Look! It's one of the very, very few examples of the motto "get woke, go broke" actually resulting in bankruptcy.
The long and short of it is that this school went full rainbow pride flag, LGBTQ+ celebrating woke, and then all the churches that funded it pulled their funding.
You know, because it was supposed to be a Christian school.
Urban Christian Academy is a private, K-8 school with an enrollment of 100 that describes itself as providing "a tuition-free, high-quality, Christ-centered education for low-income students."
The school's mission statement has always stressed inclusivity in general terms, noting that following Jesus "opens up doors and makes room at the table." But last year it added a paragraph to its website, which read in part, "We are an affirming school. We stand with the LGBTQIA+ community and believe in their holiness. We celebrate the diversity of God's creation in all its varied and beautiful forms."
This one goes out to all my "just send your kids to Christian schools" friends.
Just saying something is "Christian" doesn't make it so.
Affirming sin and celebrating the fall of creation resulting in sexual deviancies is not Christian. It's progressive Christianity, but no church before the 20th century would have recognized anything like the above statement as Christian.
According to the school, that update prompted donors to stop contributing, many of them citing their interpretation of Christianity as the reason. Now, UCA has announced it will close at the end of the school year due to the loss of financial support.
Kalie Callaway-George, UCA's executive director and co-founder, said this new language "is kind of what started the backlash from our donor base, which we anticipated. It was just that we anticipated a 50% loss in funding and made adjustments for that. We had an 80% loss in funding and that was too much to overcome."
Say it with me now:
"GET WOKE, GO BROKE!"
I wish this would happen more often.
I am sorry, I know there are real people who really lost their jobs, but if they worked for a school that claimed to be "Christ-centered" while promoting the LGBQ agenda, then I'm really not sorry.
The dramatic drop-off in donations came quickly. Soon after the new language appeared on the school's website, eight churches withdrew their support. Although those institutions were responsible for just 2% of the school's funding, church members were a donor base that gave much more.
"We lost our network" of donors, Callaway-George told ABC News. "In December of 2021, right before we publicly supported the LGBTQ community, we raised $333,985. One year later, after we had posted on our website and made a stance, [in] December of 2022 we raised $14,809."
I know, I shouldn't gloat, but...
We go after public schools a lot on our website, but let it never be said that we just blindly support all private and Christian schools. We want a lot of them to fail too.
Although the school would not disclose the names of churches or individuals who ended their financial assistance, it shared several of their missives with ABC News.
A lengthy letter from one church, which characterized the LGBQIA+ community as a "diverse collection of behaviors," explained: "Our greatest concern about the Accepting and Affirming stance is that it denies the Biblical definitions of sin and identity and thereby renders the grace of God meaningless."
Messages from individuals were far more blunt. One read, "Do not call yourself a Christian school if you are affirming sin. Jesus died to set us free from sin, not so we can die in it. You abuse kids by telling them sin is good. You are wicked."
Another declared, "By teaching them tolerance & acceptance and even to celebrate the gay lifestyle, you are setting them on a course to embrace the world and anti-God philosophy."
Man, those are some pretty based letters. I wonder if any of those folks want to write for Not the Bee.
The administrator behind the decision still maintains she has no regrets even after this decision resulted in the shuttering of an entire school.
Although the explicit embrace of the LGBTQ community has now resulted in the school having to close in May, Callaway-George still argues it was the right thing to do and has no regrets.
"The essence of the Christian faith is promoting and offering love," she said. But she understands that even this benign view of the faith is seen differently by believers who withdrew support for UCA.
I think I'll leave you with these words from Rob Phillips about the situation. He sums it up nicely.
As Rob Philips of the Missouri Baptist Convention, a network of 1,800 churches in the state, explained to ABC News, "to embrace desires and behaviors that are outside of scripture is not ultimately loving and caring."
