25th Anniversary Appeal

A quarter of a century

The anniversary was marked with a special edition guest edited by the journal's first editor, Peter Williams, and carrying four substantial articles by David Bebbington, Nazir‑Ali, Peter Williams and George Carey. It was a fitting way to look back over twenty five years of publishing theology and mission.

Why an appeal was needed

Alongside that edition, the journal wrote to current and recently lapsed subscribers with news of its situation. The management team, all of whom give their time unpaid, had been planning a move toward providing more material online. To allow time for that transition and to reduce printing costs, the trustees agreed to cut the number of issues in the following year from four to three.

At a management team meeting that summer, it became clear that subscription renewals were significantly lower than expected. Around two hundred regular readers had not renewed their subscription, representing a projected fall in income of some four thousand pounds in a year when the journal was already budgeting to draw on reserves to cover printing. Taken with a downward trend across several years, the print journal looked unlikely to remain sustainable at its existing level.

A questionnaire sent to subscribers the previous year had shown how much many of them valued the printed edition, and how much they would regret the journal becoming an online only publication. That was why the team had hoped to keep printing while building a wider and younger readership. The plan now looked difficult to sustain.

Two possibilities

The management team was exploring two routes. The first was whether the print journal could continue through a formal partnership with another body, or bodies, that shared Anvil's vision for resourcing the church with mission theology. The second was to move more rapidly to online resources, providing an archive of past articles so that younger leaders could benefit from the journal's back catalogue, and producing new material online rather than in print. That route would carry its own costs, but far lower ones, and it was unlikely to generate much income.