S B C U P D AT E
At 75, Baptist Press Still ‘Important Religion News’ BY DAVID ROACH
W
ildfire had decimated the Northern California town of Magalia, and local pastor Doug Crowder didn’t know how his 100-member congregation could meet the swell of community needs. That’s when Baptist Press (BP) published his story. In a 1976 photo, W. C. Fields, public relations director for the SBC Executive Committee, tears apart a phonebook for the city of Norfolk, Virginia, the site of that year’s SBC annual meeting. The gesture had become a tradition to celebrate the close of each year’s meeting. As the December 2018 article made its way across the internet, unsolicited donations flooded in: food for 300–500 meals per day, a forklift, RVs, tools, clothes, propane, and enough water to distribute twelve tons each day. BP’s reporting sparked the “worldwide flood” of provision, Crowder said two months after the fire. “We didn’t actually go looking for anything. God just keeps bringing the stuff.”
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That episode illustrates the reach Baptist Press has attained in its 75 years of existence. From its beginning as a dispatch of SBC news for a handful of state Baptist paper editors, BP has evolved into a worldwide publication with influence well beyond the SBC family. BP has moved “from a strictly church press orientation into something that constituted an alternative wire service on certain types of issues,” said Terry Mattingly, a nationally syndicated religion columnist and editor of the Get Religion blog, which analyzes media coverage of religion news. Rather than merely covering Southern Baptist news, BP has become “important religion news period.” The concept of an SBC news service first was suggested in a 1919 SBC resolution, but it didn’t materialize until 1946, when the Baptist Sunday School Board (the precursor organization to Lifeway Christian Resources) began sending weekly news releases to state paper editors under the
