Jose Escamilla has a forty-year Christian ministry. He has a four-year university education and an associate in arts degree in bilingual studies from San Diego City College. As an adolescent, he attended Nogales Bible School in Nogales, Arizona, for five years. There he received training for the Christian ministry and served eight years in Mexico as a pastor. In 1979 he applied for US residency, and in 1989 he became a US citizen. In San Diego he started a new congregation under the sponsorship of the Pacific Southwest Region Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He started the new church with around six families. When he retired in 2003, there were more than one hundred in the church. Since then, his son, Xose, took charge of the church. Now the attendance is between five hundred and five hundred fifty people.
Now a retired pastor, Escamilla lives in Sun City, California, with his wife.
