This is not intended as a back-handed compliment. Fact is, if anyone stepped forward claiming that they had all the solutions to the challenges that our industry is facing, I would also expect them to be able to turn base metal into gold and leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Take social media, for instance. Everyone’s excited about the potential and talking about how it upends traditional marketing practices and there are all sorts of “experts” out there hawking their advice. Sure there are some great ideas, but does anyone really have it all figured out? I think not.

So, for me, Riskey’s main qualification for the new role is not that he knows all the answers, but that, more importantly, he knows about asking the right questions. It is something he has been recognized for from his earliest days in the Christian products world.

One colleague recalls being impressed by the insightful questions Riskey asked at the prospective retailers course he attended before opening his store in Oshkosh, Wis. I appreciated the same thing during the time Riskey spent as a member of Christian Retailing’s editorial advisory board.

Perhaps it’s because he came to Christian retailing towards the end of its fat-cow years, but he has always seemed open to re-evaluating the ways things are done and not afraid to review accepted wisdom.

And, my, do we ever need to be asking some hard questions—about the church’s place in a changing culture, about the long-term impact of the economic downturn, about what makes Christian retail distinctive, about the relationship between suppliers and retailers, about what the digital revolution is going to do to traditional business models and practices. How’s that for starters?

This is not to say that Riskey and CBA have no clue, of course. He arrived at the organization as strategic solutions executive and has been a part of recent initiatives that have shown CBA to be responding to needs.

But I am encouraged beyond the specifics of Riskey’s new role, too. I believe that it is part of the emergence of what is, for me, a more open-handed, more collaborative and, yes, even more humble, trade association.

It’s not uncommon for member organizations to grow to a point where they become central, rather than the members, and you seem to end up with the tail wagging the dog. Some CBA members felt that was what happened somewhat with the association during Christian retail’s boom season, as the association’s coffers and staff swelled.

We’re now in the thin-cow days, as CBA’s shrinking staff and recent decision to sell off its building underscore. CBA can no longer afford to be high and mighty, or to be seen that way.

Naming Riskey as executive director and dispensing with the president/CEO position addresses this perception, and the shift in management style also gives more of an important role to the chairman—at least publicly. Former chairmen may have done a lot behind the scenes, but they were best known out front for using a big pair of scissors to cut the ribbon at the CBA shows.

Chair-elect George Thomsen is just the right person for this new season. He is widely recognized for his business acumen, his integrity, his ministry focus. That he is a church bookstore manager respected by independents, some of whom still find the whole church bookstore scene a little irritating, is a plus, too.

I am hopeful that this new-look CBA will also help foster some greater cooperation and collaboration with other groups in the industry. There has been talk about the need for this in the past, of course, but this new alignment might help it actually go somewhere.

CBA needs support like never before, so let me encourage you to join if you are not a member—because you need CBA like never before. If your membership has lapsed, it’s a good time to give the organization another chance. Get behind CBA and it will be able to come alongside you. Or, maybe better yet, come alongside CBA and it will be able to get behind you.

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