Last night a significant number of pastors from all across the Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, joined together with all the teachers of Thunderbird Adventist Academy for a mandatory meeting held inside the church on the campus of Thunderbird Academy.
First, about the mandatory...I don't understand mandatory. If it is mandatory, one would be justified in asking why everyone that could be there was not there. Does this happen in other systems? How about in the business world? What possesses an individual to imply that their time is more valuable than the time of all the other people who lopped off a chuck of their limited time to drive a considerable distance just to attend this mandatory meeting? It escapes me.
I am new in this particular conference (Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists), so I am not privy as to the number of mandatory meetings scheduled on short notice. I would venture to guess that they are rare. Last minute mandatory meetings would soon become counterproductive if they were the norm and not the rare exception.
I confess I have never been to a short notice mandatory meeting. As principal I recall calling for one short notice mandatory meeting. One. I was quite pleased at the attendance to this meeting. On a personal note, I would have been quite conflicted about attending a mandatory meeting if I was on the receiving end of the mandate. Of course, that is due in large part to the resistive nature of my personality to anything mandated. It is not a good place to be, since life is full of things that are mandated to do over which we have little control. So one has a choice to either become a total recluse and make a statement of non-compliance against anything mandated (taxes, speed limits, health screening, social security numbers, etc.) or to concede that a certain level of normalcy within a civilized society requires a certain amount of compromise. Unless the mandate is illegal, immoral, or dangerous, I will concede. But I digress... After all, I value my job, if nothing else. I came to the meeting.
The meeting went quite well. The only item on the agenda was a call for the entire body of conference and TAA workers to respond to a critical call to enlist more students. Elder Anobile, AZ Conference President, provided the spiritual foundation for the evening. Elder Ed Keyes, AZ Conference Secretary, shared his family testimony of the positive difference an Adventist education can make. Barry Warren, TAA principal, shared how Adventist education literally saved his life. Elder Kent Sharpe, conference treasurer, led in a season of prayer.
My small part was simply eliciting the help of all the pastors present (and absent) in finding 30 "star students" in their church communities across the state, to enroll in Thunderbird. The conference administration made a bold statement in favor of making Adventist Education a conference priority, by appropriating $80,000 for new scholarships for students who want to benefit from an Adventist education, but have not been able to close the gap between the cost and their personal financial resources. This appropriation is not a permanent solution. It is a measure put in place in order to give the school to begin now towards making next school year the first year of many in which enrollment is no longer a problem when the school year begins. Mark Tamalea'a, TAA recruiter, will be leading a Phone-a-Thon beginning tonight, to raise even more funds to assist students. He is also committed to visiting every interested family. There is a three week window. It's a tall order, but it's doable if everyone is on beard.
Either way, there is an Education Board scheduled for tomorrow, and Executive Board on Thursday. It's exciting to be on the inside of decisions that will impact hundreds of lives for the Kingdom. Now there is one mandate I am not opposed to following every time. Pray for our schools!
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