RICHMOND, Va. — Norman Jameson, former editor of a North Carolina Baptist newspaper, has been named a contributing writer for the Religious Herald on a part-time basis.
Jameson, who is based in Raleigh, N.C., will cover North Carolina Baptists for the Herald as part of the paper’s wider coverage of news relevant to moderate Baptists in the Mid-Atlantic region. The Herald’s 24-member board of trustees endorsed both the regional expansion strategy and the relationship with Jameson during their semi-annual meeting May 12.
Jameson, 58, was editor of the Biblical Recorder, the official publication of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina from 2007 until last October, when he resigned to prevent a threatened motion to defund the paper at convention’s annual meeting.
Jameson had been criticized by leaders of the increasingly conservative state convention for his reporting of stories about the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as well as Woman’s Missionary Union of North Carolina, which is no longer recognized by the state convention but is active in most of the convention’s churches.
A Baptist journalist since 1977, Jameson was executive leader for public relations at the North Carolina convention before becoming editor of the Biblical Recorder, and for 12 years prior to that was communications director for Baptist Children’s Home of North Carolina. Earlier he was features editor for Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention, and associate editor of the Oklahoma Baptist Messenger.
The Wisconsin native is a graduate of Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Okla., and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. James and his wife, Sue Ellen, have three adult children and are members of Hayes Barton Baptist Church in Raleigh.
In addition to his Herald assignment, Jameson is reporting for Associated Baptist Press on an interim basis and frequently writes for the North American Baptist Fellowship of the Baptist World Alliance.
In other action by the Herald's trustees, four new board members were elected: Lisa Cole Hawkins, pastor of Convergence, a four-year-old congregation in Alexandria, Va.; Mike Parnell, pastor of Beth Car Baptist Church in Halifax, Va.; June Ray, an administrator with an accounting firm and a deacon at First Baptist Church in Newport News, Va.; and R. G. Rowland, pastor of Greenfield Baptist Church in Gretna, Va.