October 21, 2024
DULUTH, Ga. – Subscribers to The Christian Index’s free daily newsletter are able to start their days with the latest news from around the world.
“We’re packing all the major stories into a quick and easy read,” said editor Roger Alford. “The way this newsletter is set up, people can quickly scan the headlines or, with a simple click, read full stories from wherever news is happening.”
Just in the past week, Alford said, subscribers were among the first to read that Florida Pastor Tom Ascol would enter the race for Southern Baptist Convention president, to read about an evangelistic initiative in Sylvester in which 100 people made professions of faith, to read that Georgia Baptist volunteers are being deployed to Poland to assist Ukrainian refugees, to read about six young Oklahoma girls who were killed in a horrendous collision between their subcompact car and a rock hauler, to read about every major development in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The daily newsletter arrives in subscribers’ email inboxes at 4:30 a.m. so that it’s waiting for them when they start their day.
“I have been telling Georgia Baptists that the daily newsletter can be an important prayer resource,” Alford said. “How can anyone read about those girls being killed in that Oklahoma crash without being moved to prayer for their grieving families? Or how can we read about 100 people in a small Georgia town making decisions to follow Christ without offering up a prayer of thanksgiving?”
The Christian Index has partnerships with The Associated Press, the world’s largest newsgathering operation, which provides news from across the country and around the world, and with Baptist Press, which provides coverage of all things Southern Baptist.
“The beauty of those news organizations is that they present the news without bias,” Alford said. “They provide us with the straight facts, minus the spin that’s so prevalent in the media these days. So, while they do what we can’t in providing news from outside the Georgia Baptist world, we do what they can’t by providing all the news from inside the Georgia Baptist world.”
Alford said if Georgia Baptists are to be expected to engage the world, they need to know what’s going on in the world, and that’s why the decision was made to start a daily newsletter.
It was also a practical business decision, because the daily newsletter increases traffic on the website, which makes the paper more attractive to advertisers.
“Our top priority at the Index is keeping Georgia Baptists informed, inspired and engaged,” Alford said. “And this new newsletter is key to that.”
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