UpliftED Christian Learning Centre

Richard Fretwell is organizing this fundraiser.

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Hello and welcome to the UpliftED fundraising page. UpliftED is a ministry set up for Christian families who are passionate about training up their children according to the principles and tenets of the Christian faith. As founder and lead tutor, my vision for UpliftED is to create an alternative educational model to mainstream secular education based on the Biblical principle that "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7). As such, our mission is to return the LORD to His rightful position as the centre and source of all knowledge.

Vision

At UpliftED we aim to provide a high-quality educational alternative for families who have

become disillusioned with the current system of state controlled education. We believe that the secular orthodoxy in education, whereby God can be separated from teaching and learning or at least banished to the RE classroom is not only untenable but also contrary to the will of God. God demands to be at the centre of all things for those who seek to diligently serve and follow Him which makes the very concept of secular education highly problematic for Christian families seeking to lead lives pleasing in God's sight.

As lead tutor and founder of UpliftED, I am committed to correcting this non-Christian educational paradigm and placing God in His rightful position at the heart of education. At UpliftED God is not a subjective or optional part of a well-rounded education, but the very foundation of all knowledge. Religious Education is therefore not one lesson among many as in state-controlled education, but the essential grounding for all teaching and learning.

Bringing together a love for God and a love for learning:

Everything we do at UpliftED is to support and promote our foundational purpose as a ministry of learning to build up and train young Christians to be the best they can be in all things, thus fulfilling to the utmost everything God has planned for their lives. Today's Christians need both the tools to thrive and flourish "in the world", and the over arching understanding that they are ultimately not "of the world" (John 15:19). These two principles form the raison d'être of UpliftED and the guiding purpose out of which all else flows.

In order to fulfil this purpose we believe that Christian education must be a

partnership between families and educators. God has given to parents the right and

duty to educate their children and as such it is parents who must have ultimate

authority in the education of their children. As a Christian parent myself, I firmly believe that government-controlled schooling is one of the main causes of the children of Christian families abandoning their faith. As Scripture says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6).

At UpliftEd we take very seriously the God-given right and duty of parents to educate their children and "train them in the way they should go" (Proverbs 22:6). It is for this reason that we do not follow the standard state-controlled schooling model in which most of us will have participated throughout our youth. Rather UpliftED seeks to take the best out of the standard schooling model of the past 150 years and the best out of private, home school and tutoring services in order to create something better.

In order to make this vision for Christian education a reality I have given up my teaching career in mainstream education of over 20 years. I have my own family of 3 young children to care and provide for as well as the job of procuring the necessary resources to make UpliftED all that I hope it will become. As we first embark on our mission there will not be money to provide me with a salary, nor necessary resources such as notebooks, curriculum and study guides, nor essential IT requirements such as laptops and a classroom monitor.

If you share my passion for Christ-centred education, where God is not relegated to the Religious Studies classroom but constitutes the very foundation of all teaching and learning, then please do consider becoming part of our work by contributing financially to our mission.

Thank you.