We welcome families from our surrounding area to join with us and encourage each other on the homeschool journey. We are a Christian fellowship of families from many area churches in Middlesex County, MA. We are affiliated with MassHOPE and HSLDA. We offer frequent organized field trips and a homeschool cooperative which meets for 24 weeks during the school year on Fridays in Chelmsford, MA. Membership is available at any time during the year.

Friends of Grace (FOG) Statement of Faith:

Since the founding of Friends of Grace and in our current practice, we believe the chief end of this ministry is to glorify God. As a Christian homeschool cooperative, we welcome families from various denominational backgrounds who confess Jesus Christ as Lord (Rom. 10:9), affirm the authority of Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16), and desire to disciple their children to know and love Christ (Deut. 6:6-7). We recognize that families are the fundamental instruments for spiritual growth, and that parents have the primary responsibility for oversight in the upbringing and education of their children.

This homeschool cooperative is not a church. It does not replace the role of the local church and does not aim to disciple others’ children in specific denominational doctrines. Rather, we seek to support Christian families in the education of their children, while respecting the church authority and denominational convictions of each participating family.

As a Christian co-op, we believe the following basic tenets of orthodoxy:
• We believe in one God, eternally existent in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• We believe in the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
• We believe in the deity and humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His sinless life, His miracles, His atoning death through His shed blood on the cross, His bodily resurrection, His ascension, and His imminent bodily return in power and glory.
• We believe that salvation is a free gift of God brought to the sinner by grace through faith in Christ. (Eph. 2:8-9)
• We believe in the Holy Spirit, the divine Helper who sanctifies believers (John 14:16) and guides them in worship and confession of the triune God.

Additionally, we uphold the following positions:
• We believe that the Bible is the inspired, infallible word of God, inerrant in its original manuscripts, trustworthy in all that it teaches, and “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Tim. 3:16; Ps. 119:105; Heb. 4:12)
• We believe that God created human beings in His own image, with equal dignity, value, and worth before Him (Gen. 1:26). Scripture teaches that God wonderfully, purposefully, and immutably created mankind male and female as part of His good design (Gen. 2:18-25; Matt. 19:4-6).
• We believe that God created marriage to be the lifelong covenant union of one man and one woman. This union uniquely reflects Christ’s relationship with His church (Eph. 5:21-33). We believe that God intends sexual intimacy to occur within the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman (Heb. 13:4).

Christian families differ on important doctrinal matters not addressed here. We believe that we can still collaborate in home education, and we call on one another to acknowledge such differences with charity, humility, and respect. When disputed doctrinal matters arise in co-op classes outside the above core tenets, teachers should respond to concerns with grace and understanding by referring students back to their parents and church for further instruction. While a teacher should feel free to express a biblically-reasoned statement and point of view, when conflict arises these disputed issues should not continue to be focal points in the taught curriculum. We seek to model Christian fellowship before our children by speaking the truth in love, honoring one another, and focusing on our shared confession of Jesus Christ as Lord. (John 13:34–35; Eph. 4:15)