I was part of a team in 1965 which produced a special, ‘Bible Week’ issue of Challenge. My job was to arrange for churches to deliver a copy to each of the 165,000 homes in Auckland. At the time Trevor Shaw, the editor, expressed the need for businessmen to support Challenge. Six years later when the paper closed, Ashley Fawcett and I joined Mr Shaw to see the paper resume publication. Challenge has again ceased publication and again we look for publication to be restored.

As I look back over those years, so many memories flash back. The staff, who have worked alongside me, and the journalists who have provided news items and stories. The regular features, studies, columns, cartoons, crosswords, children’s page and columnists like John Hawkesby and Garth George and the 10 years in between, when the late Henk Kamsteeg and his team published the paper.

Alongside the staff have been the Board, editorial and women’s committee, Board of Reference and those who have prayed regularly for Challenge.

To begin with we were provided with office space in an old wooden building and subsequently enjoyed specially designed facilities in the Maranatha building further along Great North Road, before moving to offices in Panmure, Greenlane and back to Great North Road again.

Challenge has sought to be a Christian newspaper that recognises Christians come in different shapes and sizes, and churches have different styles and emphasis, but agree on most of what they believe and practise. The paper has spoken on behalf of the Christian Church. It has sought to acknowledge the God of creation, the Saviour of the world and the authenticity of the Bible as the Word of God. It has expressed a Christian world view and published news items that the secular media has ignored. This role has become increasingly vital as society has systematically disregarded the values it once enshrined.

Challenge’s emphasis on mission and evangelism means that the stories it tells and the news it reports depict the life- changing experience of joining and being nurtured in the Christian family; the opposition Christians face; and the love and compassion they show their neighbours.

As I pen my last publisher’s letter my heart does a flip.

I sense again my own humanity, frailty and inadequacy.

How I wish I had done more and done it better. I had a goal for a circulation of 40,000 but we still only print 4000 copies a week. Even so, thousands in New Zealand and around the world read the paper each week and I trust their lives have been ‘challenged’ and enriched as a result.

Contact the Challenge Taskforce Committee
with your Support, Prayer and Ideas for the Future
Email: challenge@andryl.com”