Exclusive–‘There’s a Hunger Out There’: Nonprofit Provides Bible Education for Public School Students During School Hours

“There’s a hunger out there” for Bible education for public school students, Joel Penton, CEO of LifeWise Academy, said in an interview with Breitbart News, detailing how their nonprofit provides Bible-based education for students during school hours.

Penton heads up LifeWise Academy, “a nonprofit that provides Bible-based character education to public school students during school hours under released time religious instruction laws.”

He said a lot of people hear this and wonder how that is possible or realistic in modern times, often citing the separation of church and state. However, he said few people realize that over 70 years ago, in 1952, the Supreme Court “ruled that public school students can be released from public school during school hours to receive religious instruction as long as the program meets three criteria.”

In order for the instruction to meet the standards, students must have parental permission. Further, it must be off school property and privately funded. Ultimately, Penton said the ruling has been under the radar and “underutilized for decades,” and they hope to change that.

“We think it’s the single greatest missed opportunity to reach kids of the next generation with the Bible. And so we discovered this in 2018 when people … in my hometown, they had started a program what’s called a release time program,” he said revealing that they had “95 percent of the entire school enrolled in the program.”

They reached out to him and asked for help with the effort.

“So I did some research and my conclusion was, I think it’s just too hard to pull off right now. You basically have to start a private school because you gotta find a facility and transfer curriculum, staffing, and so I said, I think you should put it all in a box, make it replicable, make it scalable, make it plug and play, and then I think communities would do it,” he said, noting that they liked that idea and suggested that he do it.

“That’s how I got kind of roped into giving it a shot,” he said.

When asked if the success of the program indicates a hunger for religion and a reemergence of it in the United States, Penton said it absolutely does.

“Well, there’s no doubt it points to it,” he said, noting that parents, particularly, want it and are “desperate for this type of education in their kids’ lives.”

“They’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen. I mean, we all know that many parents will invest tens of thousands of dollars to send their kids to private, you know religious schools, but not every parent can do that,” he said, emphasizing that there is most certainly a “hunger” out there. Further, he said the secularization of everything — pushing God and the Bible out — is failing as a societal experiment.

“I think that experiment has really failed, and I think that everyone can see that that has failed and so there is a hunger to say, ok, no, we need a foundation to our lives,” he said. “We need to be able to talk about these spiritual things, these very real things, because it’s not working out when we’ve removed them.”

LifeWise stands by two values — “gospel centrality” and “excellence.”

“Keeping the gospel at the center of the program is our only hope for genuinely changing the hearts of the next generation,” it says of the former, adding that it is “diligent to demonstrate excellence in every area, knowing that we represent the king.”