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The Ear, Evangelical and Reformed, Christian Podcast. Welcome to The Ear, the Evangelical and Reformed, a Christian podcast that urges you to think deeper and draws you closer to God through faith. Through powerful sermons, teaching segments, and discussions, The Ear hopes to give you a different perspective on secular topics from a Christian worldview. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Please welcome your host, Brandon Queen.
Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to part two of surviving strategies of the small church. Today, we're going to dive right into the conversation with Pastor Bill Crawford to continue what we started last week. Join in.
you know, God moments. I found myself with the opportunity to begin a committee to found a charter school here in Thibodeau, and that was back in 2007. The school was actually chartered in 2010. I really can't fully express to you how difficult it was. We had a... would put together a team and they would disappear and I put together another team and they would disappear.
Got to the point where we were down to approval and I had to take out a $35,000 loan to make the first payroll payment with my own credit. And we were able to do that. We were able to pay everybody's first round of salaries and finish out the process. And today, I think it's 13, 14 years later, Bayou Community Academy is the 27th highest rated school in the state of Louisiana.
We are an open enrollment school that competes with closed enrollment schools for that ranking. And so it's quite, quite an accomplishment. So that's not a Christian school. It's a public school. And we have leaders in that school that are Christian and non-Christian.
But I believe we've attacked, back to your questions about ethnicity and inclusion, what I perceive as a systemic evil here in the state of Louisiana is that our education system stinks. It's not because the people are awful. We have wonderful educators. We have wonderful administrators here in Lafourche. We are blessed with incredible leaders in the school board system.
I'm not criticizing them, but we're just not where we should have been. And so Bayou Community Academy gets founded. Our church supported that. They have endorsed that as a ministry of my faith. My presence here is a teaching elder, so it's something I can, you know, write off the expenses. I can take work time to go and do this. And that's been a commitment for many, many years.
And I get more, I promise you, I get more hugs on my neck and more comments on the street about that school than I do most any other role in my ministry. And so, yeah. Being a small church pastor, you can engage your community in very serious ways. We're not a rural town, but we're a smallish town. A pastor is often, a Presbyterian pastor especially, is often an educated person.
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