What a Church Keeps When It Runs Its Own Preschool

In July I wrote about Esau — the impatient man who traded a birthright for a bowl of stew because the stew was available immediately and the birthright was a long way off. I described how the American church makes the same trade in a dozen ways at once, and I promised to return to a version consultants are now selling hard: the church that leases its empty weekday classrooms to a commercial daycare operator and calls the arrangement a ministry. (For a Bowl of Stew)

This is that piece. But I want to write about this issue from the other side of the table, Jacob’s side. Jacob is the son who understood what the birthright was worth.

Many years ago, at the church I then attended, I served on the board of directors, which functioned as the elder board, and was the board member responsible for guiding Christian education in the church. The church had a preschool. It was a good program, but it was very small.

It ran for four-year-olds only, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — one group in the morning, one in the afternoon. The rest of the week, and the rest of the building, sat idle. We had classrooms, a fellowship hall, a kitchen, a playground, and a parking lot, all paid for by the congregation, and all of it dark from Monday morning to Sunday except for those six half-day sessions that took up a single classroom.

That struck me as poor stewardship, so the board decided to change it. We enlarged the Monday-Wednesday-Friday groups to take more four-year-olds. Then we added a program for three-year-olds on Tuesday and Thursday, morning and afternoon. Our goal was to use the building as fully as we could every weekday, teaching as many children as we could responsibly.

The program’s core was Christian. We didn’t tack a Bible lesson onto a secular day. The children learned their letters, their numbers, their colors, how to hold a crayon, how to take turns and sit still and listen — and they learned all of it alongside the stories of Scripture. Noah and the ark. David and the giant. The shepherd who went looking for the one lost sheep. The songs they sang were the songs of the faith. The adults who taught them were believers chosen not only as educators, but as believers. The whole day was built on the same foundation the church itself was built on.

This was the late 1970s, long before the commercial child care industry existed in its present form. Most mothers of preschool-age children were still at home, and fewer children lived with a single parent. Families needed a good preschool more than all-day care, so we built that. Today they need both. There was no chain down the street, no national brand, no consultant advising churches on “activation.” Our church had empty rooms, and our congregation decided to fill them with children.

The program was extremely successful. It became, by a wide margin, the most popular program of its kind in the entire area. The waiting list grew so long that families enrolled their children a year or more in advance.

And then something happened that I did not fully anticipate. Many of these children’s parents started coming to church.

They came because of what they saw in their own children. A three-year-old who sings “Jesus Loves Me” in the back seat of the car is a sermon parents cannot turn off. A four-year-old who prays before supper, unprompted, because that is what she does at school, raises a question at the dinner table that the parents eventually have to answer. Some of those parents walked through the church doors on a Sunday morning to see what their children had found. Some of them stayed. Some of them became Christians.

At my former church, we did not build the preschool as an evangelistic strategy. We built it to teach children. The evangelism came with it, because that is what happens when the church carries out its own ministry in its own building with its own people. The leasing consultants promise young families at the church’s door; under their model, the company decides what those families find inside the classroom.

What has changed

I am no longer at that church, and the world the preschool was built in is gone.

The church once owned this field. A 1982 survey by the National Council of Churches counted more than 18,000 child-care programs housed in church buildings and estimated that churches housed roughly forty percent of all child care in the country — perhaps as much as seventy percent of center-based care. Its authors called that a conservative estimate and noted that no accurate national count existed. Even then, the congregation ran about half of those programs, and an outside group ran the other half under a use-of-space agreement.

By 2019, the federal government’s own survey of child-care centers found that churches and religious schools sponsored about six percent of centers serving young children, and that another twelve percent sat in a religious building under someone else’s management.

In two generations the church went from housing a large share of the nation’s child care to a small minority of it — and of the programs that remain under a church roof, two of every three are run by someone other than the church.

Childcare today is an industry. A 2022 analysis found that roughly seven and a half million children attend center-based care every day, and the eleven largest chains — nearly all of them private-equity-backed or publicly traded — serve about twelve percent of them. Of the fifteen largest chains, ten are owned by private-equity firms, according to a 2024 Bloomberg analysis of industry data.

A Congressional Research Service brief from October 2024 found that for-profit centers make up about a third of all center-based providers, and that while chains and franchises were a small share of providers in 2019, the larger chains have been expanding since. The business is consolidating, and investors are the consolidators.

An investor-owned chain is not, and cannot be, a ministry. It can be well run. It can be safe, clean, and licensed. It can hire kind people. But its purpose is a return on capital, and it makes every decision—curriculum, staffing, pricing, which locations to open and which to close (in one case I documented in July, on thirty days’ notice)—to serve that purpose. The church that leases to such an operator has not acquired a ministry partner. It has acquired a tenant.

In July, I described how this works in practice. Learning Care Group, one of North America’s largest for-profit childcare chains, operates its church-embedded centers under the brand Pathways Learning Academy. According to the company’s launch materials, the program is secular, with the option of “short ministry-led lessons” only when a school is located inside a faith-based host. The curriculum is the company’s.

The teachers are the company’s employees, hired under the company’s rules, which — as a secular employer bound by Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, and state civil-rights law — cannot include the church’s convictions about marriage, sexuality, or the faith itself. The faith content, such as it is, is whatever the host church’s staff can deliver in the time the company allows — a brief segment of each school day at some locations, by the company’s own account, and a weekly visit at others.

A child in full-time care spends thirty-five to fifty hours a week in that building. For most of those hours, she is being formed — not merely supervised, but formed, in the way three-year-olds are formed, through repetition and song and story and the example of the adults in the room. A church that leases its rooms to Pathways gets whatever short lesson the tenant’s schedule allows. The company gets the rest.

That is not a Christian preschool with a secular vendor handling the administration of it. It is a secular preschool with a Christian landlord. The church has not kept the ministry and delegated the management. It has exchanged the ministry for rent money.

The arithmetic of formation

Here is what the church gives up, in hours, because formation is measured in hours.

A child in Sunday school gets one hour a week, forty-some weeks a year, from a volunteer teacher. Call it fifty hours a year. That is the entire investment most churches make in a child’s Christian formation before kindergarten.

A church-run program open ten to twelve hours a day can have a child in the building forty to fifty hours a week, fifty weeks a year. That is two thousand to twenty-five hundred hours a year — forty to fifty times the Sunday school figure — from as young as six weeks until he starts school. Over five years, that is ten thousand hours or more. For many working families, that is more waking time than the child spends with his own parents.

Every church that complains it cannot hold its young people should look hard at those two numbers. We are losing children from the faith in their teens and twenties and wondering why, while handing their earliest and most impressionable years to strangers. Scripture’s instruction on this is explicit.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6, ESV).

These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:6–7, ESV).

When you sit, when you walk, when you lie down, when you rise — the text is describing a whole day, not an hour on Sunday. A church-run, full-day program is the one institution a congregation can build that actually fills the whole day with faith.

Children aren’t the only ones in the building. Behind every child in full-day care are working parents; that is why the child is there. They are at the church’s door at seven in the morning and six at night, every weekday, for years. No outreach program a church could design will put unchurched families in its building that often or for that long.

The church that runs its own program meets those parents on its own terms — as a congregation that loves their children, not as a landlord that collects their tenant’s rent — and what I saw happen at my own church can happen again: some of them may come on Sunday to see what their children have found.

The money

The leasing consultants sell their model on revenue, so let me meet them on their own ground.

A church that leases its rooms collects rent. Rent is a fixed, modest figure, negotiated once, and one consulting firm’s term for it — “mailbox money” — tells you how little the church is expected to do for it. The upside belongs to the tenant.

A church that runs its own program collects tuition. Full-time childcare in the Chicago suburbs now costs families well over $1,000 a month per child, and in many communities, considerably more. A church with four classrooms running full days generates far more gross revenue than a tenant would pay for the same square footage.

The costs are real—staff, insurance, licensing, food, supplies—and tuition is not profit, so run the numbers. Infant rooms cost the most to staff — Illinois requires one adult for every four babies — and the older classrooms often carry them. But any margin belongs to the church, and even a program that merely breaks even fills the building with children and puts their families on the church’s doorstep every day.

The church-run program also simplifies the tax question. Rent from a commercial tenant is generally excluded from unrelated-business income under Internal Revenue Code §512(b)(3). Still, the exclusion has exceptions, and one of them reaches many churches: rent from property subject to acquisition indebtedness — usually, a building the church is still paying for — is taxable in proportion to the debt under §514.

A church that is still paying for its building and leases rooms to a chain may owe tax on the rent it collects. A Christian preschool the church runs as its own ministry is substantially related to its exempt purpose. There is nothing to shelter because there is nothing unrelated about it.

So the choice is not between money and mission. It is between a small, passive, unrelated income and a larger, active, related one that also produces disciples. Any elder board that can read a budget should see which is the better bargain.

The honest objection

A church is not obligated to be good at everything, and running a full-day licensed childcare center is a genuine specialization.

The program I helped build was a part-day preschool, and in Illinois, a church-run part-day program is still lightly regulated. Under the Child Care Act of 1969, a “part-day child care facility” — one conducted by a church, religious organization, or social service agency, in which individual children are cared for on an intermittent basis for up to ten hours per seven-day week — is exempt from licensure once it has notified the state. A church can start there, as mine did.

The ten-to-twelve-hour-a-day program I am arguing for is a different matter. Full-day care for more than three children requires a day care center license, with its staffing ratios, staff qualifications, background checks, fire and health inspections, and recordkeeping. As of July 1, 2026, that licensing function has moved from DCFS to the new Illinois Department of Early Childhood, created by Public Act 103-0594. A second law, Public Act 104-0480, reorganizes licensing again beginning in July 2027. A church that goes this route will need a director who knows that system, and it will need to run the program to a professional standard. That is a real cost and a real commitment.

But notice what the cost actually is. It is a cost of logistics — ratios, inspections, paperwork, a qualified director. It is the plumbing. A church can hire a plumber. It cannot hire out the theology. The leasing model doesn’t solve the licensing problem; it solves it by giving away the ministry with it. The church-run model solves the licensing problem by hiring competent people and keeping everything else.

I take the second part of the objection more seriously than the first, because it is my own field. A church that brings children into its building for fifty hours a week takes on an obligation to protect them, and churches’ record on that score is not good.

The adults hired to form those children must be screened far more rigorously than most churches screen a Sunday school volunteer—criminal history, state sex-offender registries, the child-abuse registry, references that are actually called, and a hard look at character before a hard look at credentials. I have written about what that screening requires and why good intentions (Good Intentions, Unprotected Children), and background checks (The Man Who Passed Every Background Check) are not enough.

But that obligation is an argument for the church-run model, not against it. A church that hires its own teachers can require that each one share its faith and live by it. Federal law lets a religious employer hire by faith, and the Supreme Court has held that a church’s choice of who teaches its faith is the church’s to make, free of government interference. A secular tenant has neither protection.

The church that leases to a chain has handed the selection of those adults to an employer that cannot ask the questions a church must ask.

One more caution, and here the news is better than it was in the first article. Government childcare money comes in two forms, and federal law treats them differently. Funds paid to a provider under a grant or contract may not be spent on worship or religious instruction. Assistance that follows the parent — a certificate or voucher, which is how Illinois’s Child Care Assistance Program is structured — may be used for the program’s religious content, “including sectarian worship or instruction when provided as part of the child care services.” A church-run program can therefore enroll families on state assistance and keep the faith in the classroom.

It must still read the state’s provider agreement before the first check clears. Illinois’s conditions are financial and administrative. The state caps what it pays, not what the church charges: it pays no more than its maximum rate or the church’s rate for the public, whichever is lower, and the church may bill the family the difference.

The church collects each family’s co-payment, then bills the state monthly; it keeps attendance records for five years and audits them, repaying any gap; and staff complete state training and registration. A church can meet all of those. Neither the federal certificate rules nor the state’s provider certification conditions address what a church teaches or whom it hires.

What it looks like

None of this requires a megachurch. It requires a building with empty rooms, a congregation willing to staff it, and an elder board that understands the difference between a tenant and a ministry. It is not complicated.

Infants from six weeks, toddlers, and two-, three-, and four-year-olds, in separate rooms, full days. A morning that is a real preschool — letters, numbers, reading readiness, the beginnings of science and art — taught by believers, with the stories and songs of Scripture woven through every part of it rather than appended at the end. An afternoon of care, rest, play, and more. A director who holds the license and runs the operation.

Teachers hired for character first and credentials second; every one a Christian, every one screened as if a child’s safety depended on it, because it does. A curriculum the church owns — written by its own people or chosen by them, but in either case theirs, reviewed by the elders, and answerable to the pulpit rather than to a corporate office in another state.

A pastor who is not a visitor to someone else’s school but the shepherd of his own. Parent nights, Christmas programs, a spring picnic — the ordinary things a church does for its families, now offered to families who have never belonged to a church. A pathway, deliberately built, from the preschool door to the sanctuary door.

And a church that, at the end of the year, has a fuller building, a stronger budget, a nursery full of children who know Jesus loves them, and a growing number of parents who want to know why.

That is Jacob’s side of the table. The stew is still on offer; the consultants are still calling. But the birthright is still in the church’s hands, and this is one of the few cases where the church can keep it and prosper at the same time. The church once housed much of America’s child care. It is time to take it back.

What to do

If you are an elder or a pastor, walk your building on a Tuesday morning and count the empty rooms. Then count the children in your congregation under five, and the children in the neighborhoods around you whose parents are paying someone else to fill the hours they cannot. The gap between those two numbers is the opportunity.

If your church is considering a lease to Pathways or any similar operator, read the contract before you sign it, and count the hours. Ask who hires the teachers, who writes the curriculum, who decides when the school closes, and how much time your pastor or ministry staff will actually have with the children. If the answers are “the company,” “the company,” “the company,” and “a few minutes a day,” you are not opening a ministry. You are renting out a room.

If your church already has such a lease, the same questions apply, and so does the question I asked in July: did the gospel survive the handoff? Read the termination and renewal clauses, and find out what it would take to get the ministry back.

And if your church has done this — built and run its own Christian preschool or full-day program, kept the curriculum, hired the teachers, and watched the parents follow their children through the door — I want to hear from you. The model works. I have seen it work. The church needs more examples of it, and fewer bowls of stew.