Christianity Today and the World

When Billy Graham sketched a plan for a new magazine in 1955, he imagined not only “hard-hitting editorial[s]” and “full news coverage” from an evangelical point of view but also “a digest of what other magazines all over the world are saying.” Since its inception a year later, Christianity Today fulfilled that goal admirably, bringing evangelical world news to an audience centered in the United States. However, along the way, the global vision changed. While Billy Graham and the United States originally assumed a leadership role, a new form of evangelical internationalism emerged, as Melani McAlister showed, that “went well beyond missionary work.” A “politics of affection” allowed US-American evangelicals to conceive of foreign co-believers as part of their community, in her words as “part of ‘us’.” At least since the Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization in 1974 evangelicals from Latin America and the “Global South” pushed for greater participation. While international coverage in Christianity Today spiked in the 1990s with political upheavals for example in Israel, China, South Africa and Cuba, the magazine at the turn of the 21st century reimagined itself as part of a global community of faith. Adopting the tag-line “a global media ministry,” Christianity Today, while still primarily serving a US-American audience, employed new technologies for worldwide outreach. This paper explores this change by focusing on how Christianity Today’s focus on global evangelicalism transformed its own approach.