In recent years, conservative Christians have celebrated a number of Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade. But Child Evangelism Fellowship still celebrates a 2001 decision that “broke down the doors” of public schools for its after-school Good News Clubs.
The justices ruled in Good News Club v. Milford Central School that a New York public school that sought to exclude a Good News Club from its building because of its religious nature had engaged in viewpoint discrimination prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.
Nearly a quarter century later, it’s clear that court’s decision not only allowed Child Evangelism Fellowship to expand its ministry in public schools but also paved the way for many other ministries to penetrate public schools too.
Fred Pry
“The decision affected not only CEF, but also any other group that wants to do religious instruction,” either after school or during student “release times,” said Fred Pry, vice president of administration for the $22.5 million ministry.
Pry, who became a Christian at age 9 and has worked for Child Evangelism Fellowship since 2003, said the Milford ruling also helped open the door for students to pray at graduation ceremonies and for speakers to promote religious ideals in their talks — developments his organization supports but that worry advocates of separation between church and state.
The Milford victory wasn’t the end of Child Evangelism Fellowship’s legal battles. The ministry and its legal partner, Liberty Counsel, have since filed more than 200 lawsuits against schools that excluded Good News Clubs based on the assumption that such clubs were an illegal “establishment of religion.” Child Evangelism Fellowship says it has won all these cases.
Today, some states are taking the concept of religion in schools even further. Louisiana now says its public school classrooms must post the Bible’s Ten Commandments, and Oklahoma public schools have been ordered to use the Bible as curriculum.
Pry celebrates such efforts, claiming they help instill in students an understanding and respect for the nation’s explicitly Christian foundations.
He supports public schools’ “use of the Bible for educational purposes,” saying it’s good for our children to know that “the laws of the land are truly based on biblical concepts. There’s a correlation between the Ten Commandments and the laws of the land, so why hide that from children?”
Pry believes non-Christian religious groups enjoy the same constitutionally guaranteed access to America’s public school students, saying the Milford decision “opened the door for everyone.” In practice, non-Christian groups are less focused on reaching children in public schools.
Katherine Stewart
Journalist Katherine Stewart, who first became aware of Child Evangelism Fellowship when it started a club in her daughter’s California school, criticized the Supreme Court’s Milford decision in her 2012 book, Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.
Stewart told BNG she remains critical of Milford and subsequent rulings that favor a fundamentalist form of Christianity in taxpayer supported schools and beyond: “I wrote at the time that this was a hugely consequential decision, that it would weaponize the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment to eviscerate the Establishment Clause, and I am sorry to say that I was right.
“The Supreme Court in its current radical incarnation has used a fraudulent concept of ‘religious freedom’ to not only permit but effectively require public subsidy of religious organizations and religious education. It has also used this same fraudulent idea of ‘religious liberty,’ by which it means the right of select groups of conservative Christians to discriminate against others, to take away the rights of women to go to the pharmacy and get their prescriptions filled, to deny gay people the right to consumer services available to others, and to force taxpayers of all backgrounds to disproportionately subsidize certain religious groups — even while those same religious groups often participate vigorously in politics without having to answer to campaign finance laws.”
Child Evangelism Fellowship was founded in 1937 by 60-year-old Jesse Irvin Overholtzer, who was raised in a strict Brethren family but struggled over his doubts and despaired over his sins for years before finding peace. He served as a pastor who prioritized obedience over grace before being inspired by Dwight L. Moody’s ministry and his passion for evangelizing children.
Originally, Child Evangelism Fellowship reached children through meetings in homes and churches before adopting a school-based strategy. In 2001, it had 1,100 school-based Good News Clubs. After the 2001 Milford decision, its work in public schools soared, growing more than 700% by 2009, when it reached nearly 140,000 children in more than 3,400 Good News Clubs, most of them in public schools.
Child Evangelism Fellowship’s international work has exploded, but its domestic work has slowed. Today, the group says it serves 93,397 children in 2,206 school-based Good News Clubs in the U.S. Pry said Child Evangelism Fellowship struggles to find volunteers to lead clubs in some locales.
He explained that school-based clubs “dropped off when the COVID pandemic hit and many schools closed their doors and cancelled all extracurricular activities and clubs. Where we are today is partly because of the pandemic.”
In addition to Good News Clubs, the ministry offers 5-Day Clubs with more teaching, clubs for military children, and Christmas Party Clubs.
Child Evangelism Fellowship reported 2022 revenue of $22,767,215 and has 3,600 paid staff and more than 50,000 volunteers worldwide. In addition to Good News Clubs, the ministry offers 5-Day Clubs with more teaching, clubs for military children, and Christmas Party Clubs.
The ministry pursues three objectives in its outreach to children, and the ministry provided numbers for each:
- “Reaching” children through an initial meeting or gathering. CEF says it reached 29,245,736 children around the world in 2023, with about one-third of them reached through Christmas Party Clubs. In the U.S. CEF reached 567,934 children.
- “Discipling” through their regular attendance at Good News Clubs. CEF says it discipled 103,003 children in the U.S. last year.
- Professions of faith. CEF says 51,217 children accepted Christ in the U.S.
Child Evangelism Fellowship says its goal is to reach 100 million children each year globally with the gospel. Pry predicted that goal could be reached sometime between 2032 and 2037.
The COVID crisis reenergized long-running conversations about the ministry strategy of focusing on work in public schools. Pry summarized the discussions: “Our calling is to minister to boys and girls, but if we put all our eggs in one basket, and all of a sudden, that door closes, we don’t have any place to go.”
But schools remain the biggest part of the U.S. ministry, a commitment that has been affirmed by recent declines in evangelical church attendance, which makes “any ministry outside the church walls become more important,” he said.
Katherine Stewart remains concerned about the brand of Christianity Child Evangelism Fellowship is promoting and the broader Religious Right agenda for the public schools.
“We cannot characterize these initiatives as simply ‘Christian,’ Stewart told BNG. “Many if not most American Christians support public education and reject the politics of conquest and division that these programs and developments represent.”
“Instead, these developments are Christian nationalist — meaning they are extensions of an anti-democratic political movement that takes aim at the values of pluralism and equality and the idea of the separation of church and state, which is enshrined in the First Amendment of our Constitution.
“The Religious Right’s aims for public education are twofold: first, to force conservative Christian programming into the public schools, and second, to divert taxpayer money away from public schools and into ideological right-wing and religious schools,” she said. “The religious right has advanced significantly in both arenas.”
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