Changes Afoot for the United Methodist Reporter

As most of you probably know, this blog got its start as a companion to the column I write for the United Methodist Reporter. But what you might not know is that I was a reader of the Reporter long before I started writing for it. I received the Memphis Conference edition of the Reporter back when I was the associate chaplain at Lambuth University. Even after I moved back to Arkansas, I continued to read the Reporter online.

I think the Reporter is a great periodical that serves an extremely important function for the church, and I don't just say that because I happen to write a column that appears in it every other week. It serves to unite the whole United Methodist connection in a way that no other periodical can (official denominational publications like the Interpreter Magazine, for instance, do not appear often enough to do this). By publishing church- and ministry-related news each and every week, the Reporter keeps us in touch with one another, whether we are in California, North Carolina, or Cameroon.

Because I intentionally write out of a Generation X perspective, I especially appreciate the ways that the Reporter has sought to include younger voices over the past couple of years. Just in the past few issues, there have been columns, opinion pieces, or book reviews by the likes of Wes Magruder, Jason Byassee, Eric Van Meter, and Kevin Baker. Don't underestimate the importance of that in a rapidly aging church that desperately needs to address the issue of its disappearing youth.

The reason I bring all this up is because the online edition of the Reporter is making major changes this week. The old Reporter Interactive site is about to be shut down, and the online version of the newspaper will be rolled into UMR Communications' wider online effort, called the UM Portal. You can go to that site here. As you will see, besides the Reporter itself it includes blogs, letters to the editor, secular news headlines, a search portal, and lots of other stuff. It is also designed to be more user friendly, with more tabs right up front to take you where you want to go.

Some of you reading this live in annual conferences that use local editions of the Reporter as their conference newspaper. If that's the case, you should call your conference office and order a print subscription. If you live in an annual conference that does not use the Reporter, you can order a subscription to the national edition here. At the very list, bookmark the UM Portal site and visit it often. The good folks down in Dallas are doing a great service for the church, and they produce a top-notch publication.