by Keith Bassham
Sixty years ago about this time, preachers and churches were ratcheting up their efforts to open a new Bible college, to organize some type of rational and systematic approach to missions, and to start a newspaper. The result of all that work six decades ago, you hold, and have been holding for some time now, in your hands. Before the year is out, we hope to feature more glimpses into our history as a movement, but for this issue, once we take care of the May meeting report, I wanted to celebrate the Tribune itself.
We don’t have much to show in a Tribune museum — we do have a full set of bound volumes — a few examples of the lead type used in the early editions, a copy of the New York Times stylebook used by Noel Smith (with some of his notes written in the margins… corrections, do you think?), some old photographs, and a note card index that runs up into the 1970s.
The most valuable object in the Tribune museum is the idea of the Tribune itself. As Tom Harper’s essay in this issue reports, Noel Smith spoke in the founding meeting of the Fellowship and said, “Let’s have a paper….” Since the days of the New Testament, Christianity has run and prospered on paper and ink, writers and editors. It made a lot of sense for Smith to think what he thought and to say what he did. How could there be a Fellowship without a paper to chronicle their activities and to keep themselves and others informed? An unpublished Baptist movement was unthinkable.
Read Tom’s history of the Tribune, and look at the first page of the first issue. And if you want more, you can download the entire first issue from our website.
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The Fellowship’s new voting process has been mentioned before, but there is still some confusion so here it is again:
- The changes to the bylaws were publicized in the Tribune last summer, passed by the Fellowship in the national meeting held in Canton last September, and publicized again recently in the Tribune.
- Pastors who attended the May meeting had opportunity to vote already.
- Pastors will not automatically receive a ballot in the mail. Pastors qualified to vote (see the bylaws for definition) must request a ballot from the Mission Office if they wish to vote in the election for the Executive Officers.
- No one, including state BBF officers, is allowed to request a ballot for anyone else. Each pastor who wants to vote must request a ballot for himself.
- The ballot must be returned to the Mission Office for counting no later than July 1. The election results will be announced prior to the fall meeting.
- New officers will take office at the fall meeting at Sauk Trail Baptist Temple in Richton Park, Illinois September 27-29.