Grace City Church Leaders Introduce Garden City Academy Staff and Faculty
Executive pastor Josh McPherson addresses the homogeneity of the group by explaining 'hiring for diversity is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of'
Grace City Church “planter” and executive pastor Josh McPherson welcomed to the stage about 25 people who have been selected as faculty and staff at Garden City Academy starting next year. Garden City is going to be a K-12 private Christian school that puts “God at the center of everything,” McPherson said.
There are 10 women and just five men teaching at the elementary level – which is a surprise since during the announcement of the academy McPherson made it a point to say he would not send his boys to “highly-feminized spaces” where more women than men were teaching.
All the faculty members also appear to be Caucasian, which McPherson addressed in the first few minutes of his sermon by scorning the commonly-held definition of “diversity” then attempting to reframe it.
“I do not hire for diversity. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “We’re in this day in age where great words like ‘diversity’ have lost all their substance and meaning because they have been perverted. We’ve reduced it to the most shallow thing about a person, the color of their skin.”
They hire for unity of mind, heart and spirit, he said.
You can watch a clip of those remarks here.
And just because GCC is going to have its own school, that doesn’t mean the public school teachers in the crowd should stop trying to “be a missionary for Jesus” where they are.
“Don’t think if you’re a teacher in the government school system that you're being a missionary there and you're leaving the mission field to come here. No, no, no, no,” McPherson said. “It's our mission field. This is just a strategic realignment.”
Then he brought out seven of the teachers, had them each introduce themselves and say why they were called to become teachers at Garden City Academy.
The first was Kyle Hurst who is currently a public school teacher at Foothills Middle School in Wenatchee.
He said he’s constantly seeing brokenness in the kids and coworkers and compared working in public education to a “war zone.” He’s a medic trying to do triage but the powers that be tell him he can’t use bandages, he said.
He said he works with some great people, but he wouldn’t want his kids in public school.
“When I look at my kids, they're right over here. And I just think about them growing up in that environment and just trying to scrape by and survive that environment – instead of being somewhere like Garden City where they can thrive – it would break my heart to have them go there,” he said.
Washington State Patrol Detective Jeffrey Eifert was next to introduce himself and said he decided to make the career change because he wants to “protect children” who are on the “frontlines of the oppression that is the state that is around us.”
Eifert’s college degree is in vocal musical instruction and he’ll be music director for the new school. McPherson said he was happy that Eifert will be coming into the role because he didn’t want anyone too effeminate.
“I cannot have like some weeny, skinny jean music guy dude,” McPherson said. “You know what I mean, like I need a dude dude in the music department and that’s what we got in Jeffery Eifert, right men?”
Heidi Harris was the third teacher to share her story. She and her husband have six children and she has a background in public education, but when her oldest was five they felt God’s calling to homeschool their children, she said. They were living in Moses Lake at the time and around that time started attending Grace City Church.
But her husband got a job with a “large Ag company based in Boise” and they moved to Idaho for that. This was during the pandemic and when the vaccines came out her husband’s company told employees they’d have to get vaccinated to keep working at that company. Her husband refused and got fired so they moved their family of eight to Wenatchee, even though they didn’t have a place to live.
“We found ourselves with no job so we thought we might as well jump ship and go to Grace City,” she said.
Since then they have been living in an RV on 100 acres owned by a GCC couple while another GCC member, a contractor, is building them a house.
Addison King is a former collegiate athlete who is joining the faculty as a coach who also moved his family to Wenatchee because of Grace City Church.
“We are refugees from the west side,” he said. “Before we moved here we knew we needed to find a strong church and a strong community. I found Strongermen Nation online and started listening to sermons and knew that we would be fed here with strong Biblical preaching.”
The last teacher to be introduced was Eric Ballard, who is leaving the family business, Ballard Ambulance, to teach Math at Garden City Academy. McPherson and Ballard got emotional and shed tears about how much it means for the Ballards to let the next generation of Ballard Ambulance leadership leave and invest his future in GCC’s new school.
McPherson said he’s never known a time when there “wasn’t a Ballard in my life” and he grew up with Eric shooting guns in the orchard.
“Got to know ‘em since we were little boys out in the orchard, shooting…” he said. “Well, I won’t say what we were shooting, uh, I won’t say what we were shooting, anyway…”
“We were doing stuff,” Ballard said with a laugh.
“Haha, all of a sudden I was like ‘This is being recorded. Stop talking,’ McPherson said.
After the panel discussion but before he brought out the entire faculty and staff, he had another big announcement to make.
“We are announcing today that we have formed a formalized academic partnership with Corbin University in Salem, Oregon to accredit Vector Academy,” he said.
No longer will the certificates Vector graduates receive be worthless, as he admitted a year ago at the graduation ceremony for the first year of Vector Academy graduates.
“It means nothing. The certificate means nothing, by the way. I mean there's no credit,” he said.
But because of this new partnership, Vector students will earn 21 to 24 credits from Corban during the nine-month program. The plan is for The Vector Academy to fold into Garden City Academy and basically serve as the “capstone year” for students, taking the place of what would be considered “senior year” for public school students, which is a waste of time anyway, he said.
“The senior year is largely lost on wasted time in the American high school institution, if you’ve been paying attention,” he said. “It’s an absolute waste of time. It, it, it, it, it’s baking and pottery and a P.E. class with doughnuts. It just doesn’t mean anything.”
With this new partnership with Corban and the ability for Garden City students to earn college credits, McPherson said you are “literally wasting money” if you don’t send your kids to GCC’s new school.
According to McPherson, the cost per student will be $16,800 per year, but it’s a sliding scale according to the Garden City Academy website.
At least half the cost of tuition will be subsidized by “legacy donations” from GCC members to support and build Garden City Academy. That will make Garden City Academy one of the most affordable Christian schools in the state, according to the website.
On the new site, GCC leaders also lay out nine “cultural agreements” students and their families must agree to before they matriculate at Garden City Academy.
“Garden City Academy is for those who view education as a privilege, not a right, and will treat their time here as such. We reject entitlement attitudes,” the first agreement reads.
You can read the whole list here:
But toeing the line and spending the money is worth it because Garden City will be the only school where they can get a true education, McPherson said.
But what is a true education?
It’s one heavily influenced by Doug Wilson, according to the high school curriculum plan.
Wilson is pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and is internationally famous (or infamous) for his teachings and writings about how American chattel slavery was actually pretty great for Black people, how a husband can’t rape his wife because that would be like “trespassing in his own garden” and has a history of enabling and empowering pedophiles.
Wilson has created an influential Christian media empire based in the Pacific Northwest that includes a podcast network, a video production studio, and publishing houses called “Logos Press” and “Canon Press.“
Logos Press textbooks will be used for Garden City’s 7-12 Bible, Literature, and History courses. For folks like Wilson and McPherson the culture war is zero-sum. It’s dominate or be dominated, there is no middle ground.
“If it’s inescapable that morality is going to be imposed, and that’s what law is – is the imposition of morality, then which morality?” Douglas said earlier this year. “Should we want a corrupt morality? Or a good one?”
Which morality is “good” and which is “corrupt” is of course defined by Wilson. There’s a similar dynamic at play with McPherson’s definition of what a “true education.”
“A true education puts God at the center as the starting point of reality –because that is reality,” he said.
He who defines God, defines reality.
The perfect example of White Christian Nationalism.
Hard to even wrap my mind around this nasty rhetoric.
Silver lining--at least there's one less awful dude in law enforcement?