Lifeway Christian Closing Brick-And-Mortar Bookstores

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From KUAR:

LifeWay Christian Stores plans to close all of its locations by end of the year and move all of the company’s retailing online. Its bricks-and-mortar division has been losing money since 2013, and the company says it’s tried just about everything to keep the business going, including overhauling several stores last summer and experimenting with features like coffee bars.

Some of those innovations succeeded in increasing foot traffic. But nothing increased sales, which the company says plunged by more than 10 percent again over the Christmas shopping season.

“That’s kind of when we knew that we were going to have to make a change,” says chief executive Brad Waggoner.

LifeWay is more than a bookseller. Its history goes all the way back to Reconstruction, just after the Civil War, when it started producing Sunday school materials for Baptist churches. That grew into a church supply business and two publishing imprints, Broadman and Holman, now known as B&H Publishing.

. . . .

The company didn’t get into retail until about three decades ago, when box stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were taking off. But those chains typically devoted just a few shelves to faith and spirituality.

LifeWay opened stores that sold nothing else.

“The brick-and-mortar strategy was there to be salt and light out in those communities and to assist churches in doing what they do,” Waggoner says, referring to Biblical verses that call on Christians to be the “salt for the earth,” and “light of the world.” “So it’s always been motivated by the ministry impact,” he continued.

. . . .

Rachel Held Evans is a Christian author who grew up in an evangelical household in Dayton, Tenn. Today she identifies as Episcopalian and writes about her struggles with faith, including Christianity’s historic relationships with women and LGBT people.

She says the chain’s large presence in Christian bookselling has affected authors — even those, like her, who aren’t published by LifeWay.

“It was my agents and my editors telling me that, ‘If you want to be carried in LifeWay, you’ll need to make these changes,'” Evans says. “Of course, I ultimately said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be carried in LifeWay then.'”

Evans hopes LifeWay’s decision to get out of bricks-and-mortar retail will loosen up Christian publishing. But, she confesses, a bit of her still hates to see another bookseller close its doors.

Link to the rest at KUAR

3 thoughts on “Lifeway Christian Closing Brick-And-Mortar Bookstores”

  1. A little bit of googling will show you that Christian bookstores face a challenge that secular bookstores don’t – disagreement over what should be stocked. Christian bloggers seem to always be up in arms over some book or category carried by Lifeway that invalidates their ‘ministry’, even as others complain that Lifeway refuses to sell something important to them. Fights like that are a headwind that no B&M bookstore needs.

    • So true. Too bad there’s so many definitions of what a ‘Christian’ might be and what they do/don’t do or believe in.

      Probably safer/easier to run a bookshop praising the devil … 😉

    • Could they not solve that problem the way old school grave yards did ? Have each sect have its own section strictly delimited off from each other. That way the true believer will not have to set foot on defiled territory, but everyone can still make use of the necessity services provided.

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