April 16, 2024
By Roger Alford
Pastor Craig Dale made a great point Sunday about the indispensable role of mothers by telling a hilarious tale about a 14-year-old boy who came home from school hungry, only to find his mother upstairs in the bed sick.
“Mom, I’m really, really sorry that you’re not feeling well, but I want you know I’m getting big now,” he said. “And I’m strong enough that I believe I can pick you up and carry you down to the stove.”
Laughter rang from wall to wall in the packed sanctuary at Ivy Creek Baptist Church in Buford when Craig told that old joke on Mother’s Day, because everyone understood his point: Moms truly are indispensable.
You know, that’s the way I’d like Georgia Baptists to feel about The Christian Index – that it is indispensable. As the new editor of the newspaper tasked with keeping 1.4 million Georgia Baptists informed, I understand that relevance matters. I want The Christian Index to be so relevant that it’s the first place Georgia Baptists turn when they want to know what’s going on within the Georgia Baptist Convention. I also want it to be so relevant that it’s also the first place they turn when they want to know what’s going on anywhere in the world.
Too many Georgia Baptists are having to rely on newspapers, network television, cable TV outlets, and social media sources that have built-in anti-Christian biases for the information they need. Gone are the days when national and world news was delivered by fair-minded folks like Walter Cronkite and Paul Harvey.
That’s why we at the Christian Index are considering taking responsibility for providing state, national and world news to Georgia Baptists, so that you would no longer have to navigate your way through a maze of sometimes unreliable voices in an attempt to stay informed. We as Georgia Baptists need a credible and reliable source of information.
We have begun discussions with The Associated Press, the world’s largest news-gathering operation, so that we’d have access to all their articles, hundreds of them every day, from all points of the globe and from every state in the nation. The AP has reporters on the ground in countries all over the world, prompting one world leader to once make the remark that when he gets to the hereafter, the first person he will expect to see is a reporter from The Associated Press. We will carefully choose AP articles that will allow Georgia Baptists to better understand the world and therefore better pray for our churches, our pastors, our missionaries, and the people they’re trying to reach.
Georgia Baptists are a people of broad interests, and so many of us enjoy our sports teams, whether college for professional. Through an arrangement with the AP, we would be able to provide you with complete sports coverage, too.
Of course, our news team that covers the Georgia Baptist Convention will continue to churn out articles from our churches. We plan to beef that up. We understand that our bread and butter is our coverage of Georgia Baptists. We love telling stories about our people and our churches, about how the Lord is working in and through you to get the Gospel to our communities, our state, our nation and our world.
When it comes to The Christian Index, as we expand our coverage over the next several months, it’s my hope that Georgia Baptists will be like the teenage boy who sudden realized just how important his mother is, in that that they will see The Christian Index as an indispensable tool for staying informed.
