Sometimes the right decision is so obvious even a committee can’t blow it. 

When Associated Baptist Press, an independent Baptist news agency, tragically lost the services of Executive Editor Greg Warner who had to retire on disability after a seventh back surgery, the board of directors turned to David Wilkinson to lead a restructured staff.

David, a friend and classmate from Oklahoma Baptist University student days, has been in Baptist journalism since he drove his new Mustang to Nashville to work for the Sunday School Board right out of college in 1976. He was the envy of all his journalism student colleagues.

He’s still the envy of us all, but not because he has the coolest car or just got a good job. He drives the modest vehicles mandated by college tuition for two outstanding children, a servant’s salary and too frequent moves in the past five years. And his new job is the challenge of a lifetime.

It’s not his wardrobe or hair style that makes colleagues wish they could be like him. And it’s certainly not his backhand in racquetball.

David’s colleagues admire him because he is an outstanding writer, a deep, conceptual thinker, an insightful confidante and possesses a fierce, bull headed, narrow minded, costly commitment to integrity. He sticks to it even when it hurts.

A few years back the employer he loved, doing the mission he was sold on, installed an extraneous bureaucratic level between David and his executive. That extraneous bureaucrat tromped all over transparency and fiddled with the facts and insisted he do the same. So David left with no landing pad. He suffered long and hard before following a call—like his father—to a local church. For the past year and a half he’s raised money for the Baylor School of Social Work and now he’s going to lead one of the three news services the Biblical Recorder utilizes to help keep up with Baptists and other Christians around the world.

As a Baptist journalist, David has worked for the Baptist Sunday School Board, the old Christian Life Commission, and the old Brotherhood Commission and was a vice president at Southern Seminary. He established the communications office at the national Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, following one of his heroes—Keith Parks—to that new organization which was founded simply as a missionary sending agency.

Our paths crossed many times, and we worked in the same building in Nashville when I was with Baptist Press. When he married a good woman my wife finally forgave him for the afternoon in school when we went to the lake and dangled our toes in the water while solving issues global and intimate when I was supposed to be home.

David was the Oklahoma collegiate sports writer of the year for three years before becoming student newspaper editor. I succeeded him and earned the same award the following year. I felt like Aaron Rodgers following Brett Favre. 

When he married Melanie in Arkansas Sue Ellen and I carted their gifts back to Nashville and deposited them in their apartment. Of course, while there, we discovered innumerable places where red Kool Aid, Vaseline, crumpled newspapers and cellophane could find new and creative purpose.

Always sensitive and responsive to the persistent tugs and prods of God in his life, David left a dream job to attend seminary at Southern. I left him with a few bucks to help as a gift. A few years later, he returned the gift, at a time when my situation had changed and it really helped.

Some of you have no appreciation for Associated Baptist Press. Through your own lens you see it as a CBF mouthpiece or as “anti” something. Special events or needs prompt the birth of every organization and the shameful treatment, then firing of the Baptist Press editors prompted Baptist state newspaper editors to initiate Associated Baptist Press.

But ABP today has matured into a news service highly regarded by national secular media who cover religion, by Baptist editors who appreciate a perspective informed by more than dictation from an executive and by readers who depend on it for its timeliness and scope.

It has served us well. It has served you well. In David Wilkinson’s capable hands, it will be strong into the future and you will be the beneficiary.