JEFFERSON CITY – “It was a venture of faith for Missouri Baptists to step out and do this. To start a paper, that’s no easy task.
“It takes resources, it takes vision, it takes a lot of thought,” said Bob Curtis, director of missions for the Mineral Area Baptist Association in Farmington.
“And it takes a lot of prayer.”
The Pathway, with a print edition and website, made its debut in June 2002 in St. Louis at that year’s Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.
JEFFERSON CITY – The first print edition of The Pathway, shown here, was released in June 2002.
“We did not know how long it would last, we didn’t know what the circulation would be,” said Curtis, the MBC’s 2001-2002 president who was pastor of Ballwin Baptist Church at the time.
Missouri Baptist leaders knew about Don Hinkle, a doctoral candidate who had written about a legal firestorm in the state as a Baptist Press correspondent – a firestorm sparked when five convention entities unilaterally altered their charters to eliminate MBC-elected trustees from their boards.
“We met with Don and felt confident in where he stood – the kind of objective reporting we were looking for, the kind of Baptist Faith and Message values that we respected,” Curtis said.
“So we really believe that God was in this. We have a great state paper, and that’s due to God leading us to an editor who has been true to his word.”
Saturated with God’s work
“I wanted to create a newspaper that would bring honor and glory to our Lord Jesus Christ,” Hinkle said in May prior to his 20th anniversary at The Pathway. “I wanted to do this by letting Scripture be our guide and writing with a style that makes The Pathway readable for all people. We highlight the collaborative work God has called Southern Baptists in Missouri to accomplish while also addressing the issues of the day.”
Hinkle came to The Pathway in the midst of doctoral studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., after editing The Daily Herald in Columbia, Tenn., near Nashville. During 10 years in the Air Force as a writer and editor, he won the top Department of Defense award for reporting in 1981 and later worked at The Daily Press in Hampton/Newport News, Va.; The Tennessean in Nashville; and The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.
“I have been a journalist for 50 years and the most fulfilling have been my 20 years as founding editor of The Pathway,” Hinkle said. “It is a blessing to be called by God to a ministry that documents the love of Christ as exhibited by the churches of the Missouri Baptist Convention.”
John Yeats, MBC executive director since 2011, noted, “Every issue of The Pathway is saturated with God’s work through His people. It is the primary resource, the reliable resource for sharing about the people of God on mission with God.”
It’s not a journal “where the team prints whatever they will,” Yeats said. “Don and Ben Hawkins (associate editor since 2013) and other contributors work hard at telling our MBC story and other Christian news worthy of distribution.”
In addition to its daily online postings, The Pathway continues to mail out a print edition, twice each month except for single editions in July, October and December. A paper copy, Curtis pointed out, “allows many people without internet, who otherwise would not know what’s going on in Missouri Baptist life or SBC life, to have a resource available to them.” The Pathway is free upon request as part of the Cooperative Program ministries funded by the convention’s churches.
With nearly 30,000 subscribers, The Pathway’s print circulation is the fourth-largest in Missouri, behind only the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star and Springfield News Leader. Its presence also is felt among peers in the media, having won 30 awards from the Missouri Press Association, Evangelical Press Association and Baptist Communicators Association, this year garnering EPA Award of Merit honors for both its print and online editions.
Missions, evangelism & more
In describing The Pathway, Curtis points to an array of content.
• “The Pathway does stories on missions, which is what we’re about,” he said. “It keeps us informed of mission and state opportunities.
• “They emphasize evangelism,” Curtis continued, with each Pathway edition providing an item on “How to become a Christian,” telling readers: “Becoming a Christian is a personal deliberate choice. No one can make that decision for you. It doesn’t happen by joining a church or deciding to start living a good life. You don’t become a Christian by mentally accepting the teachings of Jesus Christ, or by hanging around Christians and attending Christian meetings.” The “ABC’s” of salvation, The Pathway notes with a half-dozen key Scripture passages, are “Admit that you have sinned. … Believe that Jesus died for your sins. … Confess that Jesus is Lord.”
• “Theologically, The Pathway keeps us tuned in to issues that we need to stay up on,” Curtis said. “And they have articles on apologetics” in each issue by Rob Phillips, the Missouri convention’s director of ministry support and apologetics, who has authored several books setting forth a historic undergirding of Christian faith. Phillips’ current Pathway series is focusing on the SBC’s 2000 Baptist Faith and Message and its 18 articles of basic Baptist beliefs.
• “Obviously from a practical perspective, they highlight our agencies and special events,” Curtis said, “and they keep us informed of church news” where God is at work across Missouri as well as church and associational vacancies. Yeats pens a regular column focusing on the Cooperative Program channel of missions support and other convention insights and emphases. …
• “Don’s editorials are pertinent and relevant to modern-day issues that we’re confronting, not just in Southern Baptist life but in culture,” Curtis said. Hinkle, who also serves as the convention’s director of public policy, caught the attention of one St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist who observed that he “stands out among the serious, conservative men of the Missouri Baptist Convention. Not that Hinkle isn’t conservative or serious. He even wears a tie. But Hinkle prefers bow ties, which – along with his white, furry mustache and thatch of white hair – give Hinkle a sort of plump Mark Twain air.”
Covering the breakaways
When five Missouri convention entities broke from their heritage in 2000-2001, pirating an estimated quarter billion dollars of ministry assets, Hinkle kept Baptists in the state – and nationally – informed throughout 16-plus years of legal efforts to reclaim the Missouri Baptist Foundation, Missouri Baptist University, the multi-campus Baptist Home ministry to the aging and Windermere Baptist Conference Center at the Lake of the Ozarks. A fifth entity, the Word & Way newspaper, was replaced by The Pathway.
Michael Whitehead, the convention’s longtime attorney, said Hinkle and his Pathway staff “were ‘on the story’ from the beginning. Don knew the people and the issues extremely well, and worked closely with our legal team to keep Missouri Baptists informed at each step of the legal effort. He understood the cost of the legal effort, but also the cost to the convention of not acting as stewards over the resources taken by the breakaway entities. Plus, he understood the biblical and church polity issues at stake.”
In the end, Missouri courts held that the foundation, university and Baptist Home could not legally alter their charters with self-perpetuating trustee boards to supplant MBC-elected trustees. The insurance company for some of the breakaways paid $6.5 million in legal fees and costs, covering all of the convention’s legal fees and leaving a surplus that made the MBC debt-free for the first time in years. The convention was able to buy back nearly 1,000 Windermere acres from a lender in 2014 and bought the conference center facility and property at a foreclosure in 2019.
Hinkle and The Pathway, Whitehead underscored, “covered all of these stories – month by month for 16 and a half years – in a way that informed Missouri Baptists as well as Baptists across the SBC who realized these cases set precedents for all ministry non-profit organizations.”
Stories that impact lives
In The Pathway’s day-in, day-out coverage, associate editor Ben Hawkins calls it “a joy to partner with a team of great writers and photographers to tell the story of Missouri Baptist churches. We’ve had the privilege to write articles involving evangelism, missions, local churches, disasters, the history of the church, faith and science, public policy, religious liberty and many cultural issues that call for Christian worldview thinking.”
Particularly poignant to Hawkins was a story about “how God was using a church to reach drug addicts for the gospel, and those new believers were passing along the gospel message to their friends and families.” Among them was a drug addict who had turned to Christ. “A few weeks after publishing the story, someone told me that this new believer was showing his addict-friends his story in The Pathway. He used the article to share with dozens of people about what Christ had done for him and what Christ could do for them.” It was a fresh reminder to Hawkins “that we have seen God’s glory in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that sharing stories about what He is doing can impact lives.”
Smiles and food for thought are regularly supplied by The Pathway’s columnists, Rhonda Rhea among them. An award-winning author of 20 books, the humor columnist is the wife of Richie Rhea, who retired as senior pastor of Troy’s First Baptist Church in 2020 and now serves as care pastor at NorthRoad Church in Moscow Mills.
“What a blessing it’s been to participate in the amazing ministry of The Pathway,” said Rhea, who has penned well over 200 columns since October 2010, bringing a Scripture or two to bear on such topics as doing the laundry, frozen dinners and remembrances of shopping with five children in tow. “My role is a li’l bit that of comic relief,” which means that “The Pathway powers-that-be have exercised an extra measure or two of grace. Possibly three measures. Per column.
“It still tickles me that every year – even when I’m not in Missouri – people recognize me more often for my role in The Pathway’s ministry than for even national and international magazines,” Rhea said.
In charting the course ahead for its news and feature stories, its columns and other special features, The Pathway is anchored in “the paths” referenced in Jeremiah 6:16, a motto suggested by the late Cindy Province of Dardenne Baptist Church in Defiance who chaired the search committee that recommended Hinkle in 2002: “This is what the LORD says: / ‘Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, / Where the good way is, and walk in it; / Then you will find a resting place for your souls. …’” (NASB).
“More than ever,” Hinkle said, “we must rely on the infallibility, inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture to guide our coverage as we help Southern Baptists navigate the challenges presented by an ever-changing culture. We must be vigilant watchmen in the watchtower, even as we keep telling the old, old story of Jesus and His love.”