Faith Bible Chapel v. Gregory Tucker

Video: Welcome to Faith

A dedicated, faithful school 

Faith Christian Academy is a Christian school provided as a ministry of Faith Bible Chapel, a church in Arvada, Colorado. For years, the local community has repeatedly selected Faith Christian as the best school in the city, with the best teachers, best leadership, and best service to parents and students. Faith Christian provides a top-notch education, academically outperforming other schools and sending 90% of graduates to college. And for over 50 years, the school’s focus—like the church’s—is to prepare students to live out the Gospel in a sincere relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Faith Christian Academy strives to foster an intentionally Christian environment so that students grow both spiritually and academically, with Bible classes and weekly Chapel services required for all students as part of the regular curriculum. In addition, every educator must uphold and abide by Faith Christian’s Statement of Faith and teach all subjects from the church’s biblical perspective. When looking for new educators, the school looks not only for great teachers but, more importantly, for individuals who faithfully follow Jesus Christ.  

One of Faith Christian’s explicit core beliefs is that every person is created in the image of God. The school lives this out by opening its doors wide to students in its community who want a quality Christian education and partnering with local nonprofits to provide full scholarships to underprivileged students. Faith Christian also provides a variety of outreach programs within the local community and abroad. For instance, it partners with the Denver Dream Center, a nonprofit committed to helping the poor, to serve thousands of children by providing educational resources and one-on-one tutoring, and supports building safe neighborhoods through the Adopt-A-Block campaign. Every week, Faith also serves hot meals to those struggling in its local community, and recently partnered with the USDA’s Farmers-to-Families program to provide over 215,000 pounds of food to Arvada families. Globally, Faith has supported refugees fleeing the war in Afghanistan, raising tens of thousands of dollars and helping to place Afghan families within the Arvada community. 

Faith Christian students are personally involved in Faith’s ministry. Students have participated on school mission trips to construct homes in Costa Rica, provide clean water for communities in Senegal, and build a church in the Amazon jungles of Peru.  

Conflict on Church Teaching 

As school chaplain, Gregory Tucker was responsible for the students’ spiritual wellbeing and communicating Faith Christian’s Biblical worldview. He also taught Bible classes on topics such as Christian leadership and the foundations of the Christian faith. He held a position of religious leadership in the school and was entrusted to represent its faith wisely. One of his duties was leading weekly chapel services, which included planning religious teaching, coordinating worship, and often personally leading prayer. But during one of these services in 2018, Tucker allowed a chapel service on racial reconciliation to become too political. And after he failed to handle the situation in a way that restored trust with parents and students, Tucker left Faith Christian.  

Faith Christian bans racial discrimination, welcomes students from all backgrounds, and fosters an environment that discourages divisiveness while encouraging loving conflict resolution. But Tucker forgot to keep practicing what he’d been preaching, filing a federal lawsuit against the school and making outrageous claims of racism against his former students, an unusual charge against a student body taught to uphold the opposite.  Tucker’s lawsuit was flawed from the start: the First Amendment doesn’t allow religious leaders to settle religious disputes over chapel services in federal court, since using courts as leverage in religious disagreement hurts both church and state. 

To evade the First Amendment, Tucker began claiming that he wasn’t a religious leader. His lawyers described his chapel services as “pep rallies,” and his Bible courses—which he said were meant to ensure students “grow personally in devotion to Christ”—as merely “comparative religion” classes that treated all religions as the same. Tucker even claimed that he was primarily a science teacher, when 51 of the 53 courses he taught over his final eight years at Faith Christian were in the Bible department, and when half or more of his time every day was spent on his Chaplain duties.  

Video: The Ministerial Exception Explained

Protecting Church Autonomy 

Faith Bible argues that religious institutions have the right to hire leaders that share in its religious mission, both in word and deed. The constitutional principle known as the ministerial exception keeps the government from entangling itself in religious institutions like Faith Bible.  

A divided three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit ruled that a jury would have to decide whether a “chaplain” was a minister under the First Amendment, the first court in the country to reach that conclusion. The panel’s ruling directly conflicts with rulings from the Supreme Court and numerous other federal appeals courts. Becket asked the full Tenth Circuit to rehear Faith Bible’s case en banc. Even though a diverse coalition of minority faith groups, religious school organizations representing thousands of schools, leading legal academics, and sixteen states filed briefs supporting Faith Bible’s request to rehear the case, the Tenth Circuit denied the request in November 2022. The Supreme Court declined to review the Tenth Circuit’s decision and the case is now continuing in district court.

Importance to Religious Liberty: 

• Religious Communities—Churches and religious organizations have a right to live, teach, and govern in accordance with the tenets of their faith. When the government unjustly interferes in internal church affairs, a healthy separation of church and state is threatened. The First Amendment ensures a church’s right to self-definition and free association.