In this interview, Nathan Nocchi chats with Ray Cwiertniewicz, a Westminster alumnus, about his work at Philadelphia Classical School (PCS). PCS is a classical Christian K–12 school that provides timeless academic experience rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ to disciple students and cultivate virtue so they are prepared to lead any calling. The school’s aim and prayer is to graduate students who love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Nathan Nocchi: Ray, it is a pleasure to chat with you about classical education and the good work of Philadelphia Classical School (PCS), especially as we reflect on the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea. What is the origin story of PCS?
Ray Cwiertniewicz: PCS opened twelve years ago to support the many vibrant church plants taking root and growing in Philadelphia. Katharine Savage, the founder and Head of School, saw many families that she and her family worshipped with move to the suburbs as their kids began school. Her family was committed to remaining in the city as her husband served as a local pastor. Still, they understood why families were leaving and wanted to provide an excellent, classical, Christ-centered school option to help families stay and bless the church and her covenant children. Supported by the Classical Christian
school networks and local churches, Katharine presented a vision for PCS, and many families joined. PCS opened with twenty-one students in the Fall of 2013. Twelve years later, the school serves 208 students in grades K–12 and has six alumni thriving in college. God has lavishly preserved and blessed PCS since 2013.
NN: How did you, a Westminster alumnus, get involved in this context? How did Westminster prepare you for this important work in the city?
RC: Westminster radically reshaped my understanding of worldview. Particularly, it dispelled my naive belief in the possibility of neutral worldviews. I worked in public education leadership, building school choice systems in New Orleans and elsewhere. I’m grateful for this work and the opportunity to help families choose the best school for their family. Before attending Westminster, I suspected that if God gave me kids, I’d send them to public school and seek to love and witness to that school community. Westminster’s teaching on worldview helped me interrogate the worldview presuppositions behind many public schools. I concluded that those schools thoroughly shape students according to a worldview that opposes the gospel. Machen illuminated what I had not seen in his deft education assessment in Christianity and Liberalism.
All the while, I could not ignore the fruit that Philadelphia Classical School was producing in the students who attended my church. They were uniquely thoughtful, loving, considerate, and liberated from modernity and its alluring technology. The Christ-shaped discipleship and formation at PCS drew me in.
NN: Cities, and especially Philadelphia, are epicenters of cultural ideals and values. What can the classical tradition, broadly speaking, teach us in today’s world, where there are many claims to authority, a vast array of opinions about the truth and what is good, and oftentimes disparate understandings of the beautiful? How does PCS exemplify this?
RC: I love living in Philadelphia, and PCS is grateful for our abundant access to its rich history and cultural resources. Nevertheless, our school and families must also uniquely contend with non-Christian claims of authority, and particularly the authority claim of the expressive self. It is ubiquitous and expressed in rapidly evolving, self-contradicting modern creeds on yard signs, starting with “In this house, we believe that…”
We counter this by consistently teaching our students according to the creation, fall, redemption, and consummation story God ordained through history, as summarized in the Nicene Creed. PCS’s teaching and formation flow from that Christocentric, gracious story that our spiritual ancestors have told for millennia. Students need to understand themselves as part of a redemptive story God is authoring, not just disparate theological facts. The world offers them many modern distorted stories, and we must consistently present that old, true, life-giving gospel story.
I recently spoke with a PCS parent whose daughter asked about the “they/them” pronouns included in a playbill. She was seeking wisdom on how to respond and was grateful that her daughter was learning about God’s distinct creation of man and woman in our Doctrine of Man chapel series this year. This is how we proactively counter secular metanarratives with the true, good, and beautiful God-ordained story. We do this in an integrated fashion with chapel woven in, not tacked on.
NN: As we reflect on the church throughout the ages, particularly the Nicene Creed, how does the Christian past function in the efforts at PCS?
RC: In many ways, our students get to retreat and find safe harbor in our Christian past, liberated from a never-ending assault of modern distractions. Rather than contend with peculiar creedal yard signs, they recite the Nicene Creed and other creeds from our church fathers. Instead of deconstructing their faith, PCS constructively builds up students on the foundation laid by the apostles as members of the household of God. Students are not taught to follow or identify with their sinful desires but to examine their sin and need for God’s grace with Augustine’s Confessions. Our annual prayer for our Doctrine of Man series was Psalm 8, which encouraged them to wrestle with the tension between their relative insignificance before an infinite Holy God and their
preeminence in his created order. They do this instead of being paralyzed by modern confounding assertions that man is a meaningless product of chance and his own god or ultimate authority.
As a Westminster student, I knew that no matter how long the reading list on the syllabus was, professors always explained that they would like to assign more. But they also assured us they only assigned the most critical works to shape our theology and understanding of God’s revelation, and that reading all of it would bless us. This freed us to maximize our knowledge of God and his word. That’s what we are doing at PCS, in a different context. By focusing strictly on the good, true, and beautiful works that stood the test of time, PCS frees students to grow in their knowledge of God and his world.
NN: What a firm and sure approach to education. Reading that which stood the test of time exposes students to the greats throughout time. I imagine there are many stories that you can tell, but is there a particular story or testimony that has been especially impactful?
RC: I attended church one Sunday and was delighted to see a PCS student baptized. Before being baptized, he shared how God used his Humane Letters teacher in his walk with Christ. Reading “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in class convicted him of his grievous sin and need for Christ. The teacher implored him and other students to repent, believe the gospel, and seek to glorify God. He explained that baptism was a sign and a seal for Christians, and if the students had repented of their sins and confessed Christ as their Savior, they needed to be baptized in their local church (if they were not already baptized). This student’s baptism brought me great joy, and that loving discipleship is why I work at PCS.
NN: Ray, thank you very much indeed for taking the time to chat about the good work at PCS. Can you tell our readership how they might get involved and for what they might pray? What are some ways that Philadelphia Classical School can be supported?
RC: Please join us in praying that God would provide a school building and the means to buy it so that we can be a light and support to the church in Philadelphia for years to come. Please also consider supporting through our Annual Fund (philaclassical.org) or Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit Program, which allows Pennsylvania residents to redirect their tax liability to PCS and receive a 90 percent tax credit. In other words, Pennsylvania taxpayers can donate to PCS and the state will match that donation nine times over! We need partners who can help us be a light in Philadelphia for many years to come. We provide over one million dollars in financial aid to over 60 percent of our wonderfully diverse student body, including the children of ten local pastors. That is only possible and sustainable because of partners who enable our work and serve Christians committed to loving the city, as other Philadelphia schools increasingly adopt non-Christian worldviews. I would be happy to speak with anyone interested in PCS. You can reach me at ray@philaclassical.org to learn more or talk about how you can partner with us.