As I was at the counter to pay for an automobile battery there was a very crotchety elderly lady in front of me who apparently could not find her owner's card. She turned and was walking away in a huff when the employee told her that she could get a copy of it online. She turned around and barked back at him...."Do I look like online?"
Our local newspaper which we have subscribed to for almost a half century announced that there will no longer be home delivery....but the paper will either be mailed or subscribed to online. On vacation a week ago I grabbed for the daily newspaper of the beach town....until I saw the price....four dollars!
If one is not computer savvy....they are going to be out of the loop. There is irony in that in this information age....many have access to less information.
Benjamin Franklin was a polymath....with journalism being one of his areas of expertise. He was not a Christian....nor did he show much interest in it....but showed great interest in the man who was the evangelist of the age in George Whitefield. They were great friends. Franklin publicised Whitefield's preaching and writing....in effect popularizing the young English preacher.
This anecdote has been related many times....William Randolph Hearst sent out a memo to his many newspapers across America....this in 1949....two simple words...."Puff Graham." Hearst in effect was God's chosen publicity agent for this new preacher on the scene....Billy Graham!
You will surely find this hard to agree with but one of the most devastating developments in evangelicalism has been the demise of the Christian bookstore. So you might be thinking....'so what....I can get anything that I want online." There is more to it than that.
It was 1982....I was a big reader....but nothing much more going on in me head. My wife was shopping at Penney's....and I just wandered the stripmall concourse.....and stumbled across a Christian bookstore called It Is Written. I walked in out of curiosity and walked out with Josh McDowell's classic Christian apologetic....Evidence That Demands a Verdict."
Christian bookstores became my second home. There was a good one a little north of us in the town of New Castle that was called.....Grand Bible Bookstore. If I would buy five books....one of them would move me greatly. Over time I saw that the books that had such a great affect on me had this little robed man holding aloft a Bible on the spine....Banner Of Truth publishers. My life was changing again.
Years later we owned our own Christian bookstore that emphasized reformed theology....reformation theology....Calvinist theology....the Puritans.....that type of Christian literature. I have a number of stories but I'll only relate one. A young man was passing through our town on his way to seminary in the Midwest....and he stopped in our bookstore. I don't think that he had a lot of money and after a little browsing and conversation he was going to leave. I didn't want him to go empty-handed so I gave him a copy of a Banner Of Truth book....Valley Of Vision.....a book of Puritan prayers.....(sounds exciting right....it is!)
A few months later there was a message on the store's answering machine....that young man's theology was changed by that book and he was just telling us how grateful he was.
So no one today is going to wander around a stripmall and stop in a Christian bookstore and have his or her life changed. Christians are not able to browse and come up with books that may change their theology. (Barnes & Noble will never provide this....and I am in their stores almost every week of my life.)
The television and the radio blare at us....as does the pixelated computer screen....but we have less information than we did forty years ago. Billy Graham crusades are gone. The first thing that I do when staying at a hotel is look in the bed table's drawer to see if there is a Gideon Bible there....for they were always there. Well...I hardly find them at all anymore....in fact the last time I checked....least week....the hotel chain no longer had a drawer in the bed table.
