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.