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Beauty Adorns Truth | Celebrating 20 Years of God’s Faithfulness at the Clapham Gala

On October 30, Clapham celebrated our Twentieth Anniversary Gala with an evening dedicated to alumni and families who have been part of our community over the last two decades. It’s thanks to these countercultural pioneers that Clapham is thriving today as the only preK-12th-grade Christian classical school dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom in joyful discovery in DuPage. 

Scroll on to see selections of comments and dozens of photos from the evening. All photography is thanks to the talents of Clapham parent and professional photographer Wes Craft. 

We were honored to hear from Clapham alumni Eden Parker as she spoke to the enduring nature of her Clapham education in her role at Bibles.net. Eden’s comments follow:

My name is Eden, and I am a grateful recipient of a Clapham education.

I began attending Clapham the year following its founding, entering its highest grade at the time, which was 5th grade. I experienced Clapham education as it formed, during my middle school years. In high school I got to take part in a few classes offered before the full high school education was implemented.

Although I attended Clapham for just a few years, the education I received there by far had the greatest influence on my development as a person—as a thinker, a follower of Christ, a learner, and eventually as a college student and a young professional.

Clapham sowed and planted God’s Word in my heart through Scripture memory. I learned how to learn, how to understand a text, and how to engage with what I read. I learned the responsibility I have to submit my heart, soul, mind, and strength to the Lord in humble service. And I learned through some precious teachers that discipleship is not information transfer, but the relational shaping of a soul as together teacher and student engage with objectively excellent content that rings with the truths we find in God’s Word.

I’m here tonight to tell you a little about a sponsor of this event, Bibles.net, an online ministry that I have served as the General Editor at for the last seven years.

We live in a world where people, especially the younger generation, find most of their information online. So we created a website with the desire to serve those who did not grow up in a Christian environment, who are hopeless and hurting, and who are looking for answers to questions about life and faith online. Our mission is to help them discover the Bible, and find resources to understand it, that they might encounter Jesus in his Word and find life and hope in him.

Bibles.net is not one more blog of one person’s thoughts. Rather, it’s a library of carefully curated resources, designed and delivered in creative ways to its readers. On Bibles.net you will find resource pages on every book of the Bible, on matters of biblical worldview, on life’s toughest challenges, on the most famous bible verses, and more.

Our aim is to communicate why we look to the Bible for hope, how we got the Bible, how to read the Bible, what is most important to know from the Bible, and how we live in light of the message at the heart of the Bible.

Life is ultimately about one thing—the relationship we have with God through his Son, Jesus. The aim of our lives is to increasingly trust and treasure Jesus. Bibles.net is a tool we created to compel young people to consider Christ and his Word, and to equip God’s people to winsomely and creatively share the hope of the gospel with the unbelievers in their lives.

We hope you take a moment tonight to bookmark Bibles.net on your phone and explore it after this evening. And we want to say just how thankful we are for Clapham school, as I would not be equipped for this work without the wonderful discipleship and education Clapham provided.  

A highlight of the evening was hearing from biblical theologian Carl Trueman as he spoke to the role of classical education in serving to consecrate (rather than desecrate) what it means to be human in an anti-human age. There are dozens of forces at work in heaven and on earth to systematically desecrate (or tear down) what it means to be human under God’s natural order. Ultimately, these actions are sins against the Creator. Classical education serves as a bulwark against such forces, cultivating humanitas and anchoring our approach to the authority and power of Scripture and the Lordship of Christ. 

Head of School Kolby Atchison also spoke to the legacy of a Clapham education:
Our theme tonight, as you can see on the program, is “Beauty Adorns Virtue.” This phrase is inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance-era portrait of a young Florentine woman who embodied intellectual and moral virtue alongside her physical beauty.
 
But is Leonardo correct? Does beauty adorn virtue? Well, if we think of beauty in the way the world does, as something entirely up to the individual, based on the latest popular trends, and disconnected from any sort of objective reality, then the answer is “no.”
 
But if beauty, like truth and like goodness, is bound up in God’s very nature, and if His creation exists to participate in, and point to, God’s unchanging truth, goodness, and beauty, then there can be no separating that which is beautiful from that which is honorable, praiseworthy, and excellent. As scripture tells us, “How beautiful are the feet of those who share the good news!”
 
Our culture today has all but abandoned this vision for beauty and virtue, as well as the pursuit of these ideals, wisdom. And yet, this is the very foundation that Clapham School was built upon 20 years ago. Our founders were convinced that what their children needed most, and what our children need today, and what the church needs most, is an education steeped in the permanent things, that which is timeless and unchanging.
 
So tonight we honor the courage to pursue this counter-cultural vision and celebrate the flourishing of Clapham School 20 years later. Let us now take a few minutes to hear more about the story of Clapham School:
We understand that a small high school runs counter to common American assumptions about the high school years. We also understand that there are leading public and Christian high schools in our area.
 
But, frankly, we also understand that the current trajectory of our world doesn’t give us much of an option. I know everyone in this room enjoys living in a free society. Each of us has benefited from the values of Western civilization, from the protection of human rights and free speech to the rise of modern science and technology.
 
Do you know what the best way is to see this rich heritage come to an end? To see faith decline, our liberties seized, truth overtaken by lies, and the final split of beauty from virtue?
 
Lock up the Great Books. Make sure no one in the next generation has studied Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s logic, or the rhetoric of Cicero. Don’t let them weep with Augustine when he encounters the grace of God after years of searching, ponder how God could become man with Anselm, or laugh with Chaucer at the antics of humanity in his Canterbury tales.
 
Let the honor of the knights of the Round Table fade into myth. Dismiss the courageous piety of Aeneus as the patriarchal morality of a bygone era. Don’t let students study the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., and be sure to cover up the fact that when Dr. King himself taught in black colleges he was insistent that his students read the Great Books.
 
You see, the secret to the future for a free and flourishing and faith-inspired society is rich and deep exposure to the wisdom of the past. It is the formation of the individual through a hearty welcome into the Great Conversation and empowering them to carry on this legacy into the future through training them in the virtues and skills they need to do so.

Special thanks to Kelly Martin, Jessica Sanders, and Jolene Waller-Choi for their indispensable help in making our 20th Anniversary Gala an unforgettable joy, and to our corporate sponsors who made the evening possible: OneStopPro, Belle & Pickle Heavy Industries, Bibles.net, and Innovator ETFs. 

If you are interested in learning more about Clapham, we invite you to join us for a tour or at our next Prospective Family Day. 

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