The Week in Review (1-25-25)

1. It was a cold week, with several days hovering around minus temperatures. I don't know if it's accurate, but I read somewhere that as the Arctic warms and melts, there is less containment of cold temperatures to the north, causing them to seep down further south. Reminds me of the movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004).

I ended up ordering another chicken coop, the third real one although we have two small coops and two I've tried to build. The problem with mine and the small ones is that they aren't particularly good in zero-degree weather. The result is that I have a number of more vulnerable chickens in my garage, which is far from ideal.

2. My work is always interesting. We have used AI to translate a number of Kingswood Learn microcourses into Spanish. It's fun to see Bud Bence or Dave Smith speaking fluent Spanish in manipulated videos.

Then of course there is my usual overseeing of the courses we offer -- and the ones I teach as well. There are student issues, helicopter parents. The usual.

3. I took my Wesleyan systematic theology and reformated it as a new iteration: What Christians Believe -- In Simple Terms. It had one sale on the day I put out a Facebook ad. But I took the ad down. I've done that several times. Create an ad. Be disappointed with the initial sales. Take it down. I continue to get a trickle of daily purchases of A Biblical Argument for Women in Ministry and Leadership.

My problem has always been having too many ideas. I probably have 10 books in progress right now. I drive my wife and kids crazy pitching ideas to them.

4. It has been the first week of the Trump administration. Here are some of the developments I've seen.

• He officially defined gender as male and female for the nation.
• He pulled out of the Paris accord in relation to climate change. He pulled out of the World Health Organization.
• Some of his nominees were approved, perhaps most notably Pete Hegseth at the DOD.
• He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
• He tried to purchase Greenland, but apparently it's not for sale.
• He is dismantling DEI progams. There have been extensive movements against any programs that are favorable to minorities. Here in Indiana, the new governor has defunded Martin College, the only primarily African-American college in the state.
• He has frozen foreign aid.
• He was very upset when the bishop at the National Cathedral asked him to show compassion toward immigrants and LGBTQ individuals. He blasted her on social media, as did many others.
• He declassified the files on the JFK assassination.
• The inauguration was taken indoors ostensibly because of the cold. The featured guests were billionaire social media moguls.
• He pardoned all the January 6 rioters, including those who harmed police officers.
• There's a proposed Constitution amendment in the House to allow Trump to have a third term. People are joking about Obama running if that's the case. I can't see it going the distance.
• Security details for people like Fauci have been revoked with words approving violence toward him. I saw some social media from prominent Christians calling for the hanging of Deborah Birx.
• Trump noted that while Biden had pre-emptively pardoned his family and others, he hadn't pardoned himself and thus, presumably, was fair game for prosecution.
• Trump revoked the security clearances of all the intelligence individuals (51 individuals) who thought that the Hunter Biden laptop story bore the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.

Some of these are predictable. Some are more significant than others. Here are some perhaps to watch more carefully.

• ICE has gone into action detaining undocumented immigrants. There are reports of citizens getting swept up with the undocumented with a kind of "guilty till proven innocent" approach. Trump has given the green light to detain at churches and schools. ICE agents can now show up at your worship service to detain whoever they suspect may be undocumented.
• The border was declared a national emergency, allowing the use of the military. The ease with which the military can be called up is a little disturbing.
• By executive order, there is an attempt to undo birthright citizenship. This of course is unconstitutional and probably won't stand, but we'll see what the Supreme Court does. 
• He has abolished rules against discrimination. If you don't want to hire a woman or a person of color just because they're a woman or person of color, you don't have to. The tone does not seem to be one of "everyone should be treated equal" but one of "let's go back to the good old days when white men did whatever they wanted." 
• I don't think most Americans realize how much good the federal government does in helping people in disasters and those on the edges. We take it for granted.  
• Many internal checks and balances are being removed. Last night, 12 independent inspectors were fired in the government. 
• Research on health-related problems like cancer and diabetes has been halted at the NIH.

The evangelical world is over the moon. Franklin Graham's prayer at the inauguration was incredibly celebratory, and I can see the absolute glee among many in my circles on Facebook as well. I've been mulling this over a lot. The only item above that seems overtly religious is the definition of gender. I know that some Bible colleges have struggled with Biden regulations relating to discrimination.

The only conclusion I can reach is that my fellow evangelicals have been convinced of many things that are not specifically Christian but evoke a concern for justice. For example, many Christians have been convinced that COVID was a hoax, that the deep state is nefariously controlling the country, that innocent people have been wrongly prosecuted, and that the government is evil. That would explain the sense of triumph over evil.

The Week in Review (12/7/24)

1. I went to the funeral of Herbert Mohler this week. He was probably my Dad's closest cousin, at least in the last decades of my Dad's life. I remember my Dad being very fond of his German Baptist cousin Mary Louise as well. I seem to remember "favorite cousin" being said of her at one point.

Herbert was just a good guy. Witty like my Dad's Miller cousins in general. Faithful. Calm. Accepting of his lot and fate. An unsung hero. Wild secretary skills -- again, like many of the Millers and my father and grandmother Esther included. I met Herbert for coffee at Richard's several times when I was working at IWU.

The funeral was well-attended for a 96-year-old man. Good old Indiana folk.

2. Anderson University was downgraded by Fitch to a B- last week. Sharply declining enrollment. Very significant deficits. Probably dramatic moves are in order. Rough days are ahead as we hit the demographic cliff of 2026 we've been talking about now for several years.

Campus Edu is a potential Hail Mary for institutions like these. They could effectively "insource" their gen eds through us. I don't know enough about their situation to do precise math, but I figure we could save Anderson over 2 million dollars a year.

3. I was thinking this week about the brief South Korean attempt to invoke martial law. I'm sure that was scary for the South Koreans. It reminded me of some ideas I remember floating around in my teens and early 20s.

After my mother died a couple months ago, we went through her library, and I was reminded of some of the books that were hot in certain circles in the late 80s/early 90s. The Unseen Hand in 1985. Constance Cumbey's, A Planned Deception in 1985. A little earlier in 1971, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. These books were a bit scary to me back in the day.

The idea was that there were elite groups secretly meeting behind the scenes plotting to take-over the country and the world. For example, I remember the idea of creating a crisis so they could call a new Constitutional convention to rewrite the Constitution. I remember hearing the concept of "change agents." You manufacture a crisis and then use the crisis to bring in your solution (that your cabal had preplanned).

Of course this wasn't a new concept. Hitler may have set fire to the Reichstag so he would have an excuse to accuse and arrest his opponents. Not too long thereafter, he effectively dismissed the Parliament. South Korean's failed move by the president this week reminded me of the conspiracy literature I grew up with.

Anyway, I'm glad none of those things actually happened so many decades ago. 

4. The CEO of United Health was assassinated this week. One theory is that he hired his own killer. The response has been intriguing. Let's just say there wasn't a lot of public sadness or sympathy.

The state of American culture is a matter of great sadness to me. We are being swept away by a river of hate, misinformation, and genuine malintent, and there seems like nothing a person like me can do about it. It feels like we are self-destructing from within. God will let us self-destruct.

The Weeks in Review

1. It's been three weeks now since my mother passed. She lived a long, good life and her passing was peaceful. It's more just weird. This morning at 11 is a show she used to listen to called Tinyberg Tales. I won't be calling to ask how it went.

The readership of my reflections on her life was surprising. It helped to have some notes from her early years. I may combine them with the notes from my dad's life. Together their lives covered a century, 1924-2024. I don't expect a large audience of buyers. :-)

2. I've had a lot of success on YouTube with Hebrew, so I wrote a book that took the approach I had used at Wesley Seminary and presented it in book form. It goes with a Udemy course I created in parallel. I have only promoted it on YouTube because the women in ministry/leadership book has been doing well (for me) with Facebook advertising so I didn't want to taint that well. First real "success" I've had with Facebook advertising, although I'm only making a few dollars a day when all is said and done.

3. In early July I made my yearly trip to Silver Lake Camp to be the Bible teacher (alongside none other than A.J. Thomas). We went through the book of Acts this year. I'm convinced that my sense of Acts (and in fact many parts of the Bible) would be interesting to a lot of people if I could find the right way to present it. I've had this blog since 2004 and of course any number of people have engaged it, but it has not had a broad punch -- not when you think of the likes of Nijay Gupta or Michael Bird or James McGrath.

I did start a new project this morning (not another one!). I'm titling it, "As Told by the Women: The Story of the Bible." Most readers are women. I thought it might be interesting to write a novelized overview of the Bible using the voices of key women throughout as the narrators, so to speak. Fourteen chapters. On your mark, get set, go.

4. I do have a writing schedule, but most days I don't get much to it. Sundays, I've been working on a project relating to the book of Revelation. Mondays I'm writing some notes from my life. Tuesday is Science and Scripture, a course I teach for Houghton that starts in a week. Wednesday is how to study the Bible. Thursday is my philosophy. Friday is my family story. Saturday is math and science. Like I said, these projects languish on.

For reading, I got three books this week to read. Miranda Cruz's Faithful Politics is now out. Her book is going to do well. I also started Salman Khan's Brave New Words on how AI is going to impact education. Finally, I bought Brant Pitre's Jesus and Divine Christology. I expect I'll find it driven more by sentiment than objectivity like so many scholarly works seem to me these days.

5. I went to Oklahoma Baptist last week for a day trip. We may work on some new online courses with them. Working on finishing up the Church Leadership ordination course for Kingwood Learn. Kingswood Learn now has over 1000 learners on the platform. Five of the ordination core courses are there now (Intro to Theology, Inductive Bible Study, NT Survey, Wesleyan Church History, Theology of Holiness). You can watch and read them for free. You can pay $350 and get the credit toward ordination licensure. Or you can pay $900 and get 3 hours of academic credit.

Kingswood has been a superb partner with Campus. For example, my daughter is taking a college biology class through the partnership. I'm teaching an ethics class for a student at Cairn University through Kingswood. Their on-campus enrollment is currently small (hindered in no small part by the quotas the Canadian government abruptly imposed this year), but they train more Wesleyan ministers online than any of the Wesleyan schools.

6. Last weekend I blew through Brian Simmon's Passion Translation study notes on Luke. He's revising it because it was a little too much for Bible Gateway and they took it down, I think. He's trying to be a little more scrupulous in a revision. It is a fun paraphrase and I don't have any problem with them for several hermeneutical reasons. 

I have two main critiques as a scholar. First, he "word-fallacies" all over the place (etymology, overload...). Second, he follows the late Lamsa in thinking the Syriac is a direct line back to Jesus in Aramaic. Although he's a true believer, it's actually a great marketing device. You give readers the impression that you have a secret line to the real Jesus AND it lets you claim that all the verses and passages left out in modern translations are actually original. However, pretty much all scholars think that the Syriac is later.

Onward!

The Weeks in Review (June 30, 2024)

1. The most significant event in my life these last two weeks was the tweet that went viral. Thus far, 153,000 views on Twitter and 826 shares on Facebook. I had been working on a Kingswood Learn course on women in ministry and leadership and jotted down my notes in that post. You just never know what's going to go viral.

Here's the post:
____________________________________

I affirm women in all roles of ministry leadership on the following basis:

1. Women arguably play every such role in Scripture except one. That's the OT priestly role that Hebrews 7 says is definitively fulfilled in Christ (so doesn't apply to this conversation).

They are apostles (Junia), deacons (Phoebe), teachers (Priscilla), and arguably overseers and elders (Lydia, Priscilla, Nympha). They are supreme political and military leaders (Deborah) and the highest spiritual authority in the land (Huldah).

2. Theologically, women in ministry leadership reflects redemption from the Fall (a clear Christian and kingdom value) and is a natural consequence of the resurrection and Pentecost (Acts 2:17; Gal. 3:28). It also reflects the kingdom trajectory, where women are not "given" in marriage (Mark 12:25).

3. Counterarguments are either unbiblical or single-text prooftexts taken out of context. For example, the Bible never connects the question of husband headship to this question (thus those arguments are not biblical). 1 Corinthians 14 cannot be about ministry because it assumes 1 Corinthians 11 where women speak in prayer and prophetically speak in worship.

1 Timothy 2:12 is the only verse that even sounds like it would prohibit female leadership and 1) it is about the husband-wife relationship, 2) the verb authentein is strong and shouldn't apply to men or women in a marital relationship, 3) parts of the verse are unclear (women saved through childbearing), arguably cultural (birth order), and possibly situational (Artemis cult, false-teaching at Ephesus). In short, this verse is unclear and exceptional. You never base a theology on a single verse, especially when your interpretation would conflict with the whole tenor of biblical theology and practice.

1 Timothy 3 assumes that most overseers and deacons will be male (and they have been) but says nothing about precluding women as overseers or deacons.

4. Women have played leadership and ministry roles in the early centuries of the church (e.g., bishop as late as the 800s). The Wesleyan Methodist Church supported women's ordination as early as the 1850s.

5. It is the experience of thousands of women that they are called to ministry (which makes perfect sense). Be careful not to oppose God. Attributing to the devil what is the work of the Spirit is blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
______________________________________

2. Because the tweet/post went viral, I quickly wrote up the innards of the argument, one of course that I have been refining for the last twenty years. Here is the book that resulted (picture above).

3. I did finish the microcourse on women in ministry leadership. It should be public on Kingswood Learn tomorrow or Tuesday (I'll try to come back and insert link). I'm the tour guide, but it features JoAnne Lyon, Christy Lipscomb, Carla Working, Miranda Cruz, and Katie Lance.

4. I finished a course for Kingswood Learn and Campus toward ordination, Wesleyan Church History and Discipline, featuring Bud Bence and Mark Gorveatte. It should be up this week as well, I think. You will be able to take it for free. It will be a modest sum if you want it for ordination ($350 Canadian, I think). Then an upcharge of $550 from there to get academic credit. This is the kind of thing I think colleges/seminaries should be doing to influence, get name recognition, and attract students.

5. I had a chapter in an Oxford book come out this week, "Hebrews -- Contested Issues." This article was finished about a year ago and commissioned about five years ago. It's my latest scholarly work. It represents the state of Hebrews research circa 2023.

6. Finally, yesterday was the Crossroads District Conference. Mark Gorveatte ran an extremely tight ship. A model for District Conference. 3 hours with a break.

7. This week I hope to finish a Theology of Holiness course with Chris Bounds. Would love to publish my own version, previously started and mentioned here as well.

The Week in Review (June 14, 2024)

1. It's been a tiring week. On Monday, a colleague and I traveled to Nashville and back to talk with a great church about some possible ventures. I met some people with some real spiritual charisma. They live on a whole different plane than I do. I often wonder what it is that sets them apart. Sharpness. Confidence. Obviously people gain insight and benefit from them and keep coming back for more. 

At the same time, they're really just ordinary people. They can feel intimidated too. Fascinating.

2. On Wednesday I flew to Florida to visit and help with my mother. 98 years old. But after Monday and getting up really early on Wednesday, I was obliterated. I return to Indiana this weekend.

3. I worked some this week on the side toward my publishing ventures. It's so difficult. Very discouraged again. I write and I write and it's usually pretty good stuff. But I just can't quite get over the marketing hurdle. What's more, I seem to get a lot of jeers from Facebook when I market broadly. A lot of negativity toward Christianity out there it would seem.

4. Meanwhile, I haven't crossed the finish line on Wesleyan Church History, Theology of Holiness, or the Women in Ministry Leadership microcourse. There aren't enough hours in the weekend to finish more than one if even that. I'll probably aim for the women in leadership one.

Good night folks. 

The Weeks in Review (June 8, 2024)

1. Two weeks have passed. All projects continue. Biblical Hebrew for the Novice is almost done. Finished editing the "Rural Church Ministry" microcourse for Kingswood. Almost done with Wesleyan Church History and Discipline and Theology of Holiness for ordination with Campus and Kingswood.

My cousin Carl Shepherd got married yesterday. Angie and I went to his reception. Saw old family acquaintances there, including two of my Shepherd cousins. Headed to Florida to be with my mother this week. May work a little on family history with her. Blogged through it once upon a time. She just turned 98 last month.

2. A couple deaths of significance this past couple weeks. Alan Miller, who used to do a lot of PR for IWU, suddenly passed. Good guy. Very loyal. Wrote a history of the Barnes presidency that was kept from publication because some thought it was too explicit about some people. I think it's sitting in the IWU archives. I hope it is eventually published.

This is a dynamic that is a little unfortunate. The real opinions and history of things sometimes dies with people because of the desire not to offend some of the living participants in such events. For example, I have strong opinions about the last ten years at IWU and Houghton that may not ever see the light of day because of politeness. I suspect I have been annoying with some of the material I've blogged about people like David Riggs, Kerry Kind, or Keith Drury but I have wanted to preserve my memories of them and events involving them.

Back when I blogged through the history of Houghton University, I stopped at President Dan Chamberlain. His was the second death of great significance these last two weeks. I believe his presidency overall was the high mark of Houghton's history.  As I posted on Facebook, I never met him, but I admire the accomplishments of his time there. Here are some of his accomplishments:

• Under his presidency, I believe Houghton solidified its identity as the Wesleyan Wheaton. It remains a quality academic institution today, although it has faced invasive cuts in programs and faculty these last 15 years. 
• He gave the campus its current look, building the Paine Science building, the Chamberlain classroom building, and famously moving Fancher Hall in 1987 to its current location after tearing down Gao girls dorm.
• London Honors and the Tanzania programs started under his presidency. The Tanzania program was ended my last year in town. London Honors thankfully remains.
• He significantly expanded the Buffalo program, which went strong under him. It moved under Dr. Mullin, and I believe has closed under Dr. Lewis.
• He brought Houghton to its now mythical 1200 enrollment. It hasn't come anywhere close for years. When I left, I believe it had experienced something like 12 years of consistent enrollment decline. I believe last year it managed to creep a smidge back above 800, which is where it was when I arrived before COVID.
• The death of six students in a car accident in 1981 left a lasting impact on the campus. A monument in front of the Campus Center remains to this day in their honor. 

I wonder if lessons for Houghton could be learned by examining his presidency. It's of course easy to Monday quarterback. It just seems like Houghton had a certain magic during his time. Those were the days of Tim Fuller, for example. He would have made a nice college president somewhere, I suspect.

3. It is interesting to watch the Global Methodist Church wrestle with the question of whether to put "inerrancy" into its Articles of Religion. The online journal Firebrand has had several position pieces. Almost 20 years ago, I blogged on the Wesleyan sense of inerrancy. The word entered the Wesleyan Methodist Articles in the early 1950s under the urging of Stephen Paine (former president of Houghton). That was the era when evangelicalism was strongly pushing the idea. It was not in the more revivalist Manual of the Pilgrims.

My own sense is that the term has a lot of epistemological baggage from the twentieth century. I prefer the Asbury/Lausanne wording that the Bible is "without error in all that it affirms." In my blog pieces, I argued that this is in effect what Wesleyans mean by the term. We've never defined it narrowly. In fact, it is very difficult to define narrowly because, once you get into the details, it gets rather complicated in its clarification.

The late Bob Lyon was asked to affirm inerrancy to work at Asbury. He initially resisted the term given the culture wars over such things that were going on in the 1970s. He was asked, "If it means this and this and this and this, can you affirm it." He said yes, but is that really what people are meaning by the term? That was enough -- they just needed him to say Shibboleth -- and they hired him.

I thought Collins had an interesting point about the Evangelical Theological Society in the piece I linked above. ETS is overwhelmingly Reformed and Calvinist. Many broader Wesleyan scholars who are orthodox believers and affirm the truthfulness and authority of Scripture are excluded because they do not feel comfortable with the term as ETS defines it. I myself have never joined because the feel of it has always seemed off to me as a Wesleyan. For example, it is a sea of complementarian men, with a fairly small number of women. It also has seemed for many years as if the main preoccupation of ETS is who to kick out next. 

In any case, I have had no trouble affirming inerrancy as a Wesleyan. We have never really fought over the term. The only ruckus over it that I know about is when a faculty member at Houghton was let go on the pretext of it in the 90s. That was one moment of Chamberlain's presidency of some interest. He was apparently a gentle soul, and he assigned a friend of mine to take care of the situation while he himself went off to China for a few months. The person he assigned to take care of it was eventually ousted by the faculty, perhaps in large part in revenge for doing the dirty work of getting rid of the faculty member.

4. In related matters, it would be nice to write a little book on epistemology before I die.

P.S. As a footnote, Jurgen Moltmann also died this week. He was all the rage among some of my friends at Asbury. He never gelled with me probably for several reasons. 1) I didn't speak his language and no one really translated him for me. If ChatGPT had been around, maybe I would have taken more interest. 2) he emphasized social action now in anticipation of the coming kingdom. That wasn't a page I was on in the 80s, I don't think. 3) He depicted the cross as the suffering of God. While I think the cross does show God's identification with human pain and suffering, I don't think God "feels" anything. Patripassianism remains a heresy for me. I remain a scholastic when it comes to God.

The Week in Review (May 25, 2004) -- including a new venture

Another week has passed. The biggest thing this week was the shooting of a micro-course for Kingswood: "Women in Ministry Leadership." It features several key female voices in the Wesleyan Church with me as the tour guide. As I finished, I wondered if God might use it widely. It has great potential, I think. It should be publicly available in a few weeks.

My greatest contribution to this point I would have said was Wesley Seminary, but things just seem to get worse and worse. My friends tell me I need to just wash my hands and stop fretting over it. Maybe God will do a miracle.

My current writing project is Biblical Hebrew for the Novice. It's a 15-chapter tools approach to Hebrew with a Udemy course and YouTube videos to back it up. I'm desperate to finish it but also have a day job. Here's a video that gives a sample of the approach. 

Another new project is a Udemy course I'm calling, "How to Publish Christian Books." Here's the promo video. There are two parts to this venture. First, there is the course/series of videos telling how to do it, sharing the insights I've learned from all these years. I'll be sharing these on Patreon until the Udemy course is ready. They will be available under a new tier of subscribers there with one video coming out a week. Tomorrow's video will be on choosing a book size.

However, I'm also offering to publish your book for you. For $100 for each 100 pages, I will edit and make suggestions on content. Then I will make it available on Amazon, Kindle, Audible, and other e-book formats (as you wish, paperback and/or hardback). From then on, I only ask 10% of the net profit.

Since this is a side hustle, I can't take on a lot of book projects, but I can start if you are interested in the conversation.

Week in Review (May 18, 2012)

1. I was privileged to be invited to a think tank group called "UNMUTE" this week hosted by Wesley Seminary. I get the impression that some of my recent critiques of the academy have not been a delight to some (e.g., the Keith Drury posts, a LinkedIn post). So, I count it a privilege to be included.

The first day involved four speakers from Lausanne. Their job was to set out some of the key global issues of the day. The first was global migration. The second was creation care. The third related to the children and family of the world. The final was issues of justice and freedom. These were nice presentations by individuals coming from India, Manila, and other places. 

The second day we heard some futurism. A very well-informed IWU individual spoke on AI. This was the day after ChatGPT 4o dropped. Vernon Rainwater spoke on media and technology. I spoke on education.

Then the final day was design thinking -- what can be done to synthesize projects that bring all these things together.

2. There were a couple interesting results. I'm not particularly a fan of the design thinking process. Two years ago, when I taught an MBA class for Houghton on design thinking, I concluded that design thinking was a process invented so that uncreative, overly structured people could follow steps that would result in innovation. However, if you are already creative, I'm not sure it gets you as far as simply being yourself in collaboration with other creative people.

3. I've been working on a project called Biblical Hebrew for the Novice. It's not going as quickly as I'd hoped. I remain discouraged about my publishing venture in general. AI also keeps upping the ante. The videos on YouTube are getting better and better, and I'm falling further and further behind.

4. I did try a new YouTube strategy: longer videos. I'm currently giving snippets of the Biblical Theology I taught at IWU for the KERN program. I plan on dropping one on creation tomorrow. 

Week in Review (May 4, 2024)

Just a quick pulse through my week. In the last couple weeks, I've finished writing a biology course, a writing course focusing on persuasion, and a theology course. Now ramping up for courses in Wesleyan Church history, theology of holiness, and a microcourse on women in ministry leadership. A couple other really interesting markets in the works as well.  

Keith Drury's memorial was Monday. It's truly staggering the impact of this man. I feel most sad of course for Sharon, David, and John. It leaves a call for us to continue his legacy in mentoring young people, mentoring leaders, and being a faithful voice to the church.

My focus this week is Biblical Hebrew for the Novice. I'm taking my "Hebrew for Ministry" notes and converting them to a book, set of YouTube videos, and Udemy course. It's fifteen chapters, so probably will take a couple weeks. It's all in my head, but getting it on paper is always the effort. Keith used to enjoy it when I'd say the book was all in my head and that it just needed to get down on paper.

Have a great week!

Week in Review (March 23, 2024)

1. A lot of course writing this week again. Worked on a couple Kingswood microcourses. Here's one on Leading a Bible Study that I did the write-up on. Continued to work on a second-semester composition course, a Lifespan Development course, a Biology course, and more.

2. I largely paused my ads this week. My sense is that most sales occur from Thursday to Sunday, so I edited and turned a version of my ads back on yesterday. The ads do well. They get people to my landing page. People move from my landing page to a sales page. Good conversions there. A number of people even go into my Shopify check-out. It's only $9.99 for five e-books. I sent a couple follow-up emails to those who have already signed up too. 

No sales... well, except for some family members.

3. I pushed into the paperback versions this week. Most people still prefer paperbacks to ebooks. That may be part of my problem. You can ship paperbacks directly to people through Amazon at author cost. The problem is that it can take up to 10 days. 

I've rediscovered Lulu Press. They were the first press I self-published with. I thought Amazon would have put them out of business, but they have an impressive worldwide printing network. I had high hopes they would be the ticket. The quality of book product they facilitate is better than KDP on Amazon, IMO.

BUT their shipping price is outrageous, IMO. AND they take as long or longer than Amazon to ship. My sense is that most people in my shoes keep a stock of their paperbacks and ship them themselves. This of course would require me to buy lots of copies of my books well in advance of selling them without any guarantee they would actually sell. I could do this and may slowly stock up over time. By the way, I could do this with books I have written with conventional publishers as well, selling them through Shopify.

3. One of the more interesting things to happen this week was an inquiry about translating my systematic theology into French. The question was whether I would be interested in giving a certain mission group in Africa permission to work on a translation. Of course, I am. But I also indicated that I could have it in French by Monday, given the wonders of AI translation. I may go ahead and do that even if they do their own.

I continue to be very proud of this book. I feel like it is more accessible than most theologies. I think it is more practical. I think it is more real. And there just aren't many Wesleyan options out there.

4. I have about 100 people in my Schenck Book Club. They signed up, so I send them a couple emails a week so far. The course I took suggested that three emails a week is not onerous because people only read them if they hit them at a good moment. I promised them a couple more books by Pentecost. These are 1) novella #4 in the Gabriel sequence: Gabriel's Diaries: The Earliest Church and 2) Explanatory Notes on Acts 1-12. So I have about 7 weeks to get those finished. But will anyone read them???

5. I don't know if I ever shared my four-prong marketing strategy for this year. 

• Self-publishing -- this is the core business, selling on Amazon and now Shopify
• YouTube videos -- video atoms live here
• Udemy courses -- the videos assemble into courses here; books support the courses
• Patreon -- videos also make their way here for followers

It's still a trickle, but I probably bring in $250 a month from these venues. Obviously, I'd like to see that number in the thousands but oh well.

I hope you find this mildly amusing. Have a great week!

Week in Review (March 16, 2024)

I have always hoped that the reason why my books haven't sold as well as some others was marketing. I'm sure this is not entirely the case. :-)

After over $100 in marketing (really hardly anything), I had only two sales through Facebook last weekend. That's an $80 loss on the ad itself. I was hoping it was because it wasn't a payday, but thus far this weekend, the ad hasn't garnered any more sales even among the 50 or so people who signed up for my email list.

Yesterday I started running another ad with another bundle. This is 5 e-books for $9.99. The books are:

• Gabriel's Diary: The Enthronement
• Gabriel's Diary: The Incarnation
• Gabriel's Diary: The Creation
• Explanatory Notes on Mark's Passion Week
• Explanatory Notes on Jesus' Resurrection

Same setup as the other. Free ebook to introduce you to the series which then leads you to the offer of four more ebooks for only $9.99. Five books in all for only $10. Pretty good deal! 

I didn't have the time to work too extensively on this ad sequence. The ad gets a good reaction (although at way too high a cost per click), and the conversion rate for getting people on my email list is very good. But once on the list, they don't seem to download the free ebook or purchase the bundle. I don't know if a larger ad spend would make any difference.

I'll confess that I find it very discouraging. I know people who've written pretty trivial stuff who are selling 1000s on their personality. I mean books that have almost nothing in them. They sell because people like the author as far as I can tell. It's their magnetism. I mean, I have some charisma, but I don't have THAT x factor.

2. A good work week. I did have an encounter that had me chuckling a little. Someone seemed to take umbrage at our sales pitch. They let us know in no uncertain terms that their online courses were excellent, their faculty excellent, and that we could learn some things from the way they did online. Maybe so. I don't know. It felt a little out of nowhere to me.

Academics are funny people. Sometimes you have to be able to laugh at yourself.

Weeks in Review (March 9, 2024)

1. Time for my weekly check-in and journal of sorts. Work continues to boom. Working with more and more high schools and more and more colleges. Of the Wesleyan colleges, only Kinsgwood is working with us currently, I've expressed earlier my sadness that so much good is being done around rather than with our Wesleyan schools. I anticipate a day when we will contribute to the success of schools in direct competition with our Wesleyan schools even though we tried and tried.

Kingswood is the big exception. These last two weeks, microcourses on Urban Church Planting with Troy Evans and Apologetics with Adam Blehm dropped. I did the write-up for the Apologetics microcourse. So many good things are underway with Kingswood in partnership with Campus. It could have been that way for all the Wesleyan schools.

2. A week ago I launched Ken Schenck Books. Eventually, I hope it will be a one-stop shop for all my books, both that I have published officially with publishers and all the books I have self-published. This may require me to stock up and ship my own books, although I can ship through Amazon. The problem is how long Amazon takes to deliver author copies. It's like 10 days.

About 6 months ago, I started a course on self-marketing your own self-published books. Unless you're a well-promoted author (which is a select few), there's no money to be made with the normal system of publishing. And there's no money to be made with simple self-publishing through Amazon. Similarly, simple advertising on Facebook is pointless. Unsurprisingly, the system is rigged for Amazon and Facebook to make money off your futile dreams.

It remains to be seen whether my new venture will go anywhere. One week in, it is not encouraging. I write on too deep and detailed a level for the average audience, which of course is where the sales primarily are. Here is a brief tour of my venture.

3. The venture starts with Facebook ads. Above is one that has received 154 likes and 26 shares. It has been seen by about 4000 people on an ad spend of less than $20 a day. That ad spend is probably too low -- it takes money to make money, after all.

As you can see, I then send them to a landing page where I try to get them to sign up for a free ebook and join the Ken Schenck Club, cleverly named. Over the last couple months, I wrote a book for just that purpose, The Spiritual War for the World. You can get the ebook version for free if you put your email in the box.

About 150 people have clicked on the ad link on Facebook. Facebook keeps begging me to let it set the parameters of the ad, but I tried to target people who like theology and philosophy. Also, I tried to limit it to Facebook and Instagram feeds rather than watering it down everywhere in Meta's universe. Then about 50 people have given me their emails. A 33% conversion rate isn't bad for that part.

4. Once you give me your email, of course, I try to sell you on getting three additional ebooks for $9.99. These are previous (e)books I've written in upgraded form: Chats about God, The Problem of Evil and Suffering, and Who Decides What the Bible Means? 

Out of the 4000, only 2 have made it that far. Quite discouraging. Hours and hours of effort. Probably $1500 in set-up. I haven't given up. In many ways, this is expected. But I can't exactly say I'm in Joyland.

For those who signed up but haven't gone for the ebook versions, I've created a paperback offer where I will send them some $44 dollars worth of Amazon books for $19. Since at this point it will take over a week for the paperbacks to arrive, I'm throwing in the ebooks to read while they're waiting. On paper, it's an $80 deal for less than $20. Less than 24 hours in, no takers yet.

The books are of course on heavy topics. Stay tuned. On Friday (d.v.) I plan to unveil another book combo with another FB ad. Maybe novellas will do better than the ontological argument and the problem of evil.

Weeks in Review (February 24, 2024)

I haven't posted for a month. Campus Edu is really heating up. Over 25 Christian high schools connected. Many colleges interested in using our gen eds. Biology course well underway in design. Working on more micro-courses with Kingswood every couple weeks. Busy, busy.

The week before the one that just ended was spent at the ABHE annual conference in Orlando. Many good connections made. Even though I have spent most of my career in the CCCU, the ABHE crowd has more of the feel of home to me, given where I was born and raised. There really is a grass-roots, down-to-earth feel of the group. The CCCU doesn't realize that it comes across as elite and foreign to most churches. It smells "liberal" because it is culturally different. A lot of schools with declining residential enrollment don't get this.

My attempt to advertise on Facebook came to a screeching halt a week ago yesterday. Facebook flagged my business accounts as suspicious, and I haven't managed to get them to reverse the decision to shut them down yet. In the meantime, this Shopify offer gives you a glimpse of what I was working toward. I fear I will have to incorporate as an LLC to get back in FB's good graces.

In the meantime, Amazon is offering to create audiobooks out of many of my self-published books. So I did. I'm particularly excited about the audiobook of my AI Living Paraphrase of the Gospel of John. I already liked the paraphrase I did, and I think a lot of people would like it too if they gave it a listen. Now the audiobook is a nice possibility.

I'm trying not to give up on my advertising venture. I've put an awful lot of work into it.

The Week in Review (January 22, 2024)

1. I missed Saturday's post, mostly because I was rushing to finish a draft of a psychology course for my work. One of the fun aspects of my job is helping various subject matter experts create courses on various subjects. I think I am uniquely suited for this role because I have such eclectic interests. Currently, I'm facilitating the creation of a psychology, advanced writing, and biology course. 

I finished the draft this morning. Now of course the subject expert will make it into his own likeness. Whenever I finish a course like this one, I think, "I should create a pastor's guide to psychology," just like I created a Pastor's Brief Guide to Business last year. Maybe someday.

2. I am scrambling to write two books because of the initiative I started in the fall. One is Ten Secrets about Jesus. I ran some marketing headlines by Twitter and Facebook. "Which headline would make you want to click?" The responses were all over the place but it seems like "What they don't want you to know about Jesus" got the most with "Was Jesus a troublemaker?" probably second. Other candidates were "Jesus was a conservative... and a liberal." Do any of those pique your curiosity? 

Technically, I'm supposed to run a market test on Facebook but I'm bogged down with getting my Facebook "pixel" to work for good tracking.

The other book is Hanging on to Faith by a Thread. It is an old idea but with new impetus because of a phone conversation I had last week with someone struggling with faith. I did a poll on Facebook for what chapter items should be included in this one as well.

3. The past week was not without its unique challenges because of the weather. Sub-zero weather had us strategizing keeping the chickens alive. Then we are down to one car for various reasons, and its battery died because of the cold. Today it looks like we will be back up to two working cars by the end of the week. So far all the chickens have survived, but now it's supposed to rain all week. Sucks for them!

Sometimes life just sucks almost everything out of you. But somehow we make it, thank the Lord!

Two Weeks in Review (January 13, 2023)

1. As I write, strong gusts of wind blow across the vacant corn fields around me as the temperature plunges. We're expecting temperatures in the single digits positive and perhaps negative this week. We've brought a number of the chickens into the garage in preparation, although the big coop has a heater in it. Quite the party.

Somehow I missed last week's week in review. I think I was scrambling to finish Steve Deneff's micro-course on holiness. This weekend a misunderstanding has me giving a fair amount of time to a course called Writing to Convince. I do enjoy being part of these course creations. Once psychology and biology are finished, we will have the full panoply of gen ed courses on offer.

The way it works is that a college adopts our courses and takes on our faculty as adjuncts. We administer the dual-enrollment program for them with their complete involvement. They give us names and connect us to (potentially) feeder high schools. There are other streams of students, including college students, that feed into the same classes. Because we administer it, a good deal of the friction of the traditional academy is bypassed. 

So there is a growing army of associated high schools (currently around 25) and a growing number of colleges from which the student can opt to receive the credit. 

It is so hard to get anything done in the traditional academy system. It's no wonder so many colleges and universities are struggling. Friction. Friction. Friction. If someone has a great idea on a high level, sometimes they are ground to a halt in the hands of infrastructure people who have lost the plot or never knew it. Or maybe a middle-level director has the vision but can't get buy-in from someone on a higher level. Courses are created that are never used because of politics or systems that they don't fit neatly into. Lots of places in the traditional system for good ideas to fail or be ground to a pulp.

It's frankly maddening. We used to wonder if we should just buy a failing college ourselves. But the goal was always to create an Amazon of college courses, a network of the best of the best of the best. We are in a really good place.

2. On New Year's Eve, I decided to go ahead and self-publish a Spanish version of my ethics. No one buys my books anyway. The reason it is iffy is that I used AI to translate it and didn't pay someone to proofread it. But that's hardly worth it. It would cost well over $1000 to have it proofed and I wouldn't see that much money from it for the rest of my life. Something is better than nothing. If no one uses it, so be it. AI translations are getting better and better. They will prevail soon.

Over the last couple months, I've been generating an AI paraphrase of John. I wasn't satisfied with what AI initially came up with, so I did a lot of paraphrasing myself beyond its raw output. You can tell me if you like the result.

Other projects in the works, as always.

Wishing you all electricity and heat this next week.

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.