A School Built on Faith and Dedication
Christian education is often a labor of love and sacrifice, and it is also a question of courage and imagination, as Lubbock Christian University’s founding in 1957 can attest. Dr. F.W. Mattox, LCU’s first president, famously surveyed the cotton fields and could dream even before the first wall was erected: “I stood out on this campus and envisioned these buildings,” he once said as he reflected back on his work at the end of his 18-year presidency. “I heard the choir sing. I heard the band play. I saw the graduates march across a stage to receive their diplomas when there wasn’t a building in sight. That vision has been with us from the beginning. We did envision great things.”
That same pioneering spirit not only helped those dreams become a reality for LCU, but it also inspired those who have gone out from LCU. For 1967 alumna Peggy (Spoontz) West, that spirit brought her to West Monroe, Louisiana, where she and her husband Larry became a part of a group who wanted to start their own Christian school in 1974.
Ouachita Christian School (OCS) was born in the minds of a few parents who got together after church one Sunday with the idea of starting their own school where their children could be taught from a Christian worldview. There were other Christian schools in Louisiana at the time, but Larry recalled that many of those had been started about the same time as the mandate for racial desegregation was implemented in the United States, when some who resisted the idea of mixed-race schools formed their own private institutions that were not bound by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
“We had had some other private schools in this area, but all of them that we could find had started from a racial bias,” he shared, explaining that they wanted their school to be different. “We had an elder in another congregation over at Monroe that we had asked if we could use their building, and he said, ‘Not if you're going to have any black people.’ I remember that the board stepped aside and asked, ‘Are we going to change our standard?’ And we all unanimously agreed, ‘No way. This is a Christian school.’” The school’s board decided they’d rather look elsewhere than compromise on such a foundational belief.
Larry recalled that a few months later, that same elder reached back out to the board and explained that he had changed his mind. “We stood our ground, and he came around—the Holy Spirit worked on his heart,” Larry explained—already, before it had even opened its doors, the school was having an impact on the community.
Of course, aside from a building in which to meet, those founders knew that they would also need teachers.
Peggy shared, “There was a group of about 15 of us that met at one of our friends' houses and decided we wanted to do this. We knew we needed to look for teachers first, and we began asking around. We called different people we knew that had taught and were retired, or some that wanted to teach, and we got a group together and started meeting at the Forsyth Church of Christ in Monroe. They were very accommodating, and had several rooms that we could use.”
They also leaned into the advice of a friend named J.J. Turner, a preacher at the nearby White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ, who had been a foundational part of starting a similar school in Atlanta, GA.
“He was on the ground floor of starting the Atlanta Christian School,” shared Larry. “He a good experience there, and he became really the catalyst. J.J. was a leader.”
“Like many new things, it was a hard beginning,” he continued, “but the Lord watched over us. We started in church buildings, and we first bought a bus. After we began to get donations coming in, people rallied around us—I was really surprised how many people came aboard and wanted a Christian school. It came together fairly rapidly as far as the donations were concerned.”
Among the many sacrifices made by those starting the school were the gifts of teaching—Peggy and several others volunteered to teach for free while the school got up and going. “We had small groups at first,” Peggy recalled. “I taught music. We had a choir, and I also taught girls' Bible.”
During her time at LCU, Peggy had been a part of the praise choir, which functioned both as a performing group but also as a recruiting tool for the university. She took that model and ran with it, with great success. “The choir did a lot of traveling to different churches, to the churches in the area, and performed, and that got us more students,” she explained, “and so that was basically what I did when I started.”
“I'll tell you, Peggy really won a lot of souls out there,” Larry shared. “I mean, she really knew our dream, what it was all for. She wrote the school song, and her choirs were good—she took them to state on several occasions.”
“I loved what I did,” Peggy recalled, “because I had all the kids in my choir. I spent a lot of time finding music.” She added that when first starting out, she reached out to an old teacher friend from Abilene who shared her music with the program.
Larry also was a major part of the school’s founding, serving on the board as both secretary and treasurer. “It was really easy at first,” he joked, “because we didn’t have any money!”
Even so, OCS began to grow rapidly, and soon they knew they’d need to expand. An elder in a different congregation in town heard about the school, and after investigating their model and philosophy, decided it was such a beautiful endeavor that he donated land to the school on a well-traveled road in West Monroe. Within two years of its first meeting, the school had already begun to blossom.
“I remember that the building was not very big, but it had lockers, classrooms, and, I mean, it was a real school—it was so exciting, a lot different than a church building. Not long after that, they built the gymnasium, and they put my choir room upstairs on the edge of that building, and I can remember carrying all my books and things inside for the first time.”
Peggy taught at the school until her children graduated, giving over a decade of service to the founding of OCS. In 2024, the school celebrated 50 years of existence, from the original classes of handfuls of students to its current enrolment of nearly 800 students. Peggy and Larry both extolled the way the school had grown, including sports state titles, graduates going on to colleges across the nation, and a powerful legacy of faith.
“We had a big celebration for the 50 years, and it was wonderful,” Peggy recalled. “Most of the people that talked had been my students at OCS. Our board has grown, and some of the students in those first classes are members of the board now. That's exciting to me—very gratifying.”
“It means the world to see dreams that we had had,” she added, “insistences that we had had in the very beginning, continuing on today.”
Both of the West’s children graduated from OCS, as have multiple grandchildren, and as they look back at the fruits of their labors, they can see a passion blessed by the Lord.