Walk through most churches on a Tuesday afternoon and you’ll find the same thing: rows of empty classrooms. Sunday School rooms, fellowship halls, gyms — spaces filled with life for an hour or two a week and dormant the rest of the time.

For a growing number of churches, that’s starting to change.

Why Families Are Looking for Something Different

Christian parents across the country are wrestling with the same question: where can my child get a rigorous education and grow in their faith? A 2025 Pew Research Center analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data found that 83% of homeschooling parents cited concerns about the school environment — safety, drugs, negative peer pressure — as a driving reason for their choice, and 53% said they wanted to provide religious instruction their child wasn’t getting elsewhere.

The numbers bear this out in real enrollment. Conservative Christian schools now make up nearly 12% of the nation’s K-12 private school options, according to NCES’s Private School Universe Survey. And Liberty University Online Academy (LUOA) — a fully accredited K-12 program — saw a 240% increase in applications during and after the pandemic, surpassing 20,000 students this spring from all 50 states and 100 countries.

Families are searching. The question is whether the local church will be ready to meet them.

An Old Idea, Made New Again

In many of our country’s earliest towns, the church building was the schoolhouse. Faith and education weren’t separated — children learned to read and worship in the same room, discipled by the same community. The LUOA Affiliate Program is, in some ways, a return to that model: a church partners with LUOA to open a K-12 affiliate school (sometimes called a “learning center,” “pod,” or “co-op academy”) right inside its own walls.

Here’s how the partnership divides responsibility:

Your church provides:

  • Existing classroom space
  • Internet access for student laptops
  • A class supervisor/on-site facilitator
  • Daily discipleship, encouragement, and community

LUOA provides:

  • Certified teachers
  • Fully accredited curriculum (Cognia and ACSI accredited)
  • Grading, transcripts, and diploma services
  • Dual enrollment and college pathway opportunities

Because LUOA supplies the teachers, curriculum, and grading, a church doesn’t need certified staff, a large budget, or new construction to get started — just a point of contact to handle enrollment, a facilitator or two, and a room with reliable Wi-Fi. Affiliate schools can launch with as few as 10 students.

The Kingdom Case for Considering It

Beyond the logistics, there’s a discipleship opportunity here that’s hard to overstate. Proverbs 22:6 calls believers to “train up a child in the way he should go” — and an affiliate school gives a congregation a way to do that five days a week, not just on Sunday morning.

It also tends to deepen the connection between families and the church itself. When a family’s daily school life happens inside the same walls where they worship, the two become harder to separate — kids build their sense of Christian community around a building that’s already discipling them.

There’s a practical upside too: many churches use modest facility fees or tuition-sharing to generate supplemental income from space that would otherwise sit empty — while also creating a natural, low-pressure way for young families to discover the church.

And for graduating students, the pathway extends further: LUOA graduates can attend Liberty University residentially at 50% off tuition, or continue with Liberty University Online at a 15% discount.

If You’re Curious

This isn’t a decision to rush into — and it starts, as any of these things should, with prayer. Gather your pastoral team and key leaders and ask whether this is a season for your church to step into next-generation discipleship in a new way.

If it is, the on-ramp is designed to be low-risk: there’s no upfront fee to sign LUOA’s Strategic Affiliation Agreement, and the LUOA team offers a no-obligation webinar to walk through what a partnership would look like for your specific church.

To learn more:

Most churches have the space already. The question is simply whether it’s time to fill it.

— This post is based on information shared by Liberty University Online Academy’s Church Partnerships team and Rev. Glenn Clary’s op-ed, “How churches can play an active role in the daily education of our youth.”