Have you ever experienced a powerful wave of nostalgia as you drove past a certain place which was once a very special part of your life? That's exactly what I experienced this past Saturday, March 16, 2024 as I drove past the Federated Church in downtown Ashland, Massachusetts. That place, the Federated Church in Ashland, was the home for many years of New Covenant Christian School. And what you may ask was New Covenant Christian School? Well, New Covenant Christian School, which most of us simply called "NCCS" was a very special and wonderful school. And it was more than a school. It was a wonderful place and a wonderful family of mostly idealistic evangelical Christians who in many respects were doing the impossible and having a blast doing it! My kids are all grown and over thirty, but all of them went to New Covenant during their elementary school years, and my wife Mary Ann taught there for at least five years.
Perhaps the word "Academy" in the title was a stretch. I guess most academies are secondary schools, or colleges, or graduate schools, or trade schools. But I'm a preacher, and preachers like alliteration. Yes, "Ashland's Awesome Academy's Afterglow" would probably be a tough phrase to rattle off five times fast, but I did manage to give New Covenant Christian School All As. That was my motive!
Ashland is almost smack in the middle of the geographic territory in Massachusetts known as MetroWest. MetroWest is usually defined as the thirty or so cities and towns which surround Framingham. They're west of the immediate Boston area and they're east of the immediate Worcester area. Ashland is a pleasant middle-class town just southwest of Framingham.
Ashland, Massachusetts is known for a number of things. In 1918, according to Wikipedia, Henry Ellis Warren invented the first synchronous electric clock in Ashland, Massachusetts. During the next several decades thousands of electric clocks were manufactured at an Ashland factory. Ashland is also known for a company named Nyanza Chemical which manufactured textile dyes between 1917 and 1978. It really should also be known as the town in which New Covenant Christian School began during the mid-1980s and where the school operated for something like twenty years. It's my opinion that New Covenant Christian School was one of the finest endeavors to ever grace the town of Ashland.
Last Saturday, so much instantly flashed through my mind as I carefully drove through Ashland's town center! There were special memories of each of my children as well as a number of the children who were from the Framingham church I'd pastored in those days. There were so many memories of my wife and her teaching years there. I thought of wonderful special events, Christmas presentations, talent shows, even the chapel services in which sometimes I was the guest speaker. There was the parking lot which was the play area during recess. (Believe it or not, that play area in the parking lot did work out pretty well!) Several hope-filled people started meeting and planning the formation of a Christian School for the MetroWest area way back around 1983. At that time I was an assistant pastor at a church in Walpole. There was a woman from that church named Alice Lund who lived in Medway and was one of the people working to start the school. I remember talking to her about it at the time.
New Covenant was envisioned as a very unique Christian elementary school. It would not be owned or operated by any specific church or denomination. It would be its own corporation and entity. Shortly after I moved to Framingham in early 1987, the philosophy of New Covenant Christian School was explained to me. I honestly forget who explained it. The school actually opened, I believe, in 1986. It was a collective effort of evangelical Christian people and churches. There was a governing board. On the board was one minister who headed up a pastoral advisory committee. The pastoral advisory committee was made up of several pastors from whose churches the families who formed the school had been drawn. One item that was stressed to me, and I heard this illustration used by NCCS school board members several times over a number of years, was the "Three Legged Stool" illustration. The "Three Legged Stool" represented 1. The families who made up the school 2. The staff of the school and 3. The churches from which the families came. It was always stressed that all three needed to carefully work together to support the whole. Believe it or not, one of the strongest beliefs of NCCS over its first ten years of operation was "No Uniforms!". I know that's not at all typical of private schools, Christian or otherwise. But the NCCS philosophy was that children should be taught the proper way to dress by their parents and their teachers, and that uniforms actually undermined that instruction.
I have so many memories of the various principals who served at NCCS over the years. There was T.J. Sartori, who would never tell you his real name. He always said it stood for "Through Jesus!". There was Pamela Jo Brady who was a dynamic speaker and leader. There was Sue Smith who was and is a committed educator who became a pretty close Baril family friend. There was Michael Marrapodi who had a strong education background and served the school in its later years.
Among my most powerful memories of the school are the way it operated in faith during those early days of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Several times the school reached a financial crisis in those days. The parents would be notified that unless there was a miracle the school would have to close. I remember attending several emergency prayer meetings there at the Federated Church sanctuary. As my good friend Chuck Pierce (who pastored a Framingham church and served as the chairman of the pastoral advisor committee) used to say "charismatics and non-charismatics all came together as one". We prayed as we were led by the Holy Spirit. This was not the "vain repetitions" you'll sometimes hear in certain churches. This was talking to God! And, no kidding, miracles happened! Someone would unexpectedly show up at the school with a large check a couple of days after the prayer meeting, or a large check would arrive by mail, and the school would once again be off and running! I got to know many fine Christian people from other churches and denominations. Some of them didn't agree with my pentecostal theology, and I didn't agree with some of their theology. But it really didn't matter. They were my brothers and sisters in Christ, and as far as this school thing went, we were all in it together!
I'm a typical New Englander which means I don't like change. But change comes, nonetheless, doesn't it? In the late 1990s two major changes came to NCCS. One change was the dissolution of the pastoral advisory committee. The leadership felt it was unnecessary for the most part - that if there was really some serious pastoral issue to deal with, the pastor of whatever student or family was having an issue should deal with it but a committee was unnecessary. Honestly, I didn't agree with that decision, but that's life! A bigger surprise was that the school's leadership went to a policy of requiring uniforms! Several parents objected to this, including me. But honestly, I was wrong to object, and I don't mind admitting that publicly. Uniforms turned out to be a great idea! It made matters so much easier for every family. And there just was something nice about seeing all the students in uniforms. NCCS established a middle school somewhere around 1997 which met at a fairly large church in Framingham. Somewhere in the mid-2000s NCCS moved out of Ashland. By that time my wife no longer worked at NCCS and my kids were either in high school or college. Yes, I'm very sentimental about the Ashland days of the school, but I think they made the right decision. NCCS had the opportunity to lease an actual school building which included a play area on the school grounds. This was in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Initially that location worked out very well. A happy memory I have of that location is that one year the school put on a talent show. All of the performers were students. I was honored to be asked to be the M.C. of the talent show! I loved it, and I had a wonderful time!
I'm struggling to write this paragraph. I wish I could say the school went on to grow by leaps and bounds and is now building a spectacular multi-million dollar facility. Instead I need to report that New Covenant Christian School closed several years ago. I don't know all of the reasons. I imagine much of it was financial. I'm not sure why those emergency prayer meetings with miraculous results never continued on beyond the mid-1990s but they did not. A lot of the idealism and intense commitment of the parents diminished over time. I suppose that's not unusual. I don't know realistically if a church or a Christian school can keep up that level of idealism, commitment, and faith over the long haul. People grow older. People get tired. Things change.
I don't want this to end on a downer! Rather I want to express the happy, nostalgic memories I have of New Covenant Christian School in Ashland during the late 1980s and early 1990s. They're precious memories! I'm way past the age of having school-aged children and being involved up to my eyeballs in a Christian elementary school. But I hope sometime before I depart this life I'll be able to be involved in a powerful faith-filled endeavor with such a wonderful group of people as was that school in those days.
And, you MetroWest locals: Every time you drive by the Federated Church in downtown Ashland, think of New Covanant Christian School, be inspired, and thank God!
