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and responsive to boot
20 Years of Fulfilled! Magazine
by
Brian L. Martin
This article appeared in the 2026 Spring issue of Fulfilled! Magazine
Twenty years ago, my wife and I produced the first issue of Fulfilled! Magazine. I know that we have been at it for a while, but it doesn’t seem like twenty years, at least to me. A few years earlier, at a new job, I had been presented with the preterism view by Bill Greene, a coworker whom I knew years earlier from attending the same church. After spending several years exploring and eventually embracing preterism, I published the first edition of my book Behind the Veil of Moses in 2004. While I received many positive comments about the book, I came to realize that many Christians simply are not interested in reading a book about a theological view that from the outset seemed far-fetched to them.
So, I began to ponder the concept of a magazine, which would be much less intimidating than a 400-page book. I thought that by having a variety of shorter articles, a casual reader might come across something that piqued their interest. Another reason I thought that a preterist magazine might gain traction came from many of the comments from and interaction with readers of my book. Many told me that they didn’t know any other preterists and felt isolated. Facebook had just been created and wasn’t the social media and networking giant that it is now. Conferences were few and far between, so there was little networking amongst the preterist community. I thought that a magazine might bring a sense of community to those isolated souls scattered around the country.
So, in the spring of 2006, we sent out a trial issue of Fulfilled! Magazine to just over 500 people whose names we had gathered from responses to my book and from a list that John Bray had provided us. The response was very positive, so we decided to pursue the project. I began soliciting articles for future articles, and Kayla and I would edit them together.
Word spread within the preterist community as preterists like Don Preston, Ed Stevens, and Jerry Bernard, who already had sizable followings, shared news of Fulfilled! Magazine with their readers. By the Spring 2008 issue, our mailing list was around 1,000 names, and Spring 2009 saw a readership of over 1800. We reached our peak readership with the 2021 Winter issue with 2699 names on our mailing list. After that, we purged our mailing list by asking readers to reaffirm their desire to continue receiving the magazine. People sign up and lose interest and fail to cancel or move and fail to update their address with us, so by asking readers to reaffirm their continuing interest, we knew that our mailing list would reflect those who still wanted to receive the magazine. We had done this once previously in 2009 and knew we were overdue for another purge. Our first purge dropped our mailing list from 1874 to 902. Our second purge saw a drop from 2699 to 400. I believe this is partly due to the proliferation of preterist connections on social media and the teaching content on YouTube. Preterists are now able to connect with other preterists and consume a large amount of content online. Also, now that all our issues are posted on our website, nearly 200 readers prefer to be notified by email when the latest issue is posted, and they read it online.
With this 2026 Spring issue, we will have mailed out roughly 111,000 magazines to the US and Canada! That doesn’t include the individual issues and packages of issues we used to mail overseas. Before overseas postage became cost prohibitive, we mailed copies to 32 different countries. The preterist community is worldwide!
I started out using Microsoft Publisher to do the magazine layout and continued that through the Summer 2010 issue. I was then contacted by a reader in Canada who did graphic design for several publications there. He offered to do the layout for me and I gladly accepted. His experience in graphic design resulted in a much more professional looking layout beginning with the Fall 2010 issue. Because he did the layout with Adobe InDesign, a much more robust program, I ended up purchasing the software so that I could do minor tweaks to the files that he sent. That saved a lot of back-and-forth time making those tweaks. Unfortunately, after about a year I, lost contact with him. Thankfully, I was able to take previous issues he had done and copy and paste new text into them for new issues. I also began to slowly learn a bit about InDesign, to the point where I revamped the layout after I retired in the spring of 2020.
For the first year, Kayla and I would edit the articles, with some help from my oldest brother Scott, who has a degree in English and taught English part-time. We would do our best to correct syntax and grammar and propose alternate readings for text that we felt wasn’t as clear as it could be. I would then send our proposed changes to the authors for their approval.
In 2007, another reader, Mike Beidler, offered his editing skills. I remember thinking that Kayla and I were doing a pretty good job at editing, but I went ahead and sent Mike some articles to see what his work looked like. Wow! He knew his way around a sentence. So, I started cleaning up the obvious, low-hanging fruit in the articles and then sent them to Mike for his touch.
One thing that I have learned over the years is that authors can be sensitive about having their writing edited, some more than others. Some really appreciated it (“Wow, you made me sound great!”), while others, not so much. I think another issue was the back-and-forth time spent explaining, clarifying, approving, and rejecting proposed changes with the authors, which at times became a drawn-out process. Because of these two factors, I began separating my editing and Mike’s editing into two steps. I would do my editing and then offer the author the opportunity to have Mike go over the article for some “deep” editing. Perhaps in a small part because my editing had improved by learning from Mike, but mostly because of the extra time involved, authors increasingly said that they were fine with the article after the first round of editing. So, after about ten years of editing for us, Mike faded back into the general readership.
The most recent change for the magazine has been bringing Adam Maarschalk on board as the editor in the 2024 Summer issue. Kayla and I met Adam at the Big Tex conference in 2018, where both he and I were speakers. I had seen Adam’s name here and there online in various preterist postings but had never read any of his material or interacted with him personally. Both Kayla and I were impressed by his humble and gracious spirit as well as his teaching material. Adam became a frequent article contributor to the magazine, and in 2022 joined FCG’s board of directors.
Early on, after meeting Adam and learning that he edited various school and professional papers for a living, as well as tutored individuals in English, I felt that he was a natural fit to eventually become the magazine’s editor, if he would be interested. He was much more connected within the preterist community than I and was a popular speaker at conferences. After I retired in 2020, I tackled some much needed and time-consuming projects around the house and property. I was struggling to get the magazine issues out on time, and in fact didn’t produce a 2020 Summer issue. (As a side note, over the past 20 years, we have missed 11 of the 80 issues that should have been produced.) My thoughts again turned toward bringing Adam on board as the editor.
In 2024, Adam graciously accepted the editor’s role for the magazine, with the fall issue being the first in which he solicited and edited the articles (I continue to do the layout). The timing was providential because in January and February of 2025 Kayla and I moved my parents from their independent living facility to an assisted living facility. My parents had to significantly downsize for the move, so after we had them settled in their new place Kayla and I were still sorting through their “extra” things to determine where they needed to go (other family members, our attic for storage, donations, etc.).
Sadly, my father’s health declined through the year, and he passed away in October 2025. I spent the remainder of the year focused on helping my mother deal with all the necessary paperwork. Had Adam not already been functioning as editor, it is likely that there would have been no issues published in 2025, or one at the most. His efforts have been and continue to be invaluable.
Having Adam handle the article solicitation and editing has given me a break between issues. Prior to him coming on board, I would need to start working on the next issue as soon as, or even before, I had wrapped up the current issue.
This has become increasingly the case as I continue to tweak the website and add features for visitors. The website used to have just pdfs of the issues, and that is still the case for issues prior to the 2020 Fall issue. Since then, I have been creating individual web pages for each article. Each page includes pdfs for printing the article and commenting capabilities. This requires an online table of contents for each issue also. I’ve also been creating authors’ web pages, allowing visitors to read more about each author and view a hyperlinked list of their articles. All of this means that after I send an issue to the printer, my work on that issue is not done. I then must update the website (www.fulfilledcg.com). Thankfully, my mind is no longer distracted by the need to solicit articles for the next issue.
Although not directly related to the magazine, I should also mention that our “You’ve Gotta Be Kidding, Right?” video is on our website. But back to the magazine, what will the next 20 years look like for Fulfilled! Magazine? What does God have in store? I guess we’ll have to wait and see! ♰
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Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who the head, into Christ . . . .
(Ephesians 4:15)
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