We know what’s gone wrong. Let’s design it right.

Problem: unwieldy scale. Possibility: success at small size.

Many Christian schools are designed around expected enrollment levels that are no longer sustainable.  This leads to chronic low salaries as faculty bear the burden of budget shortfalls; admission of mission-inappropriate students with accompanying programmatic compromise; and a perceived inability to raise tuition appropriately for fear of driving families away -- or, worse, the desperate use of tuition decreases as a lever to increase enrollment (a tactic that is demonstrably ineffective but still sometimes attempted with disastrous results).

The New Christian School recognizes that an essential Christian education is a niche offering in the educational landscape and is designed to thrive at a very small size, maximizing the likelihood of consistently full enrollment and, consequently, financial health, organizational resiliency, predictable increases in tuition and salaries, and the ability to innovate and improve over time.

If student demand far exceeds the supply of available places, the New Christian School does not seek to grow in size.  To do so would compromise its sustainability and, importantly, its programmatic integrity -- its small size is integral to its character, culture, and mission.  Rather, under certain conditions, the New Christian School would replicate, seeding another Essential Christian school distinct in mission but built upon a similar design framework.

Problem: program sprawl. Possibility: focus.

The New Christian School aims for programmatic depth, not breadth.  It is focused in its mission and, therefore, in its program and in the students it serves.  Too often, schools compromise their fiscal and programmatic integrity by overreaching, seeking to fulfill an unrealistic range of interests or to compete with the exhaustive offerings of experience-oriented schools.  By contrast, the New Christian School seeks to do a few “essential” things exceedingly well (in the spirit of Theodore Sizer’s “essential school” concept), and, thereby, to serve exceedingly well those students whose needs and goals align with the mission of the school.

For example, the New Christian School might invest resources of time, personnel, and money into a well-developed and fully-integrated arts emphasis, at the expense of a competitive athletic program.  Its sister school might make the exact opposite choice. Another might invest in remote, community-based experiential learning opportunities at the expense of a highly developed physical campus.  Naturally, not all students will find all these schools to be the best fit for them. But some will find one or another to be a great fit. At this scale, choices must be made; but the benefits of smallness -- sustainability, flexibility, and depth -- are worth it.

Problem: insularity. Possibility: authentic spiritual journeys.

Christian schools appeal to parents seeking environments of relative safety for their children -- emotionally, physically, and spiritually.  Many Christian schools, however, confuse safety with insularity. Students have few, if any, opportunities to think through the issues of our day that are deeply important to them and that saturate social media and public discourse: issues of racial and economic justice; of human sexuality; of faith as it relates to science and politics.  This curious bubble of silence speaks loudly to students: we teach them implicitly that our faith (and, by extension, our God) is irrelevant; or that it’s so fragile it cannot withstand scrutiny; or that it’s too naive to accommodate complexity; or that it is blind and apathetic towards the most pressing needs of the hurting people all around us.  

Students learn, implicitly, which subjects can be discussed and which cannot; they master the correct theological responses to satisfy those questions that are customarily asked; and they reserve the deeper, more difficult conversations for social and online contexts.  Thus, students successfully navigate the school’s curriculum, and we educators are satisfied that our students have been taught the “right answers” to carefully curated questions. Along the way, they have been (we tell ourselves) preserved from doubts that might have been introduced by exploring controversial topics, and we have been preserved from answering tough questions that we, perhaps, haven’t quite figured out ourselves.  

The consequences of this game of silence are dire: too many students become cynical and disillusioned with faith -- inoculated against, rather than confronted with, the power of the Gospel.  In fact, some evidence suggests that those in the so-called “millenial” and “z” generations are exiting church life and not returning, unlike those of previous generations who temporarily exited at high school graduation and often returned soon after marriage.  

The New Christian School intentionally cultivates opportunities for students to explore what it means to live out Kingdom principles, including justice, mercy, and shalom, in every facet of life.  Rather than explicitly or implicitly framing these conversations within the outline of a particular political party or ideology, the New Christian School frames the conversations within the outline of Scripture, embracing a wide range of possible applications of Scriptural principles that span human political constructs.  At the New Christian School, we believe that learning starts with humility; that learning is about encountering new ideas, embracing new possibilities, shedding false or mistaken notions and deepening our understandings; that learning is about change; and that learning is, therefore, as scary as it is invigorating.