EDITOR’S NOTE: Gary Ledbetter served for 21 years as editor of The Southern Baptist TEXAN, the official newsjournal of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. He currently serves as senior editor of the Missouri Baptist Convention’s High Street Press.
The Missouri Baptist Pathway is like the paper I edited for 21 years, The Southern Baptist TEXAN, in that both papers were born out of the SBC Conservative Resurgence. And both our papers were necessitated by regrettable controversy. The TEXAN started in 1999 after a conservative state convention was begun out of a moderate convention in Texas. The Pathway started in 2002 after the former news journal of the Missouri Baptist Convention associated itself with an unsuccessful effort to start a moderate Missouri convention. Both moderate conventions fought against the theological revival of the Southern Baptist Convention; both conservative state conventions considered that renewal an answer to prayer. The wealth and passion spent resisting Southern Baptists’ rededication to biblical authority were wasted, a tragedy really.
Gary Ledbetter, former editor of the Southern Baptist TEXAN and now senior editor of the Missouri Baptist Convention’s High Street Press.
So both our papers had to start from very small beginnings. Don Hinkle, founding editor of The Pathway, hit the ground running. As I got to know him, I was impressed with his energy as a newsman and with his tireless efforts to build the circulation of his paper. He has had good success in an era that finds many papers ceasing publication and moving online only. That success has two parts, I think.
First, The Pathway is in harmony with the fellowship of churches that owns it – it speaks with the voice of its constituency. Do not take this for granted. There was a time in Southern Baptist journalism when the trend was advocacy for a more liberal status quo among SBC leaders and professors. That status quo often did not represent the gospel preached in nearly all Missouri Baptist, and Southern Baptist, pulpits week by week. The major Baptist papers of that era decried the Resurgence tirelessly. Those larger and older moderate state papers of the 1980s lost the trust of the church members and could not be revived by their later, conservative, editors. The Pathway, from the start, had an editorial voice that spoke in concert with the beliefs of Missouri Baptists. And that voice was sincere rather than merely clever, from an editor who agreed with his fellow Southern Baptists.
Second,The Pathway is worth reading! I’ve seen secular daily papers dwindle in number, frequency, and substance over the past 40 years. So it has been with religious newspapers and magazines. The response of some editors, desperate to stay ahead of the herd, has been to make their content lighter, less rigorous in news reporting. While there is an audience for features, there is also one for reporting. Those who watch cultural and denominational events will find thoughtful information in The Pathway. Those readers are not as numerous as they once were in the SBC, but the partnership between Missouri Baptists and The Pathway has been a success story. Missouri Southern Baptists hired a newsman to edit their paper, and they get the news.
I should add that these tumultuous events in national and state denominational bodies coincided with a difficult period of postal increases in triple digits and, more recently, paper costs that increase several times a year. Newspaper readership of all sorts has declined. The years ahead will continue to challenge print journalism. My point is that Baptist papers that in a sense fought against their readership were some of the first to dwindle and shutter. Those that did not are among those still standing. If churches and their leaders see a value, rather than a detriment, in what their paper delivers to the homes of their members, they’ll have, and ought to have, an interest in the paper’s continued publication.
I see The Missouri Baptist Pathway as one of those valuable state papers. It has earned a place in the future of Missouri Baptists, even as it has had for the past 20 years a role in the burgeoning strength of your state fellowship.