Archive: Good News Founder Charles Keysor Dies at 60

By James S. Robb with other staff reports

The minister and journalist who almost single-handedly forged an influential evangelical movement within the United Methodist Church has died.

Dr. Charles W. Keysor, founding editor of Good News magazine and chief executive of the Good News movement within the church for 15 years, died October 22 at his home in Clearwater, Florida from complications of cancer. He was 60 years old.

From his position as spokesman for and organizer of UM evangelicals, Keysor played a decisive role in the realignment of United Methodist theology and policy that began after the denomination was created by union in 1968. In many ways he personified the evangelical strain of United Methodism.

From its founding to the early 20th century, the evangelical faith had dominated American Methodism. But in the early 1900s, Methodism underwent a rapid change of direction by embracing theological liberalism. The liberal swing gained such momentum that by the 1960s evangelicals in the denomination were scattered and seldom heard.

By the time of Keysor’s graduation from Garrett seminary as a second-career minister in 1965, evangelicals were essentially unrepresented at the national levels of the church. Some observers were even predicting the death of the orthodox faith, at least among the clergy.

Charles Keysor was not prepared to accept this situation. Just a few years earlier it would not have mattered to him. Though an active Methodist, Keysor had no personal relationship with Christ. He did, however, have an intimate knowledge of the institutional church. He had been the managing editor of Together, the now defunct official Methodist magazine. Then, while managing editor of the David C. Cook Publishing Company, he was profoundly converted in a Billy Graham crusade. Soon he felt called to leave his journalism career to enter seminary.

As a minister with an evangelical faith, he became distressed with the prevailing liberal theology of the denomination. In 1966, at a lunch meeting, Keysor told his concerns to James Wall, who was then the editor of the official Methodist ministers’ magazine, the Christian Advocate. Wall suggested that Keysor put his concerns in an article for the Advocate. The article, “Methodism’s Silent Minority,” clearly explained what an evangelical is. Keysor called upon his fellow evangelicals “to become the unsilent minority.”

The article made a deep impact across the church. Keysor received over 200 letters and phone calls in response, mostly from pastors who shared his concern. Their responses followed two basic themes: “I thought I was the only one left in our church who believes these things”; and “I feel so alone-so cut off from the leadership and organization of my church.”

A number of others asked why the church couldn’t have just one publication that expressed the evangelical faith. Keysor asked himself, “Why, indeed, should a denomination which began with the Bible and the evangelistic thrust of the Wesleys and Francis Asbury be without a voice for orthodoxy?”

Even though he had thought his journalism days were over, Keysor decided he must found such a magazine. It would be a “forum for Scriptural Christianity.” While continuing his responsibilities as pastor of Grace Methodist Church in Elgin, Illinois, Keysor, together with his wife Marge, began to pull the publication together. He planned for it to have a rather austere design and a digest-size format similar to that used by several other magazines he had edited. On Marge’s suggestion he decided to name it Good News. The first quarterly issue appeared in March, 1967 and was mailed to 6,300 Methodists.

Other issues followed, and gradually the mailing list was converted to mostly paid subscribers. In short order Good News became widely read by church officials, who wanted to see what the evangelicals thought about various church policies.

The magazine’s early issues were collections of short articles, mostly written by evangelical UM pastors, on the subjects of evangelism, church growth, Biblical exposition, etc. But the heart of the magazine was the editor’s carefully written and hard-hitting editorials. One of the liberal church leaders reading Good News said, “Charles opened our eyes and made us think again.”

But Keysor’s direct, tell-it-like-it-is style also earned him some antagonists. In his very last Good News editorial (Jan/Feb, 1981), he unloaded a typical volley. “General Conference should stop passing so many vague resolutions,” he wrote. “Why continue providing our bureaucratic elite with carte blanche to manipulate the church?”

Such prose often resulted in counterattack. One enraged editorialist asked, “Has Good News become bad news?”

Keysor’s combative writing contrasted with his personal manner. He was compassionate and jovial with his many friends. He had a quick wit. His many admirers were enthralled by his lightning-fast analysis of events in the church and world.

Though Keysor’s plainspoken journalistic style didn’t appeal to everyone, it managed to alert large numbers of pastors and laypeople to the dangerous drift of the church. Even many moderate church leaders began to listen. And Keysor’s fellow evangelicals began to come forward. Within months of founding the magazine, he appointed an initial board of directors for the new movement. In the summer of 1970 Good News held its first national meeting, called a convocation, in Dallas. To everyone’s surprise 1,600 United Methodists came. The convocations became annual events.

In 1972 Asbury College invited Keysor to teach journalism. So Chuck and Marge, and their children, pulled up stakes from Illinois and moved to Wilmore, Kentucky, where Good News still has its offices.

During the next eight years, Keysor guided the movement into a remarkable series of expansions. He saw Good News grow into a $500,000 budget, 15 full-time employees, a missions council which lobbied for a more evangelical missions program, and a network of loosely confederated evangelical renewal groups within dozens of annual conferences.

Yet, even with the obvious success of the movement he had founded, Keysor eventually grew pessimistic about the likelihood of real reform taking place in the denomination. Frustrated by the continued liberal dominance of the church, and deeply disappointed with the mixed results of the 1980 General Conference in Indianapolis, Keysor began to consider a change of direction. He asked the Good News board how committed it was to working only from within the United Methodist Church. The board voted to keep its original purpose—a forum within the UM church. In January, 1981, Keysor resigned to teach journalism full-time

This step, however, was followed by another change a year later. In the summer of 1982, Keysor informed the church press that he was switching denominations, joining the Evangelical Covenant Church. He indicated his need to belong to a church with an uncontested evangelical perspective. He explained his desire for “a more democratic form of church government in which local congregations own their own property, call their pastors, and determine the best way to invest their money. … ”

In 1983, the Keysors moved to Clearwater, Florida to pastor a new Evangelical Covenant congregation in that city. The church prospered. Then last summer Keysor was admitted to the hospital to clear up a kidney ailment. Surgery revealed an advanced liver cancer. The malignancy evidently was a reoccurrence of one that had been removed by surgery in March, 1978. Within two months he died.

After his death many of his colleagues praised his accomplishments. The present Good News editor, James V. Heidinger II, who succeeded Keysor in 1981, said, “As a young pastor, I found hope for our church through Chuck and the Good News movement. He was a leader of courage and conviction—clearly God’s man to found a national movement for spiritual and theological renewal within Methodism.”

The current Good News chairperson, Helen Rhea Coppedge, said, “Chuck was a man of deep conviction who lived what he believed and taught. He was a dear personal friend.” A former chairman, Mike Walker, stated, “I was always encouraged by Chuck’s passion for the Gospel and by his vision for renewal among the people of God, which fueled his writing and all of his church involvement.”

An important part of Keysor’s legacy was the large number of working journalists who studied journalism under him at Asbury College. One of those, Gregg Lewis, senior editor of the award-winning Campus Life magazine, said, “Charles Keysor was not only an inspiring example of quality Christian journalism, he was also a demanding, affirming, and gifted teacher of his craft.”

Keysor is survived by Marge and their five children: Daniel, in Colorado; Joseph, in Chicago; Nancy Koester, in New York City; Charles, Jr., in Elgin, Illinois; and Stephen, in Greenville, Texas.