A recent letter from the president of Mitchell Family Books urging customers to buy books and other product from them has, I’m sure, caused more wringing of hands about the state of Christian bookstores in Canada. With the Blessings chain now gone except for four stores in western Canada, and Mitchell obviously considering changes, one wonders what the future holds and how many other bookstores are either struggling to keep going or already gone. Of course, the Canadian branch of the Christian Booksellers Association disbanded a couple of years ago, so perhaps few are keeping track.

Now I know that difficulties in bookstores aren’t unique to the Christian sector. I’m one of those who feels sad every time any bookstore closes, and over the past ten years various issues have caused all kinds of fluctuation in the bookstore community across Canada. And though I may at times mourn, and at other times want to knock some sense into someone’s head, at the end of the day I have to ask myself if, in the great scheme of things, it really matters? Has the day of the brick and mortar bookstore come and gone? And most particularly for this blog, is there still a need in Canada for bookstores that have a Christian focus?

As I thought about this question, several very different ideas popped into my head, and I realized I need to answer this question in two ways: objectively, as a Canadian small-business owner who is also the daughter of a small-business owner and the wife of a business change consultant, and who therefore has some awareness of the principles of effective businesses; and subjectively, as both a producer and a consumer of the products in the bookstores.

Since including both my objective and subjective ideas on this situation would make for an awfully long blog, I’m only going to do a small part here: my objective thoughts.

Objectively speaking, the first question that comes to me is, “Why do Canadian Christian book stores exist in the first place?”

In the broadest sense, Christian books have always existed. From Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Whimsey Mysteries, books with a Christian faith perspective grace the shelves of most bookstores and libraries. The truth is, through the ages, many of the greatest poets, playwrights, essayists and novelists have written from a Christian faith perspective. Agatha Christie would fit here. So would John Grisham.

But there are also other books that were more overtly “Christian,” whose focus was less on being great literature and more on educating and teaching people on the faith.

A lot of these books date back to the late 1800’s, when people such as Dwight Moody saw that there were few available materials for helping Christian grow in their faith. Dwight Moody and others began producing small books to fit this void.

By the 1930’s, there were books and other materials being produced by a number of publishers in the United States, including Moody Press. Slowly, stores sprang up across the US and Canada to sell these materials. Even in Canada, these stores for the most part had American roots.

So, on an ideological basis, Christian bookstores came into existence to provide resources for Christians to help in their growth and their ability to witness to others. On a practical level, they also separated the good from the bad so that customers could trust that the books before them weren’t going to be offensive.
The number of Christian bookstores slowly increased in both the US and Canada, and the number of publishers also increased—in the United States. Unfortunately, while Canadian mainstream publishing, aided by government funding, began to flourish in the 1960’s, Canadian Christian publishing barely existed. True, a few denominations published a few books, but they were predominately “in-house.” A few publishers such as Wood Lake Books and Novalis managed to work within the mainstream. A few small publishing houses sprang up and tried to do royalty publishing. And there were also a few vanity or subsidy publishing houses. But for the most part, Christian products came from American Publishers.

In the 1950’s, R. G. Mitchells became the first Canadian distributor, bringing books up to Canada from Christian publishers in the United States. Eventually, several other distributors came into existence, all either offshoots of American publishing house or relying on American products: Ausburg Fortress Canada, Cook Communications Canada, Word Alive, Foundation, etc. Some small distributors have come and gone including Rainbow House, my first distributor. And of course, more stores opened and were sold or closed, and so forth. But, basically, the situation remained unchanged until the advent of the internet and the fallout from having a few “Christian” books sell in large quantities, thus alerting the mainstream publishing houses and book outlets that there might be some money to be made in Christian publishing. But we’ll get to that later.

So it seems to me that objectively speaking there were three key reasons for having Christian bookstores in Canada:

1. To provide a place for American Christian publisher to sell their products

2. To provide overtly Christian products to help Christians grow in their faith and ministry

3. To provide “safe” materials for the Christian consumer and his (or more likely “her”) family

Okay, times have changed. How are things going? Apparently not so well. I decided to do a SWOT analysis to discover what I think are the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities Canadian Christian bookstores are facing today.

See my next blog.

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