This month we welcome David Neff to our staff as an associate editor. David has done an exceptional job as editor of HIS, standing in a long line of evangelical leaders who preceded him in that post (see photos).
Last year, about a dozen CTi editors attended Walter Wangerin’s writers’ conference in Indiana, where we met Virginia Grabill, a delightful and spirited professor of English at the University of Evansville. In 1947, as Virginia Lowell, she succeeded Ken Taylor as editor of HIS.
Virginia told us that at first she had to use her initials to mask her gender. Perhaps it’s a sign we have come at least a little distance that Linda Doll, David’s predecessor at HIS, gave no thought to disguising her identity. Linda now directs InterVarsity Press, which publishes both HIS magazine and an excellent line of books.
HIS was born in 1941 and, without exception, its editors have made significant contributions. I personally think of Bob Walker, editor of Christian Life; Ken Taylor, translator of The Living Bible and chairman of Tyndale House Publishers; Joe Bayly of David C. Cook Publishing Company, who has written his Eternity column for more than 25 years; Steve Board, editor of Eternity for 8 years (now also with Cook), who is currently giving us major editing help with the Christianity Today Institute; Paul Fromer of Wheaton College, who serves as our deputy editor, working closely with Ken Kantzer on editorials and on major projects.
So, David has a unique history behind him. I mentioned to Gordon MacDonald, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s new president, and to Linda that I felt a bit of guilt in taking David from that significant post. But only a few weeks later Linda recruited Verne Becker, one of our editors on CAMPUS LIFE, to replace him. I next saw Linda at the recent meeting of the Evangelical Press Association (EPA) here in Chicago and told her she had missed her chance to leverage any of my guilt!
We have much humor and camaraderie among evangelical publications. We’re often asked about that, and it is always satisfying to describe the sense of common purpose in EPA. Certainly one of the most affirming and constructive aspects of my work in Christian journalism for nearly 25 years has been to share this spirit of cooperation and shared learning among fellow editors. I well remember my first EPA convention in the early 1960s in Philadelphia. Russ Hitt and Bill Peterson of Eternity were discussing the school prayer issue and giving a much greater depth to the question than I had previously heard as a young man fresh out of college.
EPA has now grown to some 300 periodicals. About 500 persons attended the recent three-day meeting in which members elected as the new president Dean Merrill, senior editor of CT’s sister publication LEADERSHIP. We were pleased that both CHRISTIANITY TODAY and LEADERSHIP were given the top Award of Excellence in their respective categories, and that our new publication PARTNERSHIP came in second, right after LEADERSHIP, from which it was developed. Congratulations to editors Gil Beers, Terry Muck, and Ruth Senter and their staffs for their unusually fine work. In addition, a total of 21 awards in the EPA Higher Goals competition went to CTi publications, including five to CAMPUS LIFE. CT editors were especially happy with the first-place award given to the cover interview with Robert Schuller [Aug. 10, 1985], considering the huge effort required, and that the CT news section was again singled out for a first-place award for excellence.
The same week EPA met, we also held our first meeting of the CT senior editors (Gil Beers, George Brushaber, Kenneth Kantzer, Dennis Kinlaw, and J. I. Packer). These men will regularly give broad guidance and direction to the journalists who do the day-by-day work on CT. I was delighted with their spirit and insights. We forged a framework for equipping CT to meet the unique challenges of the mid-eighties with a careful blend of journalistic vigor and biblical wisdom.
We would greatly appreciate your prayers in that regard, for we also cautioned ourselves that we need most not energy and theological cleverness, but God’s great grace. We could win even more awards next year and have readers rise and call us blessed, yet miss God’s vision. Our prayer is that we will genuinely “live by God’s surprises,” not our own enthusiasms. We must work fully aware of our frailty (in Pascal’s words, “A draft of air can kill us”), but equally aware of God’s astounding power “in us who believe.”
