From the Billy Graham Center to Missio Nexus: A New Home for EMQ to Continue on

by A. Scott Moreau and Marvin J. Newell

With this issue, I bid farewell to my editorial role for EMQ. Having served for 16 years in the editor’s chair, I have been privileged to oversee the publication of more than sixty-four issues containing almost seven hundred articles focused on helping missionaries, mission leaders, church leaders, and lay Christians around the world better understand and engage missions. 

Final Word from A. Scott Moreau, Retiring General Editor:

With this issue, I bid farewell to my editorial role for EMQ. Having served for 16 years in the editor’s chair, I have been privileged to oversee the publication of more than sixty-four issues containing almost seven hundred articles focused on helping missionaries, mission leaders, church leaders, and lay Christians around the world better understand and engage missions. 

I’m not fully able to describe the joy it has been to pull together the line-ups we’ve seen, but even more so to hear from readers who were touched by individual articles or encouraged by our themes which ranged from member care to translation controversies to arts to families to short-term missions to mergers to retirement to contextualization to multi-direction in missions, almost all written by people either in the trenches themselves or leading those in the trenches. 

Through the more than five decades of our existence, EMQ has been the go-to journal for Evangelicals engaged in or leading the missionary task. Those of us passing the baton are delighted that EMQ is returning home to the organization that birthed it in 1964. They handed it over to us in 1997, and twenty years later we are returning the favor, knowing it is going into good hands which will continue the great legacy started by Jim Reapsome, EMQ founding editor.  

On a final note, it was with great sadness that I attended Jim’s funeral this past summer. Among many other accomplishments, Jim’s 34-year stint as EMQ founding editor charted the path we follow today. The clear commitment of Marv Newell and Missio Nexus to continue on that same path is a great encouragement to me as I’m sure it would have been to Jim. Jim left us a legacy of clear, concise, and on-the-ground writing and thinking that continues to echo with today’s readers. It is my prayer that God will give Marv Newell and the Missio Nexus team the grace to continue and even build on that legacy as well.  

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Word from Marvin J. Newell, Appointed General Editor:

In preparation for this article, I went back to the origins of EMQ to find what the founders were thinking when they launched this publication. Jim Reapsome, EMQ’s first editor, was an incredible gift to this publication. In the 1964 inaugural issue, he stated that the quarterly had two purposes: to make available to the Church as a whole the wide range of insights gained from its work throughout world and for mission agencies to “keep each other stimulated and informed in the realm of ideas and practical missionary tactics.”¹ 

EMQ has not deviated from those purposes. Throughout its fifty-three years of publication, first under the direction of Reapsome, then Gary Corwin, and most recently under my esteemed predecessor, Scott Moreau, EMQ has stayed the course. 

With the transfer of EMQ ownership to Missio Nexus, we intend to remain on that course. The balance between serving the whole Church in the knowledge of missions, and also providing mission organizations the opportunity to stimulate each other with current ideas and tactics, is the path Missio Nexus will maintain. Those twin purposes are still as relevant today as they were a half-century ago. 

Missio Nexus is delighted to accept the task of publishing this significant quarterly from the Billy Graham Center, and we are receiving it in excellent shape! Throughout the years, they have stayed current, molding and fashioning EMQ into the online presence it is today. In particular, the archives are a treasure-trove of missiological information that has been meticulously maintained for easy reference. 

We will continue to make these available as well as consistently add to them. The book reviews are second to none and will continue to be published. Some cosmetics such as formatting and delivery system may change but overall, readers will easily recognize EMQ as we proceed through the transition from one owner to another. The next edition is slated to be published on schedule in January 2018.  

We at Missio Nexus want to thank the Billy Graham Center for entrusting us with the future of EMQ. We consider this an important responsibility to be stewarded well for the sake of the advancement of the Great Commission. 

Endnote

 Jim Reapsome. “Why a New Quarterly?” Evangelical Missions Quarterly. Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1964.

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EMQ, Vol. 53, No. 4. Copyright  © 2017 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  aAll rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.