The Ten: How does the First Commandment fit in today?

Carlos Vila messed up as a kid. By the time he was 15, he’d gone from grade school nerd to high school party boy, drinking, smoking dope, sneaking out of the house to go with older Cuban and Spanish friends to disco clubs in New York City, across the George Washington Bridge from his northern New Jersey home.

His mother, meanwhile, was having none of it. A widow, and recently born-again in a Lutheran church, she picked up her family, moved to New Mexico, and joined the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. “It worked,” Dr. Vila says of his mother’s gambit. Then a high school junior, he straightened up and himself accepted Jesus as his savior during a church altar call.

Since then, says the