The Year in Review (2023)

1. Another year has passed. I continue to be grateful to work for Campus Edu. We have done some tremendous things this year. We found a couple partners who believed in the vision and committed wholeheartedly to it. Oklahoma Baptist University partnered with us to connect high schools to them through our core general education courses (20 courses we built). This was huge. We really only needed one dedicated partner, and they caught the vision. Southwest Baptist and Kingswood University have since joined as well. 

Oklahoma Baptist is also launching Raley Collge with us, an idea about which we have been in conversation with other schools as well. In this approach, students live in the dorms with the other students but take almost all of their general education courses with us at a lower tuition rate. They get an AA degree at the end of two years.

The other key partner was Kingswood University. Together, we have launched Kingswood Learn, a gift of free micro-courses to the Wesleyan Church. These courses are great by well-known Wesleyans across the church, and churches/individuals can upload courses to the platform as well. I believe that this will quickly become a repository of the best of the Wesleyan Church and a go-to place for resources.

2. I did manage to publish some things this year. I had a three-pronged strategy: 1) self-publishing, 2) Udemy, and 3) YouTube. 

Udemy
I put a Hebrew course on Udemy which, all in all, has done pretty well (over 100 students). The Romans course I put up has not done as well.

YouTube
I added over 1000 subscribers on YouTube. My best post was Merry Christmas Algebra, which has almost had 1000 viewers this month. My work has been quite absorbing in the final part of the year and sapped nearly every last bit of my time. As a result, my posting fell off pretty dramatically these last couple months.

Publishing
I did manage to have one book published in the official way: Explanatory Notes on Hebrews. I don't have analytics to know how it is doing.

I am most happy with some of my self-publishing ventures this year. 

Wesleyan Theology
After several years of waiting, I finally edited my notes on Wesleyan theology and published them. I am very proud of these. I also used tools to translate them into Spanish, actually submitting the ethics book in Spanish today, just under the wire.

• Christian Ethics: Wesleyan-Arminian Reflections (January 30)
• Wesleyan-Arminian Reflections on Christian Theology and Ethics (February 4)
• A Wesleyan-Arminian Systematic Theology (February 27)
• Teología Sistemática: Reflexiones Arminiano-Wesleyanas (September 4)
• Ética Cristiana: Reflexiones Wesleyano-Arminianas (December 31)

Explanatory Notes

In addition to the Hebrews volume above, I also published some Explanatory Notes on the Resurrection Narratives of the Gospels:

• Explanatory Notes on Jesus' Resurrection (April 8)

Chat GPT

I experimented a little with AI this year. I was disappointed that my explorations did not get more interest than they did. I haven't given up.

• Chats About God: A Novel Seeking Faith (May 12)
• Plato's Republic (with condescending remarks) (May 27)
• A Pastor's Brief Guide to Business (June 18)

Prophecy

Finally, my mother was quite keen for me to publish a book her father had written in 1960:

• Foundational and Fundamental Truth Concerning the Coming of the Lord (May 2)

3. I remain grateful for the Lord's graciousness to me. God has been faithful. Angie has mostly recovered from her accident in 2022. These have been humbling days for me, but I hope they have brought clarity to who I am and what is important.

The Week in Review (December 30, 2023)

1. This week of course has included Christmas. I apologize for being one of those sad souls who dread Christmas. The expense has often been overwhelming. I am not good at finding pleasing presents. There are sometimes tensions with broader family. The whole event is the most stressful part of the year for me. I always breathe a breath of relief on Christmas evening. I realize the true meaning of Christmas is lost in all that, but I'm being honest. I have to think I am not alone.

I'd almost like to have a separate day set aside mid-year to celebrate Jesus' birth.

2. On Thursday, I traveled to Cincinnati for FOLLOW, the youth convention my denomination has every four years. I'm still there as I type. This has been really fun. It comes home to me how many youth pastors and pastors I've taught over the years. These are my friends, and it's good to see them.

I'm here with the launch of Kingswood Learn, a free resource for the Wesleyan Church that Kingswood and Campus Edu have partnered to provide. Feel free to sign up and enroll in some micro-courses (5-10 hours each). I'm one of the instructional designers behind the lessons in many of these courses. Let me just point out a few:

• There is a condensed version of Bud Bence's church history course.
• There is a condensed version of Dave Smith's inductive Bible study course
• There is a semi-autobiographical micro-course featuring JoAnne Lyon called, "Saying 'Yes' to the Holy Spirit."

3. I am pondering an increasing sense that the Wesleyan Church as a denomination is devolving toward a connection. I would say this trend is largely fueled by Boomer leaders associated with large churches. Many of them are afraid of what has happened in the UMC. They don't like the Trust Clause that says church property belongs to the denomination. They don't like paying the denominational "tithe" that funds schools and central administration. They also have a more Baptistic ecclesiology.

I'm trying to be objective. I think the idea that a connection of churches would retain a coherent Wesleyan identity, that we would still have Follow and The Gathering and common ordination standards and Global Partners and organized church planting and schools that retained a Wesleyan identity seems unlikely to me over the long term. Our schools would go their own way, whatever that is. Small churches would fizzle away without support. Large churches would do their own thing as they pretty much are now, largely Baptist by another name. There would be little funding for current denominational events or initiatives.

We'll see what happens. I think it might take a very intentional effort to reverse the current trajectory. It may already be too late. The Trust Clause would have to stay. The "tithe" would need to stay. District leadership would probably have to be balanced back away from large churches. There would need to be more submission to the denomination's general leadership, whose power is weaker than it has ever been since the denomination was founded in 1968.

What do you think?

Merry Christmas (December 25, 2023)

Merry Christmas all!

I woke up with the words from Longfellow's 1863 poem on my mind. I posted three stanzas on Facebook:

I heard the bells on Christmas day,
Their old familiar carols play
And mild and sweet their songs repeat
Of peace on Earth, good will to men

And in despair I bowed my head
"There is no peace on Earth, " I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on Earth, good will to men

Then rang the bells more loud and deep
God is not dead, nor doth He sleep
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on Earth, good will to men

This is my wish for the new year. The world is crazy right now, but it could get crazier. Praying that cooler heads prevail in this new year. I keep asking myself what I could do in my world to build peace.

2. I missed my Saturday review. I feel like I've been busier these last couple weeks than at any time in my life. We are rollling out Kingswood Learn. Check it out!

I built the "innards" for several of these: church history with Bud Bence, the brief guides to the Old and New Testaments, theology of the body, JoAnne Lyon's "Saying 'Yes' to the Holy Spirit, Dave Smith's How to Study the Bible, and more. I may have put too much work into them, but I saw it as a service to the church. To me it was important.

3. Nice to have all my children home for Christmas. Angie did have a wee bout of COVID but is coming out of it in time for Christmas day. I have tested negative so far and feel fine. Praying the same for the rest of the family.

4. I'm off to FOLLOW the rest of the week, the every-other-year youth convention of the Wesleyan Church. Hope to see many former students.

Merry Christmas all!

The Week in Review (December 15, 2023)

1. The first semester of Campus' dual enrollment program ended today. It all clicked rather quickly in late summer and we ended with over fifty high school students in it. That's pretty amazing for such short notice. We're now gearing up for a spring semester.

Here are some of the key points:

• We had 10 options for fall. Now there will be close to twenty for spring.
• You can now choose between three colleges to transcribe the credit: Oklahoma Baptist, Southwest Baptist, and Kingswood University.
• OBU is launching Raley College in the spring where you live in the dorm but take online classes through Campus.

In short, things are really ramping up.

2. I spent the bulk of the week on a "concept" micro-course to show how some resources the CCCU has on "sexual and gender minorities" might be put together for professional development. This was quite a task because it required processing a constellation of materials they have and trying to simplify them. I'll be interested to know what they think.

3. I've been burning the candle at both ends for work with little time for my own project. Let me just mention that I have two Christmas books you might consider.

First, there was Gabriel's Diary: The Incarnation. This was the first novel I ever actually finished, back in 2017. It tells the story of the incarnation from Gabriel's perspective.

Then the second I did last year: Explanatory Notes on Jesus' Birth. This is my old style verse-by-verse commentary, covering the birth stories in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2, with the first part of John 1 thrown in.

4. Sophie's home. She finished up her quick trip around Europe with Copenhagen. Then she returned to Edinburgh to pack up her stuff. Now she's back in the states again. Now she is conspiring to figure out how to get back to Europe. 

The Week in Review (December 9, 2023)

Oh, how the weeks fly.

1. My daughter Sophie has had a very enjoyable week traveling Europe before her soon return to America. From Amsterdam, she meant to go by train to Strasbourg and then to Munich. God or chaos theory intervened. A railway strike kept her from France, leaving her to look around the scintillating Karlsruhe (sarcasm). Then unexpected snow and frigid temperatures stopped her train journey at Ulm (it has a spectacular minster which I don't believe she was able to see in the end). Finally, after a night staying warm on a parked train with free coffee, she actually had to take a taxi from Ulm to Munich, thankfully at Deutschebahn's expense.

I have a strangely clear memory of most of these locations from my European days first in the 90s and then on my two sabbaticals in Germany in 2004 and 2011. The privileges of another life when I was a scholar. We spent late 2011/early 2012 in Munich, so Sophie revisited some of the old haunts from our time there, including the Gisele Gymnasium where Tom and she went to school.

Last Friday, Ken Blake in Munich unexpectedly found out he was in danger of a heart attack. God graciously drew attention to the situation before it became really serious. The long and the short of it is that Sophie was able to visit with the Blakes for several hours the afternoon he came home from the hospital. We attended their Wesleyan church when we were there on sabbatical.

She then spent a couple days in Vienna, another place we had visited in 2011. Then on to Copenhagen, a place still on my bucket list. I provided her with a few tales of Soren Kierkegaard and Niels Bohr. I'm so thankful she has been able to do this and that God has kept her safe.

2. I had the idea to make a video of a fun algebra ditty a former Greek student once showed me. It takes an equation and reworks it into the form of "merry x-mas." I put it online Wednesday and it already has over 600 hits. It will probably turn out to be the most successful YouTube video I've made.

I haven't had much time for my science and math goals, unfortunately. Just too busy.

3. The Kingswood Learn platform with free micro-courses for the church has been shared with a beta group but will launch officially at the end of the year. I will make sure that you know how to sign up when the time comes. I've finished my part of Bud Bence's "Brief Guide to Church History" and David Smith's "How to Read the Bible." This week I've slipped in Eric Hallett's "Missional Ministry Development." This resource is going to be huge. And your church can upload things too!

4. I am so very grateful to be doing what I'm doing. The young people I work with are so smart, so sharp, so talented. They dance circles around me in so many things. I am grateful to be part of what we're doing and, hopefully, I'm doing my part too. 

The Week in Review (December 2, 2023)

So we enter the final month of 2023. This week blew by. I find myself looking back and wondering where it went. Such it would seem is most of life for many of us. We wake up one morning and we are old, and we can't quite figure out where our lives went. I am not 60, but I do find myself feeling old on several counts.

The main event of my week was a quick trip to Dallas to ACSI headquarters. My organization and ACSI have been working together for a couple years now. We are doing a lot of work currently with Christian high schools, so an ongoing relationship seems appropriate. 

I'm effectively the chief academic officer for Campus Edu, so there was a lot of "make sure everyone and every course gets across the finish line" work this week. Checking in on students, checking in on professors. A little teaching here and there. Not a lot of time for my own projects. We are on a deadline to get dozens of micro-courses launched for Kingswood University by the first of the year, so that is consuming a lot of time. I'm working on several higher ed courses for spring too. A lot to do.

My daughter Sophie is doing a quick once around Europe this week. She's been through Amsterdam and is now in Germany. Strikes and snow are messing with her nicely laid-out plan a bit. She's bringing back memories. On this score, she's reliving some of my life.

AI is coming. It's only here in a taste. I know new millionaires are in the making. I won't be one of them. I suppose AGI might make that money meaningless anyway. We'll see. I wouldn't mind AI taking over the world. Just as long as I could convince it of the right values. :-)

That's it for this week in review. This weekend? Hopefully a couple more chapters of AI translation. A bit of work on a biology course and a missional ministry microcourse. Probably should slip a run in there. Grading would be responsible. Blessings to you all.