Paul L. Escamilla is Senior Pastor at Spring Valley United Methodist Church in Dallas, Texas, and the author of an intriguing new book, Longing for Enough in a Culture of More.  It’s worthy of small group study, with a free downloadable study guide, and addresses a timely topic - - how to “escape the lifestyle and attitudes of a weighed-down world.”  That’s not my primary reason for recommending it, however.  I think it’s worthy of attention here because it’s relevant for educators as persons. 

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I was in High School when I first heard about businesses keeping “two sets of books”. My father was a manufacturer’s representative, and he dealt with small, medium, and large sized companies. Almost all of them, he told me, kept two sets of records regarding their income, expenses, and salary. One set was what the government saw and showed lower income for the business and lower salaries to the owners and higher expenses. This caused the business and the owners to pay less in taxes. My dad was always amazed at how little people actually gained by doing this, especially compared to how much worry and fear it caused them.

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I continue to be fascinated with how people are enamored with the idea of mentoring. It seems to have a romantic hold on people’s imagination. I recently received an e-mail from a friend who is a college program director. She was asking some questions about a program for college students being created at her college. The program design looked pretty good, though it included a “mentoring” component. I sighed and cautioned my friend about the tendency to misapply “mentoring.” Much of what people do under the rubric of “mentoring” isn’t appropriate to their goals, aren’t applicable to their audience, ignores the significance of context, and isn’t designed to be mentoring at all.

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As second chair leaders who focus primarily behind the scenes, our contributions to the community of faith, often gets lost in the myriad of congregational events that are quite visible and take center stage. Sometimes I wonder if what I do is making an impact. In my impatience, I want to see immediate results that make a difference in people’s lives. Sometimes that happens, but much of the time what I do doesn’t bring immediate measurable results. Like a planted seed, the impact of my decisions as an educator flourishes in its own good time.

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One of the courses I teach at the seminary goes by the clumsy title of “Developing Lay Leadership in the Congregation.” I think it’s one of the most important courses I teach, though I’m frustrated that I’ve not found the best way to teach this one. I think it’s important because the future of the viability of the congregation as church lies with reclaiming a “theology of the laity,” to use Findley Edge’s term from the Church Renewal movement.

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I’m preparing a session for an upcoming youth retreat on the topic of “Silence and Solitude as Spiritual Disciplines.” It has caused me to think about the lack of silence in our lives in the US.

My parents owned a small cabin near Warsaw, Virginia on a tributary into the Rappahannock river when I was growing up. They never had a telephone installed there (this was way before cell phones) and the small TV could only pick up two stations on a good day. The place was amazingly quiet, and it gave me time to fish, swim, and walk in the midst of silence. Most of our teens today have constant noise, or the potential of noise invading their lives all the time. Cell phones, IPods, computers, cable TV, radio (how do you like yours—AM, FM, XM, Sirius, HD…?), and a host of other sounds invade the lives of our teens every day.

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It is my privilege to serve on the Development Team of Cross Over Ministry, a non-denominational, Christian-based organization that serves the needs of the uninsured in the Richmond, Virginia metropolitan area. The mission of Cross Over Ministry is “To provide health care, promote wellness and connect the talents and resources of the community with those in need in the name of Jesus Christ.”

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In a recent post Marty identified the “domains of effectual faith” found in a couple of my books (The Craft of Christian Teaching and in How to Be The Best Christian Small Group Leader). Marty’s treatment was accurate, and the schema is very helpful for addressing educational issues from curriculum design to lesson planning. These domains are more subtle and dynamic than we usually get into when introducing the concept of Effectual Faitih in workshops. The risk there is in leaving people with simplistic or one-dimensional misunderstandings about this schema on the nature of faith.

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As one who confessed that, after having met some remarkable role models, all I ever wanted to be was a great Sunday School teacher, how do I explain all the time and money invested in those later credentials in Sociology of Religion?  The sixties>happened, and they were pretty exciting, whatever else you may have heard about them.  For this young suburban pastor’s wife, mother of four, the sixties were an early taste of the change that swirls around us now, overwhelming many and bewildering most. 

From the early Women’s Movement I learned that the personal is political.  I learned that centuries of church history only told part of the Christian story, which is a nice way of saying that, if it didn’t lie, at least it didn’t tell the whole truth - - about women, about power, about institutional preservation.  From there it’s an easy matter of connecting the dots to the academic discipline that drew me in.  The sociologist’s fundamental question is, what is going on here - - not what do people say is going on, but what is really going on?  It is the relentless probing and sifting and connecting of human behaviors. 

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Theocracies are not new, of course. They spring up all throughout history (and literature), sometimes as a result of a group that sees itself as a “remnant” and splits off from a larger religious culture, and sometimes they come about as a result of a reactive or pro-active stance against the wider “secular city.” In a world that many describe as “post Christendom” a Christian “city of God” seems newsworthy:

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