Happy New Year! We hope and pray that 2022 will be a momentous year for Concordia Academy, as we continue working towards opening our doors to ninth graders this fall and providing the next generation of high schoolers with a quality education oriented towards wisdom and virtue in Christ.

​Towards that end, we are planning an informal come-and-go open house on Saturday, February 12th, from 10am to 12pm on our campus. While this event will kick off our official enrollment period, it is open to all families with any level of interest in the school, even if you’re not sure your child will attend Concordia, or if your child isn’t yet old enough to attend this fall. Members of the board of directors will be available to talk with you, answer questions, and share information, and you will be able to see our facilities at Grace Lutheran church.

​We also have some exciting news to share for those considering enrolling their child in ninth grade at Concordia Academy this fall. Thanks to the financial support we’ve received so far, we’re able to make a number of generous scholarships worth half to full tuition ($3,000 to $6,000) available for the 2022-2023 school year! It is our hope that these scholarships will enable more families to choose a Lutheran high school education for their child, as we know that the financial aspect of school choice can be a struggle for many.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We hope to see many of you on February 12th!

​What happens when we send our children off to school? For almost eight hours a day, five days a week, and thirteen years of their life, are they being given an example of faithfully hearing the Word, receiving the Sacrament, and calling upon God with prayer, praise, and thanksgiving? Or is it a different pattern and a different formation? 

It is clear that reformation is needed in the way American children are educated—and at the heart of it, the goal(s) they are being educated towards. Will you join us in being part of this reformation? Please consider a donation to Concordia Academy on Giving Tuesday, November 30th. We are a 501(c)(3) organization and a Recognized Service Organization (RSO) of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Save the dates for Concordia Academy’s upcoming fall events! October 2nd, 9:00-11:00 am: An open house for all prospective students and their families, held on the school’s campus (Grace Lutheran, 3310 E Pawnee). November 5th, 7:00 pm: A recital of works for violin, voice, piano, and bowed psaltery performed by Ann Harms and friends at Holy Cross (600 N Greenwich), with a reception following. A free will offering will support Concordia Academy’s capital campaign.

We are pleased to announce that three new members have joined our board of directors! They are Dick Lewallen and Rev. Dean Christ of Trinity Lutheran, Wichita, and Rev. Tim Meyer of Christ Lutheran, Eureka. We are so thankful for their willingness to serve our school, the community, and the body of Christ in this capacity.

We also want to thank two departing board members whose terms have concluded, Rev. Thomas Johnson of Faith Lutheran, Derby (who was with us since the beginning of our steering committee days), and our immediate past secretary, Della. We are thankful for the time and effort they put into helping Concordia Academy get its start!

Please continue to pray for wisdom and discernment for our board of directors as we work towards opening our doors in the fall of 2022 and educating high school students towards wisdom and virtue in Christ for many years thereafter.

Hopefully you've heard by now that we're having a capital campaign kickoff banquet on April 16th at Grace Lutheran, the site of the school campus. What kind of event will it be? We are planning an uplifting and informative evening of fellowship, with a delicious dinner, entertainment, and a couple of keynote speakers we're sure you'll enjoy hearing from. The tickets are free, because we want to encourage all who are supportive of or interested in the mission of our school to attend. There are no financial obligations that come with attending. 

Sound good to you? Be sure to register for your free tickets by clicking on "register for banquet tickets" above. The deadline to register is April 9th. Know anyone else who would like to come? We appreciate word of mouth!

​At Concordia Academy our mission is: 

Right off the bat we admit that our school isn’t neutral. It’s not passive. It’s not “student led” or “child-centered”—at least, not in a way that leaves the direction of their development up in the air. When we say that our mission is “to form students…” we mean that we’ve got an ideal in mind. We know where we’re going (or at least where we want to go) with them. Admittedly, it’s not as though they’ll come to us un-formed or neutral. They’ll come in all shapes and sizes—and I don’t mean physically, though that, too. They’ll already be formed in part by whatever home-life happens to look like. They’ll be formed by their friends. They’ll be formed by whatever preaching they’ve been given to hear and whatever church-life (or not) they’ve been given to witness and experience. Some will come formed with very hard edges, others overly soft and malleable. Some will come formed with fear and humility, others with an unnecessary boastful pride. However they come, we’ll tell them right up front that we have plans for how they’ll go. In this way, Concordia Academy seeks to be intentionally formative on who they are as humans.

The question is: what sort of humans do we seek to form them into? What is this ‘ideal’ towards which we’re directing them? For that we offer the next part of our mission statement: “faith, hope, and love…”. The ideal human that Concordia Academy deliberately seeks to form is one marked by faith, hope, and love. Of course, these three come from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he says, 

There’s now and there’s the not yet. Now, we don’t quite see things as they are—neither our sin in all of its sinfulness, nor our righteousness in all of its splendor—but then we will. Now, we don’t quite know as we ought to know—either how things work, or the universe operates, or even what we want—but then we will know as He knows us: fully and completely. Concordia Academy recognizes that it exists in the now for people living in the now and yet orders everything it does towards the not yet, where they are ultimately headed. That’s our hope, built on our faith, and expressed by love both now in this life and not yet in the life to come—which is why the greatest of these is love.

But how do you do that? Well, one thing we plan to have at Concordia Academy is a school garden. Gardens beautifully teach patience. You plant one day, spend many days cultivating whatever’s planted—flower, fruit, or vegetable—and then you wait. Cultivating a garden requires watering and tilling and weeding and pruning. It’s taking away what gets in the way and nourishing with what gives life and growth. This formation in faith, hope, and love, we say, will come by “cultivating wisdom and nourishing their souls…”.  

To this the Scriptures are clear: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10; Ps 111:10). “Wisdom,” Proverbs says, was “at the beginning of his work…like a master workman” (Prov 8:22,30). And St. Paul proclaims “Christ…the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). 

The point is this: at Concordia Academy we seek to cultivate wisdom by delivering Christ in all that we say and do, nourishing their souls in the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty—each of which finds its fullness in Christ Jesus. He is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6). He is “the Good Shepherd” (Jn 10:11). And He is the one we see as we “gaze upon the Beauty of the Lord” (Ps 27:4). 

All of this, you see, is done “according to the Word of God and the Lutheran Confessions.” The Scriptures are the basis of all that we teach and all that we do. As St. Paul says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Tim 3:16-17)

This is what we’re about at Concordia Academy. It’s our mission. Will you join us in it?

What holds all of this together is, of course, the person of Jesus Christ. He says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev 22:13). So the sort of education you’ll find at Concordia Academy is one centered on Christ, where He is the goal toward which we lead and draw our students and He is the form after which we seek to shape our students. 

This Christ-centered education presupposes that man is created in the image of God; that in the fall this image is distorted, destroyed, and requires re-formation; that man is re-formed by God himself, entering into our humanity, joining Himself to us and drawing us into him; and that where we are going—our end, goal, and telos—is union with God in the person of Jesus Christ.

So how do we do that? How do we form, shape, and mold our children, leading them from their fallen image bearing life, into the very life of God in Christ? At Concordia Academy we believe that this is done by cultivating wisdom and virtue—what we might also call faith and love—and by nourishing their souls on what is true, good, and beautiful, by means of the seven liberal arts and the catechetical life of the church.

Why do we speak of the true, the good, and the beautiful? Well, for two reasons: one, because in Himself, 

God is true: “I am the way, the TRUTH, and the life” (John 14:6); 
He is good: “I am the GOOD shepherd” (John 10:11);
and He is beautiful: “Behold, you are BEAUTIFUL, my beloved, truly delightful” (Song of Solomon 1:16). 

And secondly, because His truth, goodness, and beauty have been instilled into His creation. Those who bear the image of God, also bear truth, goodness, and beauty. 

Admittedly, with the fall these are all distorted. Nevertheless, the law has been written on our hearts. And because it was by our Lord’s word that all of creation came into being, St. Justin Martyr could say, “whatever is true is ours.” 

Perhaps the greatest conflict of ideas over the last 75-100 years, has been whether or not there is such an objectivity to truth, goodness, and beauty. At Concordia Academy we say “yes!” But the progressive education that began with Dewey around the time of World War I, and has only gained momentum through our post-modern culture, issues a resounding “no.” 

If we think that truth, goodness, and beauty find their fullness in Christ, then we can take whatever shares in that truth, goodness, and beauty and lead our children from the distortions of sin to their reality in Christ.

This ultimately is our goal. We want to educate our children and are convinced that this means bringing them to Jesus. This happens in the Church through the preaching of the Gospel and the giving out of our Lord’s gifts in the Sacraments. It happens at home as father and mother teach their children to pray and the beautiful stories of salvation in Scripture. And it happens in school, when we take what is true, good, and beautiful in this world—and the stories handed down—and teach our children that all of it reflects Christ for us.