How a Simple Prophetic Prayer Birthed ‘Godspeed’ Magazine
Everyone knows the media world is changing—most of it not for the better. Recently, though, I had the chance to speak with someone who is making a difference in media for God’s glory. Jeremy Lamont just started an online magazine called GODSPEED, something he never even considered until God burdened his heart to do it in 2012.
In my interview with Lamont, he shared how God led him to publish the digital magazine, the promises the Spirit gave him for the magazine’s future and how this growing publication is making a difference. (Click here or scroll down to the end of this article to listen to our entire conversation.)
“In 2012, God—in prayer—specifically said that this was what I was supposed to do,” Lamont tells me. “And so I started following the footsteps because He specifically said it had to be a digital magazine. And in the seven years since then, it has turned into exactly what He promised. Just as an example, He said it would look like Time magazine, and we now have David Aikman, who was the senior news correspondent for Time magazine for 23 years, as our editor-in-chief. So it’s really God who has the glory on this one.”
I’ve known Aikman since the late 1970s when he was senior correspondent for Time magazine, and our lives have intersected in so many different ways. There was a time when Aikman was one of the highest-ranking Christians in the journalism realm. So I was impressed when I learned he was working with GODSPEED magazine. When I asked Lamont how he managed to get an editor-in-chief of Aikman’s stature, he gave all credit to God.
“It’s so impossible to describe the things God has done with GODSPEED magazine without going back to what God did,” Lamont says. “I was specifically told in another prayer later that I would have a partner who was the granddaughter of the founder of the Pentecostal movement—or one of the founders—Charles Parham.”
A week after that prayer, Parham’s granddaughter, Roberta Parham Hromas—affectionally known as “Bobby”—invited Lamont to a meeting at her house with various representatives from the Christian Broadcast Network, Oral Roberts University, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and more. Lamont tells me he felt out of place at that meeting, but afterward, Hromas approached him, and the two decided to be partners in Lamont’s digital magazine. That same night, Hromas put Lamont in touch with Aikman, and a year later, Aikman came on staff for GODSPEED as editor-in-chief.
In all this, Lamont sees the hand of God at work.
“In all of GODSPEED magazine, the common theme is that I literally cannot take credit for any of it,” he says. “Rather, He’s made it clear that it’s His will that my primary role is to follow and go exactly where He takes me. And so our method is we take clipboards and fill them with information and planning, and then God somewhat swats them out of my hand and fills the clipboard with His information, and then we follow His planning.”
GODSPEED is available for $5 a month. You can download the app free of charge in the app store, on Google Play and on Amazon, and Lamont says you get two free issues when you do that. If you do subscribe, though, you’ll get content every month centered on “God in action,” as Lamont puts it.
In fact, Lamont says he won’t publish stories simply for the sake of prominent Christian names. If a story doesn’t show God moving in some way, he doesn’t want it.
“That’s what GODSPEED magazine is,” he explains. “We cover freedom from the point of view of, ‘How is God using people right now to protect the freedom to worship Him?’ If we cover ‘infant lives matter,’ we’re really covering ‘How is God protecting the right only He could give, which is life?'”
I’m happy to report on people like Lamont, who are resisting culture’s secular pull toward godlessness and instead taking a firm stand for Christ in media. And in a way, I can relate with Lamont, since I felt a similar call many years ago to publish a magazine and report on how God is moving. Granted, I started Charisma magazine before personal computers were on the market—and this was long before the internet. So much has changed since Charisma‘s founding in 1975, but God’s heart to reach the masses with truth has not.
I encourage you to listen to my entire conversation with Lamont below. I recently subscribed to GODSPEED magazine, and I encourage you to do the same at the App Store, Google Play, Amazon or godspeedmag.com/gettheapp.html. For more information, go to godspeedmag.com!