Monday Morning Music Ministry

3-6-17

A possible Sign of the Times. But this sign says “Going out of business.” Not Sears nor Macy’s nor Outback Steakhouse nor JCPenney nor Kmart nor Office Depot nor Aeropostale. Not American automakers, either; nor air-conditioning plants; not other businesses being yanked back to our shores.

No, this week it was announced that Family Christian Stores, the self-proclaimed “World’s largest retailer of Christian-themed merchandise,” is giving up the ghost. For several years, the chain’s financial woes widely have been discussed, inside and outside the camp.

There were bankruptcies, reorganizations, proposals, takeovers, conversions from for-“profit” status to non-profit; promises to earmark income to charity; inventories that disappeared; unpaid invoices; at least one publisher and one distributor who were forced to go out of business because of Family Christian’s actions; and, of course, approximately 3000 employees in 240 stores across 36 states.

Beyond this recitation of facts, no more will be said, even as employees in the home office in Michigan are not being told much more than their final dates to report. Many good people tried to make Family Christian Stores work, and the causes perhaps will be fully revealed someday.

The chain began 85 years ago when brothers Pat and Bernie Zondervan (yes, those Zondervans) opened stores. Their bookstores were re-christened Family Christian Bookstores when HarperCollins bought the Zondervan publishing arm. This was about the time, in the interest of disclosure, that books I edited were distributed by Zondervan, and books I wrote were sold in FCB shops. So Zondervan begat Family Bookstores begat Family Christian Bookstores begat Family Christian Stores…

When I noticed that the logo changed – removing “Books” from the name – it told me more than did gossip on business pages and in Christianity Today. Two years ago, in a court-sanctioned bankruptcy move, the chain “shed” $127-million of its obligations; and soon thereafter was sold for $55-million. Customers were little affected, but publishers, authors, manufacturers, and distributors were, negatively.

Excuse me for already breaking my Commandment to recite no more facts. We have the sad reality of this major go-to source for everyday Christians… no longer is a reality. In any form of reorganization.

Time and chance, however, happeneth to all. “The business of America is business,” Calvin Coolidge famously said (and, little appreciated by many, not as a valedictory to capitalism but as a spiritual rebuke to shallow materialism) – and there is a macro-narrative about companies that outlive their usefulness. Manufacturers of buggy-whips were mightily depressed when Henry Ford coldly threatened their existence.

Similarly, as many American manufacturing jobs are moving overseas, history might record that it was the “turn” of emerging economies as the United States moved on to other technologies. To the extent this is true, despite the discomfort and dislocation of middle-aged factory workers, a lot of Economic Nationalism might be retrograde.

Lucky for me, digressions are still in vogue, and I shall return from mine. My point is that times are a-changin’ in retail publishing, as elsewhere. Another Michigan-headquartered chain, Borders, was a recent casualty. Barnes & Noble retains a measure of viability because, and to the extent that, it has become a bookish theme-park in each store, with coffee bars, easy-chair oases, gifts, toys, music, puzzles, and kids’ zones. Smart.

Family Christian did the same thing, accelerated in the past few years. Unlike Barnes & Noble or Starbucks’ pastry and CD counters, the move was doomed to fail, however. Family Christian was in a different line of work, and when it forgot that fact, its days were numbered.

Ken Dalto is “retail expert.” These days, despite the Trump Bump, I fear, his line of work – that is, performing autopsies – will be a growth industry. But his post-mortem of Family Christian’s demise is: “I don’t think it has anything to do with religion – I see it as pure business.”

Indeed, that was the problem: the stores had less and less to do with religion; the Christian religion, specifically.

Which was the chicken; which was the egg? Did the customer-base of believers hanker for more jewelry, pictures frames, wall hangings, travel mugs, driftwood with Bible verses, and baseball caps? Or did Family Christian’s strategic planners cast bigger nets to capture larger numbers of fish? The question is not rhetorical, nor is the answer dispositive: both trends must be true. However, it would have been difficult to hew close to the bedrock commitment to offer of solidly Christian material; and to remain a retailer of books and music.

Being “all things to all people” failed St Paul’s injunction when, say, FCS refused to carry Chick tracts but ballyhooed the latest Osteen books or Christian-lite DVDs. No, Family Christian had tried to become some thing for some people according to the dogmas of marketers and focus groups. In so doing it fell between the pier and the boat.

A Christian literary agent, Steve Laube, was quoted, I think about the consequent failure of Send the Light Distributors: “One less [sic] major distributor to feed the Christian store market.” Beyond the cold analysis, which is unavoidable at any temperature, we arrive at a snapshot of Christian publishing, 2017. Literary agents using bad grammar; Christian book stores that scarcely carry books (during this morning’s visit to my local Family Christian store, a large outlet, I counted only four short aisles of books); and many of the “Christian” books are relativist, celebrity-oriented, motivational, sometimes heretical.

“The Shack” and “Silence” are touted, and consumed, as contemporary substitutes for the Gospel itself. So many new translations of the Bible appear these days that I wonder if God sees this, ultimately, as a churchy Tower of Babel redux.

But times does march on, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there?

I love my 14 commentaries, most of them the size and weight of car batteries. I am proud of my 40-volume set of Luther’s works. Yet I will admit that I haven’t cracked them in several years, not the commentaries anyways. After almost everything I write, I literally thank God and Google. And Wikipedia, sure. Change.

As a Christian author I lament the death, and perhaps dearth, of Christian stores.
But the internet allows us all to sell, and to buy. Smartphones and iPads allow us conveniently to follow scripture passages in our pews. Bibles have not yet been outlawed; and they have margins to accommodate home study.

Up to the minute, the great site FaithHappenings is a one-stop shop for ordering books, reading reviews, following debates, learning about concerts and speakers – more than “old-fashioned” (ouch) retail outlets ever could.

Roughly concurrent to the Family Christian announcement, Tim Keller of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian shared the news that he would retire from his pulpit… however to shepherd his megachurch into three smaller congregations; each in turn to plant three “daughter” churches of their own. Thus (through the City to City program) has Tim encouraged the establishment of almost 400 churches in 54 cities around the world.

It’s hard to keep a good Gospel down. But my daughter Emily made a prescient point about the trend, perhaps death-spiral, of Family Christian’s product-line decisions. Christian jewelry and decorations and toys were not co-opting Target and WalMart – who will, after all, pick up Jesus products in new corners of their stores, complete with the superficiality.

No, it might all be illustrating the stark fact that contemporary Christianity in America has become jewelry and decoration and toys.

If belly-up Family Christian Stores across the landscape is what we need to demonstrate that sad fact, then may the chain Rest in Pieces.
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Click: Lachrimosa

8-1-16

Tim LaHaye died this week. Many people know him from – indeed, were mightily affected by – his books, the famous Left Behind series.

I never met Tim, but had mutual friends across the landscape. I attended the church he pastored, Scott memorial, later Shadow Mountain, in California. A magazine I edited, Rare Jewel, promoted Beverly LaHaye’s organization Concerned Women for America, and we interviewed him. Likewise we profiled the Institute for Creation Research in El Cajon, which spun off the college Tim founded, now known as san Diego Christian College. My friend Stacy Hollenbeck from girlhood was a friend of the LaHayes, and Tim married Stacy and my buddy Mike Atkinson (I mean… he officiated at the ceremony). Finally, my agent, Greg Johnson, was Tim’s literary rep on many of his books.

It sounds amazing, actually, that we never met. In my San Diego years, I did get to know quite well some Christian luminaries (of different camps, truth be told): Mike Yaconelli; Wayne Rice; Jim Garlow; David Jeremiah; Miles McPherson;
Josh McDowell – forgive me for name-dropping, one of my cardinal sins. Which
reminds me, I saw a cardinal in my back yard yesterday…) Maybe I was just Left Behind.

The Left Behind books were a publishing sensation. Co-authored (actually written) by Jerry B Jenkins, they numbered more than a dozen titles and sequels; movies; and uncountable debates. They brought the Tribulation (the awful events at the end of history, foretold in many Bible prophecies), the Rapture (the physical disappearance of believers before the end of the world), and the apocalypse of Daniel and Revelation (and many other places in scripture), into mainstream discussion.

LaHaye’s views and books formed a sort of Second Blessing of Eschatology (study of End Times), following upon the wave of interest generated by Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and other books in the 1970s. My wife was one of the followers of the Left Behind series, and followed the news with informed interest, finding Biblical parallels that LaHaye’s books made more evident.

The phenomenon peaked about a dozen years ago, and will, if the End Times do not come first and subsume humanity and rapture the faithful in the meantime, assert itself again.

Just as with the “other end” of the Bible’s timeline – Biblical archaeology – modern science is explaining things to us that once seemed like fantasy or even nonsense. Ancient cities and rulers once described by “experts” to be of mythology or legend… are appearing in diverse places like desert plains shorelines, and under Jerusalem’s streets. Likewise, coins and amulets with faces and names and dates, are now confirmed as real, not fictional. (Just wait – I have had a glimpse – until you see the National Center of the Bible, opening soon on the National Mall in Washington DC. It will open many eyes.) (Need I say? NOT sponsored by the Federal Government…)

It is remarkable, just as science is explaining, if not confirming, many of the “mysterious” events and occurrences of Bible prophecy. Thank you, God, for Your timing. Some of us have waited patiently (sometimes impatiently) for scientists to catch up with you. Our next chuckle is when some chucklehead with a degree realizes that the Big Bang is just tech-language for Genesis.

Having asserted all this wise-guy stuff, however – and no offense to the late Dr LaHaye – there are some things about End Times that pastors, theologians, fiction writers, and scientists will never explain. And I hope they never do.

The Book of Revelation – Jesus’s dictation to John on the Isle of Patmos – even specific letters to specific churches, are shrouded in the type of mystery that leaves us ever conflicted. Literal words? Imagery? Poetry? Warnings? Fearfulness? Hope? Of course, Bible prophecy is a bit of all these… but in what mixture, with what emphasis here, or there, I believe God means to be ambiguous.

The mysterious aspects of the End Times, to the extent they are mysterious, are intended to KEEP US ON OUR SPIRITUAL TOES.

It is a sin that eschatological questions often are the basis of angry disputes among believers. They can claim to be well-intentioned, but Christians think they can improve on God – who always has been quite clear when He wanted to be. Let us speculate: that is useful. But let us not obsess.

We’ll find out… maybe sooner than we think.

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Click: Midnight Cry