Gospel Advocate

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The Gospel Advocate is a religious magazine published monthly in Nashville, Tennessee. The Advocate has enjoyed uninterrupted publication since 1866.

The Gospel Advocate was founded by Nashville-area Restoration movement preacher Tolbert Fanning. An important early contributor was Fanning's student, William Lipscomb. A few numbers of this periodical were published starting in 1855, prior to the American Civil War and its subsequent interruption of mail service, particularly in the South.

After the end of the Civil War, publication resumed in 1866 under the editorship of Fanning and William Lipscomb's younger brother David Lipscomb: Fanning soon retired and David Lipscomb became the sole editor.

Lipscomb was later to be signally influential in using the Advocate to advance, among other things, formalizing the split between the Church of Christ and the more-liberal Christian Church which officially dates to 1906 but had its origins in disputes beginning decades earlier.

[edit] Influence

The GA has long been very influential in the Church of Christ and has more-or-less defined mainstream orthodoxy in this group throughout most of its existence. As the Church of Christ has no denominational hierarchy or "official" structures, it has tended to be defined by its publications and their publishers.

The editorial staff of the Gospel Advocate has always been "conservative" in a Church of Christ sense, meaning that they believe that there is no direct operation of the Holy Spirit in the current age and that its work on Earth was completed with the revelation and compilation of the New Testament. In the beginning of its publication, the Gospel Advocate was against orphanages and the missionary societies. But the editorship of B. C. Goodpasture changed the paper's positions.

A controversial front page editor was Robert Henry Boll, who wrote articles on Biblical prophecy during his tenure beginning in 1909: he was ousted by the other leadership by 1915. Boll's teachings on premillennialism mirrored the eschatology of some of the early Restoration Movement founders such as Alexander Campbell, however, by the early 20th century, this theology had lost favor among most Church of Christ leaders.

Later influential editors of the Gospel Advocate have included Benton Cordell Goodpasture, above, and the current editor, Neil Anderson. The Gospel Advocate also publishes Sunday School materials and operates Christian bookstores in Nashville and Mesquite, Texas.