NEWS
One prime method most overseas mission societies use to spread the Gospel is placing Christian literature in the hands of non-Christians. Yet, except for tracts, this approach has not been used extensively in the United States; until recently the vast majority of Christian literature has been read only by Christians.
But this pattern is changing rapidly. And signals early in 1972 indicate an aggressive tooling up by evangelical publishing houses, bookstores, and bookrack evangelism colporteurs to saturate the secular market with good Christian books—especially paperbacks.
John Q. Public is an eager customer.
“The whole public, Christian and not, is becoming aware that we have something relevant to the world,” says John Bass, executive vice-president of the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) of Colorado Springs. “This trend is definitely related to the consciousness of the public to the ministries and services of the Christian bookstores in their community. Also, the publishers are bringing into the market fresh, attractive, contemporary books and Christian education materials meeting the needs of a rapidly changing church and a society searching for the relevance of the Christian faith.”
A flood of new Christian paperbacks, mostly from evangelical publishing houses, is churning off the presses for the 3,500 Christian bookstores across the nation, 1,100 of which are related to the CBA.
But the publishers—some of whom represent new companies or new product lines of established ones—are turning more and more to direct-mail sales, secular jobbers, and book-rack visibility in supermarkets, airports, drug chains, and other mass outlets. These methods sell books to non-Christians as well as the burgeoning Jesus-people contingent of young believers searching for biblical material.
Secular book and department stores are catching on to the sales potential and are now stocking evangelical books they wouldn’t touch a few years ago. Meanwhile, old-line denominational publishing houses are having financial woes with books that draw minimal or lukewarm attention.
The trend isn’t hurting sales in non-denominational Christian bookstores, according to Bass. The growing use of large, direct outlets for evangelical books only enhances the volume of the same titles in CBA stores, he feels.
One new publishing firm making a strong bid to reach both the secular and religious markets with solid evangelical books is Creation House, of Carol Stream, Illinois, a community bordering Wheaton. Cliff Dudley, sales manager for Moody Press for five years, founded Creation House two years ago this next month with one other employee, his secretary. Mrs. Gene Hartweg says Creation now has twenty-six titles. One, Pat Boone’s A New Song, is in its eighth printing with 167,806 copies sold by the end of last month. It has been translated into nine languages.
Creation, which caters to CBA stores, is also increasingly tapping secular jobbers (like the Sunshine State News, a Florida vendor) to reach the masses who don’t patronize Christian bookstores. Book-club offers also bolster sales.
On God’s Squad, out only several months, is another fast mover for Creation, selling 8,658 cloth copies at $4.95 in three months. The book is an autobiography of the Miami Dolphins Christian football star, Norm Evans. The New American Standard Bible, in three editions, has also done very well for Creation House.
Compass Press of Pasadena, California, not yet a year old, broke the 200,000 mark with its first book, Jesus People, by Duane Pederson. Compass, working independently but closely with Gospel Light’s Regal line (Regal has also issued Jesus People) concentrates on fast, direct mail of bulk paperbacks to news agents and bookstores.
Word Books, Waco, Texas, is not a new company (the firm was selling Christian records twenty years ago), but its book division started only six years ago. Last month Word launched a “popular paperbacks” series, reprinting a dozen or so of its best-selling hardcovers. Word published fifty cloth books last year in addition to its thirteen-volume Twenty Centuries of Great Preaching.
Author Keith Miller proved to have the Midas touch in A Second Touch for Word; he and Charlie Shedd (The Stork Is Dead, Promises to Peter) have been good producers. Word picked up Shedd’s early books from Spire paperbacks (Revell) and has added Is Your Family Turned On?, a book about drugs. Miller’s trio, Taste of New Wine, Second Touch, and Habitation of Dragons, collectively have sold nearly one million copies in cloth editions.
Word has no direct-mail outlet as such, but its new book club and its sales force promote widely. “We are pushing our books more and more on the secular market,” noted Mary Ruth Howes, Word senior editor.
That pillar of the evangelical publishing world, Zondervan, isn’t collapsing. Its best sellers topping 100,000 copies (cloth and/or paper) in the past two years include: The Jesus Generation by Billy Graham (203,000 in five weeks), The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey (an amazing 650,000 in nineteen months), Dare to Live Now by Bruce Larson (232,000), The Art of Understanding Yourself by Cecil Osborne (145,000), Black and Free by Tom Skinner (156,000), Purple Violet Squish by David Wilkerson (220,000), and The Layman’s Parallel New Testament (122,000 in fifteen months).
Dan Malachuk’s Logos International press specializes in the charismatic market. Begun in Plainfield, New Jersey, about three years ago, the company—now with a staff of thirty expanded from an original three—boasts a 300 per cent increase in sales volume for 1971 over 1970. Its Run, Baby, Run, by converted gang leader Nicky Cruz, has more than a million copies in print and is available in ten languages, says publisher Malachuk. And Methodist chaplain Merlin Carothers’s Prison to Praise sold 250,000 copies in fifteen months through referral alone (no mass publicity or advertising).
Logos’s newest, Power and Praise by Carothers, due January 25, has sold 50,000 advance copies. Malachuk said in an interview that Logos’s twenty-five titles are distributed through Christian bookstores, its direct-mail division, and a rack franchise that offers seventy-two books selected from a possible 250 titles (including many by other publishers) selling for $49. These are handled in supermarkets, airports, and churches, Malachuk said.
Logos is also breaking into Jewish and Catholic oriented books featuring “Messianic Judaism” and “completeness and new birth.” They are written by Jewish and Catholic authors who have identified with the charismatic movement. Another innovation is “throwing a book party”: Christian housewives are encouraged to imitate Tupperware and apparel gatherings. But these, explains Malachuk, feature Christian books and gifts that the women may buy on the spot.
Book-rack evangelism in the United States and Canada isn’t new, but its recent extent and volume are.
Back in 1962 Eugene Garber, a Mennonite minister in Iowa, placed his first rack of evangelical literature in an Iowa City store. His idea and enthusiasm spread. Last year, through its Life-Line Book program, Mennonite Broadcasts, project coordinator, moved 209,000 Christian paperbacks through 600 racks in markets, airports, stores, hospitals, churches, and schools.
Coordinator Ron Yoder of Harrisonburg, Virginia, outlined the plan: Store managers make a profit from the racks. Books, at discounts up to 50 per cent, are periodically placed in the racks by concerned laymen. They donate their time (but not the books) to the ministry and receive no cut. Twenty-three regional Mennonite mission boards are involved; these choose which of a hundred or so top-selling titles from fourteen publishers will go into the racks in their jurisdiction. Moody Press heads the list in popularity, with Zondervan, Spire, and Pyramid all near the top.
Simon Schrock of Fairfax, Virginia, has twenty outlets in the Washington, D. C., area. None does better than National Airport, where about twenty books move from the rack each day. Life-Line is also doing well in Canada and Jamaica.
Successful Living, Incorporated, launched in March, 1970, moved 500,000 books in its first sixteen months through a pocket revolving-rack franchise. Unlike Life-Line volunteers, Successful distributors make money. Successful Living president is David Thornberg of Minneapolis. Participating outlets get discounts of 25 to 30 per cent.
Leading publishers for the racks include Zondervan, Tyndale House, and Regal, according to Byron Anderson, a Minneapolis Young Life staffer who had twenty racks in the area. His books “moved very fast,” especially in hospitals, he said. Top titles include On God’s Squad, A New Song, How to Be a Christian Without Being Religious, Peace With God, and The Amplified New Testament.
“This is the hottest item in my store,” volunteered George R. Jensen of Coon Rapids, Minnesota, about the Successful Living rack. “Through a twenty-four-inch rack, our inspirational paperbacks outsold our conventional paperbacks on a forty-eight-inch rack two to one.”
Another new book-rack evangelism distributorship ($1,000 to $5,000 investment is required for initial inventory) is Hearthstone Publications of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. In less than nine months Hearthstone agents moved about 200,000 Christian paperbacks. The books are placed from coast to coast in stores, hotels, and even banks.
Inserts describing the Hearthstone ministry (its president, Albert S. Taylor, is a pastor, author, and former National Association of Evangelicals official) are stuck in each book. Some purchasers have written in asking for counseling; pastors have followed up.
A sampling—far from exhaustive—from some key evangelical publishers also reveals that the Christian recording and cassette tape industries are hitting a vast and hungry market—and pay dirt. Top-quality “now sound” and Christian rock music by outstanding artists are in heavy demand. Cassette “how-to” and devotional albums packaged with interpretative paperback pieces are just coming into their own.
The CBA, whose stores increased sales volume 18 per cent last year, is grooving on management-training seminars for store employees and managers. CBA’s Bass notes things like a Decatur, Illinois, Christian book shop with wall-to-wall carpeting. It’s not uncommon, Bass says, for turned-on young Christians to sit on the rug, browsing, and then emerge at the cash register with $40 to $50 of books they want to buy.
Top CBA titles include The Late Great Planet Earth (the entire prophetic line is “going very strong,” says Bass), The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century by Francis Schaeffer (Inter-Varsity), and The Living Bible and New American Standard Bible.
Meanwhile, Alpha-Omega Sales, a Colorado Springs firm, has been established to give publishers and suppliers qualified and effective sales representation in book and department stores, gift shops, and other secular outlets.
Consubstantial Agreement?
The Anglican-Catholic international report on the doctrine of the Eucharist, approved by Pope Paul and the archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Michael Ramsey, claims that substantial agreement has been reached. Catholic co-chairman Bishop Alan Clark of Northampton called the consensus “extraordinarily startling on the subject which separated the Church at the Reformation.”
The agreement turns on two pivots: first, seeing the Eucharist as a memorial of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; it is not, however, “a mere remembrance to keep alive the memory of Christ’s redeeming death and resurrection” but is a memorial that makes “present and real his historic sacrifice each time the Eucharist is celebrated” and that brings the worshiper into active involvement. The second pivotal point is the agreement that Christ is really there in the Eucharist independently of what the congregation think or believe, “as an offering to the believer awaiting his welcome. When this offering is met by faith, a life-giving encounter results.”
Despite significance claimed for the report (the commission called it “the most important statement for Anglicans and Roman Catholics since the Reformation”), it initially got lukewarm notice in British Catholic publications. Britain’s 1,300-membcr Catholic priests’ association urged complete rejection.
Asked for his reaction, the president of the evangelical and influential Islington Clerical Conference, the Reverend Peter Johnston, said that despite some good points the report was really offering “transubstantiation dressed up in a refined form shorn of some cruder superstitions.” He criticized especially the statement that “the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ by the action of the Holy Spirit so that in Communion we eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood.” The view that “something happens” to the bread and wine is very dangerous, said Johnston, though many Anglicans would agree with it.
CHRISTIANITY TODAY then asked the one evangelical Anglican commissioner, the Reverend Julian Charley, how he would counter Protestant criticism. He said: “The report is very explicit that there is no repetition of or addition to the work of Calvary,” yet makes clear that the Eucharist is not simply a meal but the Lord’s Supper in which Christ genuinely offers himself to us apart from our feelings.
Charley said the Roman Catholics were anxious to safeguard the point that this was entirely the grace of God. Protestants were slow to acknowledge that in the Eucharist there is a mystery, something we cannot fully explain.
The high-powered commission was composed of seven bishops, ten university and college teachers, and a Vatican undersecretary. Their report, which took two years to prepare, does not advocate intercommunion. The Catholic Church still doesn’t recognize as valid the Anglican priesthood; only its own priests can consecrate the elements. The subject of the priesthood will be discussed when the committee reconvenes this May in Woodstock, New York.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Evangelical Thought: Putting It All Together
Editor Harold Lindsell of CHRISTIANITY TODAY has urged evangelical scholars to bring academic disciplines to bear upon one another so that an authentic Christian world view relevant to the times might emerge.
At the present time, he told the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society last month, there is too little interdisciplinary interaction. Theologians, he said, are divorced from evangelical scholars in economics, political science, sociology, philosophy, and ethics.
The latter, Lindsell declared, “read their Bibles, say their prayers, attend their churches, and confess their commitment to Christ—but they live in two worlds.”
The “theologians do no better,” he added. “Steeped in their preoccupation with God’s revelation, they do not often relate what they know to politics, economics, sociology, and the like.”
Lindsell made the proposal for vigorous interaction among evangelical scholars in his presidential address to the members of the society, meeting at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
Professor Robert L. Saucey of Talbot Seminary was elected to succeed Lindsell as president.
South America Crusades
Participants in major evangelistic campaigns in Brazil and in Peru last month reported large attendances and responsive seekers answering altar calls.
San Diego, California, charismatic evangelist Morris Cerullo presided over the closing session of what he called the largest evangelistic crusade ever conducted in the upper Amazon jungles. A total of 150,000 persons came to the eight-day crusade, led by Cerullo’s associate, Argemiro Figueiro. It was reportedly the largest crusade ever held by a “national evangelist” in Brazil; nationals—following the World Evangelism format for mass evangelism in foreign countries—were in complete charge. Thousands streamed to the front of the hall at the invitation to receive Christ, and many sick persons came for prayer.
A concurrent Deeper Life Ministers’ Institute conducted by Cerullo stressing charismatic gifts and motivation techniques was said by participants to have had “the greatest spiritual impact in the area’s history.” Pastors and lay leaders came to the training sessions by cart, bicycle, auto, foot, and horseback.
Meanwhile, in Lima, 15,000 persons nearly filled the 18,500-seat Acho Bull Ring for the closing meeting of twelve nights of a Luis Palau crusade. There were 650 decisions that day. Total attendance was 103,000, with 4,585 decisions recorded. Television outreach included thirteen programs.
In his year-end report, Palau listed as 1971 accomplishments: ten million taught the Word through daily radio “Crusada”; fifty telecasts in four countries; 500,000 gospel tracts placed; preaching in person to 350,000; and 15,000 professions of faith in Christ.
Dishwasher For Jesus
For the last years of his life, an elderly man in his seventies or eighties worked as a dishwasher in the Life Line Mission on the San Francisco waterfront. Eight months ago, the man, who asked to remain anonymous, died—a skid row benefactor.
He left $150,000 to the mission where he worked, which shelters destitute men, and $128,000 to 540-student Messiah College in south central Pennsylvania. Both are operated by the Brethren in Christ Church.
The story of the unusual bequeathment came out on Christmas eve, when a check for $110,000 arrived at the Messiah campus ($18,000 more was expected later). Messiah president D. Ray Hostetter said he knew who the man was but was respecting his wish to keep his name secret. “He apparently worked for years and saved almost every nickel he earned to invest in the stock market,” Hostetter said. The money will be used to build a kitchen in the new Eisenhower Student Center on the Grantham campus.
“We thought it would be appropriate, since the old man spent most of his time just before his death working in the kitchen of the mission, washing dishes,” Hostetter added.
