Copeland! Hinn! Dollar! Jakes! Former LifeWay CEO Opens New Bookstore Peddling Heresy and Blasphemy

Former LifeWay CEO Thom Rainer has started a new bookstore, selling the same blasphemous trash and prosperity-gospel heresy his old organization did before running it into the ground.

Originally designed as the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board and commissioned to create Sunday School material, LifeWay Christian Resources, led by Rainer, became the nation’s most prominent peddler of outright heresy, including Heavenly Tourism, Omen Interpretation, Word-Faith Theology, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, New Age mysticism, and Anti-Trinitarianism. LifeWay’s doctrinal standards amount to profit motivation.

Before 2014, however, few focused on the heresy being sold at LifeWay Christian Resources until a tweet from Ed Stetzer set off a firestorm on social media and set our eyes on the prize. We took it and ran with it, calling ourselves the #15movement on account of Ed Stetzer blaming the uproar on “the same 15 Calvinists who are mad about everything.” Thousands of Christians began a grass-roots movement to boycott LifeWay, chiefly because of the theological heresies by their stores. We did undercover investigations and used recording devices to determine that LifeWay would special-order nearly anything for customers, including everything from TD Jakes, Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen and gay propaganda. Basically, they were stocking every sort of soft-covered spiritual strychnine they could put on their shelves in any space not currently occupied by a Beth Moore bible study.

During that time, Alex Malarkey joined #the15 movement. He was incensed that LifeWay continued selling the best-selling ‘heavenly tourism’ book falsely ascribed to him, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. Malarkey wrote his Open Letter to LifeWay and Other Retailers, raking them over the coals for selling such wretched doctrine and for refusing to pull the book when he and his mother asked.

The blog article at Pulpit & Pen soon became the #1 news story in the world on January 17 and 18 of 2014. This website was featured on The Today Show and as far away as the UK Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post. LifeWay’s shame was covered in the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Chicago Tribune. In response, LifeWay spokesmen claimed they had no idea the book was false. Then, we released private emails with Ed Stetzer and Thom Rainer in which Justin Peters told them that the book was false and asked to pull it many months earlier. They refused to do so and attacked their critics instead. Simply put, LifeWay, under the leadership of Thom Rainer, was caught in a lie.

Rainer never responded to Malarkey’s letter or gave him an apology for using this story against his permission and in the full knowledge that it was contrived. LifeWay was run into the ground half a decade later, losing tens of millions of dollars, closing all their brick-and-mortar stores, selling vast chunks of property, and engaging in mass layoffs.

Thom Rainer left LifeWay in 2018 but remains heavily involved in SBC life. He oversees his ‘Church Answers’ Ministry and partners with the SBC’s North American Mission Board (NAMB) while co-hosting the Revitalize and Replant podcast with NAMB CEO Kevin Ezell.

Recently, his ministry announced that they opened up a new bookstore, partnering with Christianbooks. His son Art Rainer, executive director of retail of Church Answers, and Sam Rainer, president of Church Answers are intimately involved with the new venture, as the Press release explains:

Church Answers has taken a major step forward to provide resources for local churches and Christians, including homeschool parents and leaders. Thom S. Rainer, founder and CEO of Church Answers, expressed his enthusiasm for this new venture: “We are always looking for ways to serve local churches and Christians better. This full-service Christian store is a natural and exciting step toward that purpose. For now, we will begin with a digital store, but we are open to other possibilities.”

Sam Rainer, president of Church Answers, noted some exciting aspects of the new store: “The new Church Answers store includes special curation to address the needs of local churches. We also have many specialty areas such as homeschool resources. Even more, we have committed to give a percentage of our profits to missions. Our initial gifts will go to train pastors in East Africa.”

What’s he selling that’s specially curated? Basically all the heretical books that LifeWay had to drop which resulted in sales tanking.

These include books by Trinity-denying modalist TD Jakes, open and unrepentant homosexual Jonathan Merritt, Joyce Meyer, Arch-heretic Benny Hinn, prosperity-gospel preachers Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar. There’s the emergent heretics Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, and Tony Rollins and then the usual suspects of liberals and pagans like Justin Lee, Jim and Jay Bakker, Richard Rohr, Marcus J. Borg, Tony Campolo, Joseph Prince, John Dominic Crossan, Rachel Held Evans, Sid Roth, Eddie Long, Donald Miller, Norman Vincent Peale, Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, John Shelby Spong, and William P Young. All caried by this bookstore.

Thom Rainer’s new bookstore features the worst of the worst. They are not serving the church, but rather their own bank accounts and their spiritually bankrupt hearts.

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