An Open Letter to LifeWay Trustees

Dearest LifeWay Trustees,

I am an associate pastor at a local church in Indiana. Our mission is to be a church united to enjoy God’s grace and to extend His glory. Part of our vision is similar to your vision. We, like you, desire to provide biblical solutions for life.

As such we are not shy about promoting LifeWay material for our church. We always, happily, use the LifeWay’s VBS material. Several of our Sunday school classes are going through The Gospel Project and others are using the Bible Studies for Life. We are also excited about the new Explore the Bible curriculum.

We love LifeWay and our people know that. The many magazines floating around our church, the VBS signs, and the curriculum in our Sunday School classes communicate to our people that LifeWay is a place that you can trust.

As such our people shop at LifeWay with confidence. They go into the store with the hopes of finding a good book to help in their walk with Christ. And they shop like most people do—they pick up the things that the store is heavily plugging and promoting. They scan the bestsellers section to find what must be a good book.

You and I both know that unless they go in their specifically to find a classic like Pilgrim’s Progress they are going to walk out with something like Heaven Is For Real. They purchase what is heavily promoted.

Now we consistently tell our congregation to be discerning. We encourage them to listen to our sermons with a discerning ear and heart. And certainly that they ought to watch television preachers and read Christian books with discernment. But you and I both know that we tend to let down our guard when we trust someone. And our people trust LifeWay.

Here is the crux of my difficulty and the reason for my letter. I love LifeWay and want to partner with LifeWay. I believe, at the core, our mission is similar to yours:

LifeWay Christian Resources exists to assist churches and believers to evangelize the world to Christ, develop believers, and grow churches by being the best provider of relevant, high quality, high value Christian products and services.

And yet, I’m finding that while LifeWay often substantially helps our congregation it also does harm. There are times when we must spend a great deal of energy undoing the erroneous teaching swallowed by some of our members rather than engaging in positive building in their lives.

Charles Spurgeon was correct that ‘a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’. The false teaching of some of the prosperity teachers sold at LifeWay (TD Jakes, John Hagee) will spread much more quickly and deeply in the thinking of our people than the slow plodding of a churches pastoral ministry. This is not to mention some of the books like Jesus Calling and The Circle Maker which attaches itself to the very way in which our people engage in spiritual disciplines.

We are laboring hard to disciple our people and help them to grow in their knowledge of the Scriptures and their love for the Lord. LifeWay’s refusal to pull such books from the shelf is making our work that much more difficult.

We are not alone in this. As you know our SBC Convention has recently adopted a resolution on the sufficiency of Scripture regarding the afterlife. In that resolution it reads, “many devout and well-meaning people allow these to become their source and basis for an understanding of the afterlife rather than scriptural truth”.

And yet books like Heaven Is For Real are heavily promoted in our LifeWay stores.

Please stop.

I’m urging you to go further than attaching discernment stickers to books. That only makes heresy seem like forbidden fruit. It only increases interest and fosters an idea that only some books should be read with discernment. Instead, what I am urging you to do is to pull the books off your shelves and stop profiting from the sale of error.

I understand the logistics of this are difficult. After all, who gets to decide which books are in error and which ones are not? I know it is tough—but I trust the people at LifeWay. You have many smart and discerning people working for you. You know which books are promoting error. You know, as Bible-loving Southern Baptists, which prosperity books make you uncomfortable. Pull them.

Lose a buck for the glory of God and the good of our churches.

In-Christ,
Mike Leake

—

I crafted this letter back in June of 2014 but let it sit. But this recent comic by Adam Ford has stirred up my heart again to call for change with the books that LifeWay sells. While I don’t believe Dr. Rainer is accurately represented in that comic, I do believe there is truth there. Of those top 10 books only Joel Osteen can’t be found in a LifeWay store. Brothers and sisters, for a company that seeks to provide “biblical solutions for life” this should not be so.