ABOUT ME
I believe that God is infinite and personal. God is triune – three persons in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit who are coequal and coeternally God. I believe God exists outside of creation and is transcendent. I also believe that He exists everywhere inside creation and is immanent. God is omniscient, sovereign and good. A general knowledge of God is available to anyone who observes nature; but specific knowledge of God’s nature is revealed only through Scripture.
I have not always been a Christian. Even though I was born in into a Catholic household, I resisted learning much about faith. I was raised by an influential step-father who was an atheist, but as I matured I developed an intuitive knowledge of the supernatural and considered myself a deist. It was ultimately the recognition of my own sinful nature that led me to confess my sins and accepted Jesus as my Savior. Since then I have experienced phenomenal and exponential growth in my personal, professional, and academic life.
I was born in Phoenix, AZ in 1966 and moved to Oregon in 1989. I am married to the most amazing and beautiful woman I have ever met. Together we have four children from previous marriages, eight grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.
Society is gaining momentum. It is cycling and oscillating at an ever increasing rate with advances in technology, burgeoning human populations, and increasingly violent conflict between competing worldviews. As a Christian futurist, I offer my vision of a highly trained team of Christian relief workers who travel the globe and encounter the difficult and dangerous issues facing society today; and then address those issues in successful and effective ways. I see a whole different earth, a cast of characters and grand adventures that will have enduring value.
ADVENTURE
Leadership is my passion. Over thirty years of military service have provided me with a vast range of leadership experiences ranging from my early days as an Infantry squad leader, to a company commander, to my current assignment as the senior ranking full-time officer of a military leadership academy. During my most memorable assignment, I served as the aide-de-camp for the Commanding General of the 41st Brigade Combat Team. In the late summer of 2005, we deployed to Louisiana as part of the emergency response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Then early in 2006, I continued to serve as the aide-de-camp during a combat deployment to Afghanistan.
For a short time I was assigned to the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, VA, where I co-authored the Agribusiness Development Team Handbook, and earned my first black belt in American Kenpo Karate. Then, in 2009, I was deployed to Tallil, Iraq as part of Task Force Jungleer. Along the way, I have also had the opportunity to serve in unusual capacities not stereotypically associated with military duty; I worked as a recruiter, the state suicide prevention manager, and as the head of the Oregon Joint Transition Assistance Program to help veterans find jobs.
After returning from Iraq, I secured a patent for a new kind of emergency shelter, and then traveled as a civilian to the village of Cache-Cache Douge, Haiti, to assist with the reconstruction efforts there. Most recently I have begun to get involved with the emergency disaster relief organization ShelterBox, acting as a volunteer role-player for some training scenarios in Oregon.
The essence of leadership is influencing others by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to achieve a desired outcome. The Spirit I display as a Christian leader enables me to serve others by guiding them, without coercion, to develop their own abilities to judge between the sinful and sacred, and to freely choose to act in accordance with God's will.
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Association of the United States Army
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National Infantry Association
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Order of St. Maurice
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National Guard Association of the United States
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Association of Professional Futurists
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World Future Society
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The Airship Association
ACADEMIC
My passion for leadership is reflected in the arc of my academic pursuits; a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management in 2002, a Master’s in Organizational Leadership in 2017, and a Doctorate in Strategic Leadership in 2021 from Regent University with a concentration in Strategic Foresight.
Regent University is one of the few Universities in the world that offers a concentration on strategic foresight. The field of leadership studies grew in parallel to futures studies, but the two disciplines are strongly integrated in the Regent model. In the post-industrial age, the focus of leadership research has increasingly turned toward the dynamics by which the future is created.
Strategic foresight is a discipline that develops and employs analytical models and scenarios as a means to investigate the future. The goal of strategic foresight is not to predict the future, but to offer plausible alternate views of the future. These alternate views are often provocative, they tend to challenge previously unexamined biases and preconceived understandings with the aim of offering more choices about how to move forward into the future.
Strategic foresight is not limited to any particular organization, philosophy, or political outlook. My approach to strategic foresight is distinctive because it stems from the perspective of the Christian worldview. I have been trained to engage biblical text using inner-texture, inter-texture, social-rhetorical, ideological, and sacred textural analysis. The future orientation coupled with a Christian-centered worldview ensures that my vocation is not merely theoretical, it also allows me to explore the future within the larger framework of strategic leadership and social action.
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A Christian approach to strategic foresight is unique in the sense that the practitioner already knows the eschatological end of the story. Rather than focus on man-made utopian or dystopian views of the future, this perspective frees me to harness the power of Scripture to wrestle with contemporary issues surrounding the nature of truth, core human values, and morality. My vocation confronts the myriad entrenched social, political, and cultural issues that plague decision makers and offers alternative futures with the power to raise awareness, admonish, and perhaps even change the hearts of those not aligned with God’s will as revealed in Scripture.
My assessment is that the greatest impact my vocation can have is in the realm of literature. Unlike academic, political, or philosophical writing, literature offers the best venue for presenting scenarios that both offer visions of alternate futures, as well as invite and immerse the reader into those scenarios. Contemporary literature is almost completely dominated by secular authors often leading to recurring themes of alienation, despair, and disintegrating cultural values. My sense is that literature crafted from the perspective of Christian strategic foresight will reveal practical approached to dangers and difficulties that lead ultimately to wonderful and hope-filled outcomes.