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Photo Courtesy of North Texas Annual Conference
NTC Reporter
The North Texas Conference edition of The United Methodist Reporter.
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Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Smith
Smith Gosden Reporter
The United Methodist Reporter has been a unifying force in The United Methodist Church
What do you say when a beloved friend close as kinfolk dies?
The news that UMR Communications, publisher of The United Methodist Reporter, will close its ministry on May 31 hits like a punch in the gut. I spent the best and worst years of my life and profession at UMR from 1988 to 2005, so the news is about as personal as such news gets.
For all our grief at UMR's impending demise, my husband John and I moved quickly from personal loss to our sense of an era passing away. We've both worked in the print industry for nigh onto 40 years now, and the carnage among print publications over the past decade has been an ugly transition.
Back in 2000-2005 when I was UMR's editor, I enrolled at SMU's Cox Business School to fill some gaps in my management skills. Our instructors warned us about the "tectonic event" that could eliminate a business overnight, but UMR was diversifying at the time in hopes of weathering the storm. In fact, I wrote my final paper on the need to integrate digital and print forms of communication in UMR's ministry. Clearly, though, even the addition of websites and digital worship resources wasn't enough diversification for a ministry anchored in print.
UMR's end after 166 years of ministry marks more than the passing of one mighty technology for another. Long before the late Spurgeon M. Dunnam grew what had been the Texas Methodist into the denomination-wide United Methodist Reporter, the newspaper that began in Brenham, Texas, in 1847 kept a sharp eye on both church and society. When the Reporter celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1997, our resident playwright, Associate Editor Diane Huie Balay, wrote a marvelous musical that traced the history of the Reporter. The little paper that started out writing about church suppers and pastoral appointments blazed ever brighter by taking on such social evils as war, race, and Demon Rum. I cherish the memory of my dear friend and colleague, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Gangler, portraying one of the Reporter's early firebrand editors in Diane's play.
But it was the Dunnam era that brought the paper into its own as an independent observer and shaper of the newly formed United Methodist Church. Spurgeon was a complex personality the likes of whom are rarely seen. I think it's safe to say that he was a genius of exacting standards who could almost never be fully satisfied with his underlings' work – or his own, for that matter. The Wesleyan adage of "going on to perfection" was sacred to Spurgeon; we were always "going on" toward perfection, never achieving it.
For all the agony it was to work for Dr. Dunnam, in retrospect he was right to demand such unattainable heights. He was a stickler for the way we used words and he vastly distrusted images, but when it came time to practice real journalism, holding the church's powerful to account, he was unflagging. He pushed us beyond our limits, with the result that the United Methodist Reporter was read and trusted by astute church leaders from Dallas to the Vatican and beyond. That's no boast; we mailed a paper every week to the Catholic Church's council on Christian unity.
One of Spurgeon's goals was that all Reporter readers be well-informed citizens of the church, so that they could fulfill our membership vows to support it with our prayers, presence, gifts and service. Thus we had series like "Church Aflame" to inspire congregations to evangelism and "The Advance" to promote second-mile giving for missions. We covered big church meetings like the World Methodist Conference and all the denominational boards and agencies every fall and spring. The strategy worked. During the early years of my tenure at UMR, we had some 300 annual conference, district and local church editions totaling some 500,000 papers printed each week.
We also wrote about humbler efforts, like when the United Methodist Rural Fellowship wanted to raise some $3,000 to send teddy bears and other stuffed toys to children being treated in stark, barren Russian hospitals. I had all the facts, but Managing Editor John Lovelace wrote the inspired lead for my article that I remember to this day: "Could you bear to hug a Russian?"
That one article drew not only the needed $3,000; it raised close to $25,000 and elicited so many stuffed toys that the home of UMRF's coordinator was crammed to the rafters! Such was the gift of connection that the Reporter provided for The United Methodist Church.
Where Spurgeon really lived, however, was on the editorial page, the Reporter's open forum allowed discourse of all kinds about the denomination. We had columns like "My Witness," through which readers told how they lived out their faith in everyday life, and "Here I Stand," a platform for arguing church issues. Spurgeon used to give a talk about what would be lost if there were no United Methodist Reporter. His list never failed to include the fact that the newspaper was the only place where people could debate the doctrine and practice of the church. Spurgeon loved few things better than a good debate.
Inevitably the Reporter began to change after Dr. Dunnam died unexpectedly in 1991 at age 49, but we did our best to uphold the standards he had set. Through the term of my beloved predecessor, John Lovelace, who retired at the end of 1997, and during my own eight years as head of the Reporter's national news team, we kept our focus on informing the church well, even when it didn't like to read what we felt duty-bound to report. During this time, more folks than I often wished would turn to the Reporter for help when they were injured and ignored by institutional leaders. To this day I wonder if one reason behind the newspaper's decline was that we did such a good job of holding authority accountable for its actions.
There's a lot more to know about what the loss of the United Methodist Reporter means to the church it has served, but to tell it would take a book. Perhaps those of us who have lived out the Reporter's priceless gift to United Methodism can collaborate on such a volume in the near future, since clearly this brief remembrance covers only one perspective from a limited time. Suffice it for now to say that its passing leaves a much greater void than we can imagine. Somehow we must find ways to carry on The United Methodist Reporter's legacy in this dizzying digital disestablishment world in which we now live.
Cynthia B. Astle was the first woman to be named Editor of The United Methodist Reporter, serving from 2000 to 2005.