My vote: a urinal

I dunno if you've been following this story, but they killed Al Zarqawi yesterday morning. The #1 Al Qaida guy in Iraq is now dead.

The best recap of what has happened in this story, and what it means, is found here at Hugh Hewitt in an interview with the extraordinary Mark Steyn.

After you read that, understand that my vote is in response to Steyn's first response to Hugh.

franchise player [winner]

Well, two days ago we had a little contest here to see who could give the best chastisement to our, um, friend JohnB5200 who left comments at the iMonk blog. Unlike previous giveaways at TeamPyro, not many people chose to play, which makes me a little sad. Apparently my junk merchandise is not as attractive as the junk merch I designed for teamPyro.

Lesson learned -- I'll have to update the shop if I get a minute this weekend.

Anyway, I have to announce a winner because I promised there would be one. The real competitors for the shirt, I think, are Libbie, EvenSo, Charlie and ... huh! iMonk. Charlie's comment was a little long, EvenSo got a little MBA (if you know what I'm sayin'), and there is a certain perverse pleasure which I would take in having iMonk wear the blog t-shirt so I have to rule that out as sin.

So the winner -- in spite of shipping costs -- is Libbie! Jolly Good Show!

Libbie -- I think I have your addr someplace, but I need your shirt size. And while I have here pictured the black stoner T, I'd be willing to get you one of the girl-cut T's if you'd rather wear something more feminine.

Nice job everyone.

Pop Tarts, Coke and Piper

One of the things you-all should read as a matter of your duty to truth and the blogosphere is this essay on the definition of "hyper calvinism".

Those of you who have not yet understood the joke in the subject line are informally chastized for being a little thick.

Anyway, after reading around today I figured that it would be good to toss some water on the fires some people are trying to stoke by calling good and Godly men "hyper calvinists", and I was afraid I was going to have to write such a thing, but thank my lucky stars for friends like Phil Johnson who have been fighting this fight for longer than I have.

After you read that, send a link to Ergun Caner at Liberty University. No vulgarities or triumphalism, please -- just send him a polite note indicating that since he has written what he wrote at falwell.com, he might enjoy a different perspective on the matter. He might enjoy it -- I am sure he'll enjoy hearing from you.

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.

A hand-out

I know you've all been engrossed by my exhange with iMonk this time around, and also with the coupla sidebar issues that have come up. It's been sort of cathartic for me to be able to say some of the things I've said here about CBA/ECPA, but I'll bet that it's been pretty boring for most of you. These are really thinly-veiled "This is Where I Am Right Now" posts, and I apologize to all of you for making them. However, there are two more -- one here, one at iMonk's blog -- left to unveil, so demonstrate perseverence.

To encourage you blog-wise, I found this little ditty via brother Dr. James White's blog and Tom Ascol's blog. Pastor Ascol was somewhat charitable towards the essay, and Dr. White was a little diappointed that this note came out at falwell.com.

Personally, I think it's inflammatory and ill-conceived. The only way to construe this essay as somehow "even handed" or "charitable" is to compare it to the private exchanges Ergun Caner has had with Dr. White and Pastor Ascol on this subject.

The real irony for me is that I don't think Dr. Caner's litany against "Hyper Calvinism" is the real offense here. I think this is the real offense:

Since my salvation, I have been a Baptist. Since coming to Liberty University, my wife and I have been members of Thomas Road Baptist Church, which has an amazing history and a 50-year trail of miracles. Yet, being a Baptist goes back even further than a building. In the 16th century, our Anabaptist forefathers were not so mingled with the Reformed movement in Geneva. In fact, they were hunted in virtually every country in continental Europe. Men such as Michael Sattler and Balthasar Hubmaier suffered at the hands of all of the Magisterial Reform movements, including the Calvinists.

That is the core historical issue. In our history, Free Church believers have never been adherents to one particular system or philosophy. We certainly have not been locked to a scholastic movement that was formed by men. We are Biblicists. We believe the Bible is inerrant, not because a particular creed forces us to do so, but because we see Scripture as plain on that issue. We are adamant that Jesus Christ — virgin-born, living a sinless life, crucified, buried, physically resurrected and soon returning — is the only Savior because the Bible states it, regardless of the whims and wishes of men. [Emph Added]

Really, I'm just speechless. Where exactly does one start with something this confounded and biased? How does one address the underlined text which is contradicted by the highlighted text?

Listen: I promised not to bring him up anymore, but I'll say this plainly -- if Tim Enloe thinks that this is the way I think, he may be wrong about me personally but he's 100% justified in disdaining this kind of ridiculous cherry-picking of facts.

There's enough material in those 100-or-so words to keep this blog afloat for a month.

UPDATED: I hate it when Gene Bridges steals my thunder.

franchise player

Over at iMonk's blog, the following gem was posted as a response to my answer to iMonk's question over there:

JohnB5200 on June 6th, 2006 3:27 pm

Come on, greeting cards and calendars do not define franchise. Do MacArthur, Sproul, Piper have franchises? Yes they do. So they don’t have cards, so what.

MacArthur has his own seminary for crying out loud. His own commentaries, study Bible, verse memorization system, radio program, seminars, etc.

Sproul’s RYM ministry is a money making franchise also. Study Bible, radio, tapes, cds, conferences, devotional mag.

Piper is probably the “leastest.” Probably because he’s more of a braniac whose stuff is over the head of 98% of church goers. But his DGM is catching up.

If you want to point a finger at Lucado et al., don’t be hypocritical by leaving out your faves just because they are your faves.

BTW, can you name a guy about 100 years ago who is probably responsible for starting the whole spiritual franchise business? How about CH Spurgeon!?

Now Tozer, there’s a guy with no franchise (while he was alive!)

Apparently, being prolific is now "franchising". Who knew opening a seminary could be called "franchising"?

You know what: I'm not going to offer this guy any correction. I'm going to ask the readers of this blog to offer the correction just to see you do it.

And here's the bait: best rebuff without being abusive gets a free T from the pawn shop. Talk about "franchise" ...

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

interrupted by jimbob

Jimbob at iMonk’s blog:

Interesting. What was even more interesting to me was a link at Frank’s blogsite to what seems to be a TR cruise:

http://www.sovereigncruises.org/AO2006/index.htm

It’s a theme cruise, the theme being “Pulpit Crimes”. Woohoo, let’s stir up a little romantic fun in the sun!

Absolutely surreal. Rod Serling would love it.

Now, I think that in the context of my actual comments that I gave to iMonk, that’s a little more than a little unfair.

I didn’t say, “stadium events are all bad”. I said (in words to this effect), “the local church cedes its responsibilities to traveling sideshows in the contemporary American church.” There’s a pretty big gap between those two things.

Also, the AO Min cruise is itself a lot different in scope and expense than a Billy Graham event or what have you. And in no way can you walk away from the former and interpret that you have received the message “my local church is irrelevant”, but frequently people walk away from the latter with the understanding that they do not have to “go to church” now because they got everything they needed from a counselor on the stadium floor.

It’s hardly surreal to think that a discount vacation around an apologetic topic can be edifying, and that it doesn’t violate the idea that the local church is still the best place for the Christian to grow up and grow out in the faith.

If jimbob wants to defend his remarks, he can do it here in the meta. Otherwise, I’ve said what I have to say about this.

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.