Celebrating a milestone

One way we remind ourselves of God’s goodness to us is to celebrate milestones, and here’s one of our latest: It has been one year since we launched WORLD Opinions, and it’s a good time to take stock of what that work, because of God’s blessing, has produced.

To review, here’s why we undertook the project: We believed, because you told us, that the content itself would be helpful. Many of you were asking for more help thinking through difficult issues, and felt our existing opinion pieces were not enough. We were mindful of the temptation to insert subtle opinion into our reporting, and we believed a ­separate section for opinions would help. Also, as we looked around, we found that while a lot of media outlets were producing good commentary, very few were tackling current issues from a ­primarily Christian understanding of the world with both clarity and unwavering conviction.

From a business standpoint, we believed a robust opinions section would lead to additional digital subscriptions, which would, if successful, provide more resources for our bread-and-butter reporting.

The whole venture was risky. We had attempted online opinions sections in the early 2000s, but that didn’t really capture your attention. We knew we’d have to do something different to make it work this time.

Thanks to the editorial leadership of WORLD staffers Nick Eicher, Tim Lamer, and Mickey McLean, and thanks also to our new opinion editors, Albert Mohler and Andrew Walker, we have done things differently. From the beginning, the pieces have been thoughtful, helpful, challenging, and Biblical. So now with more than 700 columns addressing important issues, WORLD Opinions has become a platform for a serious, confessionally minded Christianity oriented to the common good.

I talk to WORLD readers every day who tell me they have found great benefit from WORLD Opinions. That is heartening to all of us who hoped for exactly that outcome when we started the project, and it should be encouraging to all of you who have supported the work along the way.

Along with all that—and perhaps because of all that—God has allowed us simultaneously to increase our reporting resources, which was a secondary, but important, objective of WORLD Opinions. You’ve seen those increases firsthand here in the pages of the magazine, as well as on our Digital and Radio platforms. We pray for God’s continued blessing on the project.