New Church Life March/April 2016 | Page 77

  presentation for school faculties called “The Admonition of the Lord” (focused on discipline or correctional guidance). Enthusiasm around New Church education also happens by gathering people together in various groupings to talk about the use and its applications. These open house sessions are examples. We also hope to sponsor an Ed Council session in the next couple of years. The more gatherings, the more reason there will be for fresh research and pertinent conversation about the use itself. Focusing on #2, General Church Education continues to generate a steady stream of high-quality materials for use in homes and Sunday Schools, plus updated curricula for use in schools. Our primary strategy for improving access to this growing library of resources is a significantly updated web-presence. Sites to date would be classified as “information” sites, helping people know where our schools are, or a little about what New Church education is, or how to obtain some of our materials. We hope to add a comprehensive “tool” feature to our new site, allowing people to find what they are looking for efficiently in our substantial library of resources. We are well into the design phase, working with a local website company. Money for this work has come from donations, and from capital dollars allocated toward the Vineyard portion of the newchurch.org refresh project. We are actively raising additional money to complete the project. Item #3 has a two-fold focus. The first is to improve our Teacher Career System, with more robust offerings for teacher professional development. Rebekah Russell has been hired to assist Scott Daum in this work. She has been devoting part of her time to General Church education work from Glenview where she has lived, and joined our staff full time in March. It was a privilege to share some of these ideas with the people gathered at these open house sessions, and to respond to their questions. We also welcome responses from readers who wish to know more about our efforts. Please feel free to contact us at any time at [email protected]. visit to india Rt. Rev. Peter M. Buss Jr. Teresa and I experienced a new area of the Church at the end of October 2015. We traveled to India to participate in a two-day New Church seminar – the sixth of its kind in that country. The Rev. Peter Devassy is our one General Church pastor there. He invited me to present on the internal sense of the days of creation. The Rev. Göran Appelgren, also in attendance, joined me in a different session to answer 179