This is part two of my conversation with Dr. Frank Wright, President of the National Religious Broadcasters, during the association’s premiere gathering of Christian media in the world.  You can also find part one here.

The NRB has vowed to remain vigilant in the fight to protect the ability of Christian broadcasters to freely proclaim the gospel.

There’s good news and there’s bad news in the battle.

The good news is: last fall, at the urging of NRB, NAB and some influential members of the House Commerce Committee, FCC Chairman Genachowski finally removed The Fairness Doctrine language from the Code of Federal Regulations.

It was an extraordinary battle that took place over forty years in removing an incredible abridgment of free speech and free exercise of religion.

The bad news is: the hate crimes law that was passed year before last in the Congress, and signed by President Obama, still remains the most dangerous threat to anybody that wants to proclaim the gospel of Christ.

So, if a pastor speaks about God’s judgment on those who deny the truth and someone sitting in the service says they’ve suffered mental anguish as a result, you could see how hate crimes could be expanded into the arena of speech easily by a court so inclined to do so.

Free speech and social media are sure making news.

Craig Parshall, our general counsel, did a year long study of the policies of all the social media and internet gatekeepers. It’s called The John Milton Project.

Everybody in the Christian community is exceedingly excited about their ability to use social media platforms. But if the speech policies of these companies are ever fully enforced the way they’re written you could see how the gospel of Christ could be suppressed in social media particularly but in digital media generally.

The first amendment doesn’t bind companies. Free speech is being determined by lawyers and businessmen at companies such as Google, Comcast and Facebook, not by politicians in Washington or the judicial system.

We’re not looking for legislative or regulatory solutions, we’re looking for these social media companies to self-regulate. This spring we will begin to engage with the boards of directors of these new media companies and ask them to establish a free marketplace of ideas where all lawful speech is permitted.

What have you been most looking forward to at this year’s convention.

One of the challenges of any industry is to look outside for new ideas. We in the broadcast community may not have always done that as well as we should.

We share our best ideas with each other. We have a great spirit toward sharing best practices. Our Innovation Exchange is an example of that. But, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that we are talking and listening to each other much of the time.

So this year with for our keynote addresses, we’ve brought outside voices in to speak to us on subjects of leadership, communications, innovation, customer service, fundraising, branding. The religious understanding of some of these folks may not necessarily be in sync with ours, but if they’ve got something to say about these key areas, we need to filter that through our own understanding of truth, and then we need to learn from them.

We’re really excited about that.

What keeps you up at night as CEO of the world’s largest Christian media association.

We’re just like the rest of our members. We’re trying to do more with less.

That’s meant some reorganization, staff changes, restructuring the workflow internally. That keeps me up at night in two ways. One, there’s a people cost to these things. Two, it’s pretty exciting to be on the front-end of being able to do some strategic planning about how the association and its various outreaches need to be reshaped to fit better with the changing media landscape.

There seems to be an urgency in the Church using media to get the gospel to the world.

Some of that may be reflective of the opportunities that are there. We’re the first generation to hold in our hands the technology to reach the world. We want to seize hold of these tools for the cause of Christ.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the Gospel.