Necessity, the old adage goes, is the mother of invention.
Justin Walker, pastor of Salt and Light Baptist Church just outside Louisville, Kentucky, experienced that proverb firsthand — and it birthed a vision for a tuition-free, church-sponsored grade school, First Principles Academy.
The Origin
For years, Walker told CBN News, he led a small but stable congregation alongside his wife Sarah, with whom he shared six children. But then tragedy struck: in the summer of 2020, when the congregation — like many across the country — was struggling to find its footing amid a pandemic, the pastor’s wife received a devastating diagnosis.
She had stage 4 cancer. After months of battling the brutal disease, Sarah passed away in March 2021.
Overnight, Walker became a single father of six — five of whom live at home and were homeschooled — as well as a bi-vocational pastor working full-time for a family fabric business. It was in that season of struggle, when he was stretched and struck by grief more than ever before, that Walker saw a need.
“I didn’t realize it at first, but it really stemmed from my wife passing,” the pastor said, reflecting on the origin of his vision to launch a tuition-free school for kids in kindergarten through sixth grade. “I used to say that ‘we homeschool,’ and then my wife passed, and I realized, ‘Oh, my wife homeschooled.'”
That was now Walker’s job. As he began taking on those tasks, the grieving father brought one of his daughters to a local public library to find something for her to read.
“It was the first of June, and they were pushing all of these LGBTQ books on my daughter in the public library, and I was so upset,” he said. “And I just made this personal post on Facebook. I took a picture of the books they were [trying to give my 11-year-old daughter] … and I was so upset at that. … I took a picture of [the books] and I posted them on Facebook and I said, ‘Shame on you, public library, for pushing these books on my daughter. We won’t be back.'”
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That post, Walker recalled, sparked “a huge firestorm” on social media and it made clear to him there was “a great need” in his community for a better educational alternative.
“The more I started looking, the more I realized there’s a mission field in our own backyard that the average church is not involved in, and that mission field is 50 million American children that are going to public schools every day where things like what just happened to my daughter in the library are happening all day long. And here I am, the pastor of a church, supposed to be a community leader, and what are we doing about this? No one’s even talking about it.”
The Opportunity
As Walker was going through this season of pain and realization, of reckoning and navigating, a group of people in his church approached him with the opportunity to start a school.
The Kentucky-based minister — in addition to taking on the responsibilities left by the death of his wife — soon realized he couldn’t work full-time, serve as a pastor, and homeschool his children; he was stretched too thin. But he couldn’t pay the cost to put five kids in private school, either.
It’s important for the church, Walker said, to minister to people where they’re at — including financially. From his own experience, and the experiences of those around him, Walker was convinced First Principles Academy needed to be tuition-free.
“We want this to be a ministry,” he said, urging those concerned about the cost that God will provide what is needed for the outreach opportunity to thrive. “This is what the church has done through its whole history. We don’t charge ticket prices for people to come in on Sunday. Freely we receive and freely we give. I’ve just encouraged everyone to take the word ‘tuition’ and replace it with ‘donation.'”
While there is no set tuition, the school takes donations to pay its teachers and administrators, as well as the cost of running the campus inside an old horse auction facility, the home of Salt and Light Baptist Church.
And it’s “not just a pipe dream,” Walker said. “We’ve done it. We’ve successfully launched.”
The Objective
On the Wednesday after Labor Day, the school — accessible to the public and not limited to just Salt and Light congregants — opened with 65 students and several staff members with classes from kindergarten through sixth grade with the goal of adding a full middle and high school in the future.
To enroll, parents — and students who are old enough — are required to sign an agreement stating they understand First Principles Academy is a ministry and, as such, will be teaching students from a Christian worldview.
“We believe that the huge problem in our country and what we’re seeing with depression and anxiety and many of the social problems that we’re seeing stem from [a] lack of Christ at the center of our education,” Walker said. “So we have a goal of putting Christ at the center of our education. So there is a part of this that goes a little deeper. There is a community need, yes, but there’s a need to bring Christ into our education. … We want that first and foremost and we want mom and dad to know and we want students to know that this is what we will be teaching.”
The “grand goal,” he continued, is for the Gospel to go forth from the classroom to the community. Walker said he hopes to see unbelieving students hear the Gospel in math class — or any other class — come to faith in Jesus, and take the life-saving message home to their families.
That objective is at the heart of the decision to open the school to the public, not just churchgoers. While the school is “an evangelistic outreach,” Walker noted, it is committed to looking different from public schools and will remain committed to its core values and statement of faith.
“You’re coming and joining what we’re doing,” he said. “There is enrollment. We have a right to say, ‘No, you’re not going to do that here.'”
In addition to providing a much-needed resource to his community in Kentucky, Walker said he’s hoping his church’s school will be “a beacon of light … so that other churches can do the same thing.”
“We want to see the church, at large, rallied around this and say, ‘Oh, this is possible; we can do this,'” the pastor said. “I have this crazy vision: I would love to see, in 20 years, that it would be the strange thing if you went into a church and they didn’t have a school. … [We want to see] churches across America saying, ‘We can open a school.'”
To learn more about First Principles Academy, to consider enrolling your children, or to donate to the ministry effort, click here.
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