You can't be involved in the church bookstore world for too long before facing the question, "Is it proper to 'sell' in a church bookstore?"

That's because, oftentimes when someone mentions salesmen or selling we think used cars, washing machines, meeting sales goals. Our minds go to the unscrupulous tactics that we have been confronted with on the telephone by those pesky telephone sales callers.

Yet, every day we sell something in our church stores. So what's the answer to that common question? I believe it's a fresh perspective on what we are doing.

In his book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting (Retail Doctor Publishing), Bob Phibbs defines selling as a transference of feeling. I like that. How many times have you eaten at a restaurant that you thought was outstanding and spent the next few days telling everyone you know how wonderful it was, almost insisting that they try it?

Or, to bring it a little closer to home, when was the last time you read a really good book and failed to tell anyone about it?

A prime example of this kind of selling in our industry would be The Shack (William P. Young, Windblowm Media/Hachette Book Group USA). This was a little, self-published book with almost no publicity that was "sold" by individuals-every person who read it told several someone else's about the book. Now, some millions-plus books later it has had a double-digit run on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Clearly, if we are passionate about something, if we believe in something, we "sell" it. I remember one such example in the store I managed. A wonderful frontliner, Linda Reavis, loved to read and was a big John Piper fan. When his Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ came out, she became an evangelist-salesman-for that book. Within three months-the amount of time we call a book "frontlist"-she sold more than 1,500 copies.

Oh, someone else may have rung up some of the sales on the register, but we all knew it was Linda's passion for the book that had driven the purchases. She did not pay attention to the numbers. She had no sales goals set by her manager. She just read the book and saw how it could meet the needs of so many hurting people.

In a church bookstore we need to teach our staff to know their products and know them well. We need to train them to listen to the needs of the individuals who walk through the door. In the secular retail world this would be called training in salesmanship; in our world it is training in ministry. In the secular world this training will help the salesman change the material lives of his customers; in the world of the church bookstore it has the potential to change the spiritual life of the customer.

So, I suggest we dare not miss an opportunity to "sell" our customers on the Bible, Bible study or a book that has the potential to meet a need or change a life. We owe it to them to know our products like a car salesman knows all the inner workings of a car he wants to sell.

Yes, it is proper to sell in a church bookstore-to purposefully attempt to persuade someone to buy something. We want that to be something that will change their circumstance or help them meet the needs of others. We want to "transfer a feeling," a feeling of believing in what we have to offer each customer. A feeling that says our products reflect the greatest purchase ever made-the price Christ paid for our very souls.