When educators James and Barbara Kilkenny left their classrooms in the mid-1970s to serve as missionaries with Youth With A Mission (YWAM), little did they know that their call to the nations would unquestionably include a call to their own. In time, they were directed back to the field of education and tasked with starting a Christian school in YWAM (then located in Solvang, California; now in Tyler, Texas).
Under the guidance of two esteemed scholars, historian Verna Hall and educator Rosalie Slater, the Kilkennys embarked on their mission. These women, founders of the Foundation for American Christian Education (FACE), played a pivotal role in expanding the Kilkennys’ understanding of Christianity’s influence on America’s founding.
From their decades of extensive historical research and intense scriptural study, Misses Hall and Slater deduced seven principles of America’s Christian history and government. They observed that these fundamental ideas gave rise to unprecedented individual and civil liberty and the economic prosperity America has enjoyed since its founding. Learning the seven principles revolutionized the Kilkennys’ understanding of how liberty was planted and flourished in America and how it can grow in any nation.
The FACE founders directed James and Barbara to study the 1643 Puritan book New Englands First Fruits. Written within its pages was the original educational philosophy employed at Harvard College[1] which stated, “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, John 17:3, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.” This philosophy profoundly reshaped the Kilkennys’ understanding of the nature of true Christian education.
With Harvard’s philosophy in mind, the FACE founders developed an educational methodology called the Principle Approach®[2], which they defined as America’s historic Christian method of Biblical reasoning that bases every subject on the truths of God’s Word. The Principle Approach® is both the rediscovery and implementation of the educational approach used in early America. It was this approach that produced brilliant scholarship in America’s founding generation, who penned history-making documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with its accompanying Bill of Rights.
When Christian Heritage School opened its doors in Tyler in 1980, James and Barbara unequivocally chose to employ the Principle Approach® methodology and its corresponding curriculum because these held promise for both the Biblical discipleship of children and youth and the restoration of our nation’s moral and academic foundations. The Lord promised them this restoration when He directed them to what became CHS’s founding verse, “Those from among you will rebuild the ancient ruins; You will raise up the age-old foundations; And you will be called the repairer of the breach, The restorer of the streets in which to dwell.” (Isaiah 58:12)
Never wavering from their missionary call to the nations, the Kilkennys launched and led Teachers for the Nations, a one-year course to train international teachers in a Biblical philosophy of history, education, and government. For decades, educators flocked to the Christian Heritage School campus to study, gain hands-on teaching experience, and be sent worldwide as Christian education ambassadors.
Today, Principal Jeff Schapansky and a new generation of educators continue along the path blazed by our founders, cultivating moral character and academic excellence in our students and preparing them to be leaders, both in America and across the globe.
[1] Harvard College was officially recognized as Harvard University in 1780.
[2] The Principle Approach® is a registered trademark of the Foundation for American Christian Education.