Robert Walker, 95, a pioneering journalist and the founder of Christian Life magazine, died Sunday, March 1, in a retirement facility in Carol Stream of complications related to his battle with Parkinson’s disease and dementia.
“He was an icon and a major figure in the Christian publishing world,” said close friend Stephen Strang, president of Strang Communications, a Florida-based Christian publishing company. “He was also an influential, behind-the-scenes force in the evangelical movement in its early days.”
In the late 1940s, Mr. Walker was credited with publishing the first national cover story about then little-known evangelist Billy Graham in Christian Life magazine. Later, Mr. Walker helped shaped the life story of entertainer Pat Boone in his 1970 best-selling autobiography, “A New Song.”
“He was an incredible man,” Boone said in a statement released by Strang Communications. “There was an Old Testament quality to him, like I was talking to a modern Gideon or one of the patriarchs.”
Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Mr. Walker was the son of an engineer and attended boarding school in Massachusetts before moving to Chicago with his family. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Wheaton College before completing a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University.
The summer before his senior year of college, Mr. Walker took a vacation to the shores of Lake Superior, where he began reading a stack of philosophy books he had brought with him. He got to the bottom of the pile and began leafing through a Bible.
“I had included [the Bible] only because I thought, as a journalist, I should have some knowledge of it,” Mr. Walker, who was raised as a Methodist, would recall many years later.
That reading changed Mr. Walker’s life, those closest to him said. Soon after, he wrote his dean at Northwestern, saying he would be going into the seminary in the fall. But the dean convinced him that the world needed writers with religious convictions.
Despite that advice, Mr. Walker didn’t immediately pursue a career in Christian journalism.
In 1936, he landed a job as a telegraph sports editor for the Menominee Herald Leader in Michigan. He then worked for a short time as a copy editor for the Rosenow Co., a Chicago-based advertising agency.
From 1941 to 1951, Mr. Walker served as an assistant professor of journalism at Wheaton College and started a Christian campus magazine called HIS.
During that time, he also worked in various capacities for Scripture Press Foundation in Wheaton.
In the early 1940s, Mr. Walker created a magazine called Sunday, which he renamed Christian Life in 1948, after acquiring Christian Life & Times from a friend. Christian Life would later merge with Charisma magazine in 1986.
In the mid-1950s, to report on the then-fledgling Christian Booksellers Association, Mr. Walker started Christian Bookseller, which was renamed Christian Retailing after its acquisition by Strang Communications. In 1970, he founded Creation House Books.
“Beyond all his accomplishments, Bob Walker was a deeply spiritual man, who lived a life of utmost integrity,” Strang said.
“He impacted the lives of millions and will continue to through the publications he founded.”
Mr. Walker was also the founder of the Christian Writers Institute and Christian Life Missions, which he created to help missionaries. He was a founding member of the Evangelical Press Association.
In an interview with Strang in 1996, Mr. Walker is quoted as saying, “I would like people to think that I was the sort of chap who responded to what God wanted done. I sometimes kicked, and I often blew it by taking off in the wrong direction. [God] had to bring me back.”
In 1937, Mr. Walker married his first wife, Jean Browning Clements. The couple lived in Wheaton for many years and had five children together.
She died in 1993.
Mr. Walker is survived by his second wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1995; three sons, Telford, Rob and Kent; two daughters, Gwyneth Givens and Cherry Cox; a stepson, Donald E. Kropp; a stepdaughter, Lauri Fox; 18 grandchildren; and 21 great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. Friday at Wheaton Bible Church, 410 N. Cross St., Wheaton.
