In January 1995, Dr. Walter Grubb sat in his office on a gray, rainy morning and stared at the numbers.

The numbers were not close.

The school was not going to make payroll.

By then, Dr. Grubb had been carrying a heavy load for months. The year before had brought transition, staff turnover, financial strain, and the hard work of trying to steady a school that had been through too much in too little time. He had taken the interim role in 1994, then became president that summer.

He had worked hard. Maybe too hard.

“I just put my nose to the grindstone and did everything I could do,” he remembered.

There were signs that the pressure was taking a toll. He recalled issues with high blood pressure and other health concerns during that season. Looking back, he can see the problem more clearly than he could see it then. He was trying to hold the school together in his own strength.

Then came that January morning.

The financial picture was plain. There was no easy answer. No quick fix. No hidden reserve. No clever administrative move that would make the problem go away.

So Dr. Grubb prayed.

It was not polished. It was not formal. It was the prayer of a man who had reached the end of himself.

“I can’t do it,” he remembered saying to the Lord. “It is impossible. I quit.”

He was serious.

“I give up. There’s nothing I can do that’s going to help.”

It was, in his words, a quiet and sad moment. But it was not empty. Dr. Grubb remembers sensing the presence of God in that office. Not an audible voice, but a clear impression.

“Good. Quit. Sit down. Shut up and let me show you how this is done.”

That moment stayed with him for the rest of his life.

At the time, nothing changed immediately. The bills were still there. The payroll problem was still there. The school was still fragile. Dr. Grubb still felt the weight of it.

But within about six days, something happened.

A woman came into his office. She was a parent, an active member of the school community, and a member of the Board of Trustees. She checked in with his administrative assistant, came into his office, closed the door, and walked toward his desk with a smile.

She told him that she and her husband had been praying. They believed the Lord wanted them to give a gift to the school, and they believed they were supposed to give it then.

Then she handed him a check.

It was for $40,000.

Dr. Grubb immediately thought back to that prayer from the week before. He had told the Lord he was done. He had quit. And now, sitting in front of him, was the beginning of an answer he could not have arranged.

That was when the lesson began to settle into him.

The King’s Academy was not his school.

It was not even the board’s school.

It belonged to the Lord.

That truth hit him in a fresh way because the school had only recently begun using its new name. The name itself seemed to preach the lesson back to him. The apostrophe mattered.

The King’s Academy.

If the school was going to carry that name, then the people leading it had to remember who owned it.

“This is not your school,” Dr. Grubb sensed the Lord reminding him. “This is my school.”

The story did not stop with the $40,000 gift.

Not long after that, Dr. Grubb called a former board member, Luther Ogle of Gatlinburg, known by many as “Coot” Ogle. Dr. Grubb asked if the school could raise $50,000, would Mr. Ogle consider giving a matching gift of $50,000?

Mr. Ogle did not hesitate.

He said yes.

Dr. Grubb was surprised by how quickly the answer came. He later thought the Lord must have prepared Mr. Ogle before the phone call ever happened.

The board raised $10,000. Combined with the earlier $40,000 gift, the school had the $50,000 needed for the match. Around the first of June, Dr. Grubb went to meet Mr. Ogle for breakfast at the Ogle family restaurant in Gatlinburg. Mr. Ogle was ready. He could not wait to hand over the check.

Another $50,000.

Then came another gift.

Jean and Louise Gann, graduates of the school, called Dr. Grubb with news. Years earlier, they had purchased property near Fort Loudoun Lake with plans to build a retirement home. They had decided not to build after all. They were going to remain in their current home, and after prayer, they believed they should give the property to the school.

Dr. Grubb went to look at the land with Jean. It turned out to be two lakefront lots. The property was appraised at around $53,000, though Dr. Grubb felt it might be worth more.

Jean encouraged him to have a professional for sale sign made.

Then one rainy morning in July, Jean called and said he thought they should put the sign up that day.

Dr. Grubb looked outside. It was raining.

Jean already knew that.

“I know,” he told him, “but I’ve been praying about this.”

So they went.

They met at the property, put the sign in the ground, and started walking back toward their vehicles. Before they could leave, a man drove by, hit the brakes, backed up, and called out to Jean.

He had been waiting for that property to sell.

When he asked how much they wanted for it, Dr. Grubb paused. The appraisal said one thing, but his instincts told him another. He said that if they sold it right then, they would sell it for $75,000.

The man did not flinch.

He asked for until Monday to get the money.

The property sold for $75,000.

Looking back, Dr. Grubb connected the dots.

In January, he was convinced the school might close on his watch. He had told the Lord he could not do it. Then came $40,000. Then $10,000 from the board. Then $50,000 from Luther Ogle. Then $75,000 from the Gann property.

It did not make the school wealthy. It did not remove every problem. But it kept the doors open, and it taught Dr. Grubb something he would never forget.

The Lord could provide in ways he could not plan.

The Ganns’ gift continued to bless the school years later. The Tennessee Baptist Foundation helped set up a charitable remainder trust for Jean and Louise, allowing them to receive income from the gift during their lifetime. After Louise passed away, the remaining principal came back to the academy. By then, it had grown to $92,000.

That is the kind of detail that almost sounds too neat until you remember how messy the season felt while it was happening.

The provision was real, but so was the work.

The school still had to rebuild trust. It still had to stabilize enrollment. It still had to repair relationships, including the relationship with the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association after serious athletic penalties had damaged the school’s standing.

One of Dr. Grubb’s first major responsibilities was leading an appeal to the TSSAA Board of Control. He was helped by Dwight Stokes, an academy graduate and attorney in Sevierville who later became a General Sessions judge. Together, they prepared a strong appeal asking for the school to be fully reinstated, including playoff eligibility.

The appeal required weeks of work.

In the end, the school was reinstated with conditions. It was not a perfect resolution, but it was a major step forward.

There was staff turnover too. After Mike Bean’s departure, some of the people he had hired also left. That created another challenge. Dr. Grubb knew the school needed more than a plan. It needed calm. It needed people who would stay.

Stability became the word.

Parents needed reassurance. Faculty needed confidence. Students needed to know the school was going to be okay.

Dr. Grubb remembers the people who stayed. They worked harder. They loved the school. They believed in its purpose. And slowly, that loyalty began to steady the campus.

Enrollment during that early period hovered somewhere between 120 and 145 students. It was not explosive growth, but it was not collapse either.

That mattered.

Then the school began to make one of its biggest moves.

For years, Harrison Chilhowee had served secondary students. But the leadership began to ask a new question. If the school was serious about its future, should it serve younger students too?

The answer eventually led them to the Luther Ogle Building.

The building had its own story. In the 1940s, the school had released part of its property to the Sevier County Board of Education. The county built the first Seymour Primary School there, and the building served students for years. When the county later moved into a new building in the 1960s, the old building sat empty.

In 1977, Luther Ogle was serving on the school’s Board of Trustees. During a board retreat, he said the Lord woke him in the night and told him to buy the building from the Sevier County Board of Education and give it to Harrison Chilhowee.

So he did.

The school named the building for him.

Even then, the building sat largely unused for years. By the mid-1990s, it became the most practical way for the academy to expand.

But there was one problem.

The school did not have the money to renovate 22,000 square feet.

So they asked for help.

Word went out through several channels, including the North American Mission Board. Churches responded. Volunteers came from across the eastern part of the country. At one point, Dr. Grubb remembers counting 15 states represented by volunteers who came to work on the campus.

They stayed in the dorms during the summer. They ate in the cafeteria. Then they spent the week working.

Little by little, the building became usable.

The school moved into it in phases. First came the move down to sixth grade and the beginning of a stronger middle school program. Then the lower grades followed. By 1997, The King’s Academy was serving students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Pre-K would come later.

That change did more than add grade levels.

It changed the feel of the campus.

Dr. Grubb said he could not overstate how different the atmosphere became when young children were added. They brought energy. They brought joy. They changed the way older students saw themselves, because suddenly the younger students were watching them.

The younger students looked up to the older ones. The older students had younger eyes on them.

Something about that was good for the school.

The move to K-12 also helped enrollment. Over time, the school grew from around 120 students to more than 500 in the early 2000s.

That growth did not go unnoticed.

The Tennessee Baptist Convention, which had cut funding to the academy in 1992, began to see the school differently. In 1998, at the convention meeting in Kingsport, academy graduate Guy Milam made a motion from the floor that the school’s budget be increased.

The academy received a $100,000 increase, which became part of the budget going forward.

For a school that had wondered whether it could make payroll just a few years earlier, that was no small turn.

At the same time, the boarding and international programs were growing.

Dr. Grubb credits Dr. Steve Sharp with helping create a campus atmosphere that welcomed international students. Dr. Sharp valued the diversity those students brought, and he traveled internationally to build relationships with schools and families in other countries.

Those relationships mattered.

Students came from Brazil, including cities from Fortaleza to Sao Paulo. Students came from South Korea, helped by a sister-school relationship with Central Christian Academy in Suwon. Students came from Japan, the United Kingdom, Wales, and other places around the world.

Some of those students strengthened the athletic program, especially boys basketball in the mid-to-late 1990s.

But the international program was never only about enrollment or athletics. It was also about becoming family for students far from home.

Dr. Grubb remembers twin sisters from Rwanda, Liliana and Dian Meza, who were enrolled when civil war broke out in their home country. They watched from East Tennessee as their country fell apart. The school tried to comfort them and be a home for them.

He also remembers Slobodan Kozomara from Bosnia. War broke out while he was at the academy, and he lost contact with his family. For a couple of years, The King’s Academy became his family. He graduated, attended college in East Tennessee, and eventually reconnected with his family, who later relocated to England.

Those stories gave the mission weight.

The school was not only trying to grow. It was trying to become the kind of Christian community that could hold students through real pain.

That same desire shaped academics and spiritual life.

Dr. Grubb believed the school began to take a more serious academic posture during those years. The academy reaffirmed its college-preparatory roots and raised expectations for students. Faculty members helped lead that shift.

One example was the ECO Classroom, an outdoor experiential program led by Dr. Steve Sharp, with strong support from biology teacher Tracy Green. ECO stood for Experiential Curriculum for the Outdoors. The idea was simple but powerful. Get students into creation. Take them camping, hiking, canoeing, rappelling, and whitewater rafting. Then use those moments to teach, reflect, and write.

A mountaintop in the Great Smoky Mountains became more than a view. It became a classroom.

Spiritual life also became more intentional.

Bible classes remained part of the high school curriculum, and when the younger grades were added, Bible instruction came with them. But the conversations grew deeper than course requirements. Faculty and leaders began asking what it meant to teach every subject from a biblical worldview.

How do you teach history from a biblical perspective?

How do you teach science with a Christian understanding of creation, order, and truth?

How do students learn to think, speak, compete, study, win, lose, and relate to one another as followers of Christ?

The school began to talk more about core values. Dr. Grubb described them as the things that should hold steady in any circumstance. If a team was winning by 20 points, the values still mattered. If a team was losing by 40, they still mattered. If a student was doing well in class, the values mattered. If a student was struggling, they still mattered.

He was careful not to claim the school did this perfectly.

But the conversations themselves mattered. The more the school talked about Christlikeness, the more that language began to shape the culture.

Chapel remained a regular part of campus life. Spiritual emphasis weeks continued. Staff members spoke to students. Outside speakers came in. Residential students were expected to be involved in a faithful, evangelistic local church.

In other words, the mission was never meant to live only in Bible class.

It was supposed to reach the dorms, the gym, the classroom, the trail, the stage, the cafeteria, and the quiet places where students carried burdens no one else could see.

That is what makes Session 3 of Dr. Grubb’s story so important.

It begins with a president staring at a payroll crisis and telling the Lord, “I quit.”

It continues with unexpected provision, hard work, faithful donors, volunteer labor, repaired relationships, younger students, international students, stronger academics, and a deeper spiritual identity.

But underneath all of it is one lesson.

The King’s Academy belongs to the King.

Dr. Grubb had to learn that lesson the hard way. More than once, by his own admission.

Maybe every generation of the school has to learn it again.