Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast, I have with me two guests today, and I cannot wait to introduce both of them to you.
First, we have Dr. Ty Faulk. He has served in Christian schools as a Bible teacher, counselor, and administrator for 15 years. He currently serves as a Dean of Spiritual Development and K-12 Bible department head at the King’s Academy in Woodstock, Georgia. He has an MA in Biblical Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary, a THM in Applied Theology from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a doctorate in Educational Ministries from Midwestern as well, where his research focused on intentional discipleship in Christian schools. Brother, so grateful that you’re with us.
I also want to introduce our other guest. Kristi Brannen has served as the head of school and was one of the core founders of the King’s Academy in Woodstock, Georgia, which has a 25-year history and has grown to be one of the largest Christian schools in North Metro Atlanta. Kristi is a fully certified biblical counselor from ACBC, and she counsels both at the King’s Academy and in partnership with her local church, Faith Community Church.
I want to welcome both of you to the podcast, really looking forward to our time together this morning.
Kristi Brannen: Yeah, glad to be here. Thank you.
Ty Faulk: Thanks for having us.
Dale Johnson: Now, this is always interesting. We were talking even offline, and I mentioned to you some curriculum that we’ve promoted as high school curriculum and trying to get ideas of biblical counseling as an alternative of social science.
It’s always great to hear what the Lord is doing as you’re training young minds to think biblically and to consider what’s happening culturally from a biblical perspective.
But before we get into some of that, I want to just hear a little bit about the King’s Academy. So, tell me a little bit about your background, particularly in counseling, education, and then a little bit about the history of the King’s Academy there in Woodstock.
Kristi Brannen: I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about the history of the school, if that’s okay. Back in the 1990s, there was a large group of homeschooling families in this area. And as you might be aware, there were not nearly the resources for homeschoolers as there are today.
So many of us were overwhelmed with homeschooling, and we were overwhelmed with trying to juggle being wives and mothers, our homemaking responsibilities, engaging church members and then just educating many of us, multiple children. I had four children at the time.
So, three homeschooling families got together, my husband and I being one of those, and came together to hire qualified teachers two days a week to simply help and assist homeschooling families with academics. And we literally launched this idea in March of 1999, had the first informational session in May, and officially opened the King’s Academy in August of 1999 with 150 students.
It obviously was addressing a need. We’ve grown every year since that time. We now have 1,100 students K-12, 95 part-time teachers, and 100 ancillary staff, which are largely parents that help to offset tuition costs. We have 30 clubs, 12 sports, and we are a fully accredited private school, even though we are still a hybrid model.
We launched as the only hybrid K-12 school in our state before hybrid was even a term used for educational models. And many of us have called us trendsetters, but that was not our motive. We were simply trying to get our children educated while letting parents still be the primary influence in their lives.
This year we’re celebrating 25 years, and we founded the school with the strong, unwavering belief that there are three institutions that are foundational for spiritual growth of our youth: the family, the church, and Christian education. And we strongly believe that Christian education rises and falls on the first two being in order.
So, we put a strong emphasis on the family and the church in all we do. And then we wanted the parents to be the primary influence, hence the two-day-a-week model. We wanted all education to be taught through a biblical worldview. And then we wanted an affordable tuition so that it would reach the average one-income Christian family. So that’s kind of how we got started.
Ty Faulk: Yeah, I started kind of as a little baby teaching here when I was just 22 years old. And then when I started my seminary degree, I went and taught full time at another school. And over that time, was a Bible teacher for most of the time there. Then I started doing a lot of discipleship and did my survey research for my doctorate in discipleship.
I was then able to connect back with Kings, when really our visions aligned for what I wanted to do post-doctorate with kind of implementing a culture of biblical counseling. And the fact that, you know, the Kings Academy was really the forefront of that in our area. Our visions aligned, and I was able to come and have been here for two years. And it’s been really great.
Dale Johnson: Well, it’s exciting to hear such a focus on Christian education, and even in that, such a focus on the family unit and how the church is participating in that. I’m interested, certainly, to hear more about the culture of biblical counseling that you described.
So, I want you guys to describe that for me a little bit. How did your school get started in creating a culture of biblical counseling, as you call it?
Kristi Brannen: I was very blessed personally when 16 years ago, my church, Faith Community Church in Woodstock, Georgia, began annually offering biblical counseling and discipleship conferences. I was at the very first one 16 years ago, and I’ve attended every year since. And I’ve attended five of the ACBC annual conferences. Year after year, I got to sit under the teaching of amazing counselors such as yourself, Dr. Johnson, Stuart Scott, Nicholas Ellen, Keith Palmer, Kevin Carson, Tim Keeter, and on and on, just to name a few, and then I finally completed the certification process.
But from the beginning of this training, I began to see how these truths could be and should be applied to our Christian school setting. All of the issues that any Christian school faces can be addressed with God’s Word, and it’s sufficient for all of life’s issues. But I saw how easy it was for a secular worldview and psychology to creep in and hijack a biblical worldview even in a Christian school.
We began combing through our handbook to see what policies needed to come into line, how to train our leadership and teachers in biblical counseling, and how to shape our decision making, parent meetings, student conflicts, and all other areas of our school to come in line with biblical counseling. So that’s kind of the impetus for why we started.
Dale Johnson: Man, I love to hear that. First of all, it’s very encouraging that you would think biblical counseling is not something that’s limited to some sort of a formal setting where, you know, people are in an office and they’re doing this counseling.
You’re seeing it as life-on-life, teaching people how to relate to the Lord with a Godward orientation in everything that they do, and you’re seeing that as something that is very useful when you think about education and how you’re training these young people and how you’re thinking.
Now, you guys have not just implemented some of these things, you started to write about this as well. And you’ve written an article, which we’re going to include in the show notes, about how you’ve been training faculty and staff in biblical counseling, and it really gives a different outlook for your faculty and staff on how to see people from a biblical perspective. How to understand some of the things that some of their children may be going through that they’re relating to on a weekly basis.
And so, I want you to talk a little bit about what you’ve done. You talk about this in the article a little bit, but what are some of the things that you’ve done and what are you currently doing to train your staff members in concepts of biblical counseling?
Kristi Brannen: Okay, well, for several years, I’ve been sending all the school leadership and Bible teachers to the conferences at my local church, and several teachers have gone as well.
In addition, and Ty can speak to this, we’ve included specific training in our staff development, and in every parent meeting and student discipline conference, we have someone trained in biblical conference in those meetings.
And so, we’re trying to model to all of our staff how to not just understand these principles, but to apply them on a day-to-day basis. The other thing that I started doing— I really wanted parents to be involved in a bigger way, and that’s kind of hard to know how to do when they’re already homeschooling at home the three other days, and these are their two days to get things done.
But I started a book club, and we have a different book every semester, and I invite moms to come, and I choose a book from the ACBC website, and it opens up wonderful conversations. And that’s just been a wonderful way to engage mothers.
Dale Johnson: That’s very practical. And I appreciate sort of the different levels that you’re thinking about this, in terms of having a unified mindset with your teachers, with your staff, and with the parents even. One of the things that I think is really cool that you’re recognizing is that the parents are with them three days of the week primarily, and, you know, investing in the parents in that way too.
So there’s a similar mindset for the children, as they try to think biblically and as they try to, you know, learn from a biblical perspective as well. Talk a little bit about some of your specific classes, some of the ways that you’ve used your classes at the school—whether that be Bible classes or whatever, your teachers particularly—in a way that structures support and help for the concepts that we find in the Scriptures for biblical counseling.
Ty Faulk: Yeah, absolutely.
So, we want Bible classes to be the heart and the core of where the biblical counseling application happens. And that’s because we want students to see that the Scripture is their hope and help. And if the Scripture is their hope and help, then Bible class is their hope and help in that sense.
So as I am, you know, over counseling and discipline, but also over the Bible department, that kind of allows all those things to be integrated together—which I think is really cool and something that we’ve uniquely done. We have Bible class K-12, and it’s gender specific.
Girls end up with a girl teacher and guys end up with a guy teacher, which naturally flows into counseling when those things come up. We want to train all of our Bible teachers to be prepared to be able to care for students biblically. And so we encourage that in multiple ways. We want them to do local biblical counseling training. We always offer that, offer to pay for it and we encourage them to go.
Then we equip them with resources to be prepared kind of when those issues come up from the students. And we’ve done little things like allowing students to have a link where they can reach out to their Bible teacher with something they’re going through and just different ways to connect Bible teachers to the students. And if there is a care issue that comes up, then we allow the students to fill out an intake form.
And then really what we want to do is, if we see that there actually is a counseling issue, we connect these students with the Bible teacher and they do three to six sessions typically. It’s typically brief.
If we feel like it’s something that’s beyond that, you know, we’re kind of the triage, we kind of care for things as they come up. But if we feel like it goes beyond that, then that’s when we go to partner with counseling ministry and a local church for something that would be a little more in depth or take a little more time.
But then we also allow the students to be careful in that time as well and address kind of those spiritual needs with Scripture as they arise. And as you know, in a high school, in a school, a lot of these issues arise, these problems of life arise.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, we could just say just a few of those. Having teenagers in the house myself, yeah, no one is excluded from dealing with the pressures, the social pressures that we have in life.
So yeah, you’re going to have a lot of those—and especially if you’re intentionally training in a particular way. I love the way that you’re thinking about your Bible classes, because the simplest way to think about biblical counseling is helping people to correct unbiblical thinking with biblical truth.
And if we’re now taking the biblical truths that we have in Scripture and learning to apply that to life, that’s the simplicity of what biblical counseling really is. And as you’re teaching the Scriptures, there should always be the beauty of application, because the Bible was unveiled and revealed for us to reveal God’s character, who He is, the reality of the world, so that we would be creatures who would respond in application appropriately.
And so, man, what a beautiful tethering that you have there as you think about this. Listen, I’m not done. I want to ask you some more questions, a lot of questions. I want you to talk a little bit more to some of our listeners. We’re running out of time today, but I’m going to ask if you’ll come back next week and we can chat a little bit more about some detail on how you implement this. I also want to ask a little bit more—just so that you can prepare—on how do you encourage other local Christian schools? If administrators were talking to you, how do you encourage them in this mindset as well?
It seems to be very healthy for culture of your school. I really appreciate you guys sharing this initially. Look forward to chatting again next week.
Ty Faulk: Yes, thank you. Thank you.