Episode #31 – Capitalism, Christianity, & Christian Schools

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On this episode we discuss the differences and relationship of Capitalism and Christianity. Are Capitalism and Christianity at war with each other? Is it a sin to make a profit? Is poverty a sign of the being a true Christian? Join us as we discuss the book entitled, “How To Become A Millionaire in Christian Education.” It is important not to judge a book by it’s cover, and nothing could be more true than with this book.

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Radio Announcer: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network presents The Preschool Pioneers podcast with Reverend Jeremy Walker, where you will hear practical and biblical advice from a unique perspective on the subject of Christian education.

Jeremy Walker: The Preschool Pioneers podcast is brought to you by the GCS Apprenticeship Program. For more information visit gcsapprenticeship.com. Welcome back to another episode of Preschool Pioneers podcast. I am your host, Reverend Jeremy Walker, and on this episode of the Preschool Pioneers podcast I have with me a guest, Dr. Ellsworth McIntyre.

Pastor McIntyre: Hello, Reverend Walker. Good to be with you.

Jeremy Walker: And we’re very much glad to have you on this episode. Today I’m going to go ahead and give you a brief overview. Our intention today and our topic is Christianity Versus Capitalism, and how that plays in Christian education and how that plays in the running and operation of Christian schools, so we’re going to go ahead and delve into that a little bit and discuss Christianity, what it looks like in the real world, in the business world, in the education world, in the operation of Christian schools, and also discussing the concept of capitalism as well.

Now I’m go ahead and give you some background here for our listeners about Pastor Ellsworth McIntyre. He has very extensive experience in the field of education and also very extensive academic education as well, so I’m go ahead and give some brief background here of his experience and the degrees that he holds and has held for the extent of his time. He was a teacher and administrator of Bible Baptist Academy in Savannah, Georgia. He administered and was the administrator of Capitol Christian Academy in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. He was administrator also of Wilson Christian Academy in Wilson, North Carolina. He was also the administrator of Southeastern New Hampshire Christian Academy in Somersworth, New Hampshire, and of course he is the pastor and founder of Grace Community Church here in Naples, Florida, and the founder of Grace Community Schools as well which started with, in 1986, one location and has over the past 30 plus years extended to over nine locations with more on the way.

His academic background is that of he went to University of Pittsburgh, University of Pennsylvania, holds a bachelor’s degree from Bob Jones University, a master’s degree from Georgia Southern University. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California, and also a PhD from Faith Theological Seminary. Pastor McIntyre, we’re going to go ahead and now that we’ve given a brief overview and background of your experience, and I’d like to touch on a couple of things, one being, which kind of comes up in discussion and topic, you’ve also written a book and can you give me the title of the book that you’ve written a while back?

Pastor McIntyre: How to Become a Millionaire in Christian Education.

Jeremy Walker: Now this book right here has caused quite a stir in the Christian community, and when someone hears the title How to Become a Millionaire in Christian Education it does cause quite a few different emotions from different people depending on their background, some of them very positive and some of them negative as well, and so I’d like to go ahead and mix this in as we’re talking about your book and how that involves with Christian education as we’re talking about capitalism and Christianity. Before we delve in to some questions about the book itself and the reasons why you wrote it and all the rest, I’d like to start with kind of an overall discussion about Christianity and capitalism, so my first question to you is what is the difference between biblical Christianity and what people would think of as typical, normal capitalism?

Pastor McIntyre: Well, I went to extensive background and I found that the schools consisted of a faculty of primarily women. In my first experience in my first school, I noticed after I was there three years that there were maybe two teachers out of 30 that were there three years or less. In other words, I had become the most senior member of the faculty by lasting three years. What happens in most Christian schools is young ladies go into Christian education more with the idea of finding a husband than being devoted particularly to education. Also I found that the model of compensation that these teachers received was far, far below what they would receive if they were teaching in a public school, so some of them who did fail in finding a husband would end up going in to a public school as their search went on, but education was not their primary goal. As a consequence, the school did not produce a product that people wanted to buy necessarily.

People had a bad feeling for public education because of its many problems. Public education is not really interested in education either. Public education is sort of a babysitting operation, a warehousing of the students, and the teachers are not graded on, promoted on, or in their careers long enough to have education or their success of being in education have much to do with the extent of their career. I on the other hand didn’t get converted until the age of 30 and had a family of five children at that time, and it grew to eight children as I went through my career. Before that, I was a general sales manager with an international trucking company, had an insurance agency, had over 30 students, but then was converted at the age of 30 and rediscovered, because I started at the University of Pittsburgh to earn a teaching degree, that education was really my calling.

Therefore I gave up a very successful capitalistic job, but having five children and growing to eight, what was necessary for me to make more than a single teacher in search of a husband, so as a consequence when I founded Grace Community Schools here in Naples, Florida, my goal was to make a more comfortable living. To my surprise after I put my ideas into force, I found that I had become a millionaire, not purposely as such, but the goal of being a educator rather than just someone who’s just warehousing children produced a product that I found parents wanted and wanted well to pay good money for. I also discovered that most Christian schools are very poorly managed and as my economics teacher Dr. Stuart Crane at Bob Jones University was fond of saying, “Profit is 100% management.” Management is where the profit is made and you must produce a product that people want to buy in order to make money, so therefore I’ve discovered that there isn’t really any difference between a car manufacturer or a furniture manufacturer or a grocer or any marketable skill.

If you produce a product people want, the accumulation of property, the accumulation of your reputation and money follows irresistibly. There really isn’t any separation between a skill that doesn’t make money or a manager that doesn’t know how to manage or a teacher who’s more interested in finding a husband than she is teaching, so as a consequence, my schools do make money, and right away I’m sure some of your listeners are thinking, “Yeah, but you’re charging a lot more than those schools that have these, Christian schools which are not producing a product.” That’s where you’re mistaken. I produce a product for preschoolers and my preschoolers read fluently at the age four. Our saying or our marketable slogan is, “College can begin at two.” The idea of teaching preschool children to read was the marketable skill that parents got very enthusiastic about once they found out about it.

Also I found that the children who come in to the preschools that we have come from homes of mothers that are forced to work or forced to a nasty divorce, or on and on it goes to where they must go to work and they must put their children into a daycare, but instead of a daycare, we produced a school and a school that produces outstanding results, results that are so wonderful, particularly for the Christian parents that wants their child to be taught God’s law, the 10 Commandments, want their children to be taught to behave well, and most important, to read fluently and all of the other things that a preschool does not do. Even a Christian preschool does not attempt to do any of these things. I found — you read my background; I went through graduate school, even through Johns Hopkins, the University of Southern California, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pennsylvania — that none of these schools that I went to even brought up the subject of teaching preschool children to read.

It’s widely believed that you should not do so or cannot do so, so as a consequence, preschools are sort of play schools in which the children are diverted somehow and the idea that they should academically be challenged in any way is not even in sight, but whenever I produced such a school, I found that it was wildly popular. As a result, I was producing a product that people wanted to buy just like any other capitalist must do. He must produce a product that people want to buy, or nobody will buy his product and he’ll go out of business, but we have produced nine schools here in Southwest Florida that do have education as our goal. Happily I’m proud to say to you because they’re well-managed, that our tuition is lower, much lower than most Christian schools. As a consequence, just like if you were going to sell hamburgers and your name is McDonald, you produce a product which is better than the other hamburger people at a lower price.

Such it is with capitalism, and so there really isn’t any difference between capitalism and producing a Christian school that makes money, and that is the topic of my book and how I presented this to people out there. There’s not a lot of them, but there are people out there that want to raise a family as I did, that want to produce a business as I did, and therefore this idea that you could produce an education for their children and preschool childcare is a very, very desirable thing. That is the topic of my book, how to go about doing so.

Jeremy Walker: I’d like to touch on a couple of things you were mentioning there as our conversation continues, one of those being is … I’ve heard people ask the question. In fact, they’ve asked me before because of course, working with a Grace Community School as I have for a number of years, people don’t have the experience that I have to see Grace Community School in action or the clientele, and some people are under the impression that in order to request or ask people to pay tuition must mean that you’re only bringing in the upper class people, but the lower class people, the people that are the working class people, single mothers, things like that, they couldn’t possibly afford to pay anybody. The clientele that Grace Community serves, is it just the upper class people, or what kind of clientele is it that Grace Community serves as a norm?

Pastor McIntyre: Well, if you talk to business consultants, they’ll say that the most successful business plan for a preschool is a school that charges a great deal of money. The public widely believes if it costs a lot of money, it must be of greater quality. As a result, you will find in higher priced prestigious schools or the reputation high tuition, and the idea also given that the classes have to be very small and on and on it goes so that you produce not a very good quality education, but at a great deal of price because that is the preconceived notion that the parents have. Now Grace Community Schools on the other hand, we give out over 500 out of 1,500 to 2,000 students — the population fluctuates during the year — free or at a reduced tuition, and a great majority of our students necessarily come from lower, not higher, income people.

The other thing that is probably not well known to your audience, higher income people don’t have many children. A little over one to two children per family is the rule, but lower income children and dedicated Christian families typically have many more, which makes it even more difficult for them to get education and preschool out of those type of schools. Grace Community Schools on the other hand, we have the lowest tuition, I believe, of any school in Southwest Florida, and we give away much more. We give away nearly one third of our students free or on reduced commission tuition, and as a consequence it’s the very opposite of what most people think about when they think about quality preschools.

Our children not only can produce at a level which is far and above the most expensive schools, but we do it with a lot of lower skilled, lower families, larger families, and of course Christian families as well. All of these ideas are contrary to what people customarily think of, which necessitated me writing a book, How to Become a Millionaire in Christian Education, because also many of the people who are dedicated to education think that they must be dedicated to poverty at the same time in order to carry out their calling. Such is not the case. The marketplace, the capitalistic marketplace wonderfully provides a place for a well-managed school like Grace Community School at a lower price to the customer and at a much higher product than other schools even attempt, because they’ve all graduated from schools in which their professors assured them that reading isn’t all that important, then certainly not something which would spoil the education of little children, and so they end up with play schools rather than schools at all. They’re not even called schools. It is called preschool education.

This is also true, I’m afraid, of elementary schools and high schools in America. The average reading level for a successful twelfth grader from the American school system is below fifth grade. Now I’m not talking about the dropouts and the people who don’t even get through to a high school education. Their reading level is even more deficient, so as a consequence the elementary schools and public schools and even the private schools have goals which do not entail a superior education. What they entail is, again, sort of just warehousing the student until he’s 18 years old or drops out or goes in to the Marine Corps or whatever young people do nowadays. Adding to that problem is the fact that divorce is, well, just running rampant. I don’t have to tell your listeners that, so the families are deficient in producing a stable emotional, educational, Christian background and the schools are not attempting, don’t even think it’s possible to produce a superior education particularly for single mothers, divorced families, and what have you.

Grace Community Schools, for example, have children which for all intents and purposes are orphans. A child who doesn’t have a father, a child which has a mother which is more interested in other things than raising children, produces a child which is quite lost. They don’t have a family, and as a consequence, you combine that with the lack of vision on the part of the school to even attempt to teach reading to preschool children in particular, the education is very poor, but it’s no greater with the schools that charge a lot of money either, and a successful twelfth grade graduates, I repeat, is below fifth grade. It’s a sad situation, but it’s a situation which I’ve attempted and dedicated my life to attempting to point out to people that it doesn’t have to be that way if they set out with a school which has the goal of making up for the child’s lack of a home, that’s stable, or makes up for the child’s lack of teaching and dedication on the part of the school to teach reading.

For example, if I was producing chairs at a furniture factory and all the chairs would collapse after a while or wouldn’t last long, why, I wouldn’t be producing chairs very long, but schools can go on endlessly producing students who fail, don’t have a chance of succeeding, don’t have any emotional stability, and when it comes to Christianity can’t even repeat the 10 Commandments, can’t tell you where they’re found. It has a warped view of salvation, has a warped view of all the major doctrines of the scriptures, and nobody seems to be in criticism of them. Churches can exist forever just making people sort of rosy, toasty, feel good on Sunday, but not quite knowing why. I suppose because they feel superior to those who didn’t go to church, but again the ordinary Christian knows very little about the bible, very little about God’s plan of salvation, very little about anything that’s any value to them to not end up being a divorce statistic like their own parents.

It’s a sad situation, but it’s a situation that presents an open door and the open door is schools like Grace Community School that have education in view, Christianity in view, and set out to do so, and it can be done, I repeat, at a price which is far lower than any other Christian school in the market.

Jeremy Walker: I think that leads us into our next question that I have here for you and it’s based off of your experiences because one thing you can’t learn from anything except for experience, you always find those people that are doing something successfully who have gone through and maybe seen the errors or fixed errors, and yourself, clearly successful, clearly able to operate Christian schools, not one but nine over the last 30 plus years is undoubtedly successful, so here’s my question, I think, for our listeners. There’s people that might be interested in Christian education or maybe they’re already involved in Christian education. What are some of the failures that you’ve seen over the years? Clearly for all your experience of all the administration you’ve done, you’ve been in lots of different schools, so could you share with our listeners some of the experience you’ve had with how people or Christians have operated schools in the past, but things that they did wrong which were the cause of their failures?

Pastor McIntyre: Well, the very first Christian school was Capitol Christian Academy in Washington, D.C. The school was losing money, which is quite typical of Christian schools. It’s very rare to find one that makes a profit, and they almost take a perverse pride in the fact that they don’t. We’ve copied, we meaning Christianity in general, the idea that if you’re begging, if you’re poor, then somehow you must be holy. That is the very opposite of reality. You should be successful if you’re good at what you’re doing. I went to this school on recommendation from Bob Jones University and came in to the school. The school was almost $200,000 if I remember correctly, something like that, in debt, and was being subsidized by the church in order to keep itself in business, and of course by constantly ragging on the parents and the church members and so forth to donate more and more money so that their children could have a Christian education.

The doctrine taught into church was salvation, salvation, salvation, God is love, God is love, God is love, and that the law had been done away with. They even used to sing with great passion, “Free from the law, oh, blessed condition,” and on and on they went. Well, that kind of a doctrine produces a child which doesn’t know what God requires of them and produces a lawless child. How lawless, you might ask? Well, it was not unusual in that school for a student to take down his pants in the hall and defecate on the floor. I know it’s hard to believe, but that was the case. Graffiti on the bathroom walls, disrespect for teachers, and I could go on and on. This was true in every Christian school that I took up. All of them were in debt. All of them were without discipline because the child was not being taught that God requires obedience, and that if a person is genuinely saved, he will grow in the power to keep God’s law and God’s commandments.

The heroes of our faith taught that kind of a doctrine. The founder of the United States of America was really an evangelist by the name of Whitfield, and Whitfield went through America time after time after time. I can remember reading his biography and he said, he told his audience that they were little more than worms. They were cursed. They were in rebellion against God. They were sinners that had to be taught to obey God, and he had tremendous revivals across America called the Great Awakening and that was the generation produced by Whitfield that founded America, because the people who came to America by and large were pilgrims and puritans who were driven out of England because they also believed that a Christian had to be someone who obeyed God and learned to obey him more and more or was born again from above, and the proof of being born again was not an emotional frenzy of some sort. It was a growing power to obey God’s law more and more.

You are saved by God and the proof of your salvation is not that you prayed the Sinner’s Prayer. The proof of your salvation is that you are not a drunk any longer, that you’re not a prostitute any longer, that you’re not a serial. On and on we could go. You have been changed into a new person and the change has to come by repentance, by admitting that we deserve to go to hell and that the lord had to die for us because of such wretched sin as we commit in a non-saved condition, so the proof of salvation is bearing the fruit of salvation and is not something that we can speak ourselves into by our own power. We must be saved by the power of Christ, otherwise why did He find it necessary to be crucified for us?

We were such wretched sinners, those of us who are in our natural condition, that Christ had to die for us personally and that is necessary in order to produce a new person, a new person born from above, but that’s not the doctrine that’s taught in our churches, sad to say, and of course the time to teach this kind of fear of God. Love, true, but fear of God is necessary. Fear of getting what we deserve, fear of reaping what we have sowed, that must be taught and it must be taught so that we can grow in the power to become a different person, but we’ve all hear the phrase, haven’t you, “He’s a God-fearing man”? Well, one of the problems I had in every school and every church that I went to before I founded this one 31 years ago was that they didn’t want their children to be taught to fear God. They wanted to be taught that they should love God.

Well, love follows a fearful profession of faith, and God in turn comes in and makes us into a new person, but without fear, the bible teaches there’s no departure from evil for the scripture clearly teaches, “By the fear of God, men depart from evil.” If a student doesn’t even know the 10 Commandments, doesn’t understand the necessity of using the 10 Commandments, not as a plan of salvation, but as a proof of salvation, there’s really, really hopeless things.

Jeremy Walker: Well, I think it’s very interesting that when I ask about the failures of the schools, you did not start out with a economic approach to it because people, when they hear the idea of the book, the title of the book, they do get the impression, the wrong impression, because they should just open up the book and get a copy and read it, but they would get the impression that your background and your perspective is focusing mostly on the monetary aspects of it, the financial aspects of it, but clearly your focus is more on the Christian/spiritual aspects of things.

I would also like to touch on these schools, their structures, because as I know, when people think of Christian education, they think something that is developed by a church or a church group or lots of pastors or eldership or a community of people that work in the church, kind of a church-controlled school. What are your thoughts, what’s your experience on that kind of a model where the church itself, a group of people, a board of people are the ones who are actually either owning or controlling of the school itself? What kind of a impression do you have of that model? Because the listeners, I’m sure there’s people out there that might think this would be a good approach. what would you have to say to these people?

Pastor McIntyre: Well, my book counts how many schools that were bankrupt that I came to them and put them on a money paying basis in less than three years. Every school that I took over that was church operated made more than $100,000 profit within three years and the tuition was brought down during that time and the Romaic went up, and the church fired me in every case.

Jeremy Walker: Wow.

Pastor McIntyre: Why? Well, because the people in the church are not recipients of a Christian education, they’re not in the recipient of what doctrine is about. They’re easy-believism type people, that all you have to do is make a profession of faith and you’re sure and certain of going to heaven regardless of works, and as soon as you tell them that you have to prove your salvation or you don’t know you have salvation unless your work has been proved, just as the Book of James points out, “Without works your salvation is vane.” That kind of faith cannot save you and every good theologian would endorse that, that you must have faith works. You must have the faith which produces biblical works, but all of those schools did make a profit and all of those schools did fire me, which brought me to the point of firing myself from them and coming here to Naples, Florida and founding a church from scratch and founding Grace Community Schools so now I have a church which supports the school, but I’m primarily not a churchman by a long shot.

I have a very small church and that is not the main trust that I have. The main trust I have is preschools. Now why preschools? Well, the open door is the preschool level because once these children get into elementary school, they’ve already been infected with the idea of lawless salvation, of salvation that has no consequences, salvation which is sort of self-generated, and so as a consequence, the parents will not support that kind of thing, because the parents sitting in the churches, whether it’s a church that’s sponsoring the school or not, have the idea that they’re sure and certain of going to heaven just by believing, plus nothing. Well, believing in Christ produces works that are biblical based, “For by grace are you saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.” Now there’s many scriptures that talk about that sort of thing.

The gift of faith, but the gift of faith produces works, lest any man should boast. It is by grace through faith that you’re saved, plus nothing, but the grace that comes through faith doesn’t allow you to boast that, “I asked Jesus into my heart and therefore I am certain to going to heaven.” That is the profession of faith of a fool and the scripture is very clear about what happens to the fool. Just read through the Book of Proverbs and it’s chilling indeed to see how well-off the fool is versus the genuine believer.

Jeremy Walker: That leads me into the next question I would have for a person who is interested in getting into running a school or maybe they currently operate a school, about policies they might have. The question is, we’re talking heavily about the importance of Christian doctrine and the proper teaching of that, and one of the questions I would have is the approach to enrollment, the type of children that come in to the school. Do we, as far as your experience and what Grace Community School does, compare it to other Christian schools and how they model their schools and how they enroll their students? Is it something that you would ask a parent to sit down and have a profession of faith, or discriminate based on specific church membership, or is it as far as what Grace Community School does and your approach, to allow anyone to come into the school?

Pastor McIntyre: Well, the scripture is very plain. “Whosoever will may come,” but whosoever may come was not practiced by any of the schools that I administered prior to Grace Community Schools. We were required in every case to sit down with the parents and ask the parents if they believed the bible, ask the parents if they were church members, ask the parents and so forth, and then if they answered all of that positively, then we would accept their children into the school. This is not scriptural. The parent coming in to the school may not be a Christian, but his preschool child is not a Christian either. Whosoever will come means that you take all comers, but those who will not, cannot obey, cannot become good students, will leave on their own accord, so the discrimination is on the part of the hearer. You found, for example, that all of those schools fired me. Not everybody, of course, disputed what I had to teach. Many of them love me a great deal.

Jeremy Walker: We were already talking here that the primary reason and purpose for getting into Christian education is proper evangelism, proper teaching, and in this case what we’re talking about here, not being hindered by people who would not want the Christian school to teach the truth because they have other doctrines in mind themselves, hence like they wouldn’t want to teach the Commandments, etc. and so how about we go into, not only does the model that you’ve started with Grace Community School, not only is it successful, not only does it open its doors to the entire community, anybody that would desire come can, and then makes the price so affordable and so low that is below any other market value in the community.

But I’d like to touch on also not only we have a lower price that allows everybody to come in and of course gets a great deal for doing so, but let’s touch a little bit on what Grace Community Schools and your system is set up further beyond than just childcare and a low price. What else does Grace Community School provide as far as a product that would be attractive to somebody to come to the school?

Pastor McIntyre: Well, we have dance classes, music classes, art classes, and of course daily teaching in the academics. What I have found as an educator is that the child comes from a home frequently which is without one parent or it’s broken or it’s not functioning properly, and as a result one of the startling things to me was that when I founded the Grace Community Schools, I was sitting in the school preparing my Sunday sermon when suddenly the door burst open and in came a mother and a young boy. They stopped at the door and I looked up and she said in an irritated voice, “See, I told you that they don’t have school in Saturday. I’m not keeping you home on purpose.” It made me think. An ordinary school, a child doesn’t like to go to that school. A child prefers not to, but here this child wanted to come there and I found this was generally true of nearly all of the students that went to our school, and what was that reason?

Well, the reason is that our school gives lots of positive reinforcement to these children. For example, you have to once in a while, as a teacher, say something negative to the student, you have to correct them, but five times, 10 times more often what you have to do is praise them, give positive reinforcement to them. For example, prizes for sitting still, prizes for answering questions correctly, recognition. If someone visits our school, we have bulletin boards in the halls with photographs of the students holding up certificates whenever they achieve certain reading and math levels. They take home with them their lesson leaflets almost daily and show their parents what they’re doing. This is a repeat on my part. Success is what makes people happy. For example, my hearers to this podcast, if you had no success at your work, nobody seemed to appreciate you at your work, nothing ever happens of a positive nature, I don’t think you would want that job very much.

I can still remember my father sitting at the dinner table boasting about how good he was at his job and how he was appreciated in his job, and whenever he complained, he would complain that he wasn’t appreciated as much as he thought he deserved. The success is what we look for as adults and success we look for as children, but if the child is going to a school in which he’s not given recognition for achievements, he’s not given praise, he’s not given prizes, he’s not given anything to positively reinforce him, you can well understand how he doesn’t like that school just like a man would not like a job in which he’s not good at, not appreciated, and not compensated in the manner that he thinks he should be compensated, and the compensation for a child is recognition, recognition of his achievements, praise. That is the best way that you can say, “God loves you.”

In other words, whenever you stand there as a teacher in the school, you stand as a godly figure whether you are godly men, women, or not. You are in a position of authority, and if the man in authority or woman in authority gives you a task to do and praises you for it, then that is like saying, “God loves you” in the most powerful way that you can and it produces a happy, well-adjusted child. Another example I might have is we give every child a yearbook every year with all the photographs of their students and so forth, very much like a high school yearbook whenever a person would complete the twelfth grade. We don’t charge them for it. That’s just something we give to them, and I know what happens every year whenever we give them out. Some of the parents will come back and say, “Wow, you give one to every child, not one to a family?” Yes, we give one to every child. He says, “You know what my child did with your yearbook?” I will say, “What?”

“He tucked it under his pillow, and he can’t wait to go to bed and lay his head down and sleep with all of his friends, being near his school. He just loves your school.” I think to myself, “Yes, because Grace Community Schools has become his family. His students have become his brothers and sisters, and the teachers standing in front of the class has become his parent.” One of the sayings we have in our school is, “We are more than a school. We are family,” and we’re family to students who do not have a family at home, but they have a family in Grace Community Schools, and that is by positively praising the child again and again more often than criticizing.

Jeremy Walker: Amen. I think we can wrap up, because we’re going to point people, should you want more information about Grace Community Schools, you can go to the website gracecommunityschools.com. From the website you can also link to the social media that we have. We have quite a extensive social media presence, so if you’re curious to see all the various things that this model does, you can actually go on to Facebook and various other social medias that we’re on, and you can see the extensive, extensive programs that we have, theme weeks and otherwise as well, which makes everything fun, but I would encourage the listener to go there and look at those things to see more about what we’re talking about.

As we’re talking about here the book as well, the How to Become a Millionaire in Christian Education can be found on our Apprenticeship website. It’s at gcsapprenticeship.com. At the top, I think you click on Materials and you’ll find the books there. You can get a copy of this book from the website, should you want to get one, but once again, don’t let the title throw you. Hopefully the listener has been paying attention to this, and the main concept behind running a Christian school is the ability to properly teach the word of God unhindered and this is exactly what students need to hear. We’re going to close up as we’re going here. I think just the last question, kind of like a future question, so I’m going to toss this out at you, is what is your vision for the future of Christian education, and if you were going to give any advice to someone who was thinking about running a school or is currently running a school, what advice would that be?

Pastor McIntyre: Well, I had a friend of mine that I was attempting to recruit to come to work with me and to learn how to start a Christian school, and he said to me, “Oh, I already know how to run a school. I have been principal of such and such.” Since he was a friend of mine, I was quite frank with him. I looked at him and smiled and said, “How much money does your school make?” He looked at me and I repeated the question. Then he answered me, “I know how to run a school that does not make money.” Then he laughed. Yes, you have to learn how to run a school that knows how to make money and produces a product that people want to buy.

The other kind of schools, I’m afraid, are everywhere, and everywhere I have found they are not making money and they therefore will not last very long as Christian schools. Most churches have schools which last one, two, three years, and then go bankrupt. Lots of them coming and going, and unless they can find donors willing to keep them afloat, they are charging more than they are delivering, they’re charging more than a school like mine charges by far, and they’re not producing a product that is honoring to the Lord Jesus Christ, and so therefore my advice would be please, come to Grace Community Schools if you can qualify to come and learn how to run a school that is capitalist, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it charges more than it produces.

The parents come to us very often in years to come and tell us about the success of the students that we produce, how wonderfully they’re doing, but the open door is to get them young enough and train them up in the way they should go, and when they’re old they will not depart from it. The problem is we are not training our children early enough. The ability to read can come as fast as the ability to speak. Children have a gift for language and that language can be taught to them just as early as they speak. College truly can begin at two, and I would urge you to come and visit Grace Community Schools and see for yourselves. It’s an unusual title for a book, but it’s a very, very unusual school as well and it should be seen to be appreciated.

Jeremy Walker: Wonderful. Well, we definitely thank you for coming on to our podcast and for this interview. Hopefully our listeners have gotten some great information to think on and to ponder, and if you would like more information about this model we’re talking about here, you can go to our website at gcsapprenticeship.com, and on that website you’ll find lots of information. If it’s something that you’re interested in, you can also get in touch with us via the website there at gcsapprenticeship.com, so until next time, thank you for joining us and may God bless you.

Pastor McIntyre: Thank you, sir.

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