Photo via assistnews.net

Frank Wright helps calm the troubled waters at NRB

When Dr. Frank Wright took over the leadership of National Religious Broadcasters some years back, the NRB was in some disarray, reports Dan Wooding, founder of ASSIST Ministries.

After a month of escalating controversy over religion and politics, the executive committee of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) voted 7-1 to accept the resignation of the association's president, Wayne Pederson, effective February 16, 2002.

Meeting in Nashville before the association's annual convention, the NRB board (with 83 of its 93 members present) voted 47-36 to endorse the committee's decision. The association's bylaws gave the committee the power to hire or fire the president. The nine-member committee had taken the final vote the day before.

Pederson took office the first week of January 2002, but controversy began to brew January 5, when portions of an interview Pederson gave to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune were published in an article. In the story, Pederson said that Christian broadcasters should focus more on preaching the gospel than on participation in political matters.

Pederson said he would like to change the image of the NRB from its strong association with the "far Christian right." Pederson also said he planned to remedy that in his new term as president and chief executive officer, which was to begin at the annual meeting of the NRB in Nashville.

However, several of the prominent members of the then 58-year-old broadcasting association felt Pederson's statement indicated that NRB would make a dramatic shift away from taking stands on public-policy issues. Some called publicly for Pederson to resign which he eventually did.

Some time after this, as NRB appeared to splitting apart, Dr. Frank Wright was appointed as president and CEO, and he quickly set about calming the trouble waters of the broadcasters association.

In an interview in Nashville at NRB 2008, I asked Wright if he thought, at that difficult time, that he could have brought the different parties together to achieve unity.

“Well, unity in the Body of Christ is very important things and there are times where we, as Christians, get into disagreements with one another that lead to unpleasantries, but those days are behind us,” he said. “God has poured oil on troubled waters and the members of NRB have looked around the world and saw that there are billions rushing off to an eternity without Christ and that we need to be unified so that we can effectively communicate the Gospel to the world.”

I wondered if he initially had been tempted to not take the job because of all the controversy swirling around at that time.

“No, I was not. I would not say that was the case at all,” said Wright. “When I was first contacted about becoming president of NRB, I said that I was not interested because I didn’t think it was the will of God, but after praying through about an eight or nine month period of time, the Lord showed me that there are times that you need to put your career in His hands, and you need to put decisions in His hands and so, after a lot of prayer and a lot of meetings, I felt it was God’s will to come and God has been very kind to me here.”

This year’s convention was attended by many overseas Christian broadcasters who once seemed to feel they were the poor relations of the Americans. How had he been able to make them feel so welcome?

“Well, to be honest, as Henry Blackaby once said, ‘Our goal should be to look and see where God is working and join Him there.” And anybody who’s paying attention to what’s going on around the world knows that Spirit of God is moving around the world. So I wanted the internationals to have greater participation in the NRB so that our domestic members could partner with them and help advance the cause of Christ around the world and now, we have over 500 internationals attending our convention and so it’s just something that I think the Lord laid on our heart.

“More than a strategy, or more than some human wisdom cooked up by us, I think we have acknowledged that God is at work using electronic media around the world.”

I then asked Dr. Wright, with so many of the older broadcasters passing on, how did he plan to bring in a new generation of Christian broadcasters.

“Well, it is striking that in the last few years, we’ve seen some of the great lions of our faith either leave the active scene of ministry or go home to be with the Lord and many of their peers are in that same age range,” he said. “We lost in the last year the man who led me to Christ 28 years ago, Dr. D. James Kennedy. We have also seen the deaths of Jerry Falwell, Bill Bright, Larry Burkett, Marlon Maddoux and Adrian Rogers. In fact, the list goes on and on but you know, this is in the ordinary course of things.

“We read the Scriptures -- in the book of Kings – where it says, whichever king they’re referring to, he served the Lord and when he had served in his generation he went to sleep -- he died you know. So it’s in the ordinary course of things that we serve and we go on to be with our Lord and Savior.

“So where is the next generation going to come from? The same place it always has -- out of the Church and we have the great promise of Jesus who said, ‘I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.’ So even now, beyond our sight, Jesus is preparing that next generation of Christian leaders that are going to step up and use electronic media to its most advantage.”

Dr. Wright then spoke about the extraordinary progress in technology that he believes that Christians should use to spread the Gospel.

“The advances have been so breathtaking and the platforms of distribution that are available to us today far exceed the wildest imagination of any Christian broadcaster from a generation ago,” he said. “The challenge, of course, is that since consumers of electronic media can get their content so many different ways, it’s incumbent on us to raise the quality of our programming; its creativity; to tell compelling stories and interesting stories with high quality production values all while maintaining our faithfulness to biblical truths.

“So the opportunities have gotten wider, but the challenge has gotten greater and the Church of Jesus Christ has to step up to that challenge.”

I then raised the thorny question of the shrinking of new coverage in Christian broadcasting in the United States.

“It is a challenge, and yet it seems to me that access to news information is more readily available than ever before so there ought to be ways that Christian media can take advantage of that access,” said Wright. “I do think there is a swing back a little bit towards more talk radio programs on Christian stations that may ultimately result in more news coverage.

“There has been a pulling back from kind of covering daily news items. On the plus side I think the Christian broadcasters still do a very good job of talking about the news after the fact, trying to bring perspective to what happens in the news what does that mean how does that fit in with our biblical and world life view. But I agree with you we could do more in reporting on the news as it happens.”

[03/28/2008]

Print Version