Vineyard Columbus Archives

The Bookstore at Vineyard Columbus

I visited an unusual bookstore the other day. It was located inside the campus of Vineyard Columbus, located at 6000 Cooper Road in Westerville. Roughly 8,000 people attend services at this church each weekend and The Bookstore is located just inside one of the main entrances off of the south side of the building.

Jeff Baker, the Bookstore Ministry Coordinator sat down with me and explained the mission of this bookstore and some of the strategies they pursue to encourage reading as part of the efforts of this church to disciple people toward Christian maturity. Very early in the church’s life, in the late 1980’s, they established a booktable to sell books to equip their congregation. This morphed into The Bookstore when they moved into their current location and Jeff has served as Coordinator since 1998,

Jeff Baker, Bookstore Ministry Coordinator

Jeff described his passion as one for using books to help equip believers for growth and transformation. One of strategies he, and bookstore clerk, Meg Kuta (who formerly worked with a major bookstore chain) work on is finding “entry level” books that they can sell at prices as low as $5.00 a copy that are easy reads but have quality content that appeal to the non-reader, which he estimates might make up 80 percent of the congregation (pretty much what is true of the general adult population). He gave shout-outs to Zondervan/Harper-Collins and Tyndale who are publishing a number of titles in this vein.

Gifts, Theology, and Children’s Books!

At the same time, as I looked around the store, I was impressed with the quality content available and the amount of the store given over to books as opposed to gift items, stationary, cards, and other non-book items. You can find meaty Bible study tools, theology texts. serious biographies, like the new one on Tom Oden. There is also a delightful children’s section. The store stocks resources for small group leaders, the diverse ministries of Vineyard Columbus, and books related to current sermon themes. All Vineyard leaders are able to purchase books at a 20% discount and Jeff works with ministry leaders to find resources to enhance the efforts of each ministry.

We talked about how Jeff works with the pastors to order books that they will be mentioning in sermons. He observed that the way books are recommended in a sermon have a big effect. Recently, for example, a speaker talked about the devotional guide Search the Scriptures and wove the impact of using this guide throughout his sermon. As a result, the store sold 150 copies! More offhand recommendations may sell five or ten copies to the really interested.

Like many bookstores, The Bookstore will host author events with local authors as well as national authors visiting to speak at services or conferences hosted by the church. This coming year, they are planning to host a series of author events with local seminary professors. According to their website, they also host a writers group and a C.S. Lewis discussion group.

I asked Jeff what he most and least likes in Christian publishing. Vineyard Columbus is an ethnically diverse congregation and one pet peeve which he has engaged publishers on are books with only white people on the covers. He also has problems with the “end times prophecy” books which he feels nurtures idle speculation rather than serious discipleship.

Positively, once again he spoke warmly of the deeply discounted “entry level” books that Zondervan/Harper-Collins and Tyndale publish. He also spoke of the growing level of cooperation he is seeing among authors, publishers, publicists, and booksellers, all who have faced challenges in the changing landscape of bookselling.

Finally, we discussed some of the books that are his “bookseller’s picks”. Several times in our conversation he mentioned Gordon Fee’s Paul, The Spirit, and the People of God, a book deeply consonant with Vineyard’s theological commitments. Two other books Jeff and Meg are recommending these days are John Ortberg’s If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat and Michelle DeRusha’s 50 Women Every Christian Should Know.

While The Bookstore’s primary clientele are Vineyard members, the store is open to the public. Jeff contends that their prices are often better than you-know-who. They also have a Frequent Buyer program that offers a 10% discount on all purchases, email notices of featured books and specials and has no annual membership fee.

Their hours are as follows:

Monday Closed

Tuesday-Friday 12-5pm

Saturday 5:30-8:15pm

Sunday 8:45am-1:45pm

Additional contact information for the store and other resources including an extensive list of book recommendations by topic are available on their website.

Both-And: Living the Christ-Centered Life in an Either-Or World by Rich Nathan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I live in Columbus, the city in which Vineyard Columbus ministers but am not a part of this congregation, the largest congregation in the Vineyard movement and in central Ohio. The work of Vineyard Columbus is regularly featured on our local news outlets, and it is not in images of angry protesters with a hateful message but rather images of people serving throughout our community in the name of Christ. The congregation sponsors a community center providing free medical and legal assistance and other services to local residents and has planted at least 24 churches in central Ohio and around the world.

This book, authored by their senior pastor, Rich Nathan, with the assistance of Insoo Kim, pastor of ministry strategies, helps explain the vision of this church, which so many have found so attractive. In brief, Nathan calls this a “both-and” church in an either-or world tired of the kind of polarization we see in our politics and civic life. Nathan believes that the Christian message holds in a creative tension the polarities that often divide us.

The book is organized around a series of both-and polarities that Vineyard Columbus seeks to hold together and commends to other churches. Nathan describes an identity that is both evangelical and charismatic. He speaks of a community that enjoys unity and a racial diversity that matches the diversity of our city. He articulates the church’s concern and activity around both showing mercy and pursuing justice. The church pursues its mission through both proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. He challenges his congregation to holiness in both its personal and social ethics. He expresses the church’s kingdom vision in terms of both the miraculous works which might already be sought and the final transformation of our lives and world yet to be hoped for. He concludes with calling the church to both relevant practice (orthopraxy) and orthodox doctrine.

Each chapter includes personal stories and illustrations from Vineyard Columbus ministry and the author’s personal life. At the same time, Nathan writes with a lawyerly (he was an attorney and law professor before becoming Vineyard Columbus’s pastor) carefulness on key doctrinal issues of our day. For example, to the contention that opening leadership in the church to women leads to opening leadership to those engaged in same-sex relationships, he observes a key distinction rarely noted in these discussions between roles, which are culturally determined, as in the case of women, and behaviors which carry moral implications that are trans-cultural.

This example also underscores how this will not be a book that those wedded to an either-or view of reality will embrace. Nathan speaks both of the loving acceptance their church shows all who seek services in their community center and all who come to the church and of the church’s uncompromising call to things like sexual integrity and its decision to only appoint leaders and pastors who exemplify that integrity. Similarly, in another place, Nathan both speaks critically of our nation’s militarism and warmly of those who serve in the military.

My sense is that we like to define the world in either-or terms because it makes life seemingly simpler. However, what we miss is that in doing so, it also makes life smaller and leaves no way to include those who think differently. One of the most delightful aspects of this book were the repeated instances where Nathan shows how this “both-and” thinking brings us into a far richer reality than the “either-or”. Here’s one example, from his section on both evangelical and charismatic:

“If we emphasize the Word without the Spirit, we dry up. If we emphasize the Spirit without the Word, we blow up. If we hold the Word and the Spirit together, we grow up….

“The most exciting aspect of the Both-And marriage of evangelical and charismatic Christianity is the bringing together of evangelicals’ historic focus–the salvation of the lost–with the charismatic power to get the job done.”

Are you one of those like me who tires of being presented with the polarities of “either this, or this” in the church or in the culture and wonder, is there a third option? If so, you will find this book helpful in casting a vision of a different paradigm and as well as an explanation of the powerful ministry Vineyard Columbus has had in its host city.

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