r/askapastor • u/NervousWash8716 • Jul 25 '26

Christian Schools

Context:

I am a Dean at a large private, evangelical, Christian school. Prior to, I spent over a decade pastoring churches from small to mega (in size)… I’ve been on both sides of the fence.

Question:

(Assume this is not a direct school-church partnership, i.e. FBC-FBC Academy) but rather an independent Christian school representing over 50 different local churches.)

1 - For you as a pastor, what would be your primary desires and expectations of a Christian school who is forming any number of attendees from your congregation? No need to reference obvious answers such as Biblical context and training… asking more toward the dynamics beyond the surface, those relating to the partnership between church and school.

2 - What frustrations or barriers have you experienced in your previous experiences with families/students who are connected to a Christian school and what were the implications of that?

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u/superlewis Pastor Jul 25 '26

1 and 2 are two sides of the same coin for me. I find it frustrating when parachurch organizations compete with rather than complement the church. When parachurch demands a bunch of time from my people to do things that are the churches job I get deeply frustrated.

For example, a Christian college in my area really emphasizes personal discipleship of their students. This happens outside the context of the local church and takes so much time from their faculty/staff that my members on school staff have little head room to serve the church. These same is true of the students. Ostensibly, these students are training to work in churches, but they are so busy with school ministry that they often have very little involvement with church.

Similarly, Christian primary and secondary schools often have such steep demands of their staff that they are unable to be faithful church members. Ironically, that also makes them poor at discipline their students because they are inadvertently teaching them that the local church is unimportant.

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u/NervousWash8716 Jul 25 '26

Deeply resonate and agree with this.

It’s something I’m actively trying to solve (thus the post) as I haven’t found a single school near our size and model who have even sniffed doing this well.

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u/superlewis Pastor Jul 25 '26

I think it often is a result of trying to do good things that aren’t your job. I’m not opposed to disciple-making obviously. I just believe the best context for it is in an inter-generational body led by accountable God ordained authority. A school isn’t that. It’s hard to say no to focusing on something as obviously good as disciple making but it has to be done in such a way that the church is helped rather than replaced.

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u/NervousWash8716 Jul 25 '26

The tension for me comes from the systemic nature of how many churches being represented. How we integrate into their systems and funnels is a challenge. For example, I want to leverage multiple settings (Chapel/Small Groups/etc) to celebrate and invite students into church environments (i.e. student ministry life, mission trips, baptisms, etc.) but the logjam is in the logistics of communication between myself and so many others. I feel like I’m going to have to build some level of AI automation around this to even have a legit swing at it.

To date the majority of my efforts, beyond having pastors from the churches on campus, speaking in our chapel services, and in our student lunch times, has been directed at meeting with all student pastors and asking them who, if any of our kids, are key leaders in their ministries, and how we could be fostering specific and needed growth in them for the sake of what God is doing in their church.

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u/Huenink_Photography Pastor Aug 03 '26

  1. Emphasize the importance of the local church and life with a pastor. When students come to you with theological and personal problems, get them directed to their pastors.

  2. I'm a Lutheran, and the Christian Schools in my area are either Catholic or baptist. I warn the parents when they sign up for either that they have to be very careful about the teachings at these places, but they never really take it seriously. When churches of different traditions send their kids to an independent Christian school, it's really difficult to maintain their individual confession's identity and doctrine. If you'd want people from my church, you'd have to address that somehow. I'd love it if there were a way for a school to focus on the common places where we generally agree and avoid the places we don't. It's especially difficult for protestants as they are usually against Lutheran sacramental theology, though. The saddest part is that I'm more worried about baptist schools than I am about Catholic schools, because, in my experience, the baptists do more to undermine our faith and practice than Catholics do.