With respect to membership, PCA churches with schools are significantly larger. The average PCA church has 230 members on its rolls on average. Churches with schools average 630 members, while those without average 190. They have both more communicant members (500 vs. 148) and non-communicant members (131 vs. 41).

Among many of the Overtures that passed at PCA General Assembly last year was Overture 22 from Northwest Georgia Presbytery, which made statistical data digitally accessible. The statistics reported include data on church-led schools. As someone whose professional and personal interests include education and Reformed theology, this of course piqued my interest. What did I learn about schools in the Presbyterian Church in America?
Comparing churches with and without schools
Of the 1,669 churches reporting data, only about nine percent (150) report having an education ministry affiliated with their church. The churches with schools are significantly different from churches without schools in several meaningful ways. In short, they have more members, more elders and deacons, and more income and expenses.
With respect to membership, PCA churches with schools are significantly larger. The average PCA church has 230 members on its rolls on average. Churches with schools average 630 members, while those without average 190. They have both more communicant members (500 vs. 148) and non-communicant members (131 vs. 41). However, even churches with schools had wide variation in membership. Half of the churches with schools had between 50 and 400 members.
With respect to membership changes, PCA churches with schools tend to gain and lose more members than churches without schools. In the most recent year of reporting, churches with schools gained 42 members in the past year (vs. 14). As churches with education ministries may be addressing a growing need in their congregations, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of these new members came by way of child’s profession of faith (7.3 vs 2.5) and infant baptism (6.9 vs. 2.9). Interestingly, churches with schools on average experienced net negative growth, losing about 0.8% of their rolls, while churches without schools experienced net positive growth, adding about 2.1% to their rolls.
As expected with larger memberships, churches with schools had more elders and deacons as well. The average PCA church reported 5.5 elders and 6.1 deacons. Those with a school had roughly 13 elders and 13 deacons, while those without had roughly 5 elders and 5 deacons.
Finally, with respect to church finances, churches with schools had more income and expenses. In the most recent year reporting, the average PCA church had just over $700,000 in total income. Those with schools averaged $2.5 million, while those without averaged just over $500,000. Churches with schools had more expenses as well, including more benevolence, more budgeted expenses, and more building fund expenses. Again, even churches with schools had wide variation in finances. Half of the churches with schools had total income less than $1.2 million, and one-quarter of these churches had total income less than $500,000.

Table 1. PCA churches with and without schools

Has school?

PCA
Yes
No
Diff
Sig.

Membership

Communicant members
180.0
499.9
148.3
351.6
*

Non-communicant members
49.4
130.6
41.4
89.2
*

Total members
229.7
630.4
189.9
440.6
*

Membership changes

Added
16.5
42.0
14.0
28.0
*

Profession of faith (child)
3.0
7.3
2.5
4.8
*

Infant baptisms
3.3
6.9
2.9
3.9
*

Lost
14.5
43.4
11.7
31.8
*

Net growth (added minus lost)
2.0
-1.5
2.3
-3.8

Growth % (Net growth / Total members)
1.87%
-0.82%
2.14%
-2.96

Morning worship attendance
149.8
352.8
128.0
224.8
*

Leadership

Ruling Elders
5.5
12.7
4.7
8.0
*

Deacons
6.1
13.0
5.3
7.7
*

Finances (in thousands)

Total church income
$716.5
2,509.2
540.9
1,968.3
*

Total benevolence
$99.4
402.6
69.7
332.9
*

Total budgeted expenses
$534.6
1,572.6
433.4
1,139.1
*

Total building fund
$108.6
303.7
84.2
219.5
*

n
1669
150
1519

Notes. * indicates statistically significant difference between samples, p < 0.001. Examining the schools of PCA churches Of the 150 churches in the PCA data that reported having a school, I was able to find information on 116 of them. The most common education ministry is a standalone early education program, that is, a school serving only pre-kindergarten and/or kindergarten, roughly 45 percent of all PCA schools. Nearly 90 percent offer pre-K, three-fifths offer kindergarten, half offer elementary, half offer middle school, and a third offer high school. By presbytery and geography, churches with schools are concentrated in the southeast. The presbytery with the greatest number of church-led schools is Evangel with ten. Chesapeake and Southeast Alabama each have seven schools. Florida leads the states with 25 schools, followed closely by Alabama with 24. Eleven states have only one PCA school each, and 23 states and the District of Columbia have zero PCA schools. Table 2. PCA schools by presbytery Presbytery Churches with Schools Evangel 10 Chesapeake 7 Southeast Alabama 7 Central Florida 6 Gulf Coast 6 Nashville 6 Mississippi Valley 5 Missouri 5 South Florida 5 79 presbyteries 4 or fewer each With respect to tuition, for simplicity, I examined the highest level of tuition charged by each school, as reported on their website. The average PCA school charges just under $8,000 in tuition per year. Tuition is much lower at standalone EE programs at $3,700 compared to those offering elementary, middle, or high school grades ($10,700), but tuition for standalone EE programs can rise to as high as $11,484. The most expensive PCA school is Christ Presbyterian Academy, a ministry of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, TN, at $24,925 for upper school tuition. Next, I considered enrollment, as reported in the PCA statistical data. The average PCA school enrolls around 240 students. Similar to tuition, enrollment tends to be lower at standalone EE programs (83 students on average) than at schools serving other grades (373 students on average). The largest PCA school by enrollment is Briarwood Christian School, a ministry of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, AL, with 1,659 students. School enrollment and church membership tend to be positively correlated, while school tuition and church budget are weakly correlated. Table 3. PCA school characteristics Pre-K and K only? Overall Yes No Tuition Average $7,777.63 3,734.28 10,665.73 Minimum $290.00 290.00 3,000.00 Maximum $24,925.00 11,484.00 24,925.00 Enrollment Average 243.2 83.1 373.4 Minimum 14 14 27 Maximum 1659 285 1659 Grades Offered Standalone Pre-K or K 44.8% Pre-K 87.1% K 61.2% Elementary 52.6% Middle 46.6% High 34.5% n 116 52 64 The most common accreditations and school memberships include the Association of Christian Schools International (my employer) and the Association of Classical Christian Schools, though many schools were accredited by Cognia or some state or regional organization. The American Association of Christian Schools, Council on Educational Standards and Accountability, and Christian Schools International were also represented. Many schools are unaccredited, including a handful of homeschool co-ops or hybrid schools in the sample, including Covenant Christian Middle School and High School, a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Issaquah, WA. Doctrinally, virtually all schools mentioned affiliation with their church and many explicitly identified the Westminster Standards as their doctrinal standards. Some even require faculty to indicate agreement with the Westminster Standards, for example, Covenant Day School, a ministry of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC. Final thoughts This preliminary report does not capture the full extent of the work of PCA churches in ministering to families through education. Some churches with closely related schools are not represented in the PCA data (for example, Westminster Christian Academy and Westminster Presbyterian Church in Huntsville, AL). Other schools did not have information readily available on their websites. Still, this article provides some helpful descriptive information, especially as many churches consider beginning their own education ministries with the expansion of school choice across the country. Finally, I continue to keep The Covenant School and Covenant Presbyterian Church in my thoughts and prayers. I am grateful for the work of the PCA Foundation in establishing The Covenant Fund. Please consider donating to The Covenant Fund or to the March 27 Fund. Matthew Lee is a ruling elder at Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Fayetteville, AR and director of research at the Association of Christian Schools International. Related Posts:

Written by Samuel D. James |
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Evangelicals will have much to appreciate about Murray’s work. Most of us will find the book self-recommending and friendly to our priors. But this means that it’s all the more important to be distinctly Christian in these conversations. Christians are not content merely to pop politically correct bubbles (though we often must). We are obligated to speak the truth in love — an obligation that secular critics of progressivism like Murray won’t necessarily share. 

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity begins with a quote from G.K Chesterton: “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical [sic], but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” As epigraphs go, it’s a fine choice. Yet perhaps a better one would be this one: “A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.” The Madness of Crowds faithfully and forcefully documents the chaos that reigns when an entire generation of elites embraces this inversion.
Douglas Murray dives headlong into the contemporary “social justice” orthodoxy that already seemingly owns the whole of Western higher education and much of our politics. Though not a conservative — he’s an irreligious English journalist who also happens to be gay — Murray looks into progressive ideology in the areas of feminism, homosexuality, race, and transgenderism, and reports back a dogmatic orthodoxy punishing enough to make Nathaniel Hawthorne tremble. Murray’s curation of social justice culture’s alarming character is an extraordinarily valuable work of journalism, even if, unlike Mr. Chesterton, his secularist commitments keep him from connecting the most crucial dots.
Murray warns early on that the spectacles of outrage, cancellation, and ideological persecution that are now epidemic in Western life threaten not just manners but civilization itself.  “We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage, and violence,” Murray writes in the introduction, “but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances — including the good ones — grows more likely” (9). The “madness” Murray has in mind is that of a mob. According to Murray, the fuel powering the steamrolling machine of madness is identity. Once it is politically weaponized, identity becomes a powerful means to shut down truth-seeking and impose dogmatism.
One example is the conflation of what Murray terms “hardware” — innate, objective, biologically-determined facts about people — with “software,” i.e., social conditioning, preferences, and psychology. Calling hardware what is actually software empowers a multitude of intellectual dishonesties and political strong-arming.
As a gay man, Murray has no qualms with LGBT equality. But he does sharply criticize the social and political weaponization of homosexuality (“Gay”), as evidenced by the cynical way the gay left rejects any suggestion that experiences or upbringing may cultivate homoerotic feeling — even when such suggestions come from gays. Murray bemoans the way the contemporary gay rights movement reduces sexuality to sexual politics, and thus only values gay people who leverage their identity toward progressive ideology.
This is an important theme running throughout The Madness of Crowds. Identity politics, Murray observes, bottoms out in irony: tThe gradual erasure of personality and reduction of individuals to their politics. Murray recounts how technology entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who is gay, was relentlessly attacked by LGBT activists for endorsing Donald Trump. Murray cites one journalist who asked, “When you abandon numerous aspects of queer identity, are you still LGBT?” (44). Had The Madness of Crowds gone to press a little bit later, Murray would almost certainly have cited similar attacks from progressives toward mayor Pete Buttigieg.
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The distinctive contribution of ‘Pity For Evil’, however, is that feminism need not be understood as synonymous with pro-abortion politics. A more historically rooted feminism grounds the value and dignity of women in their capacity for virtue and care, not in their ability to mimic male sexual appetites. In spite of the lip service paid to diversity, the progressive left has become intolerant of self-described feminists who oppose unrestricted access to abortion. Were Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Ida B. Wells alive today, they would politely be asked to refrain from joining the Women’s March, if for no other reason than their stance on abortion.

The organizers of the “Women’s March” made headlines in 2017 when they removed pro-life feminists as sponsors, prompting more than one observer to note with irony that if Susan B. Anthony were living today, she would politely be asked to step aside and let the “real feminists” have their day. As thousands gather again to march in January to purportedly “secure abortion access and counter far-right extremism,” the question that must be asked is this: Is it anti-woman to be anti-abortion?
This question of the relationship between women’s rights and abortion permeates Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell’s timely book, Pity For Evil: Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America. In it the authors thoroughly and definitively debunk the myth that feminism is historically synonymous with pro-abortion politics. The reality, they argue, is precisely the opposite.
In today’s inhospitable political climate for transgressing woke orthodoxy, Klem and McDowell recall an era when women’s rights and anti-abortion politics went hand in hand.
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