ABOUT CHAPEL FIELD

“At Chapel Field, our mission is to partner with parents to cultivate a joyful community of students who love the truth, pursue wisdom and virtue, and live for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Chapel Field was founded by William and Kathleen Spanjer in 1986 as a Christian College Preparatory High School. Known for our beautiful 100 acre campus, our Elementary, Middle, and High Schools are surrounded by ponds, creeks, and fields, all nestled in the rolling hills of New York’s Hudson Valley. With academics grounded in classical tradition, we partner with families to provide a culture of joy in which our students can begin their journeys as lifelong learners. Above all else, we at Chapel Field strive to cultivate a community of students who live for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Chapel Field is accredited by the National Association of Private Schools, and incorporated under the State University of New York.

Our History

Chapel Field is a daughter ministry of Affirmative Evangelism Fellowship (AEF). AEF was founded in 1979 by Bill and Kathy Spanjer as an outreach ministry to international refugees and under-privileged children in New York City. Bill and Kathy began running summer camps on their 150-acre farm in Pine Bush, NY for kids in Harlem and the Bronx, bringing them up for weeks at a time and offering biblical, theological, and vocational training. Eventually, weekly Bible studies were formed in the different boroughs and the camps on the farm increased to a quarterly schedule rather than merely once a summer. By 1985, Bill and Kathy became convinced that there was a need for a more sustained ministry for the children they were serving. Therefore, they started a Christian school where the kids could receive a solid, Christ centered education in an environment that was safe and edifying for their souls. They gave 100 acres of their farm to the ministry and began converting the building they had used for the camps into their first schoolhouse.

Chapel Field opened its doors in the Fall of 1986 with an enrollment of 26 students in grades 9-12. Several of the students enrolled were from the inner city and lived in host homes within the community. Gradually, the school formed a junior high and in 2007, an elementary school. The mission and vision of Bill and Kathy Spanjer remains central to the work of Chapel Field. In 2018, we launched an effort to refresh that mission and to renew our commitment to it. In doing so, we began to pursue the classical model of Christian education with a plan to begin a slow transition toward becoming a classical Christian school. In the Fall of 2022, Chapel Field officially announced that it is a classical school.

Our Philosophy of Education

At Chapel Field, we seek to cultivate the souls of our students throughout their time in school. Our aim is not merely to produce transcripts that will make for excellent college admission nor is it merely to prepare them to get good jobs (as important as both of these things are). Rather, our aim is to prepare them to become men and women of virtue, equipped with the tools for learning so that they are set to thrive in whatever future the Lord has for them.

Our operating metaphor is that of a tree. Our aim is to help grow students who are like the tree in Psalm 1, planted by streams of living water.

Therefore, as we educate our students, it is of the utmost importance that we plant them near the living waters of Jesus Christ. We do this by situating the entire educational experience in a Christ-centered culture. From the aesthetics and daily rhythms of the school to our school discipline, we endeavor for the entire institution to bear the “aroma” of Christ. Since we affirm that Christ is the Truth incarnate, we aim to see Christ manifested and glorified in every subject and “small t” truth.

The soil in which our students are planted and through which they drink of the living waters of Christ, is composed of the three transcendentals – truth, goodness, and beauty. We aim to feed the souls of our students with the best that the Christian faith and the western tradition have to offer. The greatness of these works invigorates their hearts, minds, and souls with great ideas and presents them with wonderful models that serve as measuring rods for their own lives and lifelong sources of wisdom.

As trees planted in such soil by the living water of Christ, we seek to establish the base of their lives in gratitude and humility. Only with such a posture is it possible for any student to truly grow. We seek to cultivate a spirit of thanksgiving for the gifts God has given us, for the subjects we are studying, and for ourfamilies, churches, country, and school.

As our students grow throughout their time at Chapel Field, we seek to help them order their affections. As Plato acknowledged, this is the aim of all education – to cultivate the affections so that students love and hate the right things in proper proportion.

In the end, we seek to prepare them for fruitful lives, starting with a love of truth. That is, our ultimate aimfor our students is not the mere collection of knowledge, but a genuine love for the truth. Secondly, we aim to cultivate a pursuit of wisdom and virtue throughout their lives. Like Solomon’s son in Proverbs 2, we want to set our students on a quest for wisdom, searching for it as if it were gold or silver, and we want them to be unrelenting in their pursuit of virtue. That is, we want them to pursue excellence, intellectually, vocationally, and spiritually. Ultimately, we want them to lead lives of wisdom and virtue for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. We want to train them to be men and women who view their lives as resources with which to serve Christ in their families, communities, and vocations, and throughout the world.

This metaphor is especially helpful for reminding us of the timeframe we are working in as educators, and it helps establish appropriate expectations for our students. That is to say, trees do not grow quickly. However, if tended faithfully, fed, pruned, and given plenty of light, they will mature over the years into trees abounding with fruit. At Chapel Field we do not aim our labors at the end of a school year or even at the point of a student’s graduation, rather we aim at equipping them to be fruitful adults by giving them a Christ-centered education that will set habits and virtues to last a lifetime.

CORE VALUES

Chapel Field is a Classical Christian school with the mission of partnering with parents to cultivate a joyful community of students who love the truth, who pursue wisdom and virtue, and who live to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. As such, the core values we maintain in executing and instilling that vision are represented by the three Latin words from our school seal.

Studium: “a zeal for learning or studiousness”

We aim to be a community that reads, studies, contemplates, and debates great ideas together, from our faculty to our students. We seek to be a school where there is a buzz and hum of learning and discussing permeating the campus.

Gaudio: “Joy”

We aim to cultivate a culture of joy among our students and faculty who enjoy being in school and who enjoy being around each other. Ours is a school of singing, conversation, and laughter. We seek “Schole,” the Latin word from which we derive our English word for school, but which means leisure. We seek to provide true “school,” that is, an enjoyable and refreshing education.

Pietas: “piety or reverent humility”

We seek to do all things in a spirit of gratitude and reverent humility. We honor the authorities that God has placed over us as we honor the great authors and thinkers that we study, listening with respect to what they teach. We teach our students to respect their parents, church, and civil authorities. We teach them to respect the past and to appreciate the sacrifice of those that have given them so much of what they have.

PORTRAIT OF A GRADUATE

1. Joyful Lovers of the Truth:

A Chapel Field graduate will be a joyful learner, zealous for the truth, curious, and filled with a sense of wonder regarding the world that God has made. He will comprehend and rejoice in the fact that Christ is the Truth incarnate and that in him all things hold together and find their meaning, that all truth is God’s truth, thereby making the study of every subject a rich endeavor. He will see himself as being on a lifelong quest for truth. He will discipline himself to be attentive to the subjects before him in a world of distraction, aiming not at a cursory knowledge of his subjects, but at mastery of them to best of his ability. He will not merely be good at school, passing tests and earning good grades, but rather he will seek a true education, in or out of school, in the perception and understanding of truth. He will be eloquent in the expression of his formed beliefs and thereby equipped to defend the truth he loves.

2. Active Pursuers of Wisdom and Virtue:

A Chapel Field graduate will not merely have a head filled with ideas, but will embody the truths he has learned and virtues he has been trained in. He will develop the humility and reverence that is necessary for a quest for wisdom, and he will seek for wisdom as for silver and gold, be it in class discussions, the books he reads, or in life outside of school. He will have a love of the past and of old things that have stood the test of time and that now serve as agents of wisdom. He will be taught to see the connections among the things he studies, even across the subjects of the curriculum. In partnership with his parents and his church he will have his heart tuned and oriented toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, carefully discriminating between them and fleeting counterfeits; learning to love things in their proper place, greater things with a greater love and lesser things with a lesser love, and to hate that which God hates, namely vice, sin, evil. A Chapel Field grad will rejoice in challenges that confront him. He will pursue excellence (virtue) in all he does and when he fails to do so he will receive correction with humility and will repent. He will be filled with gratitude and piety, recognizing the debt he owes to his family, church, school, and country for the manifold gifts that God has poured out through them. He will be sacrificial in his love for his neighbor, be it his fellow student or countryman.

3. Committed Servants of Christ:

A Chapel Field graduate will drink deeply from the living waters of God’s word over his years of attendance and thus, he will desire to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. He will know that he is a sinner and yet he will know that he is forgiven, washed in the blood of the Lamb and that he is righteous in the sight of God having been clothed in the righteousness of Christ. He will be committed to his local church, understanding his need to sit under the regular preaching of God’s Word and to submit himself to the loving discipline of his elders. He will see all situations as opportunities to glorify God, even in the mundane and ordinary things of life. He will be joyful in his service to Christ viewing him as the Pearl of Great price. He will be able to discern the idols of the age, seeing them as the soul-destroying forces that they are, and will be prepared for the lifelong struggle to combat them in his life and in his culture. He will sing vigorously, love sacrificially, and stand for the truth of God courageously.

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About Us | Our History | Philosophy of Education | Core Values | Portrait of a Graduate