Joel Belz answered the indignant telephone calls himself.
When 10, then 20, after which 30 and 40 irate readers known as the workplaces of World journal to complain a couple of cowl story on a Republican presidential candidate—questioning the person’s dedication to conservatism and elevating questions on his character, his a number of marriages, and the way he’d earned his money—Belz took the calls.
He requested each the identical query.
Could they level to any details that had been fallacious?
He understood they didn’t need the Christian newsmagazine to criticize a Republican, and that if the candidate misplaced and Democrats received the White House, that may be dangerous for conservatives. But might they level to something within the article that was truly incorrect? If they might present him an error, he stated, he would give them a free 12 months’s subscription.
“So far,” Belz instructed the Asheville Citizen-Times in 2000, as John McCain’s rebel marketing campaign began to falter, “not a single subscriber has challenged a phrase of our report.”
Belz all the time believed that Christians wanted the information. In an more and more liberal and secular society that stated all the things is relative, he thought conservative evangelicals and orthodox Bible-believers, particularly, wanted “sound journalism, grounded in facts and biblical truth.” Even—particularly—if it was difficult.
“We wouldn’t pretend there are clear biblical directives on every issue,” Belz stated in 2000. “But there are facts that [have] to be stated publicly. In that sense, we believe the Bible calls for the demonstration of truth.”
Belz died at home in Asheville, North Carolina, on February 4. He was 82.
Belz based It’s God’s World, a Christian newsmagazine for center college college students, in 1981, and expanded the thought to different age teams with Exploring God’s World, Sharing God’s World, God’s Big World, and God’s World Today.
He launched World, for adults, in 1986. The motto of the journal was taken from Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”
Belz described World as {a magazine} for “the 5 percent of the people in a typical evangelical church who are serious about applying their faith to the rest of their lives.” The mission, he stated, was merely “to help readers see the world and everything in it from a God-centered perspective.”
Belz additionally helped begin the World Journalism Institute in 1999 to domesticate Christian journalists dedicated to factual reporting. The institute has skilled greater than 700 folks, to this point. Some have labored for nationwide media organizations together with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, in addition to many state and native papers, politically conservative publications, and non secular retailers together with Baptist News and Christianity Today.
“He leaves behind decades of service to Christ’s church, a trusted institution, a lengthy body of work, and a new generation of journalists and writers who stand on his shoulders,” the Colson Center stated in a press release.
Andrew Walker, a World editor and a theology professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, known as Belz a “titan of his times” and “a legend of Christian journalism.”
“Evangelicals owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for the legacy he has left,” Walker stated, “one of professionalism, conviction, and excellence.”
Belz was born on August 10, 1941, in Marshalltown, Iowa. His father and mom, Max Victor Belz and Jean Franzenburg Belz, had been a part of the Bible Presbyterian Church, a conservative Calvinist denomination led by Carl McIntire and others who cut up from the mainline Presbyterian church in the course of the modernist-fundamentalist controversies. The Belzes helped begin a Presbyterian college and plant a church a number of miles outdoors of Walker, Iowa, then a city of about 460 folks.
The household had eight youngsters—raised to learn the Bible, sing hymns, recite the Westminster Catechism at breakfast, and love church.
The household additionally ran a printing operation of their basement. Belz realized to function the linotype press at age 11 and cherished it.
He tried to enter the printing business for himself as a freshman in school, however the enterprise shortly led to catastrophe. He borrowed money from his grandfather to purchase a linotype and took it with him to Covenant College, a Presbyterian college then positioned in St. Louis. As Belz tried to maneuver the printing press into the college basement, there was an accident, and it fell down a flight of stairs.
“It may have been worth thousands at the top of the stairs,” he would later say, “but by the time it reached the bottom it was worth $20 in scrap metal.”
The catastrophe didn’t dampen Belz’s ardour for printing, although. Before he graduated, he spent a semester engaged on a prototype for a Christian newspaper.
“It was always his ambition,” his sister Julie Lutz instructed World.
After commencement in 1962, Belz went to work for Covenant College and helped scout out a brand new location in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He went again to highschool to earn an MA in communications after which returned to Covenant to work in public relations and to show lessons in media, English, and logic. He found he wasn’t good at instructing, although, and stop after two years.
An alternative to return to publishing arose in 1977 with The Presbyterian Journal in Asheville, North Carolina. Belz took the job. The journal was based in 1942 by Billy Graham’s father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell (who later went on to discovered Christianity Today). The journal was imagined to struggle theological liberalism within the Presbyterian church, however with the separation of conservatives and the founding of the Presbyterian Church in America, it misplaced numerous relevance. By the late ’70s, the journal was in decline and quick shedding subscribers.
The Presbyterian Journal was additionally going by means of a disaster of management.
“The staff became so divided,” former World editor Marvin Olasky recalled, “that writers and editors began working in two separate buildings.”
Belz proposed and launched his first kids’s journal in 1981. It was well-liked at Christian faculties and drew bulk subscriptions. In the subsequent few years, Belz added 4 extra publications for various age teams. Together, the kids’s newsmagazines introduced in about 250,000 weekly paid subscriptions—greater than 10 instances the variety of subscriptions for The Presbyterian Journal.
The board determined to place Belz in cost, and he proposed an bold new challenge: an alternate Christian newsmagazine for adults.
“Huge gaps existed in the effort to help Christians think biblically,” Belz later defined. “No one was picking up each week’s political news, international happenings, media developments, advances in science, changes in the welfare system, matters of health and medicine—no one was regularly (and rigorously) reflecting on all these aspects of life from a pointedly and conservatively biblical point of view.”
Christianity Today, then a biweekly journal, centered its information reporting on the church and what evangelicals had been doing on the earth. World, in distinction, wished to cowl all the things—from a uniquely Christian perspective.
World, nonetheless, almost failed as quick as Belz’s school printing business. The first concern was put out in March 1986. It was 16 pages, printed on shiny paper, with congressmen Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman in colour on the duvet. Inside, theologian R. C. Sproul provided evaluation of proposed laws, and there was reporting on the violent political battle in Nicaragua.
Subscriptions didn’t flood in.
After 13 points, the journal was about $300,000 in debt. It solely had about 5,000 readers and lots of of them didn’t appear too pleased with what they had been studying.
“Christian adults disagree on a lot more issues than Christian kids,” Belz stated.
The board of The Presbyterian Journal determined to cancel the publication. Belz, nonetheless, had a counterproposal. He recommended that The Presbyterian Journal ought to shut down and its assets be invested, as a substitute, in World, which he calculated he might produce at a decreased cost of lower than 10 cents per copy.
The board agreed, put $300,000 into the fledgling journal, and Belz relaunched World in 1987.
“For the next five years,” he later recalled, “the goal was survival. Could we publish one more edition? Could we pay one more week’s postage bills? Could we meet salaries one more time? … After the first five years, we still had fewer than 20,000 subscribers and were hemorrhaging red ink faster than we wanted anybody to know.”
The newsmagazine survived, nonetheless, and achieved some stability by the early Nineties. By the time World celebrated its tenth anniversary, greater than 85,000 subscribers had been receiving the 32-page journal 50 instances per 12 months.
The journal’s profile was boosted by conservative political leaders, together with William Bennett and Newt Gingrich, who praised it publicly. But World actually set itself aside by its dedication to information reporting.
“We had a sense that this was a void,” Belz stated in 1996.
He criticized the various profitable Christian publications that didn’t put any assets into reporting: “It’s kind of scary that people who are supposed to be so committed to the truth and to the Word have so easily accepted a communications model that’s based so much on feelings and experiences. Everything’s about how people feel. It’s getting harder for people to focus on what’s true and what’s false.”
As a part of that dedication to deal with details, World additionally did investigative work, reporting on the misconduct of Christians and the scandals and cover-ups troubling many evangelical establishments.
Olasky, who joined World within the early Nineties, stated it bothered Belz that Christian media organizations hadn’t damaged the story of the scandal that introduced down televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
“Joel said, ‘Gee, I wish we had done that,’” Olasky stated. “We don’t want to leave it to the secular press to expose wrongdoing within the church.”
World went on to report on quite a few evangelical scandals, together with sexual abuse at a missionary boarding college in West Africa, megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll’s plagiarism and manipulation of bestseller lists, megachurch pastor James MacDonald’s bullying and religious abuse, Christian school president Dinesh D’Souza’s obvious marital infidelity, and extra.
Any one in every of World’s near-weekly points had the potential to set off a bomb in American evangelicalism. It gave the journal sufficient of an edge that Christian media commentator Terry Mattingly known as it “Rolling Stone for cultural conservative evangelicals.”
If some readers had been often indignant in regards to the important protection of Republicans, that didn’t damage both, in accordance with Belz. He claimed conservative assaults on World’s reporting on John McCain solely “put us on the map.”
And nobody ever did get that free 12 months’s subscription.
“As much as Joel’s vision gave everyday vibrancy to timeless truths found in Scripture, he was also the son of a pastor who ran a print shop in the basement,” wrote Belz’s sister-in-law Mindy Belz, who reported for World for 35 years. “He came from small beginnings in rural Iowa, the second-oldest of eight children. And he was a mid-century newspaperman at heart.”
Belz stepped again from the journal amid well being considerations however continued writing columns as much as January 2024. One month earlier than his dying, he wrote in regards to the risks of deception.
“Our culture has learned how to play fast and loose with the truth,” Belz instructed World readers. “And we Christian believers aren’t immune to the infection that saturates the culture we live in.”
Belz is survived by his spouse of 49 years, Carol Esther; daughters Jenny Gienapp, Katrina Costello, Alice Tucker, Elizabeth Odegard, and Esther Morrison; their kids and grandchildren; and a big prolonged household.
His funeral might be held at Arden Presbyterian Church close to Asheville and streamed on-line on Saturday, February 10. He might be buried in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in a coffin constructed by relations.
