Trinitas Blog

Trinitas has a long and tasty history with barbecue. You might even say it's an integral part of a Trinitas education! Back in the early days of the school, our founding headmaster, Ken Trotter’s father, Grandpa Trotter used his meat-smoking prowess to bring school families together for picnics and community-building events. Even Grandma Trotter pitched in with her famously delicious, but always secret sauce. Though the Trotter family has all passed on from our school, the tradition of sharing good barbecue with friends and family still remains - particularly in connection to the annual Trinitas Junior/Senior Aesthetics trip.

I have often joked that when my family and I began the adventure of Christian classical education nearly two decades ago, I thought we Americans had invented Christianity in the 17^th century. And while that is a bit of an exaggeration, it is no stretch at all to say that I was largely ignorant of my true Christian heritage. I was ignorant of the history of the Church and of exactly what my baptism made me a member.

Like good Christians everywhere, I had read and was reading the Bible. I knew that Christ was the Cornerstone of the Church, that the Apostles were the first elders and missionaries and Church Council. I knew of the Holy Spirit falling in tongues of fire on those gathered on the day of Pentecost, about the appointing of deacons, about breaking bread from house to house, sharing goods among the brethren as each had need, and of Paul’s many journeys to establish and strengthen churches and his subsequent letter-writing to them. What happened between then and the Pilgrims coming to Plymouth, however, was a bit foggy.

Throughout the ages Christian monks have cloistered to free themselves from the ungodly influence of the outside world. The seclusion and the freedom from the day-to-day rat race provided them increased opportunity for study and prayer that was not otherwise available. That tradition gave us some fine scholarly work in areas as diverse as Christian doctrine and agriculture. Indeed, Western Christian thought and heritage was preserved by such cloistering. In our age of mega schools and assembly line secular education, I want to suggest that Christian children can benefit from the cloister-like atmosphere at a small classical Christian school.

On July 4, 1776, representatives to the Second Continental Congress signed their names to a little document Thomas Jefferson and a few of his esteemed colleagues penned, and the world hasn’t been the same since. The Declaration of Independence gave continuity and near unanimity to the thoughts that were already swirling in the heads of a couple million colonists chafing under British rule in the thirteen colonies along the eastern seaboard of what is today the United States of America. The Declaration served to organize the rebels in an official sort of way and make clear their intentions to the mother country that the colonists meant to be independent if King George intended to maintain the status quo they found so oppressive. He did.

Anybody else out there think the world has gone mad, or is it just me? Every time I turn around some new (perceived) catastrophe has just unfolded, or some attention-starved person has just done something to separate himself even further from orthodox humanity. All the while, the spectators of these happenings are yelling, “Unprecedented, unprecedented!” Don’t these people know their history? Well no, in fact, they don’t know their history. If they did, they would know that hardly anything is really unprecedented.

In our weekly email to parents last Friday, we embedded a video of Dr. George Grant telling the story of replacing the oak beams in the dining hall of Saint Mary’s College, Oxford. That story was part of the first talk I ever heard Grant give some fifteen or so years ago. It is a powerful example of the kind of foresight Christian people should exercise all the time in all facets of life.

Nearly two decades ago a handful of Christian parents decided they wanted a better education for their children than what was available to them. Trinitas Christian School was born out of the initiative they took to solve that problem. All these years later, parents are still making Trinitas what it is. As we leave behind a very busy October, filled with events led and staffed by volunteering parents, and head into a month that will burst at the seams with the theme of thanksgiving, it might be good to pause here and thank parents lest our thanks come across as some mid-November bandwagon theme.

Recently I proposed that the classical school movement is seeking to preserve the heritage of western civilization, in part, by teaching and training good oratory skills. I also explained some of the ways Trinitas begins this teaching and training as early as kindergarten. If the beginning is, as I mentioned last week, as simple as teaching five-year-olds good eye contact and clear enunciation, then the end of that training is guiding eighteen-year-olds through the writing, presentation, and defense of a senior thesis. There are, of course, many, many varied components between those two stages but perhaps none as important and exciting as the John Chrysostom Oratory Competition.