ARKANSAS blocked the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
But LifeWise had already found another way in.

A federal judge has now permanently blocked Arkansas’s Ten Commandments classroom-display law, ruling that Act 573 violates students’ rights and interferes with parents’ rights over their children’s religious upbringing.

That matters.

But it should also raise a bigger question: while Arkansas was fighting one blatant attempt to push Christianity into public schools, LifeWise Academy was already building another route into the school day.

That route was Prairie Grove.

Back in 2023, Prairie Grove was presented as Arkansas’s first LifeWise community. But even then, the real structure was clear. Vance Eubanks, pastor of Prairie Grove Christian Church, said he became interested in LifeWise after visiting family in Ohio, where the program had already taken off. His words were blunt: “It has exploded up there.” He also praised the model as “Bible-based, unashamedly, clearly coming from God’s Word.” Those are not the words of a neutral enrichment advocate. Those are the words of a pastor promoting an explicitly religious program aimed at public school children during school hours.

And Eubanks was not just speaking from the sidelines. Prairie Grove Christian Church now publicly lists “LifeWise Academy – Prairie Grove” among the ministries it supports, saying it provides Bible education for public school children during the school day. That is one of the clearest public receipts in the whole story. The church was not merely aware of LifeWise. It embraced it as part of its ministry footprint.

Just as troubling, Prairie Grove School District publicly lists “Lifewise Academy” on its own website under both “Elementary Student Programs” and “Middle School Student Programs.” In other words, this is not being treated as some separate church activity happening quietly off to the side.

It is being presented on the district’s public-facing programs page alongside literacy, math, science, STEAM, music, student support, and family events. That kind of placement matters. It helps normalize a privately run Bible program as part of the ordinary school-day landscape — exactly the kind of institutional blending families should be paying attention to.

And the article made something else clear too: public resources were involved before this program even got off the ground. The original Prairie Grove program was held at Abundant Life Church, not at some neutral community center. And according to the article, the district’s school resource officers assessed the church facilities from a security standpoint because children would be transported back and forth during the school day.

School resource officers are public personnel, not private church staff. They are funded to protect public school students and respond to school safety needs — not to help operationalize a private Bible program.

So even before LifeWise was fully up and running, taxpayer-supported school safety resources were already being used to help make it work.

That is not a distant, hands-off arrangement. That is active institutional cooperation. Later, Abundant Life publicly promoted Prairie Grove LifeWise Director Jamie Webb as a guest coming to share “all things LifeWise.” This is how normalization works: church hosts, church promotion, public resource involvement, and school-day access.

And Prairie Grove did not stay small.

Three years later, LifeWise in Prairie Grove is still active, and the public record suggests it has expanded beyond that original elementary launch. The Prairie Grove LifeWise page now references high school classes, including posts celebrating the launch of a first high school LifeWise class. That is a major escalation from the original rollout.

Meanwhile, the public Arkansas footprint appears to have spread beyond Prairie Grove. Public LifeWise pages or listings now appear for Lincoln, Farmington, Springdale, West Fork, and Greenland. What started in Prairie Grove did not stay there. The cluster now looks regional, not isolated.

That broader spread fits LifeWise’s own national strategy. LifeWise says it is on track to serve nearly 100,000 students across 34 states during the 2025–26 school year. This is not a loose collection of local church hobbies. It is a scalable national operation built to grow.

And Arkansas lawmakers were moving in the same direction. In 2025, legislators introduced HB 1139, the Released Time Education Act, which would have created a clearer statutory path for school-day religious release. The bill did not become law, but its existence tells you exactly where some Arkansas lawmakers wanted this to go.

So yes, Arkansas just blocked one Christian power grab.

But another one was already underway.

Vance Eubanks promoted it.
Prairie Grove Christian Church publicly supports it.
Abundant Life Church hosted it.
Prairie Grove School District lists it on its own website.
District school resource officers assessed the church site before the program even began.
And LifeWise built it into the school day and kept growing.

The Ten Commandments fight and the LifeWise fight are not separate stories. They are two versions of the same push: get organized Christianity deeper into the public school experience by whatever legal route is available.

Arkansas families should be asking a very simple question:

If the state cannot lawfully force religion into public school classrooms directly, why are religious organizations still being allowed to build their way into the school day by other means — with public resources helping make it possible?

Sources:
ACLU press release on the permanent injunction against Arkansas’s Ten Commandments law
Original” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>https://arkansasadvocate.com/2026/03/16/federal-judge-blocks-arkansas-ten-commandments-law/
Original August 30, 2023 Prairie Grove article
Arkansas” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>https://pgc.church/ministries/adult-ministries/missions/
Arkansas HB 1139, “Released Time Education Act”
LifeWise” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Committees/BillsReferred?code=810&ddBienniumSession=2025%2F2025R
LifeWise Prairie Grove page
Abundant” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>https://www.facebook.com/LifeWisePrairieGroveAR/posts/this-week-we-are-celebrating-the-launch-of-our-1st-high-school-lifewise-class-fo/750090268153314/
Abundant Life Church post featuring Prairie Grove LifeWise Director Jamie Webb
https://www.facebook.com/AbundantLifeNWA/photos/we-are-excited-this-sunday-september-28th-to-have-a-very-special-guest-prairie-g/1192476222912925/

---

View original post on Facebook