Publish or perish!
Publish or perish!
The Salvation Army’s mastheads have changed over the century, but its message in promoting the missional work and gospel of Jesus Christ has never been waived.
Do you want to propagate your story? Push your barrow? Make your views and beliefs known?
You need to find some way to do that; to rally the faithful, attract the curious and those likely to provide financial and moral support.
And if you are a rapidly growing, soon-to-be paramilitary Christian movement, then there’s no better way to go about it than putting out your own publications.
It was in October 1868, 154 years ago, that William Booth first issued a publication called The East London Evangelist – A Monthly Record of Christian Work Among the People, and an Organ of the East London Christian Mission.
William Booth wrote the first ever article for the War Cry in 1879.
The masthead titles certainly got shorter over the journey as the East London Christian Mission morphed into The Salvation Army – with publications such as The Christian Mission Magazine, The Victory, The War Cry, The Darkest England Gazette, All the World, Rally, The Salvationist, The Musician, etc.
But the message of hope proclaimed in The East London Evangelist was to prove a constant theme.
At one stage, General Booth – who penned the first piece in the first War Cry in England in late 1879 – could boast he had “circulated 48 million copies of The War Cry in various lands and languages”.
By October 1968, a century later, the Australian War Cry reported that “from this modest beginning has come a circulation of close upon two million copies per issue of the Army’s papers throughout the world”.
The academic phrase ‘publish or perish’, possibly originating at the United States’ Columbia University in the 1950s (wherein teachers and researchers write to maintain their employment and further their careers), also applies to bodies such as The Salvation Army; corporate entities that exist to communicate and live the good news about Jesus Christ.
Publish or perish ... as magazines and newspapers continue a decades-long decline, the challenge for The Salvation Army and our fellow travellers is to develop quality online offerings to continue promoting the stories of Jesus Christ and the mission of The Salvation Army in Australia.
For that, we looked to the continuing work of Others magazine, which became a national entity for the Salvos with the closure of territorial magazines Pipeline (Eastern Territory) and On Fire (Southern Territory). Others now has a regular social media presence via its website and associated Facebook and Instagram platforms.
As for the War Cry? It rolls on still but is now a weekly publication known as Salvos Magazine. And the magic of Kidzone continues to share Christian messages with Australian children in a weekly hard copy mag and online: www.kidzonemag.com.au/
There are also multitudinous, internally-aimed online ‘newsletters’ and ‘bulletins’ at the territorial, divisional, departmental and corps levels.
That 1968 issue of War Cry, with no little prescience, suggested that “in the world of mass media, the printed word still has an effective place ... May The Salvation Army’s press long continue to proclaim the eternal truths of the gospel in the language of every race and age.”
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