Welcome to 2026

First of all, I want to say thank you to all our supporters who helped us reach about 90% of our funding goal for 2025. As I look back on this most recent holiday campaign, I am once again honored and humbled that so many people believe so strongly in what we're doing. Your kindness and your care really leave me speechless, which is a good place to be. I've been talking all month, encouraging people to join us in the campaign, and it's nice to just sit quietly with the weight of it all, meditating on our place in the community of Christ and the abundant generosity of our God. Thank you so much.

I'm grateful for more than money though. We made new friends in 2025, reconnected with some old ones, and I feel a renewed sense of our place in God's plan. In particular, I'm astounded by my own novelty. That's a weird thing to say, but when I get out and meet people and talk about what it is to be a young-age creationist and how I view things, the reactions are always surprised. That's true if I'm talking to non-Christians or Christians alike. People act like I'm just a shocking breath of fresh air, as if they'd never heard of my simple, calm, respectful approach to these questions. And I'm thinking, there are lots of people like me. This is just how I've tried to work for my whole career, all thirty years of it.  I'm not special, but for so many other people who know creationism only from the outlandish braggadocio of the meme stream, I appear to be startling and unique.

So I need to be more intentional, perhaps even aggressive, in outreach and marketing, and that will be a major theme for 2026 at Core Academy. We're doing great things, but I need to find a better way to communicate that to the church and to society as a whole. People have encouraged me about that for years. (A friend who saw me at ETS commented that I had "come out of my cave.") Even though PR is not my gift, I understand that I have to do better. Much better.

First up then is finishing the Big Book. That's a project I've been working on with my coauthors for four years now. We're trying to write a sort of definitive summary of the state of creationist research, but I'm aspiring to much more, which is probably why it's taken so long to write. Fortunately, God has sent me a writing consultant who has been helping me turn the chaos of ideas and words and research into something that's actually readable. Our goal is to finish the first draft by April (we're 65% right now), then spend three months on editing and polishing. We plan to turn the manuscript over to the publisher this summer. Please pray for us that we can get this done.

With that then, I need to write another chapter. Even though it's not the chapter I'm supposed to be working on, I've got some ideas (AKA intrusive thoughts), and I'm going to write them down while they're fresh.

Happy new year then! May God bless us and keep us and draw us closer to him in 2026.

Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you.

Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!