Beginning as The Gospel Publisher, and then The Church Advocate, and finally now, The Global Advocate has changed many times over its nearly two century long run. Beginning in 1835, the periodical started as a weekly newspaper, containing a little bit of everything you could imagine. It has religious news, stories, poetry, jokes, quips, essays, church minutes, regular columns, advertisements for products, and more. More recently, as well having a name change, it has taken the form of a bi-monthly, full color magazine, as well as a digital magazine with web articles. This version of The Global Advocate is powerfully influenced by Linda Draper, previous editor of the Advocate, and the one who instituted the mission of capturing and telling stories from within our denomination. That’s a mission we still aim to carry out.
Yet, it’s time for some more change. As of the start of this year, The Global Advocate will be a quarterly magazine. We’ve been contemplating this change for a while, and the reasons are multifaceted, so let’s break them down.
First, we had a goal to publish the digital magazine day and date with the physical magazine, which we have largely achieved. Realizing this goal has also helped us realize the utility and flexibility of a digital product. digitally, we are able to produce longer articles (no page limitations), while including more pictures, and telling fuller stories. It’s also helped us to realize that publishing all of our stories at the same time, in one lump sum, is a strange model.
We can produce articles digitally whenever they are ready and people are more likely to read an article instead of reading 4 or 5. We suspect most people who pick up the magazine put it back down and forget about it before they read everything, and we’d like to avoid that!
In the switch to a digital first mindset, we are able to bring our best articles together into a physically published set. AKA, a physical magazine made of the best of our efforts, not a physical magazine as the sum of our efforts.
Second, we believe quarterly will help us to achieve a higher quality product. More time to get the right stories from the right sources, while having better photography. The rapid pace of production has meant cut corners on articles that we cherish, and that leads to some amount of regret. We want to honor the legacy of The Global Advocate by making the best piece we can, and we think quarterly will enable us to do that. Likewise, we want to continue updating the look and feel of the physical magazine, the bi-monthly turn around has made that almost insurmountable, and so each issue looks and feels more similar than we’d like. That means you can watch out for subtle and not so subtle design changes to the issues going forward.
Third, we want to produce more than just written material here. Producing videos and audio will help us capture the story of God in the lives of our pastors, evangelists, disciple makers and missionaries in ways that text can’t. And, we want to do that while maintaining a high quality. Again, we believe quarterly issues will make that goal far more feasible.
Lastly, since we’ve moved away from a subscriber-based model, and made the advocate freely available to anyone who wants it, we have to be more conscientious of the cost and effort we are putting into The Advocate. Frankly, we need to wrestle with the fact that our office is smaller than it’s been in decades while we also live in a financially conservative moment. Making the Advocate quarterly is the responsible choice in our current context, so that our office isn’t pigeonholed into just producing a magazine, and so we can steward the Lord’s resources (sweat and dollars) wisely.
We hope you understand and don’t begrudge us this change, but see it, like we do, as an exciting opportunity to continue advocating all the awesome work that the Lord is doing in the Churches of God, General Conference.
As a happy new year’s gift, you can find another article all about the awesome work our churches are doing through Preschool education. We spoke to multiple church and preschool administrators about how church run preschools are serving communities by providing affordable education and Kingdom of God through discipleship. It’s a great story that continues our the CGGC’s mission to educate from Preschool to post graduate education.
You can read that here: The Blessings of Church Run Preschools
You can also find our Prayer Calendar here! Winter 2025 Prayer Calendar: Prayer Calendar
CGGC eNews—Vol. 19, No. 1
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