The Banner did not start out belonging to the Christian Reformed Church at all. In June 1866, a synod meeting in New York gave Rev. John Yeury de Baun permission to start a monthly paper, The Banner of Truth, for the True Reformed Dutch Church in America, printed out of Hackensack, New Jersey. It passed through private hands in 1903, when a group of businessmen bought it from de Baun, sped it up to twice a month, and trimmed its name down to simply The Banner.
Then, in 1914, the Christian Reformed Church did something a denomination does not always bother to do: it bought the magazine outright. From that year forward The Banner was not a friendly outside publication covering the CRC. It was the CRC's own property, printing sermons, doctrinal treatises, denominational news and even marriage and death records for a readership that was, quite literally, reading its own church's mail.
More than a century later the arrangement has not changed. The magazine "continues to be published to this day," now monthly after passing through a bi-weekly stretch from 1997 to 2002, and its stated mandate is to "inform, inspire, educate, and challenge members of the CRCNA" by "speaking the truth in love." A paper founded for one small Dutch Reformed church and later sold to businessmen for a profit ended up, through purchase rather than founding, as the clearest kind of denominational voice there is: one the denomination itself owns.