Peter Vande Brake
Peter Vande Brake
Director of Academic Affairs / Bible Teacher
Dr. Peter Vande Brake joined the Geneva faculty in 2019 as director of the upper school, transitioned to the dean of students position in 2021, and then became the director of academic affairs in 2026. He is the son and grandson of teachers and pastors. He grew up in various places in the Southeast where his parents taught at a few private schools and colleges in Georgia and Tennessee. He has a passion for teaching and talking about theology, especially philosophical theology, theodicy, and worldview. His favorite class to teach is a worldview/media class in which he explores both points of intersection and areas of divergence of popular culture and the Christian faith in the lives and hearts of his students. He has taught several other courses in his career including English literature and composition, logic, rhetoric, Christian doctrine, Latin, church history, and others. He has also coached track and field for the last thirty years at both the college and high school levels.
He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he received a BA in philosophy and was a four-time All-American decathlete. He was a mental health worker at a psychiatric hospital for a year before going on to seminary at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, where he received his MDiv. He then did his doctoral work at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids obtaining a PhD in systematic theology in 2000 where he was a graduate assistant to Calvin Van Reken and Cornelius Plantinga. He taught an introductory philosophy course at Calvin College for a couple of years after completing his course work for his PhD as an adjunct faculty member. He was ordained as a Minister of the Word and Sacrament in the PCUSA in 2001 and transferred his ordination to the EPC in 2021. He completed the Van Lunen Fellows Program for Executive Leadership in July of 2009. He taught, coached, and administrated at North Hills Classical Academy from 1996–2010 and served as the headmaster there beginning in 1998. He has been a leadership consultant for The CiRCE Institute and has served on the national boards for The CiRCE Institute and the Society for Classical Learning. Prior to coming to Geneva, he worked at the Potter’s House, an urban, Christ-centered school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from 2010–2019 in various capacities and served as the high school principal from 2015–2019.
He has been a speaker many times covering various topics at the national conferences for The Society of Classical Learning and at the CiRCE Conferences. He has written several articles in the SCL Journal and in various CiRCE publications.
He has been married to Susan since 1988 and has two daughters, Olivia and Annake. Olivia is a Baylor (2018) and Vanderbilt University graduate (2024) and is working as a NICU nurse practitioner at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. Annake is a Calvin University graduate (2021) and works as a graphic designer for Cure International in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
