which teaches students in grades 1 through 4 about the church’s biblical worldview.
“We’re making disciples, not just on Sundays, but all week long,” Adams said. “I feel like we have an advantage here in Florida.”
The state has an extensive voucher program in which taxpayers fund tuition for any family who wants to send their children to private schools. While that’s not the main reason Faith Family Community and other churches are opening Christian schools on their campuses, the vouchers have made it easier.
The goal is not to harm public schools, said Rev. Jimmy Scroggins, whose Family Church in South Florida plans to open three time-honored Christian schools next year. Rather, it is about offering parents more school options that are consistent with their Christian values.
Family Church is responding to a persistent demand that has arisen from increased scrutiny of what children are taught in public schools about gender, sexuality and other controversial topics, he said. In Christian classrooms, pastors say, religious beliefs can influence lessons in morals and character building, teachers can freely incorporate the Bible into all subjects and the immersive environment can give students a better chance of remaining believers as adults.
A push for Christian educational reform
“We hope to accelerate this movement of Christian education. … That every Christian church with a building will consider establishing or hosting a neighborhood school,” Scroggins said. “We don’t want to burn anything down. We want to build something constructive.”
Scroggins makes his case in “The Education Reformation: Why Your Church Should Start a Christian School,” a modern book he co-wrote with Trevin Wax of the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board. Scroggins’ immense, multi-site church is also Southern Baptist.
They are supported in their cause by supporters of school vouchers.
At the national level, Joseph Backholm, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, made a similar argument in his 2020 report, “Why Every Church Should Start a Christian School,” while also calling for more public funding for private education. At the state level, the Ohio Christian Education Network launched a church school-starting initiative in 2021.
“We believe the church has a responsibility to address the education crisis we see in the United States,” said Troy McIntosh, the network’s executive director. So far, they have established two schools and hope to add more, which will likely start as miniature learning environments called microschools, he said.
Ohio passed what it called universal school choice in 2023 — tax dollars available for private school tuition with no income limits. Those laws were part of a wave of 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 policy of the Republican Party, including equal treatment for homeschooling.
Trend towards school vouchers divides interests
In addition to concerns about discrimination and church-state issues, opponents fear that education vouchers will take money away from public schools, which most U.S. students attend, and benefit higher-income families who already attend private schools.
“The problem is not that churches are establishing schools. The problem is taxpayer funding of these or other private schools,” Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement. School vouchers, she said, “force taxpayers to fund religious education – a clear violation of religious freedom.”
Most private schools in the United States are religious, although not all are supported by a particular church.
Conservative Christian schools accounted for nearly 12% (3,549) of the nation’s private offerings in the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Private School Universe Survey. Although they are not the largest group, enrollment at conservative Christian schools is increasing. Total enrollment increased by about 15% (785,440) in 2021 compared to 2019.
Melissa Erickson, director and co-founder of the Alliance for Public Schools in Florida, said she has been fighting for years against education vouchers and other policies that harm a public school system that is constantly portrayed as the problem, even though it serves most of the state’s children.
“They want the benefits of public funding without meeting the requirements that public schools have to meet. It’s very disturbing that there’s no accountability,” said Erickson, who has seen “homeschool communities or small individual churches that never thought about getting into the education business are now doing it because there’s this unregulated flow of money.”
Churches share their premises with school foundations
In Ohio, McIntosh’s group seeks to provide access to a Christian education for all families in the state and supports the state’s extensive school voucher program.
“We didn’t need five Christian schools in the state – we needed 50,” McIntosh said, noting that getting a building can be a challenge for modern schools. “We tried to remove that hurdle by looking for church facilities that are largely unused during the week.”
Northland Church, a nondenominational church in the Orlando suburbs, had this unused space and decided to start a school there, according to Pastor Josh Laxton, who wrote in an email that he sees Christian education as a counterbalance to sinking church attendance and trends in Bible education. The church invited the Ecclesial School Initiative to open a school on its property last year.
The Northland school is the second campus the initiative has opened since launching in 2020, said Kevin Clark, founder and president. The group is building a network of church-run classical schools, expanding access to Christian education in Florida – and changing lives.
“I thought, this can’t just be a one-time solution. There needs to be a systematic approach to get more families involved … and help families that haven’t really had that access before,” Clark said, noting that Christian education is often a value-added option for wealthier families.
The Ecclesial School Initiative is mentioned in Scroggins’ book, which is offered 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 announced it had 17 churches in its Emerging Schools program.
“We call on pastors to envision a generation of ambassadors for Jesus Christ, formed through Christian education,” said association president Larry Taylor in a press release announcing the Southern Baptist collaboration. He wants students to be “able not only to engage with the culture, but also to navigate and thrive in the midst of secular ideologies.”
Public School vs. Sunday School
The conflict between public and Sunday schools has flared up before over disagreements about human origins and prayer in the classroom, said Jeff Walton, executive director of the American Association of Christian Schools. Today, the accrediting organization is seeing growth in schools, particularly Southern Baptist churches, and an escalate in enrollment at its more than 700 member schools, he said.
“It’s not a fundamental opposition to public education. It’s an opposition to the ideological trajectory that public schools have taken in many communities, and that frustrates Christian parents,” Walton said, noting that the conflicting messages are difficult on children.
The first semester has begun at a Southern Baptist church in West Virginia. South Berkley Baptist Church Christian Academy, which accepts the state’s Hope Scholarship voucher, is starting with fewer than 10 students and individual learning, said Pastor Patrick McCoy, who is seeking school accreditation.
The school was born after McCoy started working as a substitute teacher in local public schools a few years ago. He said he found good people there and taught little about controversial ideologies, but there was a clear need for a solid Christian education.
“They’re failing to prepare them for adulthood,” says McCoy, who worries about the future of public school funding as he expects more parents to exploit private school vouchers.
“We need to address this issue head-on,” he said. “Since they’re not doing it, someone else will have to.”
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