Speakers
Jim Sammons
Jim Sammons has been actively involved in real estate development, brokerage, and property management in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex since 1968. His experience also extends into the natural gas mineral investment business in the newly developing Barnett Shale in Parker County, Texas. He has been active as a member and as Chairman of the Board of the Institute in Basic Life Principles since 1974. Although retired from the active board, he currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the ministry. He is a member of Fairpark Baptist Church in Fort Worth. He graduated from Austin College in Sherman, Texas and received a B.A. Degree in Business. He donates time to various ministries including the presentation of a twenty-hour video series for the Institute in Basic Life Principles, titled “Financial Freedom Seminar.’ He has been married to Fay for thirty-seven years and they have three children and three grandchildren.
Joel Salatin
Joel Salatin, 47, is a full-time farmer in Virginia”s Shenandoah Valley. A third-generation alternative farmer, he returned to the farm full-time in 1982 and continued refining and adding to his parents” ideas.
The farm services more than four hundred families and thirty restaurants through on-farm sales, brokered farmers” markets, metropolitan buying clubs with salad-bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey, and forestry products through relationship marketing.
He holds a B.A. degree in English and writes extensively in magazines such as Stockman Grass Farmer, Acres USA, and American Agriculturalist.
The family”s farm, Polyface Inc. (“The Farm of Many Faces’) has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Gourmet, and countless other radio, television, and print media. Profiled on the Lives of the Twenty-First Century series with Peter Jennings on ABC World News, his after-broadcast chat room fielded more hits than any other segment to date.
A sought-after conference speaker, he addresses a wide range of issues, from “creating the farm your children will want’ to “making a white-collar salary from a pleasant life in the country.’
He has authored five books, four of them how-to types: Pastured Poultry Profits: Net $25,000 in Six Months on Twenty Acres, Salad Bar Beef, You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur”s Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farming Enterprise, and Family Friendly Farming: A Multi-Generational Home-Based Business Testament. His most recent release, Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer”s Guide to Farm Friendly Food, is an attempt to bring producers and patrons together in mutual understanding and appreciation.
His speaking and writing reflect dirt-under-the-fingernails experience punctuated with mischievous humor. He passionately defends small farms, local food systems, and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm.
His mother Lucille, wife Teresa, daughter Rachel, son Daniel, daughter-in-law Sheri, and grandson Travis, work full-time together on the family farm.
Geoffrey Botkin
Geoffrey Botkin has served in pioneering capacities in academia, private business, and at the highest levels of corporate structure. Mr. Botkin currently advises pastors and business leaders on strategic career decisions and on the balancing of priorities and duties. He believes the entrepreneurial skills and instincts of most men can be developed to better represent the long-term business interests of Christ the King. Mr. Botkin is presently training his sons in the operation of a multi-generational, multi-national Information Technology company.
Wade Myers
Wade Myers has founded several companies and assisted many entrepreneurs with the founding of their own companies. Wade has raised over $100 million to capitalize his ventures and has completed many mergers and acquisitions while building various companies. He has been the CEO of four companies, he has served as the Chairman of a venture capital firm, and he has served as a board member of an $850 million investment management firm as well as thirteen other companies. Wade also worked for the Boston Consulting Group as a strategy consultant, he held several sales and executive positions with Mobil Corporation, he served as an Airborne Ranger in the US Army and he was a decorated veteran of the Gulf War. He holds three degrees including an MBA with High Distinction from Harvard University, where he graduated as a Baker Scholar. Wade was a business case author for Harvard and assisted with the development of one of the MBA program”s executive education courses.
Douglas W. Phillips
Doug Phillips is the director of Vision Forum Ministries, a discipleship and training ministry that emphasizes Christian apologetics, worldview training, multi-generational faithfulness, and creative solutions whereby fathers can play a maximum role in family discipleship. A constitutional attorney, Doug served with the Home School Legal Defense Association for six years. He serves as Adjunct Professor of Apologetics for the Institute for Creation Research, and co-authored the book, Weapons of Our Warfare with ICR’s president Dr. John Morris. He is the author/editor of Robert Louis Dabney: The Prophet Speaks; Poems for Patriarchs; The Birkenhead Drill; The Letters & Lessons of Teddy Roosevelt for His Sons. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including WORLD, Acts and Facts, The Houston Chronicle, Education Reporter, Quit You Like Men, The Home School Court Report, The Teaching Home, Home School Digest, Home Schooling Today, Citizen Magazine, and Patriarch magazine. A strong advocate of mentorship, Doug has taught from his home intensive college-level, independent courses on apologetics, law, theology, and government to home school students and graduates. Doug and his wife, Beall, live with their seven children, Joshua, Justice, Liberty, Jubilee, Faith Evangeline, Honor, and new arrival Providence, in San Antonio, Texas.
Dr. James Leininger
James R. Leinininger, M.D. received his B.A. from lndiana University in 1966 and his M.D. from Indiana University School of Medicine in 1969. While completing his residency in Family Medicine from the University of Miami, he founded and organized the Medical-Educational Assistance League of Miami, Florida. This non-profit organization induced the building of and the raising of monies for equipment and staffing of a hospital located in the Amazon region of Brazil. While serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corp, he concurrently served as an adjunct assistant Professor at the University of Texas Medical School, San Antonio, lecturing on the subjects of Epidemiology and Preventative Medicine. From 1975 through 1986, Dr. Leininger and his partners directed the three Baptist Hospital Emergency rooms in San Antonio. Dr. Leininger founded Kinetic Concepts, Inc., a San Antonio, Texas manufacturer of special purpose therapeutic beds and convalescence equipment in 1975. He served as Chairman of the Board of this publicly listed company from 1976 to 1997. Dr. Leininger holds a majority interest in more than twenty companies and has helped found close to fifty companies (including two publicly traded companies).
Scott Brown
Scott T. Brown enjoys launching companies and is currently involved in commercial properties, real estate development, the automobile business, cattle, and ministry. He is the director of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches and elder at Hope Baptist Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He graduated from California State University in Fullerton in History and received a Master of Divinity from Talbot School of Theology, financed partly by a custom furniture and cabinet business he operated out of his father”s garage. He gives most of his time to local pastoral ministry, conferences on fatherhood, church reformation, and strengthening the family. He has been married to Deborah for twenty-four years and they have four children ages twenty-one, eighteen, fourteen, and eleven.
Arnold Pent III
Arnold Pent has been a real-estate investor and developer for the past thirty years focusing primarily on infrastructure development, site planning, zoning, and management for commercial retail end-users. His interests also include mineral ownership in Barnett Shale natural gas fields in Wise, Tarrant, and Johnson Counties in Texas, lease and development agreements, and coordinating real-estate development for surface use. He is working with one of his sons developing salt-water disposal facilities for the gas drilling industry. Pent Energy LLC was formed in 2004 with another son focusing on acquisition of oil- and gas-producing properties in Texas and Oklahoma and expanding drilling operations. He is author of Ten P’s in a Pod, written during his late teen years recounting the unusual life he shared with a family of ten members traveling around the U.S. in the 1950s and ’60s singing, quoting Scripture, and playing instruments. The book was republished forty-five years later by Vision Forum. One of Arnold Pent’s passions is passing on the vision God gave him as a young man to become an entrepreneur and train his children both in knowledge of the Word of God and to serve the Lord in ministry and business. Another passion is to encourage the memorizing of Scripture by chapters and books with families working together, sharing with each other what they have memorized thereby multiplying the effect for each family member. Arnold and Esther, married thirty-six years, are parents of three sons, a daughter, and grandparents to five grandchildren. They are members of a small country church near their farm in Virginia.
Nick Logan
Nick Logan is the father of nine children, and is also the Chief Executive Officer of Cornerstone Bancard (Bancard), an Atlanta-based firm that issues specialty stored value Visa and MasterCards. Prior to launching Bancard, Nick founded Cornerstone Payment Systems (Payment Systems), another Georgia-based company that specializes in credit card processing services. Prior to founding the two Cornerstone companies, Nick served as a senior executive officer at public and private companies in the credit card processing industry. As an entrepreneur, he has successfully launched, grown, and sold several businesses. Nick and his wife, Gail, have been committed to home schooling since 1992 and have graduated three children that stand alongside their father in the day-to-day operation of the family business initiatives. In 2006, Nick and his family acquired the Hula Bowl as a sporting event that is committed to sporting excellence.
Don Hart, Esq.
Don is a devoted husband, father, attorney, and faithful board member for Vision Forum Ministries. Don is blessed to serve as an elder in a family integrated assembly where he enjoys the distinct pleasure of worshiping and ministering with a number of dear and faithful families, including his father and mother who passed to him a legacy of faithfulness to God, church, and family. Don”s efforts as a church leader and attorney are directed toward encouraging and promoting the return of the church and the Christian family to their biblical foundations for the glory of God. Don resides in the Austin, Texas area with his loving wife D’Ann and their five children whom they are privileged to educate at home.