About Us
Our mission is to provide education founded on a biblical worldview that equips our students to know truth, love wisdom, and embrace service.
Our Mission
Core Values
Our mission statement reflects our commitment to three core values: truth, wisdom, and service.
Truth
The core of education is the inculcation of knowledge, yet the concept of truth itself has been lost in many sectors of modern education. We stand in opposition to this trend. We value the truth above all else, striving to both know and love the truth in all areas of life. This is a feature of our curriculum, which emphasizes the accumulation of knowledge and the cultivation of wonder, particularly in the lower grades.
In the upper grades, students study logic, rhetoric, and debate, and interact first-hand with the greatest thinkers and writers in history. This equips students not only to know the material, but to love and seek truth beyond the classroom, and to be able to critically analyze and respond to different ideas and worldviews from the standpoint of a stable, tested biblical perspective.
Our commitment to valuing truth means all subjects are set in their proper context within a biblical worldview. All truth is God’s truth, and we equip our students with a holistic and Bible-based understanding of the world.
Our course of study is rigorous and challenging, producing students who excel beyond their peers in the accumulation of knowledge and the mastery of academic disciplines, and are exceptionally well-prepared for success in continued education at the university level.
Wisdom
While the accumulation of knowledge is basic to the mission of education, no less central is the development of wisdom or the “capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct.” The knowledge of truth forms the foundation for wisdom, which is the proper use and deployment of truth. Wisdom is truth enacted.
Academic subjects, from mathematics to history, are not ends in themselves but pieces of the whole of reality, which is governed by God. This means that academic subjects are never learned in a vacuum, but are situated within the greater context of reality, understood most accurately in a biblical framework. We aim that our students not only accumulate knowledge about reality but gain the wisdom required to think and act properly within it.
ALCA aims to produce students who excel academically, but also develop a keen moral compass that guides their progress and actions in life.
Service
If wisdom is truth enacted, service is the direction in which we aim to enact it. Community is an essential part of God’s design for human beings, and the link that binds a healthy community is service. Thus, we emphasize service to others as the necessary and proper direction in which truth and wisdom are oriented. More importantly, we are designed to render service to God, by loving him and obeying his word. Cross-shaped service to God and others is the calling and vocation of every person, and in it are found true satisfaction and fulfillment.
We therefore emphasize service as the practical aim for everything we learn in the classroom. We strive to create opportunities for service in the classroom, the church, and our community, and to teach students to seek and value opportunities to serve in every area of life.
Our vision is to build a community that produces disciples of Jesus equipped to positively influence a world that is in cultural decline.
Our Vision
Our mission statement defines what we do; our vision explains why we do it.
Ephesians 6:4 declares that parents should bring up their children in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord” (KJV). The word admonition might be more clearly translated today as “instruction.” In other words, parents have a responsibility to instruct or educate their children in the way of the Lord. It is the responsibility of the church to assist them in this, given the church’s mandate to shepherd the souls of all its members. The school’s function is therefore to act as an extension of both parents and the church in their responsibilities concerning the education of children.
The word the KJV translates as nurture needs even closer attention. The word in the Greek is paideia, for which there is no English equivalent. It means something like “enculturation” or “the passing down of culture.” As G.K. Chesterton memorably put it, “education is… the transfer of a way of life.” In other words, education goes far beyond instruction in academics, or even religious instruction. It encompasses the transfer from one generation to another of an entire culture, or way of life. All schools, churches, and parents pass down a culture, but whether they do so intentionally or not can have serious consequences.
At ALCA, we approach education with this grander vision in mind. We strive to consciously and thoughtfully pass down to students in our care the culture of Jesus Christ and his church. This is not limited to Bible class, though biblical instruction is an integral part of our program of study. Being a disciple of Jesus encompasses all of one’s life, including academics. This is why we place significant emphasis on biblical integration for every subject. We also emphasize the history and literature of the Christian West, inviting our students to take part in the “Great Conversation” with thinkers of the last two millennia.
It is our conviction that this model of education best prepares young minds not only for a deep, authentic, and well-grounded faith in Jesus, but also to be leaders, on the strength of academic excellence and thoughtful training, in a world that has, unfortunately, begun to abandon biblical truth and is therefore experiencing cultural decline.