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:

As fallible humans we all sometimes succumb to haste, emotion, and the influence of others, especially the media, whose sole occupation lies in seeking to get us to believe its narratives and to think and act along its preferred lines. Add in the rigors and tedium of pastoral and publishing work and mistakes are apt to happen sometimes, even large ones. In such cases a little public or private contradiction that seeks to set one right is justified, provided it is moved by charity and expressed courteously.

On April 24th, byFaith, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), published an article titled “Prayer and Work in the Face of Violence,” in which it was claimed that “gun violence” is “the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” I published an article showing that was false on the basis of mortality statistics provided by the CDC (available here). Others also took umbrage to the April 24th article, and I dispatched a personal message to byFaith requesting a removal of the article and a full retraction. That has not occurred, and as of May 24th the article is still available at byFaith, unamended and unaccompanied by any editorial clarifications.
Mistaken claims are rather common in the world of the published word. The careful observer will note, for instance, that I misnamed David Cassidy’s church in the first sentence of my first Aquila Report article, accidentally referring to it as Spanish River Presbyterian rather than Spanish River Church due to an editing error. Are Dominic Aquila and I to then be regarded as wholly unreliable in our claims? Hardly. But the answer in all such cases is to correct the mistake when it is brought to one’s attention and to be more careful in future, hence why I have mentioned my fault here and why I have checked with a former professional proofreader to ensure my pronoun usage is correct in the phrase above about the proprietor of this site and me. (And in fairness, I reversed them the first time around.)
It is a rather more serious fault, however, to make a claim as large and consequential as that gun violence is the leading cause of death of children in this nation when it is easily verified that it is not. And it is significant as well that this claim seems to be that of a certain political faction in our nation, as evidenced by the fact that I passed by a waiting room the other day and found a pair of activists making the claim verbatim on a major news outlet. The PCA’s magazine should not be parroting the false claims of the political left. Nor should it be repeating the claims of any other political faction, unless they involve questions in which the church has a vital interest or unambiguous questions of public morality, such as matters of liberty of conscience, the free exercise of our faith, abortion, euthanasia, and the like; and even in those questions I think the church’s involvement should be as an independent witness of right and wrong, and that she should never allow herself to become a de facto organ of any political party.
But even granting that it is a more serious offense, we need not assume the worst as to its reasons. As fallible humans we all sometimes succumb to haste, emotion, and the influence of others, especially the media, whose sole occupation lies in seeking to get us to believe its narratives and to think and act along its preferred lines. Add in the rigors and tedium of pastoral and publishing work and mistakes are apt to happen sometimes, even large ones. In such cases a little public or private contradiction that seeks to set one right is justified, provided it is moved by charity and expressed courteously.
What I am suggesting, then, is that we provide a collective remonstrance against byFaith’s error of fact. If you are reading this and are a member of the PCA I ask you, dear reader, to take a moment to drop byFaith a line here or via email at [email protected], and to tell them that you are disappointed that the public news outlet of our church has done poorly by its departure from its proper mission, and that it needs to retract its errors by removing the source of offense in question and offering a public acknowledgment and correction of its published errors of fact. The reason I suggest this is simple: byFaith is an official agency of the PCA, paid for by her funds and subordinate to her government. Our magazine should not be publishing false claims which venture into the territory of the purely political and have no direct relation to the church or her duties of disciple making.
I believe, moreover, that any PCA member should be able to do this in good conscience, regardless of his or her beliefs about criminal justice policy. For while we may differ as to our beliefs about civil or political questions, yet the proper focus of the church is a matter which we should all respect, and upon which we should all insist. Christ’s “kingdom is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36), and when the people of Israel were about to make him king he withdrew from them (Jn. 6:15), lest their mistaken popular enthusiasm should distract from his true mission of redeeming his elect. The PCA (including her agencies like byFaith), being a manifestation of Christ’s body, the church, ought to take heed and beware lest in her concern with the things of this life she diverts people’s attention from things above (Col. 3:1-2; comp. Matt. 16:23).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
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As Hillsdale’s Thomas West notes, a serious Christian nationalism must engage in a potentially unpopular challenge to existing civil rights laws, which “frequently limit religion as practiced outside of the narrow realm of ‘religion as such’…. Civil rights laws protect the right of unwed mothers, gays, and transgenders to nondiscrimination—which means religious schools or businesses may be required to admit them or hire them, contrary to their Christian moral convictions.” In such a situation, where Christianity cedes the public square to state atheism, it can become functionally impossible “to follow and teach in daily life the moral beliefs of Christianity as understood by most believers.”

A time for choosing.
Advocating Christian nationalism may seem, at first blush, like a futile enterprise. We live in a country that is de-Christianizing rapidly. America is expected to lose its Christian majority by 2050 and be just 39 percent Christian by 2070. As even Mike Sabo acknowledges in his introductory piece on the subject, “Absent a nationwide crack-up, it could take a century or more for the Christian nationalist project to have any measurable effect at scale.”
Yet despite this, the debate over Christian nationalism has taken on mythic proportions in certain corners of the Right. Christian nationalism has a variety of definitions among those versed in the relevant arcana. As a layperson (literally and when compared with the initiates in these debates) I will adopt a broad and basic but serviceable definition: Christian nationalism is the view that America’s institutions should bear the influence of, and move people toward, Christianity. This definition could obviously include a large variety of policies and perspectives, but it has the virtue of encompassing the vast majority of the Christian nationalist project, while being broadly comprehensible to the average churchgoer.
Before examining the positive case for Christian nationalism, it is instructive to examine the arguments of some of its fiercest critics. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne, perhaps the most popular current critique of the white evangelical community, told an interviewer that “at the core of Christian nationalism in contemporary politics is really the idea of privileging certain views over others, in terms of determining our laws, in terms of even interpreting our Constitution, and in terms of implementing our democracy.”
Well yes, that’s actually the idea. As Christians we should privilege a Christian viewpoint, I think, rather than the godless viewpoint that has been forced on America, largely illegitimately, by the courts over the past several decades. Of course, this approach could be taken too far. Russell Moore, editor of the liberal quasi-evangelical magazine Christianity Today, cites the case of the Russian Orthodox patriarch who recently implied that military sacrifice in the war versus Ukraine would wash away all sins. Or witness the tight integration between church and a conservative state that can ultimately damage both, as we recently saw in Poland. But while a state which embraces Christianity too closely can cause a collapse in Christian faith from without, a fully-secularized state such as our modern one can also rot the moral foundations of a society from within.
That is to say, while Moore’s attack on Christian nationalism in Russia is fair, he goes too far when he claims that Christian nationalists use “Jesus’ authority to baptize their national identity in the name of blood and soil.”
This is not a description of Christian nationalism that those Christian nationalists I know would embrace. Of course Christianity is a universal religion—there are obviously certain core beliefs. But, as missionaries have learned over many generations, Christianity’s ability to embrace particularities is often as powerful as its universality. What leads people to the Gospel and keeps them in the community of believers can be almost infinitely varied depending on the cultural and national context. Simply put, “nationalizing” Christianity in the sense of localizing, particularizing, and institutionalizing it in a particular place and culture is necessary for the very real work of saving souls. A Christianity that excludes a national mission or that does not integrate with an existing cultural context is a Christianity that will likely fail to save souls for Christ.
Or, as noted Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman wrote in a balanced and perceptive article: “To love one’s country, to be patriotic, is…not to sneer at every other nation or to look with scorn upon other peoples. It is simply the appropriate response of gratitude and love for the place where one belongs, that gives one an identity, that provides one with community and with purpose.”
Our Christian Nationalist History
So why promote Christian nationalism? One reason is that it has been shown to work in an American context previously. A version of Christian nationalism grew America from an obscure collection of colonies hugging the Eastern seaboard of North America in the 17th and 18th centuries to the world’s greatest economic and political powerhouse by the early 20th century. No founder seriously disputed the goal of encouraging Christianity among the populace.
Even the two most famous early examples of the alleged “separation of church and state” were public diplomatic gestures, not forthright descriptions of reality in the founding generation. Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he famously alluded to a so-called “Wall of Separation” between church and state, came from the least religious founder to a denomination concerned about their unfavorable treatment in Connecticut. And the notion that America is “Not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,” is found in the Treaty of Tripoli (1797) made with a Muslim power, a public declaration that was possibly shrewd diplomacy but did not really reflect American reality.
By contrast, the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, began by invoking “the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.”
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