Many thanks to all who worked so hard to make our building fund raising efforts successful! We made it! Now we ask your prayers that we will be able to get the building up before winter sets in. If you haven’t had a chance to make a gift to the school don’t worry – you can still do that. Please visit the link below. We are thankful to the Lord for His mercy. And to all our benefactors as well. May the Lord reward you in this life and the next for your efforts!

SUPPORT THE SCHOOL BUILDING EFFORT

There is still time to help us build our building! We are over $800/month in pledges and that is SUPER! We have a special parish meeting set for Sunday, October 7 to discuss our options. Help us cancel this meeting by making a pledge at the link below today! If we get to $1200/month in pledges we will cancel!

Four people at $100 each, or ten people at $40 each, or forty people at $10 each. We can do it - but we need you!

This is a great challenge but a completely attainable one if we all pitch in and help just a bit. Please join our school team and help us surpass our goal!

JOIN US BY CLICKING HERE!

The Three Weight-Bearing Pillars of Education: The Church, Home and School
By Father Patrick Tishel, Headmaster of St. Herman of Alaska, Allston, MA

Years ago I lived in a house that was undergoing renovations. As one of the workers bounded up the stairs to the second floor, the house began to sway back and forth. It so happened that they had taken down certain walls that bore the weight of the structure. It is clear in all “construction” projects that all of the finish work must be done after that house has been furnished with strong, weight-bearing pillars.

The same must be true in a child’s formation. If the educational foundation is not in place, then all of the knowledge gained in specialized disciplines will be for naught. Often parents assume that such a foundation is simply found in school – in any school. Yet just as a literal foundation upholds and affects the entire house and not merely certain rooms, it is clear that the educational foundation must also include all areas of life. For this reason, the three weight-bearing pillars of a child’s education are primarily the Church, the Home and the School. If we begin to see these divinely ordained institutions as rich fountains of wisdom and grace, flowing with the living water of Truth, then we will expect of them unity and cooperation in the midst of their particular functions. Instead, given the secularization of curricula in schools, busy home lives and minimal church attendance, we are left with weakened relationships amongst the three and, therefore, an unstable foundation. While it is possible to presume that Church exists for Sundays, home-life is for evenings, and school is for weekdays, they actually deeply affect each other and the overall education of our children.

The Church is the most prominent and foundational of the three pillars. St. Timothy calls it the pillar and ground of the truth (I Timothy 3:15). It is upon this ground and under this umbrella that the home and school must operate. When we are baptized in Christ, we become part of His Body – the Church – and are replanted into new soil. The children (and parents) need to know the fullness of the Faith. Our life in Christ is founded upon a living faith – a revelation from God delivered to us by the Son of God Himself. The Divine Services express the ineffable wonder of living in the fearsome, awesome presence of the Living God. The prayers of the Hours and the celebration of the Feasts lead us to understand Christ’s life. When the Gospel is preached, the heart and mind are given wings to soar to the throne of God. When various church traditions are practiced (such as lighting candles and making the sign of the cross) the spiritual reality is realized more fully. We must teach and encourage the children to inhale the air of the Church – to stand boldly upon its foundation clad with the full armor of Christ.

The Home and the family are close to the heart of the Church – the Little Church. This is where the heart of a child is formed, the feeling for prayer, the zeal for the commandments, and the love of God and neighbor, all within the child’s heart. The obedience of the children to the parents is the precursor to the obedience to God and the Church. The love of God is nourished within the children while they stand before the icons during morning and evening prayers. The bridge between the home and the church (and the servant of both) is the third pillar – the school. During the Turkish enslavement of Greece, St. Cosmas of Aitolia, an apostle and martyr from Mt. Athos, dedicated his entire life to establishing schools throughout Greece. Ignorance, he feared, was a greater yoke of enslavement than political totalitarianism. St. Cosmas claimed that schools would build the church and fill the monasteries. By his tireless efforts, he left a legacy behind that resounded throughout the centuries. Our schools should also build up the churches and monasteries.

The School is a workshop for servants of Christ to enter into human society and make a difference. They have to learn to think, to discern, and to speak intelligently and convincingly in the context of the world – in a language that non-Christians can also understand. Just as a brain surgeon’s training must be thorough in his vital work, so too our children must know their faith thoroughly and possess a right understanding of the world. We should all be concerned about our schools, not only because of Columbine-type tragedies, but also because of the more insidious precursors of this type of bloodshed – apostasy and ignorance and coldness towards God and neighbor.

We must uphold these three pillars of education – The Church, the Home and the School – in order to fulfill our Lord’s command to suffer the little children to come unto Me. This means that parents, godparents, educators and pastors need to labor to ensure that all three pillars are in order and ready to support the edifice. Sports and social events have their rightful place, but if we sacrificed as much to make it to the Feasts and vigils as we do to go to soccer games and violin recitals (even on Sundays during Divine Liturgy), the children would see in living color the hierarchy of what we valued on their behalf.

By September 23, 2018 we will need to have $1200/month in pledges set for five years OR $70,000 in our Parish School bank account. So we have lots of work to do! Please help! This is a time sensitive situation – if we push further out than September 23 it is virtually certain that we will miss this year’s construction season, and that will make it impossible to begin instruction in 2019.

1. Please establish a pledge or make a donation today. Visit the fund raising page below or reach out to Fr. Gregory or any of our Steering Committee members with questions

2. Talk to your friends. We can easily reach that $1200/month if we all chip in just a little! And if we add like-minded friends and loved ones who support Orthodox Christian education we can far surpass that goal!

3. Ask questions! Would you like to learn more about the Ann Arbor Orthodox Christian Academy? Send an email to Fr. Gregory, call him, or see him in church. He or any member of the School Steering Committee can answer your questions.

4. Volunteer! Join the School Steering Committee! We need lots of hands to help with this pleasant and much needed work.

This is a great challenge but a completely attainable one if we all pitch in and help just a bit. Please join our school team and help us surpass our goal!

JOIN US BY CLICKING HERE!