A lot can happen in one year.
In the fall of 2024, Justin Walker, pastor of Salt and Light Baptist Church in La Grange, Kentucky, set out with an audacious goal: successfully launch a tuition-free, church-sponsored school.
“We launched the school with nothing,” Walker told CBN News, reflecting on the year since Salt and Light Academy first opened its doors. “We had no money, we had no teachers, we had nothing.”
“But,” he continued, “the Lord provided.”
God certainly has provided, but not without a series of steps into the dark — steps into an uncertain future that required open hands and faithful surrender. Through a series of confirmations, the pastor said, the Lord has made it clear He has a plan for the town just outside Louisville.
In a year’s time, the congregation at Salt and Light has made great strides, reimagining an old horse auction house — a sprawling piece of real estate complete with a mammoth building overlooking a pond and rolling fields — into a sanctuary, offices, and a series of classrooms.
The school launched with kindergarten through sixth grade. This year, enrollment has doubled and the church has added seventh and eighth grade. As each grade has been added, Walker said, it has almost simultaneously been filled — with more on waiting lists.
While the physical growth is impressive, it’s the spiritual growth — the eternal fruit of the congregation’s labor — that is most significant.
“One of the things that was a huge confirmation this past year was the number of our students who were baptized and that were saved through the school,” Walker said. “We took in 65 students. … Six of our students … accepted Christ as their Savior and were baptized in the school year.”
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On top of that, the pastor said, one child led his or her entire family to faith in Jesus and the whole family was baptized on the same day.
All of that, he said, was the “result of us opening our church and allowing our church building to be used as a school for students that evidently need it.”
Walker’s motivation for launching the tuition-free school was born of adversity.
In March 2021, about one year after her diagnosis with stage 4 cancer, Walker’s late wife Sarah, with whom he shared six children, passed away. Immediately, Walker became a single father of six, five of whom were homeschooled.
Adding “homeschool teacher” to his list of duties, Walker, who has since remarried and is now a father of nine, took one of his young daughters to a nearby public library, where he found a series of LGBTQ books marketed toward children. Angered by what he saw, Walker took to social media to share his thoughts.
That post, he said, sparked “a huge firestorm” that revealed “a great need” in his community.
“There are 57 million American students that go to school every single day and I think, at best, we could say that our public schools’ education system is spiritually empty, it’s spiritually inept,” he said. “And that’s probably not strong enough language, because some of what is happening is not just spiritual emptiness, but, to some degree, is actually spiritual wickedness, and that’s being put on our children.”
As a result, Walker added, “we see our students in America — 57 million of them — as the mission field.”
Now, one year into the mission, he is confident God has “called” Salt and Light Academy to build out “Christ-centered” education to “push back against the darkness” and “unrighteousness” in the secular education system.
“If Christians truly believe — if I believe what I say that I believe, that trusting in Christ will transform your life,” he said, “then how much more [should I want to] put that in all of our education across the board.”
To learn more about Salt and Light Baptist Church, its tuition-free school, and to give to the mission, click here.
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