The August 2015 issue of Charisma just came off the press and we’re excited about it. A new issue has come out more than 400 times. We get excited about each one every month. But this one is extra special: It’s our 40th anniversary!
It’s the biggest issue we’ve had in years, and one of the nicest we have ever produced. If you subscribe, you’ll get it in the mail in about a week.
We wrote about 40 leaders “who radically changed our world.” They were people we wrote about in the last 40 years—many but not all appeared on the cover. We will feature at least one a day during the month of August. Because we’ve decided to celebrate Charisma’s anniversary all month long, I need your help.
We have some exciting things planned for each day, such as a daily giveaway of 40 gifts to those who register. We will also have video greetings from leaders you know commenting about Charisma, or what the Lord has been doing the past four decades or just telling interesting stories about their experience with the magazine.
I intend to focus on one decade each week, trying to give perspective on trends in the church and culture that we’ve covered. But I don’t want it to just be a history lesson. I want to write about what’s interesting to you. For example, we’ve had more than 430 different covers. What interest is there in putting all those covers online?
Friday morning I recorded my weekly Strang Report podcast (I hope you’ll sign up if you haven’t already). I invited my listeners to email me with their ideas. (We also put this on Periscope, a form of social media I recently discovered). I told my listeners to send me their ideas, and we created an email account, [email protected], where you can write me directly. I’ll see every email that comes in.
To create a little interest, I’ll give a new large print version of the Modern English Version to the person who sends me the 40th email. We’ll email the winner so you can send us a mailing address.
When you write, you can also tell me your own stories of Charisma and what the magazine means to you. This is my way to make this an interactive process as my staff and I complete our plans for this special issue online.
The events will be on charismamag.com, which presently has more than 1.4 million unique visitors a month. This is in addition to the several million that come to our other websites, such as cn.mycharisma.com, ministrytodaymag.com and so forth. I hope that friends like you, through our use of social media, can create a lot of interest in this special anniversary month.
Everything will culminate with a special reception at our headquarters in Lake Mary, Florida, just outside Orlando. We expect a few friends from the area to drop by for this reception. But I’m curious how many from outside Central Florida would be interested in visiting our headquarters that day and joining this special celebration.
I won’t tell you now which 40 people we featured in Charisma this month, nor will I go in to the other articles we ran on upcoming leaders who are younger than 40. In the print issue, you can also read thoughts from Lee Grady and Jack Hayford about what we can expect in the future. You can read that in our print issue. Yet day by day we’ll publish online the articles from the magazine, plus new material.
And remember, your input will help us decide what goes up online. Remember, please send me your ideas at [email protected].
Steve Strang is the CEO and founder of Charisma. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook (stephenestrang).
