Public Elementary School Good News Clubs
A “High-Powered Sunday School”
Liberty Counsel President Mathew Staver
The Liberty Counsel, a far-right legal and advocacy organization notorious for its shrill attacks on gays
and lesbians, boasts having brought — and won — over 100 equal access cases on behalf of the Good
News Club. Founder and Chairman Matthew Staver frequently compares the Good News Club to a
“high-powered Sunday School.” In a Good News Club promotional video, Mathew Staver states:
Good News Clubs are a tremendous opportunity. I like to analogize a Good News Club to a “high-
powered” Sunday School program. And it really is the opportunity to take Sunday School to
the public schools.
CEF President Reese Kaufmann
In a speech given on February 20, 2007 to the chapel at Dallas Theological Seminary, Reese
Kaufmann described Milford as giving the cause of evangelizing public school children more
freedom than the Supreme Court took away with its 1960s school prayer and classroom Bible
reading decisions.
Do you know that the Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, in [2001] ... gave
a verdict of 6-3 decision that the Good News Club, the CEF Good News Club, could be
held in the public schools of America — the elementary schools.
And since that law has been passed... and we now have the opportunity that the minutes
the bell rings and the class is ended at 3 o’clock or 3:15 — whenever they end — we can have a Good News Club
immediately right on campus and children can stay in the school. We can open our Bibles, and not only can we
present the gospel to them, but we can pray with them in the classroom to receive Christ. The United States Supreme
Court gave us that victory.
And most people don’t recognize or realize that, and right now, we’re going across this country. We are now in 2500
public schools, but there are 65,000 public schools in America. We can change the course of a nation if we go back
into the schools and take the Word of God and teach the Word of God to children at that early age.
And we now have the freedom. You can talk about how we lost our freedoms, and we have lost some. But let me tell
you something. In the public schools, we have more freedom to present the gospel than we did in the 1940s and
1950s, because God has opened the door.
“We are church”
A promotional video created by CEF Greenville quotes one volunteer describing the Good
News Club as “church” for children whose families don’t attend church:
When they come to us, they hear a gospel story every week. They hear a clear
point of salvation. We are church for a lot of those children who, on the weekend,
don’t have an opportunity....
© Intrinsic Dignity
