Our Past & Present
Master’s Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1991 and has grown to include over 15 locations in the U.S. as well as a new location in South Africa . With over 1500 students, Master’s Academy’s goal is to instruct students in the arts from a historical perspective and to train them to “glorify God through excellence in the arts.”

Through the years, the growth and development of artistic skills and interest in Master’s Academy students necessitated the start of a more advanced scope of arts instruction at the high school level. Master's Academy of Fine Arts for the Visual and Performing Arts also known as Masterkey Academy and Portfilio Academy was thus created. The Masterkey and Portfolio program provides specialized and college prep instruction in theater, media arts, visual arts and music. Students are coached through portfolio and audition preparation and are offered various opportunities in leadership, performance and training through their involvement at Portfolio. Many of these experiences have led to college scholarships both in and out of arts-related fields.

Home schooling can bring a series of challenges and opportunities for the homeschool child and parent. Finding a program that provides homeschool students with leadership opportunities, academic classes and fine arts instruction in one location is something that has not existed for the home schooling family. Those of us who have been involved with Master’s Academy for any length of time have watched parents struggle trying to find a program of instruction that integrates the unique giftings of their child, offers college prep academics, and yet retains the flexibility that drew many of us to a homeschool lifestyle in the first place. The ability to daily disciple our children’s hearts and adapt our teaching approaches and materials in order to reach the hearts AND minds of our children is one of the most precious aspects of home schooling. Teaching our students from a “wholeheart” approach is a key element to the philosophy of Cordis Academy.

“I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God’s word becomes corrupt.”
-Martin Luther

“Withdraw from a child the only divine rule of life, and the result will be most lamentable. An education purely secular is the handmaiden of godless skeptics.”
-C.H. Spurgeon

“The public school is confessedly and deliberately secular. I am bound, therefore, to lay on the doorstep of our educational system the prime responsibility for the decline of religion and the steady advance of secularism, another name for atheism, in American society….Protestant children in public schools are under an influence which the churches cannot counteract. The public school presents the church with a generation of youth whose minds have been cast in a secular world.”
-Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of “The Christian Century,” addressing 10,000 public school teachers in Kansas City , 1940

“What’s clear…from creation onward is that God’s rule extends to everything. From our bank accounts to our business dealings to our educational curriculum to our social justice issues to our political choices in the voting booth – everything must reflect the fact that God’s righteous rule extends to all of life.”
-Charles Colson (The Body: Being Light in Darkness)

Cordis Academy Core Values

1. Implementing a Biblical worldview
2. Offering a creative, integrative and real life approach to learning.
3. Offering academic and artistic excellence
4. Living out a Christian life
5. Assisting the home
6. Being a wise steward of God’s resources
   

• We believe that God is one in essence, but that He exists in three distinct and equal persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that these three have precisely the same nature, attributes and perfections.
• We believe that the Bible is the inspired, complete and only Word of God, and that both inspiration and inerrancy extend to every part of the writings as they came from God.
• We believe in God as absolute and sole Creator of the universe and that creation was by divine fiat, not by evolutionary process.
• We believe that human beings were created by God in His image to enjoy His fellowship; that by their own choice, they decided to rebel against their Creator; that every person since that time has been born with a propensity to sin; that our personal sins cause us to have need of justification and redemption; and that sin is universal and without excuse.
•  We believe that God, by His sovereign choice and out of love for humanity, sent Christ into the world to save sinners. We believe that we are justified before God simply by placing our personal trust in Christ, and that we are eternally secure in grace from that moment on. However, sin may interrupt the joy of fellowship with God and may bring the loving discipline of our heavenly Father. We believe that there is no way of salvation other than through Jesus Christ.
• We believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man; that His death paid a sufficient price to redeem any person who would believe in Him as personal savior; that He rose from the dead bodily; that He ascended to the right hand of God the Father; and that He will return to the earth bodily and visibly to set up His eternal kingdom.