From the Editor
Marshall Shelley
January 1, 2000
Sometimes you just can't find the right word, so you have to create one.
My daughter's high school English teacher was looking for a word that encompassed "huge" and "gigantic" with the added sense of enormous, sweeping scope. So he coined "hugantic" (pronounced hew-jan-tic).
Now that's BIG.
We faced a similar dilemma finding a name for this issue's theme. How do you describe the assignment of today's preacher, to communicate an ancient-future message that God is, God loves, and God can be known. And further, that God is currently at work, as he has been since the world began, to redeem good out of evil, to transform self-centered people into saints who fully engage life in the present but are never satisfied with simply an earthbound worldview, because they know that eternal glory is the reason they exist.
And that's just the message. The other half of the assignment is to spread that good news, embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, to listeners who are ever-changing. To a world ever more complex.
How do you put that in a word?
Not long ago, some of our editors met with John Ortberg, a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church and a frequent contributor to LEADERSHIP. John described the recent shift in the media from "broadcasting" to "narrowcasting."
Fifty years ago, all radio stations offered "block programing," a variety of music, news, comedy, and drama, assuming the whole family tuned in together.
TV networks took over that approach, and many predicted the death of radio. But radio stations adapted, going after narrower and narrower niches, with great success. So we have news talk or sports talk or shock jocks or the professionally opinionated Rush Limbaughs or Dr. Lauras.
Music stations are even more finely defined: ...
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