President's Message for Ecclesia College Students

Dear Friends,

Our world is changing.  But we know that God’s ways have not changed and are still perfect.  When it comes to helping shape our minds and the minds of our students, we are determined to follow His ways so that His purposes will be fully realized in our lives.

There is a particular order He prescribes to us in II Peter 1:5-10.  As we follow this prescription for knowledge, we arrive at an increasing understanding of Him, the Truth Who sets us free.  According to Scripture, the proper foundation for knowledge is first “faith” and then “character.”   In Christ we continually add faith, character and knowledge, in that order of cyclical increase.  Knowledge gained through any means apart from the foundation of Christ inevitably leads us to spiritual ignorance and eventual ruin.  Begin with the wrong premise, and you will arrive at the wrong conclusion.

We encourage you to stand firmly against the trends of this present culture to pursue a faith and character-based education.  And we invite you to do it here at Ecclesia College.  Here we always emphasize—whatever your major—setting your mind on the things above so you will be rooted and grounded in unshakable Truth.

Allow us to help equip you with godly knowledge, skills and credentials so you can be even more effective for His Kingdom in your sphere of influence!

"Dr." Oren Paris III

BA Ecclesia College, BA University of Arkansas, Online DMin Laurel Univeristy
President, Ecclesia College

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Ecclesia College President Oren Paris Among New Indictments in Arkansas Bribery Scandal

March 2, 2017 by Warren Throckmorton 35 Comments

The other shoe dropped today.

After Arkansas state representative Micah Neal was indicted for his part in a kickback scheme involving Western Arkansas non-profits, including Ecclesia College, speculation mounted that state senator Jon Woods would also be indicted. The fate of others mentioned in the Neal indictment was not as clear. However, today a federal grand jury released indictments of Woods, Ecclesia College president Oren Paris III and their mutual friend Randell Shelton, Jr.

Read the indictment here.

According to the indictment, Neal, Woods, Shelton and Paris conspired to defraud the citizens of Arkansas.

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Inside Higher Education wrote -

On Sept. 27, 2013, Ecclesia College President Oren Paris III signed an agreement accepting $200,000 from the Arkansas General Improvement Fund -- $200,000 that had been directed to the college by Republican State Senator Jonathan E. Woods, federal prosecutors say.

The same September day, Ecclesia College cut a check for $50,000 to a consulting firm that had been established the day before by Randell G. Shelton Jr., a friend of both Paris and Woods. Shelton took the check and used it as an initial deposit to open a bank account for the consulting business. Then four days later, on Oct. 1, Shelton transferred $40,000 from the newly opened bank account to a personal account owned by the state senator, Woods.

Also on Oct. 1, Woods withdrew $33,000 from his personal account to buy a cashier’s check. The only funds in the account at the time had come from the consulting firm’s account, which was only filled with money from Ecclesia College.

Shelton issued a check to himself on the same day from the consulting firm’s account for $1,035.62, writing that it was a reimbursement for gas expenses. Two days later, Ecclesia College’s Board of Governance approved a $25,000 bonus payment to its president, Paris. The board approved the bonus on the same day the college deposited the state General Improvement Fund money into its own account.

That series of events is described in an indictment issued March 1 of this year against Woods -- who did not run for re-election past the start of 2017 -- Paris and Shelton. A similar series of transfers took place numerous times between September 2013 and October 2015, according to the indictment. A federal grand jury charged the three men with multiple counts of mail and wire fraud in the alleged kickback scheme. The college was not named in the indictment.

Paris paid a total of $267,500 to Shelton’s consulting firm over the two years without the knowledge of Ecclesia’s Board of Governance, according to the indictment. He also had the college hire a secretary in the summer of 2013 at the behest of Woods, paying her a salary of $43,000 and increasing her bonus from $4,000 to $7,000 during the hiring process, the charging document alleges.

It’s rare for a college president to face such a serious set of charges. But Paris has not signaled any intent to leave Ecclesia, a work-learning interdenominational Christian college founded by his parents. Paris, his mother and his brother-in-law are all on the Board of Governance. His sister, Christian singer-songwriter Twila Paris, is on the college’s Board of Regents.

On Thursday the Board of Governance issued a statement backing Paris, writing that while the charges should be taken seriously, its members believe the president acted with integrity and is a “godly leader.”

 Angie Paris Snyder is charge of the college website,
so I would not take any of the "facts" posted there
too seriously.
Thanks to excessive spending on themselves, the Paris family
has let the Third World college facilities run down even more.
No gym. No stand-alone library (just a room in the old octagon building). Three "classrooms" upstairs are separated by a
folding plastic curtain on a track.
One classroom near the dean's office is little more than a broom closet with desks there.

Start Roses by Pruning Them

We had a long summer last year,
a great time for large, almost flawless roses.
Beneficial insects and spiders ate most of the
rose destroyers, though Japanese beetles did have some fun.

Facebook tells me not to neglect the Creation Gardening Page, so I will feed their software another post. I put the gardening posts on my main page, but the Creation Gardening Page is only gardening and Creation related posts and articles.

 Creation Gardening: By Him Were All Things Made -
Every time you click, a butterfly gets his wings.

 It worked, it worked!

Many plant roses but relatively few prune them. If I could teach people the best activity for roses, it would be -

1. Prune the roses.
2. Prune the deadwood off.
3. Prune the crossed canes away.
4. Prune the spent flowers before they produce seed (hips).\
5. Toss the clippings in the garbage can. Read John 15:1-10.

Frequent pruning encourages more growth above and below ground.

Trimming is a large part of caring for the yard. Frequent mowing at a decent height is very good for grass, but terrible for weeds. The grass cuttings feed the soil and make the grass even denser. Weeds go to seed opportunistically. If the weeds are allowed to seed themselves, they will continue to vex the gardener. But, if the weeds are cut off just when they want to create another generation, they will greatly diminish.

Some of us like to prune. For weeks I would work on the Crepe Myrtle bush, knowing that all the extra twigs and false starts were holding it back. I kept working on the canes until they were no longer trying to twig out. The results showed in a smooth, attractive base and a wild explosion of long-lasting blooms on the top.

I never poison or pull out dandelions. They are perennial herbs, sometimes called lawn nails, and difficult to remove. But why do that? They bring up calcium in their leaves and shed those leaves on the soil. They feed the bees and provide seed fluff for birds' nests. Dandelions also produce the most nutritious leaves for salads, but not so appealing after being soaked in broad leaf weed-killer.

This double red KnockOut looks like a painting.
Usually beneficial insects follow the rose to the vase
and continue working.

Pruning Is a Habit Formed by Its Rewards
The supposed chore of pruning is not so awful when the job is rewarded with beautiful flowers. Leaving the blooms on the roses will mean they will aim toward turning to seed. Cutting and sharing them promotes immediate new growth and more flowers.

Soon a few rose bushes will rotate blooming and giving up the flowers for the vase. More flowers mean color and fragrance in the garden while sharing the roses.

A rose can be cut as soon as the five sepals are open. Four open sepals are not enough. Even if the bud seems closed and not ready, the five sepals that first covered it at will signal when the rose can be put in a vase. Our late neighbor remembered when I told her, "This rose bud does not look like much, but watch it open up in the vase." She was skeptical, but it happened just as I predicted. That gave her more time to admire a single flower as it opened.

Prolific bloomers like KnockOut roses need more pruning to produce more roses. Grandson Alex learned to flick a bloom with his finger to see if petals were ready to fall off. If a flick made some petals fall, the flower was cut away.

 I pruned half the Crepe Myrtle,
so we all enjoyed this second bloom.

How Much Pruning?
I will prune all my roses back at least 50%. The power is in the cane growth and root expansion.

KnockOuts will be pruned back that much, several times over during the season, a tribute to their rapid growth. If we have a long, soaker rain that beats them down (by softening their canes and loading the bushes with water), I will cut the KnockOuts back instead of letting them look like last week's laundry left on the floor.

ICU
If a rose looks bad and sad, cut it way back and pamper it with rainwater. If you have not stored rainwater in a barrel, then store tapwater in a barrel, so the chlorine gas can evaporate out. Pampering means watering it twice a week, not every day until it is dead.

Make sure the rose is well mulched with a combination of cardboard and plant material (grass or shredded wood). Mulch holds water, diminishes water and wind erosion, and stores a mass of decaying matter that ultimately feeds the the roots.

Any grassy weeds around or in the rose bush should be snipped away to keep the invader small and weak. Sometimes a planted nut tree will spring up in the middle of a rose plant. The culprit is probably a squirrel storing his food, or more ominously, assuming his plant will outlive mine.

Roses are royal and must live and grow without competition. Garlic or chives can grow among roses and help them. Other plants - larger and more aggressive - crowd them out (Mark 4) and that is not good for either one.

Pat Boone remembers he's on Ecclesia board

 Now I remember.

Pat Boone remembers he's on Ecclesia board: "Home / News / Arkansas

82-year-old singer says memory jogged
By Bill Bowden

This article was published today at 4:01 a.m. Updated today at 4:01 a.m.


Oren Paris, president of Ecclesia College, is shown in this Thursday, April 11, 2013 file photo.

Pat Boone has had a revelation.

The 82-year-old singer, who last week denied ever having heard of Springdale's Ecclesia College, said his memory has been jogged.

Boone said he apparently agreed in 2012 to serve on the Christian college's board of regents, but he had forgotten all about it.

"I've had to go back and review correspondence and consult memories of others than myself about my being on the board at Ecclesia College," Boone wrote in an email Wednesday to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Oren Paris III, president of Ecclesia College. "My memory was vague but clearer now."

On March 1, Paris was charged in federal court with nine counts of honest-services wire fraud and one count of honest-services mail fraud in a kickback case involving state legislators and hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds. The scheme involved bribing the legislators and thus denying "honest services" by the elected officials, according to the indictment.

Attempts were made last week to reach members of the board of regents regarding the indictment of Paris, so a call was placed to Pat Boone Enterprises in West Hollywood, Calif.

Through his assistant, Boone said on March 7 that he had never heard of Ecclesia College and didn't serve on its board of regents.

Boone apparently heard from someone at Ecclesia College after an article was published in the Democrat-Gazette on March 9.

Boone began his email Wednesday with, "To whom it may concern: (and obviously it concerns many)."

Boone wrote that Paris "evidently" contacted him in 2012 about serving on the board. Boone said he had known Paris for a couple of years.

Boone wrote that he also was contacted by George Hiller, a "highly respected investor manager and analyst in Atlanta and devoted Christian," about being on the Ecclesia board. Hiller didn't return a phone call Thursday.

"As I remember, I proposed I'd be on a board of advisers, but was told that the board of regents as expressed by Ecclesia was more of a 'board of reference,' and an endorsement of the goals and objectives of the school," Boone wrote in the email.

"So, on that basis, I accepted, and since then have had little, if any, contact with Oren or the school. I meant my name to be used as an endorsement of the goals and aspirations as they had been expressed to me, and because of those expressing those goals and my confidence in them, felt I could lend my name to the enterprise."

Regarding the charges facing Paris, Boone wrote, "Since I know nothing of what has happened since then, I can only hope and pray that the problems that Ecclesia faces momentarily can be settled by complete transparency, explanation and records. We need more Christian education not less in America.""


'via Blog this'

Oren Paris III is standing  where an addition was built,
one large room - not "a classroom building."

GJ - Pat Boone is one of three who said they did not know they were on this Board of Regents, as they call it. The other two said they knew about the college but did not know they were on this board.

This so-called board is just window dressing and does not meet. Three years ago, one faculty member said, "If Pat Boone is on this board, why have we never seen him?"

Oren Paris III was not seen very often and did not engage in much work at the college, but he spoke as if he were over-worked.