In 1984, I quit my job for a big-city daily newspaper so I could start a weekly newspaper in Glenpool, Oklahoma.

At that time, Glenpool was the fastest growing city (percentage-wise) in the state. It grew from about 2,500 in 1980 to around 6,000 in 1984.

My wife and I saw an opportunity for ourselves and for Glenpool, which didn’t have a newspaper at the time.

The Glenpool Post was born. We ran that paper for three years and sold it because we started having kids and we wanted Susan to be a stay-at-home Mom.

The buyer was Neighbor Newspapers. They did not take care of it and after that chain sold, the new owners stopped publishing the Glenpool Post, the Bixby Bulletin and the Jenks Journal.

In 2000, I quit my job for a big-city daily newspaper because the business changed. The paper was filled with radical left-wingers – including alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals, atheists and other editors and reporters who opposed conservative values and fought against the influence of Christianity on our metro area.

Based on what we thought was God’s guidance, we started the Tulsa Beacon from scratch. Our business plan was to start a paid-circulation weekly and grow it into a daily newspaper.

We designed a family paper that parents could show their children without dirty words or liberal editorials. Christians could read this paper without being reprimanded for opposing abortion and holding what used to be traditional American values.

This issue marks the 21st anniversary of the Tulsa Beacon.

This wasn’t easy, especially at first.

In 2001, we almost went out of business because our advertising came to a halt in the wake of the attacks of September 11.

We were blessed to get help from some local radio shows – including KCFO AM970 and KFAQ – to build up our circulation. It’s very difficult to go from zero subscribers to over a thousand.

QuikTrip let us sell our papers in their stores for several years and then without any explanation, we were pulled from QuikTrip and our distributor refused to put our papers anywhere anymore.

But all those people who were buying the paper each week at QuikTrip decided to buy subscriptions. Not only did our circulation not drop but we made more money on subscriptions than individual sales.

In 2008, we nearly went under due to the recession caused by George Bush and Barak Obama.

Someone tried unsuccessfully to put us out of business with a fraudulent lawsuit in 2005.

(A Christian lawyer stepped forward and got the suit dismissed and didn’t charge us for his services. It was not a libel suit but we were just added to a frivolous suit to force us to hire an attorney – which we couldn’t afford).

When Oklahoma approved casinos, two casinos approached us and wanted to run ads in the Tulsa Beacon. We refused, even though it was a lot of money.  But God made up the difference in revenue for us without promoting gambling.

About 10 years ago, newspapers began to seriously decline. Every paper lost circulation due to the Internet, liberal news coverage and disinterest from young people. Papers were closed in Broken Arrow, Pryor and a lot of small towns in Oklahoma.

Print advertising declined. Businesses started advertising on social media.

But a strange thing happened. The daily paper bought the remaining suburban papers in Tulsa and shut down the legal newspaper. We are a legal newspaper and we started getting more and more legal ads.

And former Tulsa County Treasurer Dennis Semler started running delinquent property tax lists every other year and that was a tremendous account for us. (It still is with current Treasurer John Fothergill).

Our plan to make the Tulsa Beacon a daily paper never worked out and it’s good that it didn’t. Many daily papers in Oklahoma and throughout the nation have cut back to five or three or even one print edition per week. Had we gone daily, we probably would have gone out of business a few years ago.

Throughout all of these 21 years, we have clearly seen the hand of God in protecting us and promoting our business. God has blessed us with the best readers, subscribers and advertisers anyone could hope for.

Every week, we get calls or letters from subscribers who are renewing their subscription and thanking us to continuing to offer a family newspaper that holds to traditional values and promotes a biblical viewpoint.

The mainstream media is the worst it has ever been. Democrat owners and liberal editors control all but a handful of paper in this state.

What does the future hold for the Tulsa Beacon?

We don’t know but I do know one thing – God has commissioned us to carry the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and we will “occupy ‘til He comes.”