The Dialogue Continues

I am home after a relatively long day. I was in meetings most of the day with a couple of VIPs dealing with funding for the future of the Arizona Adventist school system. We were trying to dissect the nuances of an agreement that has yet to be drawn up. If in fact the document will ever be signed still remains to be seen. One thing in certain—the time has come to consider paradigms that are unlike anything we have tried before.

The challenge is to re-build a broken system that as a result will be both a model of academic excellence while at the same time creating sufficient streams of income to make the system accessible to those who have been locked out of the system due primarily to financial limitations.

We will have to look critically at the system as it exists today and reassess the components that make it the system that it has become. Once we have looked critically at every nook and cranny of the system, we must decide which components are working and which ones are not. The intent is to create a school that will draw the best students in our community of faith and beyond-- students that at the moment are being prepared for the future by other schools, and often in other communities of faith.

We must reclaim our own constituency if we are going to be able to attract those outside our community. We will work to create a model of education which honors the best of our educational roots while molding that pattern into one that fits the 21st century setting: technology, virtual education, co-curricular opportunities in technology, organic farming, solar energy, and flight school. We have an ideal setting for a field school in those areas with the potential for offering the highest level of academics in the greater Phoenix area and the nation.

And after hours I am enjoying myself immensely preaching at the Generation Joven Week of Spiritual Emphasis at the Phoenix Central Spanish SDA Church. It’s a small group, but they are coming every night, more or less, to listen to my evening talks. My theme is “The Pursuit.” I am exploring some new concepts with them in the areas of salvation, grace, life, love, good and evil. It’s pretty informal, but the topics are serious. I am enjoying myself. I hope they are internalizing the messages. That is something I cannot elicit. That’s a God thing.

Gotta go and get my evening exercise in before I call it a day.