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October 2026 Partner Update The Most Powerful WeaponA look inside an abandoned Englewood school, and why we press on. |
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A stairwell mural inside an abandoned school in the neighborhood. |
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Dear Friend, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” So says Nelson Mandela, according to a faded and peeling painting of him on a stairwell wall inside an abandoned school in Englewood. The first letter of “Education” has already peeled off the wall. If this quote is true, then what happens when the education of our children gets neglected? What happens to a world, or to a neighborhood, when the most powerful weapon it has is simply abandoned? We think the same thing that happens to a school building that nobody maintains. The paint and plaster peel back and pile up on the floor. Vandals break in, break the glass, and spray their names across the chalkboards. Water finds a way in, first as a trickle, and in time it dissolves ceilings and floors. In a neighborhood, that same neglect looks like cycles of poverty and hopelessness, dealt with by numbing the senses with drugs and getting what is needed through violence. |
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Somebody once loved this abandoned building (several somebodies, we suspect). The stairwell pictures show it. Someone painted encouragements for children to read on their way up to class: Be Positive. Be Powerful. Be Productive. The letters are still crisp; the paint around them is coming off the wall in sheets. On another landing it says Be Present, in a building where nobody has been for years. |
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Painted in the stairwells for children on their way up to class. |
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In one classroom the last lesson is still on the whiteboard. “Theme Question,” it says, underlined, and beneath it, in a teacher’s hand, “3rd Grade: How do the changes around us make us who we are?” Nobody has erased it in all the years since. We keep coming back to that photograph. |
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Still on a classroom whiteboard: “Theme Question. 3rd Grade: |
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We do not think the answer to that theme question is “not at all.” The changes around a child shape him. A boy who walks past boarded-up windows every morning learns something from them, whether or not anyone means to teach it to him. A girl who knows which corners to avoid on the way home has learned something too. Children in Englewood have been learning these lessons for a long time. We intend to teach them better ones. |
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The auditorium, seats still bolted in their rows, and a classroom with the plaster on the floor. |
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And yet we do not think the Mandela mural goes far enough. Education is powerful, and we would not be starting a school if we did not believe that with all our hearts. But power is not the same thing as goodness, and a weapon is only as good as the aim of the one who holds it (we did not name the school Archer by accident). Even when the paint was fresh and the halls were full of children, the education on offer was for the mind and the body; it was never meant to speak to the soul. Good teachers surely did good work here, but a child is a mind, a body, and a soul, and only the gospel reaches all three. What we are building is a different kind of school, one where children are taught to read and write and reason well, and also to love what is good and true and beautiful, and above all to know and love the God who made them. That is the kind of school we intend, by God’s grace, to open in Englewood next August. Friends, thank you for joining us on this journey. We look at these pictures and cannot help imagining what a building like this could be with children in it again. (Forty-two kindergartners, first graders, and second graders would rattle around in a place this size, but we are allowed to dream.) The longer we look, though, the more our hearts break at the broken dreams of a community represented by this desolate and forsaken school. |
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Isaiah 58.12 “And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.” |
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We do not know whether God means for us to rebuild this particular ruin. We do know that He has called us to raise up foundations for the next generation in Englewood, and that He has called you to do it alongside us. Our school will launch. Lord willing, in just under eleven months. We still do not have a location where we can meet, but we are trusting God to open the right doors. Would you pray with us that He will make clear the routes we should pursue? As we look ahead to a shrinking timeline and a growing list of things needing done, we are confident that He will give us the strength, wisdom, and guidance to get where we need to be. Would you pray that with us? |
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Another stairwell in the same building: “The time is always right to do what is right.” |
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Finally, two invitations. At the end of the month we are hosting a Vision Breakfast in the western suburbs (Thursday, October 29, at 7:00 in the morning, in Carol Stream), where friends of the school are each gathering a table of people who ought to hear what God is doing in Englewood. Seating is limited, but if you would like to be there, send us a note and we will do our best to find you a chair. The invitation we are more eager to extend, though, is this one. Would you consider gathering a handful of friends, family, or neighbors in your own home some evening in the coming months, over coffee or tea or a dessert, and letting us come tell the story of Archer? It does not need to be large or fancy; six or eight people around a kitchen table is exactly the right size, and a living room reaches people a breakfast in Carol Stream never will. We bring the pictures; you bring the coffee. If you are willing, or even just curious about what it would involve, please let us know! |
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Pressing on in Christ, Daniel Bair, Founder & Executive Director Michelle Kelley, Director of Operations P.s. Pictures only go so far. If you would like to see Englewood itself some afternoon (the kids at the after-school club would be glad of a visitor), and see what we are actually building toward, let us know! |
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Archer Christian Academy
daniel@archerchristian.org archerchristian.org · Facebook · Instagram · LinkedIn Sagitta vera — the true arrow.
672 West Marquette Road · Chicago, Illinois 60621 |
