In response to complaints received concerning Lifeway’s stocking pro homosexual and New Age materials Lifeway writes today:

LifeWaystores.com improving efforts
to filter questionable titles from third-party distributor’s list

LifeWaystores.com is enhancing its efforts to ensure that questionable books are filtered out of a massive list of titles available online through its third-party distributor. In fact, the third-party distributor makes 130,000 titles available to LifeWay, while adding sometimes as many as 1,000 new titles each week. Lifewaystores.com includes only about 100,000 of these titles, having eliminated nearly 25 percent of the books for a variety of reasons, most often because of inappropriate content, according to Mark Scott, vice president of the Christian stores division of LifeWay Christian Resources. In addition, LifeWay filters the titles electronically based on information from publishers and the reputation of authors and publishers for producing biblically-based material. Every week, dozens of inappropriate titles are removed successfully. And, says Scott, the electronic filtering and human-review processes are being improved to meet the high volume of new books hitting the Christian retail market.

“Even so, no system is perfect, and because we’re human and make mistakes, a few inappropriate titles occasionally make it through our filtering system and onto the online list,” says Scott. “When we become aware of these titles – often through an email from a customer – we investigate them, and if we confirm them to be inappropriate, we remove them immediately.”

That’s what happened this week as several Web logs reported that LifeWaystores.com was offering a number of pro-homosexual titles. “We checked it out immediately and found that, in fact, several titles did appear on our third-party distributor’s list,” says Scott. “We were unaware of these and removed the titles immediately. We appreciate it when such titles are brought to our attention and we invite our customers to contact us if they discover titles or authors about which they are concerned. Our customers place a high degree of trust in us to provide biblically sound resources. We value that trust and strive to maintain it.”

LifeWaystores.com also will be providing “Read with Discernment” tags on certain titles that are requested for scholarly study but may not appropriate for a broader Christian audience. ”Many of the titles available through the distributor are made available for critical study or research so that pastors, seminary students and ministry leaders have access to material that helps them understand and develop responses to the diversity of religious thought in a postmodern world,” says Scott.

I’m grateful to Scott for responding so quickly and so positively.