Devoted to the Propagation and Defense of New Testament Christianity
VOLUME 21
May 15, 1969
NUMBER 3, PAGE 4-5a

Forward Step For Gospel Guardian

Editorial

It is with considerable satisfaction that we are able to announce an historical forward step for the Gospel Guardian. Originally founded by Foy E. Wallace, Jr. in 1935, this journal (like most publications of this nature) has had a constant "battle of the deficit" throughout its lifetime. As religious journals go, the Gospel Guardian is hoary with age; not one in a hundred such ventures lives this long. For the past six or seven years this writer has had a double load — the entire editorial responsibility, and at the same tune the entire financial responsibility for the paper's survival. It has riot been easy!

But now we have help. Brother William E. Wallace (youngest son of the Gospel Guardian's original founder) has arranged to purchase the Gospel Guardian Company, and will take over the complete load of financial management and control. He has adequate backing and resources not only to assure continued publication of the journal, but even to expand its services to our readers and customers. This will relieve the editor of an immense burden, and will enable us to concentrate on the editorial phase of the operation. Everybody ought to profit from this move — a better journal to our subscribers, better service to our customers, and a far more efficient operation in every way.

-F. Y. T.

Purely Personal

When you receive this issue of the Gospel Guardian, I will be somewhere in the Middle East — Jerusalem, Samaria, Galilee, or maybe in Athens. or Corinth. If you are a few days late in receiving it, I will probably be in Switzerland or maybe in London, on the way home. We are to arrive back in New York on May 23. I make the trip as a part of the Jenkins-Wallace Bible Lands Tour of 1969. (Except that William Wallace is not along; his new responsibility with the Gospel Guardian Company forced him to drop out of the tour to "tend to business"!) Incidentally, Brother Wallace is also preparing material for the Gospel Guardian during these three weeks I am away; the issue he edits will be out in June.

Another "purely personal" item is that the Tant family will be moving to Birmingham, Alabama about the first of June, where I will be preaching for the Cahaba Heights Church. This will be my first regular "local work" in fifteen or twenty years, and I'm looking forward to it with considerable pleasure. This will in no way interfere with my editorial work on the Guardian; I will be in constant contact with the Lufkin office, and all letters and articles will be forwarded to me promptly. For more than twenty years I have edited the Guardian "on the run", and my 'editor's chair' has often as not been found in a swaying Pullman (I rarely ride the train anymore, but rode them often twenty years ago), a lonely motel room, under a towering Douglas fir in an Oregonian forest, or in some private home in Canada, Kansas, Florida, or Arizona. Since I will not be tied down by the routine of office management, there will be no reason why the editorial task cannot be performed as easily in one location as in another.

The brethren at Cahaba Heights understand my deep interest in "personal evangelism," and I will have a rather generous "time off" arrangement to visit congregations who are interested in my working with them to improve their effectiveness in this respect. I will also continue my work in introducing the "IMPAC" program (if you don't know what it is, you haven't been reading the Gospel Guardian very much this past year or so) into as many places as I can. We are getting tremendous results from people who conscientiously use the program, and I, personally, think it has one of the greatest potentials for good of anything that has been developed among us in many, many years.

One more item of interest — the "peace offensive" which the Gospel Guardian is waging in the hope that lines of communication may be improved with many of our brethren in the institutional churches. It has been both encouraging and discouraging — encouraging in that I have met with warm interest and concern on the part of many in the institutional churches, and discouraging in the apathy and general lack of concern I find among my own conservative brethren. I talk to many who want to see something done, but they think the situation is impossible; they see no hope at all for any kind of development in the right direction. Well, maybe it IS hopeless — but, I, for one, am not going to give up until I have done what I can to reach some of the honest and thoughtful brethren "on the other side," An increasing number of you (far fewer than I had hoped and expected, however) are now sending in your "I Will Help" cards, with funds to send the Gospel Guardian to brethren who express a desire for it. Perhaps as more tangible results become apparent the interest will increase. I hope so. I'll be giving some brief reports from time to time concerning what I consider to be significant developments.

F. Y. T.