Tate Springs Family,
We wanted to take a moment to provide you with an update about the 2021-2022 Tate Springs Christian School year.
Last year the world was introduced to a life-changing virus—COVID-19. COVID-19 has caused irreparable harm across the globe. Many people lost their jobs or businesses, and some even lost their lives.
As a local church, we were not impervious to COVID’s impact. Alongside members losing jobs and/or loved ones, we had to shut down our campus for months, cancel programs and camps, and rethink how we do ministry altogether. One of COVID’s biggest impacts on Tate Springs was the closing of our school ministry. You know this well as you learned at a members’ meeting about how our leadership led us to take on a loan so we could continue paying our TSCS staff through their 2020 contracts, even after the school year was canceled. But you are especially aware of it because of the heart-wrenching decision we made as a church to forgo having a 2020-2021 school year.
The difficult reality, we determined, was that operating a school ministry during a pandemic introduces complications we are unable to manage safely and effectively, which has been confirmed as we’ve watched the pandemic continue to unfold in our local schools. This led the church to make the difficult decision to close indefinitely until we can establish a new plan for our new normal.
Since that decision, we have prayed, assessed our respective situations, and talked through the prospects of when we may be able to safely and effectively reopen a private school ministry. While a new school year doesn’t start until the Fall, we have to begin making plans in the Winter for the purposes of hiring teachers and enrolling students. This means that to open the school in September we need to make a decision in January.
At this time, we feel that as we continue to navigate the present circumstances we are not yet ready to reopen for the 2021-2022 school year. There are a variety of reasons for this decision and much prayer, care, and consideration has been given to all.
What’s more, we are both in agreement that, as the primary people God has entrusted to oversee this ministry, we do not feel this is the right time to reopen. With this in mind, we want to do our best to be good stewards of the trust and faith we have built with our TSCS community. This means we need to make a decision now so that any parents and teachers who may be awaiting our decision can make their own decisions for the Fall.
The ministry of TSCS remains on our personal prayer lists. To share a personal word, it’s something I (Pastor Jared) think about all of the time, and after Halley and I met recently I was reminded of Genesis 22, the passage God laid on my heart in the days leading up to our member’s meeting last Fall. This chapter tells the remarkable story of how God called Abraham to sacrifice something very dear to him—his son Isaac. As a father of a newborn son myself, I can’t even imagine such a command. Yet, Abraham was faithful. We learn the secret to his faithfulness in Hebrews 11:19, which is that, “He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead.”
This story has been an incredible sense of encouragement to me as we have navigated these trying months of our beloved school’s closure. God has given Tate Springs a vision of reaching our community in unique ways. A school ministry has always been a part of that vision, and it still remains so now, even if we find ourselves weeping at Lazarus’ proverbial tomb, because we trust in a God who is able to raise things back from the dead.
With all my heart, I believe God will breathe life back into this ministry one day, and the thing about resurrected life is that it testifies of the power and faithfulness of our great God.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Telling His Story,
Jared Wellman
Tate Springs Baptist Church
Halley Steinhilber
Tate Springs Christian School
