Creation Museum Expands Plans in Anticipation of April '07 Opening
by Mary Rettig
September 12, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis (AiG), says his group's Creation Museum is getting some major projects finished as its public opening edges closer. The biblical creation-themed museum, which is located near Cincinnati, Ohio, is scheduled to open in April 2007. This week, Ham notes, one of the largest of the Creation Museum's exhibits, "the Wonders Room," will be installed. This attraction, he explains, will feature 18 different presentations concerning the wonders of God's creation.
"The Creation Walk is well under way," the AiG spokesman says. "The rock is being done right now, where people are going to walk through the whole history of the world from creation through corruption," he continues, with "the cave of sorrows, then catastrophe, Noah's ark, Noah's flood -- there's even a whole section of the ark that's under construction here to show the size of the ark compared to the original."
Although the opening of the museum is still many months away, Ham says AiG and its Creation Museum have had such an enthusiastic response from potential visitors that it has been necessary to make a larger parking lot, a larger lobby, and a larger café. "Statistics indicate we're going to get hundreds of thousands of people a year, and everyone recognized that we needed more parking and so on," he notes.
All this has increased the museum's construction budget a little bit, the creationist points out. "It's now something like a $27 million budget," he says, "but of the $25 million that we set out to raise for the original budget, we raised $23 million. So there's only two million to go for the original budget, and then about two million for the expansion that we've had to do before we open."
That expansion, while not in the original plan, was welcome news to Ham, who observes that it's "really good when you've got to expand before you open." He says AiG's ultimate goal is to open the museum debt-free, and he believes things are looking very positive for an auspicious opening in the spring of next year.
Ed Thomas, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
