A beef about study bibles

During the release last year of the ESV Study Bible, I made some randy comments about my opinion of study bibles – and because I didn’t want to be seen as a hater, I held back my thoughts on study bibles until after the hoopla had settled down.

You know what? Lots of people own study bibles. Lots of people own concordances. Lots of people own commentaries. LOTS. So if you own any of these devices, I say good on you – learn to use them wisely and so be it.

But here’s the truth: most of the people who own these things don’t really know how to use them. And for many people, my experience is that all that extra paper and ink gets in the way of actually reading the Bible itself. If you add half-again the volume of the actual Bible to the Bible, and nobody was reading the Bible itself before you added all that other stuff, why would they read the Bible-plus-stuff afterwards?

My 2-bit opinion is that people substitute a study bible for bible study – and let me be as specific as possible about this. Often people will buy a “study bible” for a new believer, or an older teen, and hand it off to them as if that’s all they need – go and make yourself a disciple now.

But that’s not actually the Great Commission, is it? The Great Commission is, “Go, therefore and make disciples.” That means somehow you personally have to get involved with somebody to help them grow in the faith.

So my beef with Study Bibles in general – not the ESV specifically, but as it resides in the universe of Christian publishing among similar items – is that they usually are an inadequate replacement for actual study and discipleship. And like much of Christian publishing, they are unintentionally-harmful to the local church and to believers because they stand in the way of real fellowship, discipleship, and the building of a local community which God has established and ordained to glorify himself.

I am sure that’s more than you wanted to know. Now back to work with you.

e-mail bag: the Manga Bible

About 100 of you have e-mailed me to ask, with one link or another, what I think of the Manga Bible.

Seriously, people: why would I like that any better than the other blasphemies and magazine bibles running around ECPA today?

Humility vs. humiliation

I'm reading this book by Ken Blanchard called the Servant Leader, which came out in 2003, so this isn't like this is something that new and whatever. And before I get too far here, I think Blanchard's point in this book – that a good leader has right motives, a right plan, right work ethic and right disciplines – is sound enough. If you want to be an effective leader who is getting others to get on-board and stay in your organization, these are good practices.

But here's something Blanchard says which sort of stunned me:

We want you to trust Jesus as your leadership model ... Would you hire him? A common barrier to embracing Jesus as a role model for leadership often lies in skepticism of the relevance of His teaching to your specific leadership situations. One way of putting Jesus to the test would be to apply the same criteria to His knowledge, experience and success that you would to the hiring of a business consultant.

And I find myself thinking, "you know, he was also a carpenter, and I need some work done around my house. Maybe somebody should write a book about how Jesus can teach me to be a really great carpenter."

Because that's what the Gospel is all about – that's what Jesus came to do here.

Wow.

Missional Irony

Working the bookstore this weekend. A local church is using the Message (yeah, don't start) for some devotional project, and on the one hand, MSG comes in a really affordable paperback for about $ 5.99. On the other hand, you can't get all 66 books in one decent binding for under $30 -- and to get one where you don't need a Microfiche reader, you're talking $40 or better.

All I'm sayin' is that you can get all kinds of other translations -- which are translation and not one guy's opinion -- for something approaching affordable. If somebody wants to be "missional", they should consider that great retail missionary "WAL*MART" for pricing strategies.

The burden of conscience

Some fellow named Henry tracked back to my open letter about TNIV here at the blog, and I go a kick out his response. Not “got a kick” like “I enjoyed it a lot” but a “got a kick” like “I can shoe you his shoe print”. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to be mean, but I think he wound up being something worse than mean. And I’m not going to get a chance to do his whole post on this subject before I’m off for the week, so this little bit is going to have to be enough.

Let’s take a look:

A friend tipped me off by e-mail to a post, and I think it is appropriate to respond. The poster, Centurion, expresses his concern about Christian booksellers and publishers, and their choices in terms of what to offer their customers, especially considering that many of them regard their business as a ministry as well.

Let’s keep something in mind here: CBA and ECPA both represent themselves as ministries – so to hedge one’s bets and say “many of them regard their business as a ministry as well” is somewhat distracted from the actual facts.

There is also another problem: who, exactly, wants to but books about faith and life from someone who’s in it “as a business” instead of “as a ministry”? I don’t know anyone like that – even people who shop Amazon for price on their religious books. When you ask them, “do you think that Amazon demonstrates any discernment about the kinds of books they sell,” those people will tell you flat out: “I don’t shop Amazon for anything but price. But I only buy things from them that come from Christian publishers.” What does that say about what people think Christian publishers are doing?

In their mind, there is a level of discernment going on someplace. And that is the problem, isn’t it? Let’s read more from Henry:

I’m a Christian publisher, a very small one, offering 15 titles at this point, some of them my own, and I certainly do have a conscience about what I publish. My conscience, however, seems to tell me something substantially different than Centurion’s.

I need to address a couple of minor points, but then I’m going to simply tell you what my conscience as a Christian publisher requires of me.
Centurion says:

That’s my second point: the two most-vivid proclamations of the Gospel in the NT are unquestionably Acts 2 and 2Cor 15 — and both of those proclamations place the authority of God’s word as the centerpiece of how and why Christ died. That is to say: whatever it is Christ did (died for our sins, was buried and was raised on the third day) was “in accordance with Scripture”: it happened because Scripture said it would happen. In that, Scripture is our most precious possession in the Christian life. . . .

This is an example of the most bizarre set of statements I have seen about the gospel and the place of the Bible in Christian life. (I refer to a set of statements because I have seen quite a number of similar statements over the years as well as recently.) I’m sorry for the strong term, but I simply can’t think of anything less forceful that nonetheless expresses what I see here. Let me illustrate. I’m going to travel to Atlanta, Georgia in a few weeks. As I follow the highway from here to there, I will proceed “according to the road signs.” But those signs will not become the center of my trip, the purpose of my trip, nor will they be my “most precious possession.” They point the way. Jesus is the object of our faith; the Bible is one of the things that points the way to Jesus.

Think about this: someone who calls himself a “Christian publisher” has branded the statement “Scripture is our most precious possession in the Christian life” bizarre! I’m sure he thinks Spurgeon, Piper, Owen, Hodge, Warfield, Luther, Calvin, Bunyan and the Westminster divines are all equally “bizarre”.

In Henry’s view, you can come up with the Gospel without Scripture. The odd thing, really, is that Paul and Peter disagree with him. However, it is very insightful to find someone like Henry who is willing to put all his cards on the table in the first round. Scripture isn’t necessary in his view: it’s only useful, and other things can be sufficient to do the work that Scripture does.

But further, Centurion appears to believe that this somehow means that Christian book stores should avoid the TNIV and possible new and different bindings of the Bible because they don’t fit in with that agenda. He’s not very clear as to what he thinks dealers should and should not carry, other than putting the TNIV front and center in his general complaint.

Interestingly, that’s not what I said at all. The context that I am writing as a Christian retailer who sells many different kinds of bindings in Bibles, and frankly a wide variety of translations, is somehow lost on Henry even though the preface of my open letter says it is in response to the “going back and forth between some fellow Christian Retailers on an e-mail list I belong to.”

My complaint about the TNIV, as you can read for yourself, is that it whitewashes the controversial nature of its methodology. Now, if the Bible is just a "signpost", my complaint is, of course, nit-picking. What the Bible says isn’t actually of first importance but of far secondary importance – if it is not the actual words of God written down, not meant to be sufficient to equip the man of God for every good work.

The problem is that this is exactly what the Apostles taught about Scripture. Isn’t that odd that Paul and Peter actually hang the integrity of God on His word and whether or not he keeps it? (cf. Acts 2, Romans 3)

So let me be somewhat clearer here. What does my conscience require of me as a Christian publisher. First, I do include some of my own writings on my list of publications. This is because the original purpose of my company was to publish materials necessary for classes and seminars offered by Pacesetters Bible School, Inc. As I continued to work, that list expanded, and I very quickly heard this question: Are you going to publish things that you disagree with? People who knew my own doctrinal positions, and knew that I was publishing some of my own material, thought that I would publish only books that supported my own view. But my conscience would not allow me to do that. [Emph added]

Let’s think about that for a minute: his conscience would not allow him to publish only books which had doctrine he agreed with.

That’s somewhat staggering. What scope is he talking about here? For example, would be publish a book which denies the resurrection? How about a book which denies the consequences of sin – a book which says that sin is not a death sentence for man in and of itself? The extraordinary thing about his complaint, of course, is that he pleads conscience in this matter!

Isn’t our conscience exactly what we are supposed to use to separate the false from the true? Even in Henry’s view where conscience is formed by nature and history and the bunnies and the puppies, conscience is what keeps us from doing what’s wrong. And apparently, it is far more wrong to refuse to publish a book because it is doctrinal pap than it is to publish something which will confuse or mislead the reader.

Let’s be clear about something here: I don’t think that it’s wrong to have a publisher who is willing to publish Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran titles – I’d actually admire someone who could do that well. My concern -- and it ought to be the concern of pastors, elders, and teachers in the church -- is that Henry is plainly advocating for the liberty to print anything without regard to its doctrinal substance.

For example, it was irresponsible to publish Jim Rutz’s Mega Shift. Its ecclesiology was reckless and waters down the effectivity and ministry of the local church; Barna’s last book Revolution was equally irresponsible. I have reviewed both of these books here at the blog if you are interested in more detail on those complaints. It is also irresponsible to publish books by people who have been proven to be fraudulent prophets; to publish teaching books by people who demonstrate a lack of concern for the Trinity; to publish books which apply deconstructionist literary theory to the Bible; to publish books which claim that Christ died to make you rich, happy and healthy.

And in the end, my complaint about TNIV centers on this kind of error, not the problem of paedobaptism vs. credobaptism or some other such important-but-not-deal-breaking denominational doctrinal application.

My conscience as a publisher suggests the following:

Let me also say that if your conscience is only suggesting things to you, it’s not worth listening to.

* Respect the ability and responsibility of the individual believer to make choices as to what they read and study

That’s an interesting assertion. Does Henry really believe that a 16-yr-old who has just made a confession of Christ has the same ability to discern truth from error as a 30-yr-old believer who has spent his time since his confession of faith being discipled by men of good conscience who have been faithful to the Gospel?

If the reader has a responsibility to be exercise discernment, why does the publisher not actually have that same responsibility? For example, when a writer says something like, “your Bible is only a guide; Christ is the real object of faith and you should seek Him whether your Bible helps you or not,” don’t you think that the publisher has some obligation to consider that even Catholics affirm that the Bible is more than just a signpost and is critical to the formation of faith in Christ?

Publishing books is a form of teaching. In exactly the same way that a University tacitly promulgates what its faculty teaches as truth, a Publisher is tacitly promulgating what it prints and distributes as truth. There is a duty attached in the Bible to being a teacher, and that duty includes a higher standard for representing the truth. (James 3)

That's all I have time for. Listen: be with the Lord's people in the Lord's house on the Lord's day. And try to find more use for your Bible next week while the sidekicks are running the asylum than as a bookend. And be kind to them -- they're not used to the spotlight, such as it is.

open letter

I was shovelling out my e-mail this morning and was reading some of the chatter that was going back and forth between some fellow Christian Retailers on an e-mail list I belong to. The topic was TNIV, and there were some people saying that it's not a great translation and they aren't carrying it; others were somewhat angry that a retailer was making a content decision (take your astonishment to the meta), and yet a third group appeared -- saying that an argument like this was dishonoring to Christ.

yeah. So I sent the following e-mail to that list, and I thought you people might enjoy it as the first post of substnace this week:

Oh brother. When I read emails like this topic has inspired, I think that we retailers are doing more harm than good for the sake of the Gospel -- but not in the way implied by some. I have a couple of thoughts on this subject, and believe me when I say that I have no one in particular in mind as I spin these notes out to the list. You can throw rotten produce at me when I present on Strategy at CPE. :-)

The first thing to say about "arguing" is this: we are supposed to contend for the faith, amen? The Gospel is not some truth-less blanket that just gets thrown over things, and whatever happens to be under it this morning as we cast it out wide is not "the Gospel for today". The Gospel is the power of salvation for everyone who believes. But believes what?

That's my second point: the two most-vivid proclamations of the Gospel in the NT are unquestionably Acts 2 and 2Cor 15 -- and both of those proclamations place the authority of God's word as the centerpiece of how and why Christ died. That is to say: whatever it is Christ did (died for our sins, was buried and was raised on the third day) was "in accordance with Scripture": it happened because Scripture said it would happen. In that, Scripture is our most precious possession in the Christian life. While we have an interior witness of the spirit, the Gospel doesn't go out by means of interior witness: it goes out by the Gospel being proclaimed. What gets proclaimed -- if we follow Paul's example and his own words -- is the testimony of Scripture.

Third, that means the truth of Scripture doesn't change -- it's not a mutable template which we can upgrade. We receive a Gospel we are expected to then declare. The question is: how does this apply to translation efforts? For example, what's the purpose of the a translation -- is it to provide the Gospel in the context of "every tribe, tounge and nation", or is it a somewhat-worldly pursuit to remarket a product?

This third point is the critical issue for those of us who are Christian retailers who profess to be in a ministry. Without naming any vendors, let me say that we must discern whether or not a publisher is trying to remarket an existing product at the expense of fidelity to the mission of spreading the whole Gospel to the whole world.

For example, let's assume (not conclude) that all translations in print today are generated by the motive to evangelize (an assumption, I suggest, that is faulty): are new binding types a violation of the kind of spirit we want to see cultivated in the body of Christ? That's a hard question -- because what it really asks us is if we are trying to make disciples of men or consumers of product -- who are hungry for the next big thing.

That is a hard question -- because personally I sell a lot of "new" bindings. You know: duotone, tru-tone, gripper, 16 different kinds of "leather", etc. People like new bindings -- especially in the context that 60% of Bibles are given as gifts. But are we marketing a binding, or are we being the beautiful feet of the Gospel?

When we look at the question in this way, we have a larger problem: how "new", exactly, is the TNIV? Did the NIV need an update? Why? Who is the target of the TNIV? Do those people have a theological persuasion?

There is not one person on this list which sells the New World Translation (the Jehovah's Witness bible) because it's not "just another translation": it is a faulty translation with a theological agenda. By no means is the TNIV as-bad as the NWT, amen? It's not a cultic corruption. But it is something we need to be aware of: a translation which takes ecclesiastically-volatile subjects like the gender-specific language and in many ways glosses over the problems.

So when we think about this problem, let's specifically think about what we are doing for and to the body of Christ. Is it more controversial to take a stand against marketing the Gospel, or is it more controversial to simply ignore legitimate controversy and simply let things pass through our stores which do more to confuse people than to help them grow in faith.

God bless you all as you think on these things, seek guidance from your pastors and elders, and resolve to do God's work for God's sake and God's glory and not for the approval of men.

Post script to CBA posts

OK – Micah brought it up in the meta, and it’s a good enough question to come back to the front page of the blog. However, I admit it has limited appeal, so those of you who didn’t care for the CBA posts can just be on your way. This is important stuff we’re talking about.

Micah said this in the meta:

Gotta an idea for a blog post... what would it take for a person to start and maintain an independent Christian bookstore?

Since I have done this personally, I can tell you. However, I am sure some people will not like my answers because they are not the conventional answers to this question.

The first thing you need to start an independent Christian bookstore is a business plan. Why? Because at the end of your first month in business, you cannot call all the people who shopped and tell them (as if it was a church) that the giving did not match the budget and we need to take up a special collection. Also, because the workman is worth is wages, it is important to note that you personally will never get paid unless you know in what way your bookstore has to function financially in order to generate wages for you and your help – and you will need help.

But financials are not the be-all and end-all of your business plan: they are merely the necessary skeleton. Another important part of your business plan is your marketing strategy. Now, don’t give me that I-just-bit-the-pickle reformed schoolmarm look. A bookstore is not a church: it is a business – well, it is if it’s a bookstore not propped up inside Phil Johnson’s church, anyway. (no offense, Phil) But your marketing plan includes things like “we’re a bookstore that caters to high-brow theological tastes,” or “we’re a bookstore that majors in Precious Moments” or whatever. See: you (the layman, the person who only shops at retail from time to time) think that somehow a retail establishment somehow just reflects an approach to selection and presentation by accident, or by some kind of luck. But the reality is that the places that execute retail professionally check every decision against some kind of core value marketing position. That’s how, btw, you keep Precious Moments out of your bookstore in spite of the gaggles of old women who will request them but will never buy them: you decide that your bookstore is “this kind of bookstore” before you buy piece #1 of anything, and then you check every buying decision you make after that against your marketing values (you can call it a mission statement if you want, but that’s not broad enough to cover what you are covering here) to make sure your bookstore is what you want it to be and what it ought to be.

Also included in your business plan is you marketplace survey. That is, if there are 50 Christian Bookstores in you neck of the woods, and 5 of them are associated with MegaChurches®, and 75% of people who live in your neck of the woods are Mormons, opening a Reformed Baptist bookstore which specializes in countercult apologetics will probably go over like a the 8-letter word of conflagration goes over here at the blog. And, again, the mission of an indie retail store seems to make missiological sense in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, but geez louise: there’s no way that store is ever going to make enough to pay the rent as a stand-alone enterprise. You have to be in a market that you either can actually evangelize, or that is dying for the resources you intend to have on the shelves. You will literally drain all your cash in 3-4 months if you are selling at a break-even ate to start, and your idea to be a better bookstore will cost you all your cash.

Last of all, your business plan has to include an operating plan. What are you going to use for inventory control? What financial software are you going to use for book-keeping? How many employees will you use? What will they do? What is your inventory mix? Do you know what “inventory mix” is? Do you need a loss prevention system? Do you need a listening station for music? Your method of implementing a retail strategy results in 10,000 details, and if you don’t even know the 500 categories that the details fall into, you have no hope of being successful.

So the first thing you need to start an independent Christian bookstore is a business plan. If you don’t wanna or you’re intimidated by it and think you can do it on a napkin, forget it. You’re not qualified.

The second thing you need to start an independent Christian bookstore is capital. As I told Micah, you can bank on needing $80/sq ft of real rented space to start, and that will leave you almost no cushion for operating cash through your first three years of struggling to establish your business. Now, unless you have $150,000 lying around, that means you’re going to need to borrow the money from a bank.

If you have a comprehensive business plan, and you have done your research, then you can probably secure a SBA loan from a bank. Without a business plan, you can forget it.

The third thing you need to start an independent Christian bookstore is a guts. Listen: you need to be somewhat fearless (but not stoopid) to own your own business. It means being able to be unwilling to commit suicide when you have your first $100 day when you need $650/day to break even, and unwilling to fold up the tents when somebody starts competing with you when you start being somewhat successful. You have to be able to look your customers in the eye and tell them, “Running this bookstore is a great blessing from God,” as if you mean it when they ask you, “How is your business going” and yesterday you had that $100 day.

You need to be a member of the chamber of commerce that other businesses admire. You need to have the confidence of your accountant and your lawyer. You need to be a member in good standing in your local church. You need to be a good representative of your business when you’re at your kid’s soccer game and that sheep-headed 16-yr-old who’s supposed to be the ref won’t blow the whistle for anything, and when your team is about to crush the other team 7-0 because your son has finally figured out that he’s the tallest (and therefore the fastest) kid on the field.

You have to have guts to be more than just some anonymous person anymore. You will be forming a relationship with your community that is necessary for your success, and if you don’t wanna, don’t waste your time and money. WAL*MART already sells the retail basics in this category, and the only reason people will shop you is if they trust your reputation as an example of Christian living. And guess what: that takes guts.

And just to make sure I say this, the last thing you need to start an independent Christian bookstore is a ”a word from God”. And when I say “the last thing you need”, be sure you understand me to say, “you need that like you need vinegar in your underwear.” Did you know that CBA bookstores fail as startup businesses at a rate of 70% in the first three years of operation? Do you know why? Because so many happy-hearted people think that God has given them a word that they should open up a bookstore, but apparently God didn’t tell them how to pay bills or the rent. If you just think you have the urge, the still small voice, the word of knowledge, the dream, whatever, but when you read the words “business plan” you just skimmed down the page, you are not qualified to open a bookstore of any stripe. Sorry. That’s rough, but that’s the truth.

I mean, since Micah asked, right? This is what it takes. To paraphrase a pretty smart guy, being reformed is not enough, and being a really, really, really nice person is not enough. You have to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and you have to be that way every day.

White Elephant in the room [5]

ote to readers:I prolly did a disservice to iMonk by posting Q10 here rather than giving it to him, but it's my post and I'm putting it here. Q9 will show up on is blog when he has a minute to get it up.

You can follow the whole "interview" with these links:
[Q1] Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10

Thanks for indulging me.

10. Our state Baptist paper used to publish an annual list of books recommended by our state denominational leadership. In all the years I read that list, I can never remember a book that wasn't on the subject of church growth or self help. In other words, no books on theology or the gospel. How important are the reading habits of pastors in shaping disciples who are reading good books?

Let me preface this answer by saying, that I am a layman who is now speaking to any pastor who is reading this with honest love of Christ, his Church, and the Gospel, and for you personally. This is also my opinion, but if anyone wants to argue with me about it I will be willing to argue within reasonable limits. Let me also say that my short list here presumes that every week, as a pastor, you are reading, studying, considering, and then expositing God’s word for the sake of your flock – so please don’t start with the “what about the Bible” objections.

First of all, any pastor who is not a reader and a writer of some sufficient means needs to think about his career choice. I’m not saying you ought to quit: I’m saying you need to think about what exactly you ought to be doing as the shepherd of the sheep. I’m pretty sure it’s not playing golf, so to speak.

Second of all, you have to be reading enriching stuff. You know: primarily the Bible, of course, but then stuff about the Bible by other men of good faith. And not blogs, for pete’s sake. Stop by my blog for a laugh once in a while, but my blog ought not to be on your top shelf. It disturbs me when pastors are reading books like Iraq: the Next Move which ought to be classed as fiction but is instead being used to supply sermons and small group study time. Read things of substance that are not vaguely topical and vaguely intimating that they have finally found a use for Rev 19:7 or whatever.

Third of all, you should be reading challenging stuff. Sometimes you have to read a decent Presbyterian defense of paedobaptism to be a convinced credobaptist. Sometimes you have to read Ehrman to become a passionate advocate of the Bible as God’s word. Sometimes you have to read Mark Driscoll because some kid in your congregation may pick it up after reading centuri0n give Pastor Driscoll the business, and you’ll have to answer questions about the difference between being “missional” and being “vulgar” – which both cent and Pastor Driscoll violate. Read something that makes you a better pastor on a broader playing field to people you didn’t think you would be ministering to.

Last of all, you should also be reading to keep your brain in shape. I just had a mock argument with Banty Rooster this week because he was asking his readers to vote for To Kill a Mocking Bird in some on-line survey as the best American novel ever – when plainly The Scarlet Letter is the greatest American novel, and perhaps the greatest novel in English. And people were actually voting for Huck Finn which is itself a sort of slap in the face to anybody who’s read it more than twice. But I have this fear that Mattson and I were the only ones in on the joke. It shouldn’t be that way. You don’t have to be a pericope-loving desiderata-sniffer in order to be a literate and mentally-agile person. But for pete’s sake: you should be reading to keep your brain from being more than a place that keeps the top of your skull from caving in.

Your reading habits make you a better person for the sake of the Gospel. Without abusing the text, when the church started getting bigger in the first egeneration of Christians, what did the Apostles do? They enlisted men of good faith to minister to the daily needs of the church so that they could then dedicate themselves to the study of God’s word. For reference sake, they weren’t watching the simulcast from the church in Antioch: they were reading in order to study God’s word.

You: read. Read! If you’re not a reader, you had better figure out what you need to do to get there. And if your primary diet is not something like theology, what exactly are you feeding your flock?

And that really brings me to my final point, Michael: notice that I said “something like theology”. There is something quite amazing about the history of Christian literature: it is all “something like” theology even when it is not exactly a book on systematics. For example, Hawthorne is unequivocally Christian literature – from his social criticism to his fiction, it revolves around the relationship of man to God through Christ. But is Hawthorne “theology”? His work could not exist without theology, but it is not merely or exclusively theology.

See: if I have any sympathy for the “emergents”, it is that they wish they were Hawthorne, and Bunyan, and Milton, and Shakespeare, and whoever else is rightly in that crowd. There really is something to the idea that real missionary zeal is expressed when we create art which magnifies God in truth and spirit – because it reaches out in a way that simple propositions do not reach out.

The problem is that this ideal is not preaching but merely praxis. In the same way that opening a soup kitchen is a nice thing to do which may or may not be spreading the Gospel, making a poem or a book or a movie which is anecdotal and expresses Christian values may or may not be spreading the Gospel. The only way to preach the Gospel is to preach the Gospel.

But we do not preach the Gospel to people who just hatched out of their eggs, so to speak; we don’t preach to pod people who just emerged and just now need to find out what to think. We preach to people who live in a real world with flesh that bruises and bleeds and also sometimes tickles, and bones which break, and eyes that cry from both joy and sorrow. So to be a great pastor, one has to read “something like theology” to be able to preach to the people God gives him.

Anyone who argues against that has never read Spurgeon or Edwards in anything but a superficial way, but anyone who thinks this is the approach of either the emergents or of those whom they frankly despise is out of his mind. A pastor does not have to be a genius, or a Ph.D. of Literature, or even a better-than-most poet or writer: he just has to expand himself by reading for enrichment.

If he does that, he will be better at discipling because he will be equipped to do God’s work. End of story, and thanks for the questions.

White Elephant in the room [4]

You can follow the whole "interview" with these links:
[Q1] Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10

7. Let's talk about how your own faith enters into running a store. Do you ever look at a really good book that you know is not going to sell ten copies or at a really bad book that is going to sell 500 and say "I've got to do something to change that?" What can you- or should you- do?

Oh, it’s about me now, is it?

The answer to your first question is, “I task my staff to read all the books that we bring in which, subjectively, I have assigned as ‘core material’ for the bookstore”. And it’s not that many titles, really – at this point, maybe 25 books. There are some exceptions – like everyone hasn’t read Institutes of Christian Religion. I’m a bookstore owner, not a cruel despot. But when Dever’s Deliberate Church came out, we were reading that – so we could talk about it and recommend it. Piper’s God is the Gospel is on the current “must read”. So what we do to advance the cause of good books is to read them and then talk about them when they come up.

And let me make sure I don’t paint us up as an ivory tower here. I have 3 PT folks who do about 80% of the customer service in my store (my wife and I split the other 20%), and they are all very different people from me – Thank God! So if somehow you find yourself visiting our store, don’t expect it to be a somewhat prim and proper place in which no preposition ever ends a sentence, and where every statement comes with a 3x5 card of proof texts. I have one guy who’s a little emergent (well, prolly a lot emergent, but he works hard and I'm beating it out of him) and is all over music; I have a young woman who is a fiction reader more than a non-fiction reader; and I have the post-Wesleyan fellow I have mentioned before. And you’ll be shocked to know that while every one of them can ably tell you the difference between KJV, NASB, NIV and MSG (and all the flavors in between), they aren’t constantly blabbering theology. The first thing they ask every person who walks in is “How are you today?” They’re nice. That’s more important, in retail, than whether they know the difference between van Til and William Lane Craig.

So we set out to change the world one person at a time by being informed and by being nice about it. I know that doesn’t really sound like me, but that’s our strategy. And if you don’t mind, let me give you an example. Last year (as reviewed on my blog) James Rutz came out with the execrable book Mega Shift, and I found it somewhat disconcerting that after that, George Barna came out with Revolution, built on the same premises. Now, what did we do? Did we hide the Barna book and the Rutz book behind the counter and only sell it to people if they let us put it in a brown paper sack, and only if they watched our 10-minute DVD on the evils of inept ecclesiology? Oh please. Some local church was reading these books for who-knows-what reason, and I’m not going to march down there and have a Diet of Worms with their pastor because he’s a little carried away by some of the alleged trends in global missions – if you can call what those books describe “missions” in the Paul-and-Peter sense of the word.

What we did was this: we put one copy of each on the shelf (1 only), and restocked it weekly if it sold. We even put them on the top shelf – the “featured” shelf. But we put them next to Dever’s 9 Marks and Tony Evans’ God’s Glorious Church, and when people asked us about the not-so-hot books, we showed them the book they were looking for and the books we would recommend in that category. That way, people have the opportunity to think about the question “what is missions?” in the right context – “what is the church?” – and not get (frankly) fooled into sensationalism.

And consider it: are these two books the most high-brow books on the subject? Not by a long shot. They are hardly books of a systematic quality, but are books at a popular level which make no major errors of exegesis or application and are accessible to Mary Methodist or Charlie Community Church, but they drive the point home that the Bible tells us something about “church” which ought to be honored in some way. And when you read either of those and then sit down to read Mega Shift or Revolution, you have enough basic information to ask the question, “do Rutz and Barna bother to apply the Bible to their exciting anecdotes, or do they instead apply the Bible when they have run out of anecdotes?”

And, I think, this methodology works. We are not berating people who don’t know any better for making choices their pastors or Sunday school teachers have suggested, and we are offering guided options to them which, if they make the comparison, will result in their spiritual growth.

Have we transformed NW Arkansas into a teeming hotbed of theological geniuses who can spot a fraud by the way he handles the NLT? No – of course not. But the trend in our bookstore – which is atypical in the industry – is away from gifts and junk and toward books and resources. And we don’t have people who avoid my wife and I at the grocery store because “that’s the crazy lady and her mean husband who run the bible bookstore”.

White Elephant in the room [3]

You can follow the whole "interview" with these links:
[Q1] Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10

5. What responsibilities does the publisher- or the retailer- have to the consumer in terms of knowing the basic doctrinal orientation of a book? For instance, should retailers have information available (on computers, for example) that could help a customer know what's actually in a Joel Osteen book? Isn't this one of the strengths of online bookstores? They can make more information available?

Again, I think this is a better question than you intend. I think it ought to work something like this:

- Someplace, there's a doctrinal affirmation in place which can be looked to for common ground which stays inside the essentials of the faith. For example, the A.C.E. statement is mighty fine; the new T4G statement is adequate, I guess. Personally, I like the LCBF or the WCF if we can haggle over sacramentology on the side.

- The result of a doctrinal statement is an ecumenical consensus. That's not "ecclesiastical body" but "common ground for common action". I get twitchy every time I see our brothers at Sharper Iron on about "separation". Dude: we have more in common than not if we are affirming the Gospel.

- Inside an ecumenical consensus, inside the "common ground for action", we can then start talking about what we can do for each other. This ought to be the playing field for CBA/ECPA.

Now, in this framework, the local church can look to the doctrinal affirmation and take some comfort: Nice list, looks like what the Bible teaches, we can admire that from a "go and make disciples" standpoint. But the affirmation has to be more than lip service. It has to stake out the territory that we are not going to let things in the margin get by us.

This is the White elephant in the room, by the way -- if you'll allow me to mix up two metaphors. On the one hand, CBA is and in many ways ought to be, a White Elephant sale of sorts -- it ought to have a veritable shmorgasborg of Christian books for reads who what Christian worldview and Gospel edification. We're not living in the apostolic age. There are between 1 billion and 2 billion Christians walking around the planet, and with that many Christians there ought to be at least 10 million pastor/teachers preachin' it every Sunday. 10 million guys who have to talk between 20 minutes and an hour (and some of them can't stop at an hour) every week should be compiling their sermon notes (which are good enough for the pulpit, btw) and publishing them for the edification of all Christians.

But what no one will talk about -- the elephant in the room -- is that first of all most sermon notes are simply not good enpough to be published, and second of all there is no standard to which these notes can or should be measured for Christian decency -- and by that I mean whether or not they stay on the doctrinal blacktop or wind up in the doctrinal ditch. You can't bring it up in CBA without getting the cold stares of publishers like Warner Faith who just gave Joel Osteen a $15 million advance on his next book.

I made a post at TeamPyro a while back half-heartedly defending CBA/ECPA because about 70% or some such thing of the top 100 books were at worst non-offensive. Listen: that's terrible. While it's better than Barnes and Noble (since you bring them up), if 30% of the gas you put in your car was sugar, you'd sue your local filling station. There's no reason for 30% of the books in the channel to be outside the scope of orthodoxy.

And the problem, by the way, is not laziness or ignorance. If it were that, you could almost forgive the lot of them for being a little like fat friars who are too busy making bread or whatever to consider that the common man outside the friary might like a bite to eat. The problem is frankly an intransigent attitude toward the matter of orthodoxy.

I say this because every time I personally bring it up inside the industry I get caster oil looks from 90% of the people at whatever situation it happens to be: “you can’t offend blah blah blah,” “you can’t exclude blah blah blah,” “you can’t divide blah blah blah,” and my favorite, “who are you to judge blah blah blah.”

It’s amazing to me, really. If you press the issue and ask them, “well, when do we start letting Mormons in as Christians in CBA,” the dismissal is as if this is not the point – that somehow it’s self-evident that Mormons have it wrong, but to think that TD Jakes has it wrong, or Randy Phillips has it wrong, or Rick Joyner has it wrong, or Mary K. Baxter has it wrong ... dude: you’re a divisive person. You’re a trouble-maker. As if the ones making the trouble with truth are the ones telling the truth like the Presbyterians, and Baptists, and the better Anglicans, and even some of the non-conformist Charismatics.

CBA and ECPA does not perceive that while orthodoxy may be a broad net it is also a threshing floor – a place where the wheat is allowed to stay and the chaff has to get blown into the fire. Being “sensitive” to stuff like the rejection of the Trinity or someone claiming to be a Prophet in the “thus saith the Lord” OT sense of the word ... I have foresworn using the vulgar barnyard expression which means empty and worthless, but if we can’t tell which doctrines are and are not “Christian”, and we’re allegedly selling books, we better call Hercules out to clean the stables because it’s getting mighty deep and stinky in here.

And let’s not kid ourselves: Amazon and CBD and LifeWay.com do not do any kind of a decent service in sifting out the raisins from the rabbit pellets. I don’t want to get all Grad School on anybody here, but what’s the interpretive grid? If the grain of the grid is so big that you can sail baseballs through it, it’s not a filter. The filter ought to be applied at the publisher’s end and it ought to be reviewed at the local church end. That’s accountability. Challies new adventure in relaunching DR is interesting and I have high hopes for it, but it’s barely a start.

I disagree with the “clearing house” methodology of having a database of books with 500-word reviews that tell the user blah blah blah. It’s hardly comprehensive, and only barely useful. In my bookstore, my employees are tasked with reading books. When they have questions about books, they talk about them with me. I have one young feller who started off as a rank Wesleyan (¡madre tamale!) and, after working in the bookstore for a year while attending the local university and taking a couple of courses (like “theology of worship” from a [!]Presbyterian) he finds himself in the under-appreciated position of knowing he was wrong about a lot of things when he started. But because his boss was ardent that he ought to read up first on what he thinks he believes, then also to read what is required of employees to know in order to assist customers, and then read because it’s pretty great to be a reader, and because he also had to pass a class being taught by someone who has a much more traditional and systematic view than he had, he is no longer mired in a theology that today he will admit was pretty flimsy. Is this young feller a reformed storm trooper? Why no: he is not. My point in relating this is simple: if you ask him to tell the difference between what he believes and what, for example, Charles Spurgeon believed, he could tell you. And CBD can’t. It doesn’t have that kind of time.

And that, in my book, is better than a static blurb. Some young guy who is studying his theology and reading books is a better resource than some fixed corporate web page every day. That is also why Christian retail ought to be beautiful: it is missional in the broadest sense, reaching both inside the church to bring some to maturity and reaching outside the church in a non-church setting to those who have questions, if I can say “missional” without condemning myself of being Emergent.

The strength of the local retailer ought to be that we are a bunch of crazy (in a nice way) people who love the Gospel and the church, and who read books as if they were more important than our next meal – which is something no chain and no web site can replicate. CBD and Amazon are price/assortment market strategies, and if they try to make “service” (as in: there’s someone you can talk to about your purchase before you make it) part of their paradigm, they are going to go out of business. It’s too expensive to do at a 4% gross margin.

This is question 6 in this series

This is question 4 in this series

This is question 2 in this series

White Elephant in the room [2]

You can follow the whole "interview" with these links:
[Q1] Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10

As we continue this little series, I was re-reading yesterday's post and I wanted to make a clarification really for the sake of conscience. Yesterday, I said this:

To answer your question more narrowly, I think the greatest single damaging "event" which intersects both ECPA/CBA and the local church is the explosion of media ministries, beginning with the grand-daddy of media minsitries: the Billy Graham Crusades. Hal Lindsey is a small fish in a dirty pond compared to the damage I think has come about in the exercise of the local church mission due to media-based ministries which have convinced people they don’t need to "go to church" in order to "be a Christian".

And in thinking about how that statment reads, it is possible that some people might read that to say, "Billy Graham and his ministry is of the devil." That's not at all what I mean by that. Do I have some problems with some of Dr. Graham's most recent views on ecumenicism and the interpretation of the Gospel? Sure I do. But for decades -- nearly half a century -- Billy Graham was frankly the public face of American Protestant Christianity, and as an ambassador he represented us well enough that to dismiss his life-long work is callous and somewhat stupid.

My statement from yesterday, in its context, should be understood this way: the local church has work it ought to be doing, and when it cedes that work to any other organization it has done something wrong. The trend to do this started when people -- with good intentions, and for what we can only interpret as Gospel-minded labor -- started making evangelism a stadium event rather than a personal event.

The ripple effects of this, I think, are wide-reaching, and it goes directly to iMonks Q2 which he posted on his blog yesterday.

Thanks. Back to the questions.

3. Should every church have a bookstore? Should every church be supporting a bookstore run by its members?

Before I answer that, I am about to use a lot of retail words -- like "overhead" and "transactions" and "wholesale buys". I use those words rather than fluffy spiritual words because we are talking about practical matters and not matters of doctrine. So forgive me for being a crass retail wonk.

Having said that, you ask an interesting question. I think the simple answer is "no", but is that answer really very simple? For example, how can a small church of 50 people support an actual "bookstore"? Frankly, it can't. It can't generate enough transactions to make wholesale buys. You need a base of about 2500 bodies to generate enough transactions to cover your costs -- even if your costs are part of the church's overhead. But what about a church of 3000 – should it open up a bookstore? Would it be “books” or “books and CDs” or “l’il Barnes & Noble complete with café pomo outreach”? The simple “no” covers a lot of cases that really have different reasons behind “no”.

But the problem -- which I see as a very real need and a very real problem for the contemporary church -- is that most little churches deperately need a local bookstore to assist in discipleship. A bi-vocational pastor desperately needs a place where he can have a partner in ministry which is bigger than his flock of 10 who are meeting in his dining room in order to give people what they need to grow up as ministers of the Gospel.

In that, we have the problem I mentioned in my intro to this little jam session: the CBA/ECPA channel takes itself too seriously and also to lightly. It is too serious when it tries to make every activity a spiritually-enriching activity. For example, loss prevention and inventory accounting are, in the best case, good for one's retail practice. However, anyone who can do either one of those without feeling the need to employ vicious idioms of frustration and rage is qualified for canonization. Everything one does is not necessarily a step toward sanctification®, or an act of worship™. But at the same time, one of the things that ECPA/CBA refuses to do (and therefore takes itself too lightly) is establish a working confession of faith which defines what the "C" is in their funky names. You know: we shouldn't accept false prophets, deniers of the Trinity, or blasphemers as viable authors in "Christian" bookstores. But there are whole publishing houses (and TV channels) devoted to this sort of thing, and their goods are right on the shelf today at Family, and LifeWay (sorry SBC), and Berean, and Mardels. And, to be totally transparent, my store, too. We bat about 95%, but I admit we aren’t perfect.

So CBA/ECPA ought to be more concerned with what it is doing to and for the local church. Instead, it is worried that it isn't pan-denominationally friendly and it isn't selling enough neo-Marcionist literature to baptists and presbyterians.

If the world was a perfect place, my opinion is that Christian bookstores would be run by people who are under the accountability of their own elders with a somewhat-ecumenical ideal in mind. That word “ecumenical” is going to come up a few more times in this exchange, so I’m going to flesh it out here.

“Ecumenical”, as I am using it, does not mean “blindly taking everyone’s word for it that they are Christians”. For example, wherever you come down on the AA/FV issue, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the baptism of the author of a given book. Since she comes up later in iMonk’s list, for example, Joyce Meyer may actually be a Christian. I say good on her for following Jesus. That doesn’t mean that all her books – or any of her books – are worth reading from the perspective of spreading faith in Jesus Christ or maturing one’s faith in Jesus Christ. She’s a Christian? Fine. Is she growing up disciples in Christ? The answer to that question is what’s at stake in the CBA/ECPA industry.

“Ecumenical”, then, actually does mean “unity in TRUTH”. That means first we seek TRUTH, and in our admiration of the Gospel and its truth we find unity in those things indicative of that truth. Like grace -- when was the last time you read a book or heard a sermon about grace in which you found out that it is through grace one becomes a fantastic husband? That is, not only by giving grace, but by experiencing the grace of God and living inside the gratitude of a sinner who not only got off light, but got love in place of justice? Do you have to be a Methodist to read that – or a Lutheran? How about a Baptist – can a Baptist read that and not call out the hounds? Could it be that we have this truth in common with Presbyterians as well?

See: the upside of “church” bookstores is that they almost certainly (and there are exceptions) are being timoneered by pastors and elders. But the downside is that these bookstores tend to be denominationally narrow – about 5 microns more narrow than the most conservative overseer of the assembly. So in that, questions like, “why do Presbyterians baptize babies” or “why do Baptists use grape juice” or “what should I think of the Koran” or “I’ve always been taught that I got saved when I made a decision and walked down the aisle, but I accidentally read Romans 9 and it says that God wants to save, and in fact decides to save, without any regard for who I am or what I have done; what’s up with that”, or “I’m 13 and I really like my youth pastor; should I dedicate my life to ‘the ministry’ before I even know anything about girls” never get asked or never get answered in most church bookstores.

Being under submission but being free to demonstrate the discussion about very hard subjects like these is one of the benefits of being a bookstore outside of the 4 walls or polity of a church. Think about it: what if, rather than mutter in darkness about “those crazy Baptists” or “those liberal Methodists” or “those muttering continualists” there was a place where these questions of denominational abstraction could be learned about with a stern eye focused on the Gospel. Personally, I think it would lead more people to being Baptist, but of course I am well known for having a disastrous hermeneutic. My point is that while a church bookstore can serve a particular purpose well, it is not (in my view) the best possible purpose for Christian retail and publishing.

You know, Michael, we’re going to toss around a good bit of tough talk about this industry as we walk through these questions of yours, but let me say something: I see Christian retail as a very God-honoring thing and a very spiritually-beautiful thing – when it has all its ducks in a row. But that is so rare, so obscure today that it’s like finding a Hershey’s Kiss made of gold in a urinal in Grand Central Station in NYC. At a glance, you’re sure it’s prank meant to get you to put your hand into something vile; if you stare at it long enough and you realize that it’s real, you can’t figure out how to touch it without looking giddy or disturbed; and if you don’t grab it, somebody else with less sanctification than you is bound to grab it and waste it on sterno and summer sausage. This thing we are talking about is one of the great lay ministerial opportunities in the history of the church, but so many people have no idea how to get the kiss without touching the porceline that we just wind up with a lot of people trying to wash their hands quickly and forget that they ever saw the confounded thing to begin with.

So, no, I don’t think that every church should have a bookstore in a one-to-one kind of correspondence, but yes: I think every church should “have” a bookstore that they can rely on and do turn to in order to be more than a bunker full of people who never experience or fellowship with the rest of God’s people, intellectually or spiritually.

White Elephant in the room [1]

Well, so this is the big news: after having a nice exchange of about 150 words, iMonk has asked me to have a little palaver over the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) and the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA). I have honestly meant to blog hard on this subject since I opened up this Blogger account, but I always seem to find other things which grab my attention which also seem to have a broader appeal. And no: iMonk is not the "White Elephant".

iMonk has sent me 10 questions, and one of the terms of the chat is that we're going to share the content between our two blogs. I'll be posting the intro and first Q here, and I'll be sending him Q2 and my response for him to post over there. The subsequent cross-posting and eventual collision of worlds will undoubtedly bring and end to civilization as we know it, but the hits should be amazing, so it was nice knowing you.

Along the way, I'll bet iMonk will have some follow-up Qs, and I'd be willing to field those as we go. I'm not running for the presidency of the SBC, after all: no need to screen questions. The only real ground rule is that I'm not going to answer questions which I think strike too close to home and might raise the ire of my full-time employer.

Fair enough? On with the show. iMonk's words will be like this.

I've been wanting to do some occasional posts on Christian publishing and its influence and effect on American Christians, particularly the local church. I know a few folks in the business, but none of them are as interesting and as potentially entertaining as my personal therapist, Frank Turk. I've been impressed with Frank's posts on the CBA and his asides about Christian retail in his comments are always interesting. So I asked Frank- a Christian retailer himself- if he would answer some questions about this topic, and he was gracious enough to accept the invitation. Any resulting t-shirts are not my responsibility.

Before we kick this off, there might be some "new" readers who are unaware of the history of iMonk and centuri0n, and rather than rehash that history let me frame up this exchange in a couple of ways.

First, iMonk and I both think there are problems with the contemporary American church. However, painting broadly, I would say that I think what iMonk represents is a large part of the problem, and (again, broadly) iMonk thinks what I represents is a large part of the problem. We may both be right.

Second, it turns out that we prolly agree that another large part of the problem is what passes for "Christian retail". The Q & A that iMonk proposed here and I accepted really is a kind of ex tempore stink-eye against an industry that somehow takes itself both too seriously and too lightly.

Last, I claim full responsibility for all t-shirts and overpriced gimmicks that get created and sold as a consequence of this exchange. Let's just not pretend that said gimmicks and apparel are in any way spiritually edifying: they are merely self-deprecating commerce.

1. Where, in the recent history of Christian publishing, do you feel there was a significant shift in the relationship between publishers and the church? (My nomination: Late Great Planet Earth.)

Well, I think your question oversimplifies the problem by a lot. A good comparison would be the question, "Which church council founded the Roman Catholic church?" I think you and I would agree that no church council founded the RCC, but that it was built up by a series of events -- some pragmatically good and some cynically bad -- over about 1300 years.

So even if we zoom in on the history of the publishing industry as it interfaces with church life in America in the last 100 years, to say there was "one" significant shift is a little reductive. Someplace in a blog entry I said (in words to this effect) that the problems with Christian retail (which includes the ECPA marketplace) have one foot in the local church, and the other foot in the local church. I'd say that the bastardization of the local church over the last 100 years has been the foundational problem with American Christian culture, and in that it is the foundational problem with Christian retail today.

To answer your question more narrowly, I think the greatest single damaging "event" which intersects both ECPA/CBA and the local church is the explosion of media ministries, beginning with the grand-daddy of media minsitries: the Billy Graham Crusades. Hal Lindsey is a small fish in a dirty pond compared to the damage I think has come about in the exercise of the local church mission due to media-based ministries which have convinced people they don’t need to "go to church" in order to "be a Christian".

I think the chain of causation goes like this:

- media ministries (MM) have supplanted local church ministry over the last 50 years. If we're 100% honest with ourselves, local churches ceded their position to media ministries in part because MM looked good on the outside and in part because local churches tried to be "like" MM.

- media ministries are more like media-based organizations than like ministries

- media-based organizations thrive of "spin off" or "franchise"; for example, a good book gets a movie; if the movie is target-rich, it gets trinkets (cf. Star Wars); if the movie is hit, it gets a sequel; the sequel gets a book; etc.

- media ministries propagate themselves like media-based organizations and not like Gospel-based organizations.

- Thus, the franchise-driven CBA channel of retail.

So what we really have is a media-based paradigm frankly over-running any and all paradigms contained inside the Gospel. I'm 100% ready to admit that the delivery of the Gospel is not necessarily restricted to guys with one cloak and one staff and a pair of sandals who only stay in towns were someone will put them up for the night, but I am also 100% sure that the Gospel is tied inextricably to local church bodies who are working personally to deliver the work of Christ in word and example.

To be clear: CBA is a tangle because the right-side-up version of Gospel ministry from the local church is not even upside-down but inside-out. That doesn't absolve CBA and ECPA from its complicity in this gigantic mess, but it does explain why CBA and ECPA has such an easy time remerchandising its goods every coupla months: there's nobody there to stop them.

You can follow the whole "interview" with these links:
[Q1] Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10

[*] Why CBA is a cess pool

UPDATED: Welcome SBTS readers!

HOLY MOLEY: Welcome readers from albertmohler.com!

One of the things that really gets me angry is the fact that CBA doesn't understand why it is wandering into the grand canyon of irrelevance. For those of you who don't know, "CBA" is the "Christian Booksellers Association", and I am a former member because of my bookstore. That is to say, I joined CBA because of my bookstore, and I left CBA because of my bookstore.

I got a postcard this week at my bookstore about the book to the right, and on that postcard, the following copy was given:

You've seen the lively discussion on CBN.com. You've heard Charles Colson talk about the book on Breakpoint. Albert Mohler wrote on Crosswalk.com that "Nelson's book is genuinely interesting, offering credible and helpful insights into the Oprah phenomenon."

There's more on that postcard, but that's the part I want you to think about.

See: while Dr. Mohler actually did say that about this book, he actually wrote a complete review of the book which is very balanced and does not require any centuri0nization for the astute readers of this blog.

What I wanted to point out is that what Dr. Mohler concludes about this book is the following:

In her substitution of psychology for theology, Oprah has become a high priestess and icon of the psychologization of American society. When she features prominent New Age figures on her television show, she helps to mainstream New Age influences and philosophies among millions of Americans. Her substitution of spirituality for biblical Christianity, her promotion of forgiveness without atonement, and her references to a god "without labels" puts her at the epicenter of a seismic cultural earthquake.

At the same time, Oprah cannot be ignored. Marcia Z. Nelson's new book is intended as a celebration of Oprah's significance as a harbinger of a new gospel. In the end, the importance of this book is grounded in the fact that it draws attention to Oprah's influence and cultural impact. Oprah's newly-packaged positive-thinking spirituality is tailor-made for the empty souls of our postmodern age. She promises meaning without truth, acceptance without judgment, and fulfillment without self-denial. Marcia Z. Nelson is certainly right about one thing--Oprah Winfrey's "congregation" cannot be ignored.

That's a little bit different than the postcard intimates, yes?

And that is why CBA is irrelevant. I have an object lesson related to that which I have to get off my chest, so bear with me.

Let me let you in on a not-so-little secret: in the next 4 months, a WAL*MART near you is going to start carrying a short line of "Christian" t-shirts branded "Only Son". The price-point is going to be $ 9.77. (source: Arkansas Democrat Gazette, dated: 1/15/2006) When that happens, there is going to be a massive exodus of apparel vendors from the CBA arena because $14.99 Kerusso T's won't sell at all when a very comparable shirt at Big Blue will be 30% less. Sadly, two years ago at CBA Advance I was telling all the shirt vendors that the right price for their wares was (based on Comp at GAP and Old Navy) $9.99 -- with seasonal T's being $7 or $5.

The funny thing about these T's is that all references to Jesus have been reduced to the "Only Son" brand line, or reduced to 6-point type in order to keep from "offending non-believers". So in order to stick a fork in the CBA apparel market, WAL*MART has done exactly what Oprah has done: taken the stupidity and ignorance of alleged Christians and capitalized on it.

And the co-dependent partner in this deal is CBA. "Cent: you've cracked," comes the response from the clown car. "CBA is the enabler of this deal? How so? Did CBA broker the deal?" No: CBA set up the marketplace through apathy to orthodoxy.

Listen: it may make me crazy to listen to Tim Enloe talk about objective sacraments, and it may make me dizzy to listen to Lutheran Pastors discuss the Eucharist, and it may make me punchy to watch Baptists take pot shots at Limited atonement and Unconditional election, but that's what apologetics is there for. We can at least stage the argument even if nobody is going to change his mind, right?

The problem with CBA is that they don't think the arguments are valid. T.D. Jakes has more clout than John MacArthur because Jakes has a talk show, has been on Oprah, and sells a lot of self-help books in spite of his open rejection of the Trinity. Nobody asks any questions of Randy Phillips regarding his take on the Trinity, either. Nobody wags a finger at Joel Osteen for being unable to preach the Gospel when questioned by Larry King. And if you can get past Richard Abanes to ask Rick Warren a question, you're a better man than I. But raising any of these objections is categorically verbotten in a CBA forum.

And listen: if you don't carry Rosaries, you're branded irrational. It's a classic Seinfeld episode: it's "You don't wan' to wear the ribbon? " and "Not that there's anything wroing with that" all rolled up into one.

But because of this blind rejection of the simple categories of the faith which have been in play for centuries -- some for millennia -- CBA has lead the Christian consumer into a dead end where Oprah can be called a Christian because she doesn't openly reject Christ even though she would never mention Him by name, and her message can be called "the Gospel" even though it doesn't just fail the Galatians standard: it fails the 1Cor 15:1-4 standard.

Let me say something clearly here: while I reject Communio Sanctorum and Tim Enloe's view of the faith, I respect that they have bothered to offer some basis for their view of the Christian life and the Christian church. It may be dreadfully wrong, but at least it offers something to think about -- and it asks a lot of the right questions. Blind ecumenicism is the worst enemy of orthodoxy because it has no way to consider questions like "church" and "believer" and "salvation".

But blind ecumenicism is exactly what CBA offers its customers. And in that, it eliminates the true ministry of Christian retail and, ironically, the true competitive advantage of Christian retail. See: if I can walk into my local CBA store and what it carries has no more or less spiritual advantage to what I can find at WAL*MART, why on earth would I buy (as an example) Max Lucado's Cure for the Common Life for full retail at a place that is out of my way when I can buy it at WAL*MART off the endcap on my way to the checkout at the Amazon price?

But if my local Christian retailer is someone who trains his associates to know the difference between KJV, NASB, NLT, NIV and tNIV and the Message, maybe it's worth going there. And if my local Christian retailer offers me the service of screening the books that come out so that he (and his employees) can tell me, "this author denies the Trinity," and "this author soft-soaks the Gospel -- he talks a lot about grace and not so much about the cost of discipleship" and "this book is biased by anti-dispensationalism," and "this book is founded on traditional Protestant theology, which in the end is useful to a broad spectrum of readers," then maybe it doesn't hurt that I have to pay 20% more for books I can trust.

But because CBA is like CBN and TBN and is blind in its ecumenicism, WAL*MART beats it up all the time -- because when there's no discernment at stake, price is the only issue. That is to say, we have already established what kind of girl you are and now we are haggling over the price.

So when you see the Oprah Gospel book on your local CBA bookstore shelves, take it to the owner or manager and ask him/her if they have read it. And then ask them why they would sell a book like that when they don't know what it's teaching. And then ask them what their ministry statement is and whether it is in-line with their ministry statement to sell books which dare to call what happens on the Oprah show in the same league with the cross of Jesus Christ.

Then come back here and tell me what happened. Only do it before Saturday because CBA Advance is next week and anyone who's a manager or owner will prolly be there in Denver Nashville at the Gaylord Opryland pretending he's in the New Jerusalem.