Gospel Assembly Christian
Lloyd L. Goodwin founded Gospel Assembly Christian Academy
in the early 1970's. The school curriculum was obtained through an
organization in Texas run by the Baptist Church, known as Accelerated
Christian Education (A.C.E.). In our opinion, A.C.E. and other instutitions,
such as Bob Jones University, were originally established in order to avoid
court-ordered desegregation of public schools and to protest the United
States Supreme Court's decision forbidding public schools to require students
to read the Bible or pray. One should note the fact that Bob Jones University
later lost its tax-exempt status due to the fact that it received federal
funding and prohibited any dating between individuals of different racial or
Due to the fact that A.C.E. is affiliated with the Baptist Church, many parts
of its curriculum directly conflicted with the teachings of Goodwin and
Gospel Assembly Church. For example, the A.C.E. curriculum teaches the
Trinity, while Goodwin was anti-trinitarian and taught that there were only
two in the Godhead. The A.C.E. curriculum did include information about
evolution, but attempted to counter it with a heavy emphasis on creationism.
Goodwin taught that the church's youth should not attend public schools or
watch television due to the contaminating influences of "Babylon,"
but used the A.C.E. curriculum, which was written by individuals whom he
considered to be a part of "Babylon." These "false
doctrines" had to be countered somehow, so he instituted Bible Doctrine
classes taught by Leander
Ray to reinforce the teachings of Gospel Assembly Church.
The A.C.E. curriculum is divided into twelve individual Packets of
Accelerated Christian Education, commonly known as "PACE's." Each
PACE is designed for the student to "learn at his own pace" (no pun
intended). As the reader can well imagine, this process does not work well
for students who are not self-starters. And even for students who were
self-starters, there were no classrooms for each subject. Rather, each student
had to sit at a desk with dividers on either side and learn for themselves.
It was not until the late 1980's that Gospel Assembly Christian Academy began
using the regular classroom method of a teacher and a blackboard.
Gospel Assembly Christian Academy's used teachers and "monitors." A
monitor is perhaps best described as a quasi-substitute teacher. In other
words, there were no minimum standards for monitors, other than church
attendance and a demonstrated loyalty to Goodwin. If a student had a problem
with their schoolwork, they were to ask the teachers for help. Unfortunately,
the monitors were not supposed to help them and for most of the school's
history, there were never more than two licensed teachers. For a short period
of time, that number did go as high as four. The last we knew, the school
only has two licensed teachers, with one of them being semi-retired.
From the school's inception, it did use licensed teachers, a fact that was
heavily emphasized by Goodwin during court battles between some small Baptist
churches and the State of Iowa. Parents were not directly informed by Lloyd
L. Goodwin that the school was not-- and
still is not-- accredited by the State of Iowa. Several students,
upon graduation, have learned that their diplomas were not recognized by law
enforcement agencies and branches of the military.
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