Using Newspapers in California by Frank A. Coffin

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 24, 1914

Using Newspapers in California

By Frank A. Coffin

Reports of our sermons and meetings, published in the daily and weekly secular newspapers, do bring people into the truth, as is evidenced by the experience of one of our workers at Reno, Nev. A series of tent meetings has been held there, thirty-five sermons having been given, at the last report. The newspapers, recognizing the value of the articles submitted to them by those in charge of these meetings, have printed fifty-seven of them, giving the message to the people. About twelve thousand homes in Nevada are reached by these papers.

Now, above all times, the public will read about the signs of the times. The day the Austro-Servian war began, the editor of a newspaper in a Southern California town called up one of our brethren on the telephone at noon, and was hardly willing to give him time to eat his dinner before giving the newspaper an interview on Armageddon and the signs of the end. This brother is not a minister, but he did his best to give the truth, and has sent in two more articles since.

The Southern California camp meeting, held at Alhambra, a suburb of Los Angeles, August 3-16, was given wide publicity through the newspapers of the southern part of the State. Seventy-five articles were printed in the Alhambra and Los Angeles dailies, giving over twenty-eight columns of solid reading matter, in addition to four large cuts in the Alhambra paper and two in a Los

Angeles paper. In spite of the great amount of space taken by the European war, the truth upon the Sabbath question, the judgment, Armageddon, the millennium, and other Bible topics was given to the public in both discourses and newspaper articles.

During the camp meeting, one of our workers, in giving his report, told of the great interest in the Sabbath question in a city where he held meetings, and of the favor shown our work by the local paper. Four persons who had accepted the truth during the year through this brother's labors, helped him to hold a strip of newspaper clippings seventy feet long, showing the items for and against the Sabbath, which had appeared in this one newspaper since the last camp meeting.

Truly the Lord will finish his work, and cut it short in righteousness. If we are to have a part in it, now is the time to act. We cannot estimate the great power of the newspapers for good if we improve our opportunity to use them in heralding God's word to the world.

FRANK A. COFFIN.