A lot can happen in a year.
In the fall of 2024, Justin Walker, pastor of the Salt and Light Baptist Church in Lagrange, Kentucky, achieved his bold goal.
“We set up the school without any problems,” Walker told CBN News, reflecting on the year since Salt and Light Academy first opened the door. “We had no money, we had no teachers. We had nothing.”
“But,” he continued, “The Lord provided.”
God is certainly offered, but it is not without a series of steps into the darkness. A step into an uncertain future that requires open hands and loyal surrender. Through a series of confirmations, the pastor said he made it clear that the Lord had plans for the town just outside Louisville.
A year later, the Salt and Light Congregation made great strides and rethinked the old horse auction house. This is a vast estate with a mammoth building overlooking the pond and rolling fields. For sanctuaries, offices and a series of classrooms.
The school was released from kindergarten to sixth grade. This year, enrollment has doubled, with the church adding seventh and eighth graders. Walker said each grade was added, so it’s almost simultaneously filled.
Physical growth is impressive, but it is spiritual growth, the eternal fruit of congregational labor. This is most important.
“One of the major confirmations last year was the number of students who were baptized and saved through school,” Walker said. “We took 65 students…6 students… accepted Christ as our Savior and were baptized in the grade.”
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Additionally, the pastor said that one child led the whole family to faith in Jesus, and that the whole family was baptized on the same day.
All of that, he said, was “the result of allowing us to open a church and use our church building as a school for students.”
Walker’s motivation for launching a tuition-free school was born from adversity.
In March 2021, about a year after being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, Walker’s late wife, Sarah, shared six children and passed away. Soon, Walker became a father of six, five of whom were homeschooled.
Adding “homeschool teacher” to his job list, Walker later remarried and now a father of nine, he took one of his young daughters to a nearby public library where he found an LGBTQ book for children. Angry at what he saw, Walker took him to social media to share his thoughts.
The post, he said, caused a “massive fire” that revealed “big needs” in his community.
“There are 57 million American students who attend school every day. At best, I think the education system in public schools is mentally empty and mentally incompetent,” he said. “And it’s probably not a strong enough language, because some of the things that are happening are not just mental emptiness, but to some extent it is actually spiritual evil, and that’s what we put in our children.”
As a result, Walker added, “American students, 57 million students will be seen as mission fields.”
Now, a year after the mission, he is convinced that God has “called” the “Academy of Salt and Light” to “build a “Christ-centric” education and “pushing back” the “adjusting” the “Academy of Salt and Light” in a secular education system to “push back” the “unrighteousness.”
“If Christians really believe, if I believe I believe, trusting in Christ will change your life,” he said.
For more information about the Baptist Church of Salt and Light, a tuition-free school, click here to give to the mission.
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