RALEIGH — A ceremony honoring retired Baptist state
newspaper editor R.G. Puckett for a lifetime of journalistic achievement is
scheduled May 1 at Ardmore Baptist Church in Winston-Salem.
Puckett, who worked as a Baptist journalist longer than any
person in the 20th century, is being honored by Associated Baptist Press with
the Greg Warner Lifetime Achievement Award in Religious Journalism.
A pastor at heart, Puckett never expected a journalism
career. Yet, after being elected at age 25 to edit the Ohio Baptist Messenger,
he went on to serve as associate editor of Kentucky’s Western Recorder, then as
editor of the Maryland Baptist for 13 years and finally 16 years as editor of
North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder before retiring in 1998.
Puckett was a founding board member of Associated Baptist
Press. He described July 17, 1990,
when Al Shackleford and Dan Martin were fired by Baptist Press, the catalyst
for forming the independent news service, as “the saddest day of my entire
journalistic career.”
Covering Baptists from their golden age of numerical growth
and harmony through controversies over race relations, women in ministry,
biblical inerrancy and finally a strong shift to a theological and political
conservatism, Puckett, 78, saw Baptist newspapers mature from devotional and
promotional journals to instruments covering and interpreting hard news in the
expansive denomination.
Puckett said he admires groundbreaking Baptist journalists like W.C. Fields of
Baptist Press, E.S. James of the Texas Baptist Standard, Reuben Alley of Virginia’s
Religious Herald and John Jeter Hurt, who edited both the Christian Index in
Georgia and the Baptist Standard. Yet he claims as mentor C.R. Daley, the
legendary editor in Kentucky,
with whom Puckett served as associate 1963-66.
Daley’s consistent calls for improved race relations in an
era when the nation was still figuring out how to treat all men equally and
white churches often denied membership to blacks drew constant heat.
Puckett remembered Daley’s editorial following the 1963
bombing of the 16th Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham in
which four girls were killed as the most important thing Daley ever wrote.
Puckett said he considers himself privileged just to have handled the galleys
of that editorial and committed it to the press.
Puckett credited Fields with making Baptist Press a respected news service and
creating a positive image nationally for Southern Baptists who, until then,
were often treated as a regionally limited caricature of religion.
Fields, 89, ranked Puckett among “those remarkable, ambidextrous, amphibious
journalists who move through trying, challenging situations with courage,
confidence and effectiveness.”
“He has the energy and intelligence that have made him a
trusted colleague and friend for 50 years,” Fields said. “If he didn’t exist, I
think we would have to invent him.”
After 36 years of helping to write the first draft of Southern Baptist history
at their rowdiest, Puckett remains more than a casual observer. He laments the
trend of Baptist newspaper editors to play it safe while the convention is
throbbing with change.
“Self-policing is basic to being a Baptist,” Puckett said. “A hierarchical
system and monolithic mentality exists in so much of the world. If Baptists
succumb to that, they will no longer be Baptists.”
After several pastorates in his native Kentucky
and one in Ohio, Puckett became
editor of the Ohio Baptist Messenger 1958-61. Then he followed a seminary
classmate’s pastorate in a tough situation in Dunedin, Fla. He stayed long
enough to realize his heart was in Baptist state newspapers and he returned to
his hometown of Louisville to serve with Daley. He still speaks glowingly of
Daley, who died in 1999, as a man of courage, insight and frustratingly long
sentences.
As often happens, a good associate is tapped for an editorship, and Puckett
moved to Maryland in 1966 to edit
the Maryland Baptist.
“One of the joys of my ministry was serving as associate to C.R. Daley,”
Puckett said. “I struggled to leave that because it was secure, it was in my
hometown, close to my seminary alma mater. But I went to Maryland
out of a deep sense of call.”
Being in Maryland put Puckett in
the heart of Southern Baptist expansion into the Northeast. At one time the
Maryland Baptist Convention covered all or parts of 11 states. On his own time,
he produced papers for the New England and
Pennsylvania/New Jersey conventions.
In 1979 he became executive director of Americans United for Separation of
Church and State. Many Southern Baptists were involved with the organization at
the time, and it was in some transition. But Puckett traveled constantly, his
family was still young, and his heart still beat for Baptist newspapers.
He regarded the North Carolina Biblical Recorder one of the
best of those papers and when its editorship came open with the retirement of
J. Marse Grant in 1982, Puckett pursued that opportunity.
He led that paper for 16 years, through the delicate and often contentious
transition from a moderate convention fond of and supportive of its
institutions to a more conservative, anti-institutional leadership that shook
the denominationally loyal base and prompted the rise of an alternative
fellowship of moderate churches.
Looking back, Puckett calls his years at the Biblical Recorder “the greatest
experience of my career.” He is within months of publishing a history of the
Recorder, which he has named, “The life and death of the vision.”
After his journalism career, Puckett was a part of the founding faculty at Campbell
Divinity School,
where he taught preaching. He called it “the capstone of my career.”
“Baptists say they believe in a democracy,” Puckett said. “An
informed constituency is essential to the survival of any true democracy.
Thomas Jefferson said the Baptist church was the purest form of democracy he’d
ever seen. Therefore a free press is essential if Baptists are to be Baptists.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Jameson is reporting and coordinating
special projects for ABP on an interim
basis. He is former editor of the North Carolina Biblical Recorder.)
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