The Case for Church-Based Microschools
Last Updated: December 28, 2026
Why Churches Are the Right Institution for This Moment
"And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." — Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (KJV)
The Problem
95% of Christian kids in Texas are not in Christian schools. They're being formed 40 hours a week in environments that treat faith as irrelevant at best, hostile at worst.
Sunday school cannot undo what daily immersion accomplishes. Two hours of church teaching cannot overcome 40 hours of secular formation. The mathematics are brutal.
When schools teach science as patterns in a meaningless universe, they're teaching atheistic ontology. When they present history as randomness rather than divine providence, they're catechizing children into secular worldviews. When they treat every behavioral problem as a medical condition while ignoring the reality of sin, they're denying fundamental truths about human nature.
There is no neutral ground in formation. Education is discipleship. The question is: discipleship to what?
What Is a Microschool?
A microschool is a small learning community, typically 8-15 students, led by a guide (not a traditional "teacher"). Students learn through a combination of adaptive software, project-based work, and small-group instruction. The model prioritizes relationship over scale.
Microschools are not miniature versions of traditional schools. They're a fundamentally different approach:
- Small by design. The size isn't a limitation to overcome. It's the feature that enables real formation.
- Guide-led, not teacher-centered. The adult facilitates learning rather than lecturing. Students take ownership.
- Flexible structure. Multi-age groupings. Personalized pacing. Room for the child's particular gifts and struggles.
- Low overhead. No massive campus. No administrative bloat. A church fellowship hall and a few laptops can be enough.
This is why microschools are the right model for churches. Starting a traditional school requires millions in capital, years of planning, and professional administrators. Starting a microschool requires a room, a guide, 10 families, and a curriculum platform.
The barrier to entry is low enough that any church can do it. The scale is small enough that formation actually happens.
Why Churches?
Private Christian schools exist. Homeschool co-ops exist. Why do we need churches to start microschools?
Because churches have what no one else has.
Buildings That Sit Empty
Churches possess facilities that sit unused six days a week. Classrooms. Fellowship halls. Kitchens. Playgrounds. This is infrastructure that could serve children's formation but instead generates property tax bills and maintenance costs.
Meanwhile, homeschool families scramble for meeting spaces. Co-ops pay rent to secular facilities. New Christian schools struggle to find affordable real estate.
The church already has the physical infrastructure. It just needs to use it.
Communities That Already Exist
Starting a school from scratch means building trust with strangers. Church-based microschools start with trust already established.
The parents know each other. The guide teaching your child attended your small group for three years. The family whose kids will sit next to yours shared Thanksgiving dinner with you. The relationships that make education work are already in place.
This is the parish model that worked for most of Christian history. Not schools as isolated institutions, but education embedded in community. Teachers who know families. Families who know teachers. Children learning alongside kids they'll worship with, serve with, grow up with.
Pastoral Authority
Children don't just need information. They need formation. They need adults who can speak with spiritual authority into their lives.
A secular teacher can deliver content. A Christian teacher at a secular school must bracket their faith. Only in a church context can educators function as what they should be: guides for the soul.
The pastor who knows a struggling student can address the spiritual dimension. The elder who notices a family in crisis can intervene. The congregation that surrounds a child provides the village that actually raises them.
This pastoral dimension cannot be replicated by private schools disconnected from church community. It cannot be purchased. It emerges from the life of the body.
Mission Alignment
Churches exist to make disciples. Education is discipleship. The alignment is total.
When a church runs a microschool, it's not adding a program. It's fulfilling its core mission. The formation of children in the faith is not peripheral to what the church does. It is the work.
Every other institution that runs schools has divided loyalties. Private schools must stay solvent. State schools must serve political masters. Only the church can make formation itself the uncompromised purpose.
Why Now?
The policy window is open in a way it has never been.
TEFA Changes Everything
Texas Education Freedom Accounts provide approximately $10,500 per student per year. For the first time, Christian education becomes affordable for ordinary families.
Before TEFA, church-based microschools faced a brutal choice: charge tuition most families couldn't afford, or subsidize heavily and run deficits. Now the funding follows the student. A church-based microschool operating at TEFA rates can be financially sustainable without pricing out the families who need it most.
This is not a small shift. It is a fundamental restructuring of what's economically possible.
The Supply Crisis Is Coming
TEFA creates demand. But demand without supply means families with vouchers they can't use.
Current private school capacity in Texas: approximately 350,000-400,000 students. TEFA Year One: 95,000 students. Projected growth: 300,000-500,000 students by 2028-30.
The math doesn't work. Even aggressive expansion of existing schools cannot create hundreds of thousands of new seats in a few years.
Churches can fill this gap. There are thousands of churches across Texas with unused facilities. If even a fraction launch microschools, the supply crisis is solved.
Year One Determines the Future
TEFA must be reauthorized every two years. The 2027 Legislature will decide whether to expand, maintain, or defund the program.
That decision will be based on Year One results. Did families benefit? Did the market respond? Did innovation happen?
Churches that launch microschools now become part of the success story. They generate the testimonials, the media coverage, the proof that school choice works. They provide the political ammunition that ensures TEFA survives and expands.
Churches that wait miss the window. By the time they act, the program's fate may already be sealed.
Note: New schools typically must operate for two years before accessing TEFA funding. But churches partnering with established platforms like Prenda can access TEFA funding in Year One, since Prenda already meets the eligibility requirements. This dramatically lowers the barrier.
What Education Actually Is
"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." — Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)
We cannot know what or how to teach children if we do not know what a child is. And we cannot know what a child is if we do not know what humanity is. And humanity cannot be understood apart from the One who created us and for whom we exist.
A human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom. Not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love. Not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it. Not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion.
Education, properly understood, is the formation of the human soul toward its designed purpose: participation in the life of God. It is not job training. It is not test preparation. It is not credentialing for economic competition.
Education is discipleship.
This is why the church's abdication of education has been catastrophic. When the church handed formation to the state, it handed over discipleship itself. You cannot separate spiritual formation from intellectual development without producing confused, fragmented human beings.
The Form Is the Content
Size matters in ways we don't want to acknowledge.
A pastor of a congregation of thousands cannot truly pastor. He can broadcast. He can inspire. He can manage. But he cannot know his flock in the way that enables the Spirit to speak through him into their particular circumstances.
The same principle applies to education. Personalized formation cannot be mass-produced. Every child is singular. Every child requires attention shaped to their particular gifts, struggles, and calling. Industrial education produces humanish products that can add one plus one. It cannot produce whole humans in right relationship with God.
The mega-church model and the factory school model share the same disease: they prioritize multiplication over fruitfulness. Scripture commands us to be fruitful and multiply, in that order. Fruitfulness must precede scale. Quality of relationship must precede quantity of reach.
Church microschools operate at the right scale. Small enough for real relationship. Embedded in community. Shaped by pastoral care. This is not a bug to be engineered away. It is the feature that makes formation possible.
What Church Leaders Must Do
Open Your Buildings
Your facilities sit empty most of the week while families struggle to find space for co-ops and microschools. This is a stewardship failure.
Let families use church space for educational community. Charge minimal rent. Stop treating church property as revenue-generating real estate and start treating it as infrastructure for kingdom purposes.
Speak Clearly
Tell your congregation the truth: secular education is not neutral. It is formation in a rival worldview. This will upset some people. Do it anyway. Faithful shepherds warn their flocks about wolves.
Organize Your People
Help parents find each other. Create networks for resource sharing. Identify adults in your congregation who could serve as guides or tutors. The church has human capital that sits unused because no one has organized it for this purpose.
Think in Generations
The formation crisis will not be solved quickly. It took decades to create and will take decades to address. Church leaders must invest in infrastructure their successors will use. Plant trees whose shade you'll never sit under.
What Parents Must Do
"And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." — Ephesians 6:4 (KJV)
Stop Outsourcing
Take responsibility for your children's formation. This doesn't mean you personally teach every subject. It means you take ownership of what they're being taught, by whom, in what environment.
Find Your People
Connect with families who share your convictions. You cannot do this alone. The nuclear family was never meant to be isolated. Build networks of mutual support.
Push Your Church
If your church isn't stepping up, ask why. Volunteer to help. Offer to research options. Bring the need to leadership's attention. Churches often don't act because no one is asking them to.
Accept the Difficulty
Christian formation is hard. But secular formation is hard too. The choice isn't between hard and easy. It's between a hardship that bears fruit and a hardship that deforms souls. Pick your hard.
The Urgency
The children being formed today will either rebuild society on Godly foundations or preside over its continued collapse. There is no middle ground. Children either learn to see themselves as divine image-bearers with callings from God, or as sophisticated animals competing for temporary pleasures.
Jacques Ellul warned:
"Remember your Creator during your youth: when all possibilities lie open before you and you can offer all your strength intact for his service. The time to remember is not after you become senile and paralyzed! Then it is not too late for your salvation, but too late for you to serve as the presence of God in the midst of the world and the creation."
Youth is when the soul is most malleable, when habits of heart and mind are established, when fundamental orientation toward God or away from Him gets set for life.
The church cannot stand by while this window closes. Every year of secular formation is a year of catechesis in a rival religion. Every hour on algorithmic social media is an hour of training in attention fragmentation and appetite indulgence.
The policy window is open. The funding is available. The need is desperate. The infrastructure exists in every church building across Texas.
The formation of human souls toward God is not one mission among many. It is the mission. Everything else follows from it or is meaningless without it.
The time to act is now.
For the history of how this policy window opened, see How Texas School Choice Happened.
For why Year One is critical, see Why Year One Matters.
For practical guidance, see Starting a Church-Based Microschool.