by Keith Bassham
I began attending church to be near a pastor’s daughter during my teens. That decision led to another to become a Christian, and a later one to enter the ministry, and so on — a chain of choices and pushes and pulls that led me to the Tribune about 17 years ago.
The irony is that a few days after I joined the church, I met up with a fellow church member in my high school journalism class. She had a copy of a newspaper called the Baptist Bible Tribune. I looked the paper over, and she told me a little about it and the editor, and then she said, “Just think. Someday you could be their editor.”
I dismissed that memory for a few decades. And then, 10 years ago, in the February BBFI meeting in Gulfport, MS, I was named the editor of the Tribune. A side note, if you will, is in order. The editor at the time I learned about the Tribune was of course Noel Smith, the founder and editor until his death in 1974. I have enormous respect for him, as well as for all my predecessors, but I am pleased he was not omniscient. He wrote, for instance, in 1952, that if the Baptist Bible Fellowship continued and if the Tribune lived for 25 years, “some modernist will be editing it.”
Anyway, my kids surely don’t think I’m a modernist. I was the last in the family to acquire an iPad, a gift given to me by the officers of the Fellowship in recognition of my 10 years as editor. They all, with the help of my wife and a few friends, managed to surprise me with that, a weekend getaway, and a very nice note of appreciation which read:
Congratulations on ten years at the
helm of the Baptist Bible Tribune.
On behalf of the pastors of the Baptist Bible Fellowship International, we the undersigned officers express our gratitude and recognize your faithfulness to the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, and your faithful participation and valuable contributions to the BBFI.
Thank you. I am honored to serve.