About 5Talents
Discovering talents for God’s kingdom
5Talents is a magazine for young Christians, edited from India and written for the world. It began in Hyderabad in July 2012 and ran to twenty issues — nineteen monthly to July 2014, and a last one in January 2017 — made as PDFs and passed around a small circle of friends and supporters rather than published to anyone who wanted it. It became a magazine in the open sense in 2026, as a website, which — looking back at that first cover with its fake browser navigation drawn across the top — is probably what it always wanted to be.
Those twenty issues are the archive. They are the magazine’s origins rather than its back catalogue: they were never printed, never sold and never publicly circulated, and we do not count them as publication. 5Talents has been published, in the ordinary meaning of the word, since 2026.
The name comes from Matthew 25:14–30. The parable is not about visibility. The servants are not commended for the size of the crowd; they are commended for use.
We publish for Christians in their twenties and thirties — in India and across the diaspora — about the things that actually shape a life at that age: what to do with a gift, how to work, how to stay well, and where the church we belong to came from.
What we cover, and what we do not
5Talents covers Christian culture, formation, news, events and conferences. We do not cover political controversy.
We publish culture, formation, work and money, wellbeing, campus writing, and the history of the church in India and the Global South. We also cover Christian news — events and conferences before and after they happen, and the moments in public life where faith surfaces.
What we do not do is politics. We do not take sides in political disputes, and we do not report on persecution or caste. Where a story sits close to that line, we cover what happened and leave the argument to others.
Advertising and disclosure
Some articles are paid for. Every one of them carries a label above the headline, before any content, and that label is generated automatically from the article’s record rather than added by hand — so it cannot be forgotten.
- Sponsored means a sponsor paid for the piece and our editorial team wrote it, keeping control of what it says.
- Paid feature means the advertiser wrote and supplied it. We did not.
Advertisers do not see articles before publication, do not influence coverage of anything they are not paying for, and cannot buy their way out of a review. Rates and formats.
Journal particulars
| Title | 5Talents Magazine |
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What we believe
THE STATEMENT
What we believe
Every magazine has a position whether or not it prints one. Here is ours, so you know what you are reading.
The things we hold with the whole church
There is one God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The Bible is the word of God and our final authority for what we publish.
Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man. He was born of a virgin, lived without sin, was crucified, was buried, rose bodily on the third day, ascended, and will return.
Every one of us needs saving, and none of us can manage it alone.
Salvation is a gift. It is received by trusting what Jesus has already done, and it is not earned by anything we do afterwards.
The church is not a building or an organisation. It is everyone who belongs to Christ, in every country and every century.
None of this is original to us. It is what Christians have confessed from the beginning, and we would rather stand in that line than invent something.
Where we put the emphasis
What a magazine believes tells you what it holds. What it emphasises tells you what it will be like to read. Ours comes to this.
God has already done the thing. The cross was not a down payment. What Jesus finished, he finished, and the Christian life is spent discovering what is already true rather than working towards something still owed.
Righteousness is a gift and not a wage. You are not more accepted on a good week. You were never less accepted on a bad one. Standing with God is settled by what Christ did, and nothing you manage or fail to manage moves it.
Identity comes before behaviour. Scripture almost never tells people to change without first telling them who they already are. We try to write in that order, because the other order produces exhausted people.
Faith is receiving, not performing. It is not a quantity of effort you generate. It is taking God at his word about what he has already provided.
The Holy Spirit is present help, not a doctrine. He is God with us now, in ordinary work and ordinary weeks, and we expect him to be at work in the lives of the people we write about.
God is good, and he is good towards you. That is the sentence under everything else here. Where a piece in this magazine has to choose between making God sound severe and making him sound generous, we will get it wrong in the generous direction.
What we hold loosely
Christians who agree on everything above still disagree, sincerely and in good faith, about a great deal: church government, how and when baptism is done, the order of events at the end, spiritual gifts and how they operate today, and much else besides.
We have our own convictions on some of these. We do not make them a test of fellowship, and we do not use this magazine to win those arguments. Our contributors come from Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic, Anglican, Church of South India, Mar Thoma and independent congregations, and we would like to keep it that way.
We publish about faith, work, culture, wellbeing and the history of the church. We do not report news and we do not take political sides.
How this shapes what you read
We would rather print one honest sentence than three impressive ones. We say where our information came from. We correct ourselves in public when we get it wrong, and we have. And we try never to leave a reader feeling that God is disappointed in them, because we do not believe he is.
Masthead
- Founder & Executive Director — Premasis Satman
Editorial board
The magazine’s editorial board, with each member’s institution and contact details, is listed on its own page.
Getting in touch
Pitches go through Write for us. Corrections go to our corrections page. Everything else: contact us.