BAPTIST BOOKSTORES TO CHANGE NAME

BAPTIST BOOKSTORES TO CHANGE NAME

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 1998. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites. The articles cannot be sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal is not devotional. OUR PRIMARY PURPOSE IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, tell us who you are and where you are located, and request to be placed on the list. Also include your postal address and the name of the church of which you are a member. Please note that we take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and you will be expected to participate. Some of these articles are from the "Digging in the Walls" section of O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 15th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. The Way of Life web site is http://www.wayoflife.org.)]

December 6, 1998, 1998 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The Baptist Book Stores, which are owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, will be renamed LifeWay Christian Stores beginning in January 1999. There are 75 stores nationally, and they are in the process of acquiring others.

It is not surprising that the Baptist Book Stores are dropping the name Baptist. I visited the Baptist Book Store in north Oklahoma City this summer in search of biographies of Baptists. They had only a pitiful handful of Baptist biographies, but they had many biographies of Protestants, Modernists, New Evangelicals, and Romanists. The Baptist Book Stores are filled to the brim with psychology, self help, self esteem, romance novels, ecumenical and charismatic literature, and undependable Bible versions--and isle after isle of "Christian" rock music. They will stand accountable before God one day for polluting the minds and hearts of their customers with unscriptural material and for refusing to carry sound material from fundamentalist Bible-based publishers which they could and should be stocking but which they refuse to stock because it is "controversial."

It was thrilling to visit two large Christian bookstores recently which are more concerned about faithfulness to God than the profit margin. One was Gullions Christian Supply in North Carolina (3856 Reynolds Rd., Winston-Salem, NC 27106). The other was at Bob Jones University. These stores don't carry Christian rock music, but they do have a wide variety of sound music. (Gullions carries a lot of Southern gospel, much of which we would not recommend.) These stores refuse to handle ecumenical-charismatic literature, but they do stock books and pamphlets which edify God's people from a fundamentalist standpoint. In the case of Gullions they don't even carry the corrupt modern Bible versions. Sadly, Bob Jones University bookstore does carry some modern versions, as well as undependable books such as Fuller Seminary-educated James White's misleading volume entitled "The King James Only Controversy" (it should be titled "The Peter Ruckman/Gail Riplinger Controversy") and Donald Carson's "The King James Version Debate: A Plea For Realism." These books have been ably answered by Dr. Thomas Strouse, Dr. Donald A. Waite, and others. Sadly, the BJU bookstore carries nothing in defense of the Received Text and the King James Bible. This is very strange since they claim to stand for the King James Bible!

See "When Was the Southern Baptist Convention Delivered from Liberalism?"