Gospel Assembly Christian Academy Overview

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 ethnic groups.

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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