Mission & Distinctives

Sycamore Christian Academy exists as a classical Christian education school which uses the classical method rooted in the Christian worldview in order to nurture students’ appreciation of truth, goodness, and beauty as they strive for excellence, while guiding them to live purposefully in the service of God and man.

Sycamore Christian Academy enables students and families to experience an abundant life by equipping, empowering, and engaging them in meaningful, Christ-centered education and discipleship.

God is honored.

The rightful end of education is to enable the student to more fully honor and glorify God.

God is the foundation of all knowledge.

All knowledge will be presented as part of an integrated whole, with God as revealed in His Scriptures at the center. All true knowledge is a reflection of the Creator.  The Christian worldview, which is further defined in our Statement of Faith, will be presupposed in all subjects.

The Western classical tradition is thoroughly taught.

The foundation of Western civilization will be emphasized through the study of history, philosophy, science, the arts, literature, and classical language. The method of instruction will implement the Trivium: Grammar (the fundamental data and interrelated rules of a subject); Logic (the ordered relationship of particulars in a subject); and Rhetoric (the clear expression of the grammar and logic of that subject).

Students are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord

Students will be cultivated into wise, thoughtful, compassionate, articulate, and virtuous men and women who give their hearts to the Lord in order to become well disciplined and well adjusted disciples of Christ whose chief end is to glorify God. Students will apply the Lordship of Christ throughout all of life and become good, productive, and patriotic American citizens.

Parents are assisted in the education of their children.

Parents are responsible for training and instructing their children. Sycamore Christian Academy endeavors to assist parents in this responsibility.

Our schools operate as an extension of the family, under the authority of fathers who are required to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.  The authority granted to fathers and mothers in Scripture is passed to the school in loco parentis.  For the development of paideia in students while at school, the school operates with the same authority that fathers have in the raising of children. 

Our transcending values are to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

We desire to provide a social and engaging culture for our student community.

We strive to graduate students who have a systematic Christian worldview that can provide context for a fulfilling Christian life as well as to nurture students in the Christian faith so that they will come to embody honor, duty, accomplishment, self-discipline, and maturity. We seek to serve all diligent and capable students as long as they do not compromise our educational environment.

We desire to hire and retain the best possible teachers who can use classical methods to inspire students with a love of learning.

We strive to internalize the Classical and Christian distinctives in our board, administration, staff, students, and parents.

We hold our students accountable to a moral code of conduct: Love, honor, duty, accomplishment, joy, self-discipline, and maturity.

Sycamore Christian Academy holds the following Statement of Faith, which will permeate all courses and levels of the Academy:

•  We believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord. Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was born of a virgin, Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hades, and on the third day, He rose again from the dead. He ascended into Heaven, where He sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From Heaven He shall come to earth again to judge the living and the dead. We believe in the Holy Spirit, one holy catholic church, the communion of all true saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the gift of everlasting life. (Apostle’s Creed)

•  We believe that God reveals Himself through the creation, preservation, and government of the universe. We believe that God makes Himself more clearly and fully known through the Scriptures, which are the only inerrant and infallible Word of God, our ultimate and final authoritative rule for faith and practice. These Scriptures are made up of 66 books, from Genesis to Revelation, the authority of which depends not upon the testimony of any man or church, and are all to be received as the Word of God.

•  We believe that there is but one living and true God, eternally existent in three Persons of one power, substance, and eternity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is perfectly wise, the overflowing fountain of all good. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. In all things, He is limited by nothing other than His own nature and character. We believe the God we serve is holy, righteous, good, loving, and full of mercy. He is the Creator, Sustainer, and Governor of all that has been made.

•  We believe in the true deity and full humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, such that two distinct natures, divine and human, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. We believe in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory.

•  We believe that Adam was made from the dust of the ground and formed after God’s image and likeness, which was good, righteous, and holy. Because of Adam’s sin, all mankind is in a state of rebellion against God. For the salvation of such lost and sinful men, regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary.

• We believe that salvation is by grace through faith alone, and that faith without works is dead. We believe that God freely justifies His own, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous, for the sake of Jesus Christ alone.

•  We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit, by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life, as the Spirit of Christ within us enables us to do freely and cheerfully what the will of God revealed in Scripture requires to be done. We believe that good works are only those which arise from true faith, conform to God’s Word, and are done for His glory.

•  We believe God has appointed a day when He will judge the world in righteousness through Jesus Christ. We believe in the resurrection of both the saved and the lost; those who are saved to the resurrection of life, and those who are lost to the resurrection of damnation.

•  We believe in the spiritual unity of all believers in our Lord Jesus Christ. All who are united to Christ as Head of the Church are united to one another in love, and have communion in each other’s gifts and graces.

•  We believe that God defined marriage as the life-long covenant between one man and one woman, and that all forms of sexual activity outside of marriage are sin.

• We believe that God immutably creates each person to reflect His image as male or female.

• We welcome families who hold to traditional, conservative Christian orthodoxy and our statement of faith (above).  Our board reserves the right to remove families who, in our sole judgment, are openly opposed to the above statement.

Sycamore Christian Academy is a private Christian school committed to providing a biblically-based classical education. Sycamore Christian Academy is intended to be inherently different in its philosophy and educational content from that offered in government schools.  The Academy strives to operate as an extension of the family, assuming that the education of children is the responsibility of parents, not the state.

The Academy will provide a classically based curriculum that focuses on classical languages, mathematics, rhetoric, natural history, and the study of history and literature. The goal of the Academy is to produce young people grounded in history, language, and the skills of sound thinking. This classical approach is more fully described in the following texts:

A) Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, by Douglas Wilson

‍ B) Classical Education, by Dr. Gene Edward Veith and Andrew Kern

C) The Seven Laws of Teaching, by John Gregory

‍ ‍ D) The Lost Tools of Learning, byDorothy Sayers

An orderly, well-disciplined environment conducive to learning will be maintained so that academic excellence can be achieved to the glory of God alone.

The Sycamore Christian Academy Educational Foundations express our convictions, ideas, and beliefs. They provide the foundation for many of the ideas, values, and emphases that make Sycamore Christian Academy unique.

We also hold to the historical, orthodox, and ecumenical creeds and confessions that help us understand our place in historical Christianity

Sycamore Christian Academy has adopted The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel.

Dorothy Sayers’ essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” is a helpful guide to understanding our educational model.