Showing up, every day

Fifteen years is a long time in podcasting.

Long enough that the medium itself barely existed when The World and Everything in It began. When Joseph Slife and I recorded a pilot episode for commercial radio in the spring of 2011, we were thinking about audience—but not about rankings, platforms, or anything resembling today’s podcast ecosystem. We did not even know what to call the program. We were testing an idea: What would WORLD’s journalism sound like if it were written for the ear instead of for the eye?

That first experiment led to a weekend broadcast later that summer on hundreds of stations syndicated by the Salem Radio Network. The work was difficult and not immediately popular. But week by week, the program improved. By May of 2013, what started as a weekly broadcast became a daily.

There were early moments when it was not clear the program would survive. Once Joseph and I sat on a bench in a hotel stairwell during a broadcasting conference to pray, asking God to provide the people we needed to do the work well. Over time, He did.

What followed was not the result of careful engineering. It was persistence, plain and often costly. Across an estimated 3,300 episodes, The World and Everything in It has never missed a deadline.

Consistency matters in any medium. It matters even more in one as young as podcasting. Many of the most widely known shows have yet to reach 2,500 episodes. We happened to start early. More importantly, from the beginning, we resolved to stay with the work for the long haul.

Even the program’s name reflects it. As Joseph later recalled on air, he was reading Psalm 89—“The world and everything in it is yours”—and also thinking about Paul’s words in Acts 17. The phrase, Joseph said, gave the program “rails to run on,” a way of grounding daily news in the ­conviction that this is God’s world, ordered by Him, even when the headlines suggest otherwise.

This summer, The World and Everything in It marks its 15th anniversary. In the life of a daily news program, 15 years suggests maturity—less concerned with proving itself and more with faithfully stewarding what has been built.

Along the way, many people have carried responsibility for the program: reporters, editors, hosts, producers, engineers, freelancers, administrators, donors, and listeners who made room for it each day. Among those stewards has been Paul Butler.

Paul served as executive producer of WORLD Radio for more than five years. During that time, he helped shepherd close to 1,500 daily programs, as well as special weekend editions and radio news efforts. Taken together, that represents nearly half of all the episodes we have produced—and more than 60 million downloads.

Those numbers matter. But they are not the most impor­tant thing. What matters more is the care Paul brought to the work: care for the journalism, for the people producing it, and for the listener who trusts us each day. Radio is a collaborative craft that calls for patience, humility, and an ear for voices. Paul brought those qualities to the role, and the program is better for his service.

Paul is not leaving WORLD. He is taking on a role that plays directly to one of his greatest strengths: directing our internal training program. He has shown year after year—especially through the World Journalism Institute—that he is an outstanding teacher. In the years ahead, his focus will be on helping develop our journalists’ professional skills across the organization. I suspect, though, that broadcasters will always hold a special place in his heart.

As for The World and Everything in It, this anniversary year also includes a transition. I have stepped back into direct leadership of the program as executive producer, working alongside Lindsay Mast, a highly experienced producer whose voice listeners know well. Lindsay manages the day-to-day work, and together we are collaborating with a deeply talented team of writers, editors, reporters, technical producers, and journalists across WORLD.

The purpose is not reinvention. It is a recommitment.

We recommit to the same things that have guided this program from the beginning: careful reporting, thoughtful conversation, and a clear Christian worldview applied to the news of the day. We are grateful for what God has built. And we look ahead with confidence.