Grace City Church Announces New K-12 Private School Called Garden City Academy
Church planter, executive pastor Josh McPherson said they've raised $44 million in 15 years for the church, and now the goal is to raise $22 million for the school
Grace City Church executive pastor Josh McPherson announced Sunday that his organization plans to launch a new K-12 private Christian school in the Wenatchee Valley, and the first campus will be King’s Orchard Church on Orchard Avenue in Wenatchee. During a livestream on GCC’s YouTube channel, McPherson said they’ve raised “just shy” of $44 million from their followers in the last 15 years, and “that is staggering.” He went on to say he hopes they’ll raise an additional $22 million to get this project off the ground.
During one of two multi-hour sermons at GCC’s 12-acre compound located in the affluent Sunnyslope neighborhood of Wenatchee, McPherson said they envision an environment free of “woke indoctrination” that tells kids what to think rather than how to think.
He announced the name of the new school, Garden City Academy, and admitted it wasn’t his first choice.
“The working title for the last three and half years has been ‘The Patrick Henry Academy of Patriots,’ he said. “Because I was so frustrated with the lack of freedom in our nation that I wanted to name it after the whitest, most stubborn anti-federalist founding father I could think of.”
That portion of the sermon was later edited out.
McPherson said they’re going to “charge hell with squirt guns” and said they’re either “the Elon Musk of educational dissension, and reform and disruption” or they’re going to crash into a “dumpster fire and they’ll talk about it for ages.”
He said his staff has been working “two jobs” for quite a while, handling their regular church duties while also working to build out a plan to make the Garden City Academy a reality. In the course of their research and prep, they all visited multiple Christian school campuses across the state to get a better understanding of what they were getting into.
One of the things they learned about were the financial challenges of running a private Christian school.
McPherson also said at a lot of Christian schools, female teachers far outnumber the males. That is unacceptable and he wouldn’t send his children to a school like that. He said the first thing he does when he goes to a Christian school’s website is go to the staff page and compare the male-to-female ratio among teachers.
“Thirty-two female teachers, two male teachers, my kid’s not going there,” he said. “You’re like how sexist, no-no. I like women. I married one. It’s awesome. Love women, but I can’t send my 16-year-old son to a highly feminized culture to learn from a bunch of women.”
McPherson also debuted the mascot, which is “The Farmers,” and the various merch and sports uniform designs they created.
He also addressed why there’s no version of the logo featuring a “lady farmer.”
“Just to say this for the ladies who are like: ‘Where’s the lady farmer?’ Here’s the deal, chica. We tried doing a lady farmer logo, no bueno,” He said. “Either way too portly, or way too hot.”
He said either way it wasn’t going to work on a t-shirt.
“It’s gotta be the dude with the ‘stache and the hat and the muscles and the plaid shirt,” he said.
Gender was a big theme of his sermon, and teaching children Biblical gender roles will be a focus for their new school he said.
“We envision a training ground for boys to become Stronger Men and girls to become noble women as God’s design for gender is taught, encouraged, modeled and celebrated,” he said.
McPherson called King’s Orchard a “dying church” and they’re excited to breathe new life into it by making it the first of many Garden Academy campus locations until they can ultimately consolidate the entire school into one facility.
He also took aim at the region’s public schools, which he calls “government schools.”
Using language that could have been copied and pasted from a website promoted by an anti-WSD billboard at 404 S. Mission in Wenatchee, he derided public schools as places for “indoctrination,” and said they’re failing.
“Test scores plummeting, graduation scores rising. How does that work?” he said. ”Average proficiency test scores in math, language, art, English, science, history, across the board in the four school districts plummeting.”
Insinuating that local districts are allowing students to graduate without meeting basic educational requirements, McPherson then took aim at the public school students themselves.
“Do you want any of those students to build the next bridge you drive over?” he asked.
Although the entire sermon was live-streamed twice on Sunday, both videos were removed by GCC later that day and a new version of the sermon with a few key moments edited out went up the next day.
You can watch that here:
In order to accomplish their fundraising goals, GCC will be doing a major fundraising push and ask for “radical, sacrificial” giving beyond what members have already donated.
They’re also promoting a “Homesteading” campaign, to encourage folks to move to the Wenatchee Valley and help them make it “the family capital of the world.”
Correction:
A previous version of this article stated that a board member of King’s Orchard threatened to quit that organization if they made a deal with GCC. That was an error.
So interesting they are commenting on the expense involved. I told Dominic that back when I taught at Bethesda Christian School there was a sudden "brain child" to make it tuition free! This created a multitude of problems for both the school and the church paying for it all.
I continue to be horrified at the GCC rhetoric (as someone watching with interest from Western WA). I guess you can't say you don't know their opinion on things! Sad if parishioners are just going along with this, but I also recall how impossible it seemed decades ago to think for ourselves or ask reasonable questions.
This is one of the many reasons that churches should not be tax exempt. If we could tax churches and billionaires out of existence the world would be a much better place.