President’s Update: Summer 2022
Dear Friends,
I can remember so clearly the moment I made the decision to build what would become Christian Halls International. I was sitting on a park bench at University Parks with a colleague at the University of Oxford. Before me lay a promising academic career, the culmination of over a decade of study, exams, research, publishing, and teaching. However, I had become deeply dissatisfied with the means and outcomes of traditional university education.
I have a deep love for the delights of university life. However, the crushing debt used to fuel the education industry, the oppressive secularist ideologies, and a growing tyrannical sexual ethic that has inverted all sense of what is good, true, and beautiful convinced me that we needed a global revolution to return responsibility of post-secondary education to local communities of faith.
Christian families have, by and large, outsourced their God-given responsibility and privilege of educating their children to a godless culture and educational systems which fail us in nearly every meaningful way. Ideologies from kindergarten through graduate school actively attack and deride our Christian worldview, while producing spiritually, psychologically and economically stunted adults. Newly dominant, perverse ideologies ferociously twist our youth’s minds, souls, and bodies into their own image.
Those institutions which remain true to the historic Christian faith face their own significant challenges: enormous overhead requires pricing well beyond the abilities of most families to pay without debt. Once students graduate, college have limited ability to integrate students into local, thriving communities. Many universities have turned to digital and purely online solutions which commodify information while abandoning wisdom formation. In the meantime, good luck trying to find a Christ-centered trade school.
As I voiced my growing concerns that day in Oxford, my colleague asked me to consider if God was calling me to a teaching career in a seminary or university, or whether God was calling me to build larger, systemic alternatives and solutions. That summer afternoon, I made the decision to build something new. And Christian Halls International was born.
From the start, we identified Four Strategic Goals:
Partner with trusted Christian universities to offer their degree programs to our members.
Offer zero-debt college tuition pricing
Find and train expert, godly mentors in local communities for weekly small-group instruction, using the tutorial model I had learned at Oxford.
Remain community-focused and flexible, able to respond to and serve local needs.
To date, we have signed agreements with nine respected Christ-centered universities and seminaries, collectively offering to our membership hundreds of degree programs ranging from high school dual credit, to undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees. (When you have a moment, watch what a few of our partner universities have to say about the Christian Hall partnership model).
We have negotiated the right to instruct these accredited degree programs in the small group tutorial model I experienced at Oxford. CHI student-members benefit from local academic tutoring, professional coaching, and discipleship within their local Private Christian Hall, with region-sensitive tuition and payment structures that nullify the crushing weight of student debt. Tutors and Mentors enjoy the opportunity to invest in deep intellectual discipleship and professional coaching. For many of our Tutors, the local Private Christian Hall represents their first opportunity to teach in their discipline at the university level with an open posture of Christ-centered discipleship, without fear of professional repercussions.
With partnerships in hand, and a sustainable business model, we began to operate internationally. Since 2018 we have seen over 300 learning sites started in East Africa and Brazil, with a student enrollment that will surpass 5000 students this fall. Operations such as Christian Halls Brazil (christianhalls.com.br), Classical Press Brazil (classical press.com.br), Homeschool Brazil (homeschool.com.br), and Watoto Christian Hall (watoto.christianhalls.com) are thriving and growing.
In 2021 we launched the North American non-profit entity, Christian Halls International. This decision was driven by COVID, which blew the roof off North America university education. In the midst of unprecedented national political and civic crisis, parents began to reconsider the value and the outcomes of college education, and even more once they observed what their children were studying at home. I never imagined the need we would find in North American communities, or the response we would receive.
We actively adapt our university partners’ degree pathways into CHI custom programs to meet the unique needs of regions and cultures. Some of these programs include:
Our Dual Credit program, which offers hundreds of affordable high school dual-credit college classes starting at $100/credit hour, both saving money and giving maximum opportunities for private schools and homeschools to influence their youth. We can offer a strong alternative to secular dual-credit classes that have invaded many of our private schools and homeschool co-ops.
Beginning in Dallas/Ft. Worth, a metro area where over 350k students are enrolled in community colleges, we launched a rapidly expanding Christian Community College and Trade School network, in partnership with private schools, homeschools, businesses, and churches. We are offering selected Associates Degrees, Bachelor Degrees, and Graduate Degrees, with an Associates Degree starting at $6k, enabling us to complete financially against state colleges across North America. We can effectively provide alternatives to the underclassman courses which are intentionally weaponized against our most vulnerable students.
We are engaged deeply in the public square, offering programs such as the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics program we built with The King’s College, NYC, as we seek to redefine how students can engage in the public square in their local communities through local city councils, county courthouses, and in public administration.
The CHI Work-Study program offers apprenticeship placement and entrepreneurship opportunities within Christian businesses while studying in an applicable degree program.
CHI’s Core Work: Advocacy, Training, and Design
In support of our growing network of Private Christian Halls, CHI’s core work in North America can be summarized in three primary areas:
We cast vision and advocate for local Christian tutors, mentors, and organizations to take a direct role in post-secondary education. We are helping our communities re-imagine how to decentralize and revitalize college and technical education, placing the local Church and her members at the center of the work. The funds we raise help create the media, convene advocacy events, and tell the stories as we call people and organizations to take part in this work.
We find and train local leadership. Our network of professors, tutors, and mentors perform the daily work of student engagement. As we grow this network, we aim to plant a Christian Hall in every county of North America in the next ten years. We love finding people like Melissa Cain Travis in The Woodlands, Texas and her team at the Caemon Honors Institute, with the Great Books and Honors College program. Help us find more people like Ben Hagan, whose family runs a restaurant franchise committed to forming virtuous people and a virtuous workplace through the Work-Study program.
We Research, design, and develop Programs. Every week we have requests for additional programs. I have been asked to build nursing programs for local clinics and hospitals, a network of constitutional law schools for the rural West, professional aviation programs, and a Christ-centered special education program. Let me underline this last one: many parents have pleaded with us to expand our special education programs, both by training Christ-centered special education teachers, and also in designing a Christian Hall program specially created to serve special needs students. For this and other local study programs we need to fund the design, training, and implementation model.
We believe that a well-resourced, radically decentralized network of Private Christian Halls can change local options for well formed and flourishing communities, and thereby transform this nation.
I hope this latest issue of CHI Connect has given you more background into our origins, and a vision for our future. If you are interested in leading a local community, teaching a class, or becoming an advocate for CHI, we want to hear from you. You may know someone who would be passionate about our work: if so, please forward this newsletter to them.
Finally, while we run a lean team at CHI, we need funds to continue the work as we build towards sustainable operations. We need to raise $25,000 by August 1, and $140,000 by December, to fund our media, training, customer service, and program design teams through the end of the year. If you would like to know more about how we use these funds to further the work, please contact me directly and I would be happy to walk you through our stewardship commitments and our budget.
It has been my great joy to imagine something new for the kingdom of Christ and to invest in its founding. We welcome you to join us in building upon these foundations, in whatever place you live. Call me, I’d love to talk.
Warmly,
Dr. Nicholas Ellis
Founder & President
Generosity Information
Christian Halls International is a US 501(c)3 non-profit charitable organization, federal tax identification number 87-1135608. To make a one-time or reoccurring gift online, please donate here. Checks can be mailed to:
Christian Halls International
901 W. Bardin Rd. #101
Arlington, TX 76017
CHI can also accept wires and ACH transfers, as well as stock donations and non-cash assets — please contact me directly at nick@christianhalls.org for more information.
