The Sunday-school publisher that became a church operating system

James Marion Frost did not start Lifeway with a distribution center, a venture round or even a room of his own. In 1891, the Baptist pastor worked from a corner of a Tennessee newspaper office with money borrowed from his wife. The Southern Baptist Convention had approved his idea for a Sunday-school publishing board. It had simply neglected to give him a budget.

That underfurnished beginning is more than a tidy origin story. It explains the durable logic of the organization now called Lifeway Christian Resources: find a recurring problem inside local churches, turn the answer into something repeatable, and make the next product pay for the next piece of the mission. Frost's first problem was curriculum. A century and a third later, the list includes volunteer training, group video, church surveys, worship supplies, summer camps, event registration and ecommerce.

The result is an odd and revealing institution. Lifeway is an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention, governed within a denominational structure and explicit about its theology. It is also a self-supporting nonprofit with customers, product lines, inventory, subscriptions and a large logistics operation. It has no outside shareholders waiting for a multiple. It still has to make things people will buy.

A bookstore is the wrong picture

For years, many Americans knew Lifeway through its shops in suburban retail centers. That made the company easy to mistake for a Christian bookstore chain with an unusually large private label. When Lifeway closed all its physical stores in 2019, the decision looked like the disappearance of the business. In fact, the company kept its online retail operation and emphasized publishing, events and church services. The storefront had been a channel, not the whole machine.

A better way to see Lifeway is as a vertically integrated supplier to church life. B&H Publishing produces trade books and Bibles. The Christian Standard Bible gives Lifeway its own major English translation. Curriculum brands such as The Gospel Project, Explore the Bible, Bible Studies for Life and Hyfi supply lessons for different ages and teaching approaches. Lifeway Research surveys pastors, churchgoers and the public. Ministry Grid trains leaders and volunteers online. Camps and conferences turn content into shared experience. Lifeway.com puts the catalog in one cart.

Each part answers a practical question. What does the sixth-grade class teach this week? How does a new volunteer learn the child-safety policy before Sunday? Where does a women's group watch the video it bought? What do pastors actually believe about their congregations? Who provides the music, signs, craft supplies and leader guides for Vacation Bible School? The products are religious, but the friction is often operational.

The product is coordination

Consider Vacation Bible School, the bright, noisy summer program familiar to generations of church kids. From a distance, Lifeway sells a themed box of lessons and decorations. Up close, the box is a compressed management system. It aligns teachers, music leaders, recreation volunteers, snack crews and parents around five days of programming. It replaces dozens of local decisions with one tested plan.

The same compression appears across the portfolio. A church can buy a study, stream its teaching sessions, give a leader a training course, order participant books and use related material for children. A pastor can read Lifeway Research's survey of small-group leaders, then choose curriculum from the organization that ran it. That does not make every product interchangeable or every research finding a sales pitch. It does create a feedback loop few general publishers possess.

The customer benefits most when time is scarce. A small congregation may have no curriculum editor, training department, research analyst or event producer. Its staff still has to perform all four jobs, usually before Wednesday night. Lifeway converts specialist work into a purchasable system and lets one volunteer stand on the output of a much larger team. The trade-off is standardization: a ready-made program cannot reflect every congregation's culture. Yet for the buyer, the comparison is rarely between Lifeway and a perfect custom solution. It is between a finished resource and another late evening spent assembling one.

“Behind every support specialist, Bible study editor, graphic designer, and accountant is a Sunday School teacher, kids volunteer, or small group leader.”Lifeway, describing its staff culture

That line captures Lifeway's sharpest distinction. Employees are not merely researching an audience; many inhabit it every week. The editor may teach from the curriculum. The product manager may recruit volunteers. The support specialist may know why a church account has three administrators and a treasurer who prefers the telephone. In software language, the company has embedded domain experts. In church language, the staff serves.

This intimacy narrows the audience as well as strengthening the product. Lifeway's doctrinal commitments make it a natural fit for Southern Baptist and many evangelical churches, but not a neutral supplier to every Christian tradition. Competitors split the market from several directions: David C Cook, Group and Orange in curriculum; Zondervan, Thomas Nelson, Tyndale and Crossway in books and Bibles; RightNow Media and Logos in digital content; Barna in research; Amazon and Christianbook in commerce. Lifeway's advantage is less any single category than the number of church jobs it connects.

Old category, new access

The more interesting recent products do not abandon print. They reconsider who print has excluded. The CSB Grace Bible for Kids, released in 2024, uses a typeface and layout designed with 2K/DENMARK and tested with University of Cambridge researchers. Heavier letter bases, more spacing, distinct character forms and colored overlays are intended to reduce visual stress for readers with dyslexia. Teen and adult editions followed.

It is a telling kind of innovation: not a gadget, but a familiar object made usable for more people. Another 2026 partnership with Hosanna Revival wrapped more than 8,000 study notes, maps, photographs and articles into a women's study Bible. A Revive Our Hearts edition paired journaling space with a reading plan and prayers. Lifeway treats the Bible not as one SKU but as a family of reading contexts - age, language, purpose, accessibility and aesthetic preference.

Print also travels beside digital rather than simply losing to it. Purchased study videos live in Lifeway On Demand. Ministry Grid turns the annual volunteer orientation into ongoing training. Ecommerce reaches customers after the store closures. The company says its resources now reach more than 160 countries on six continents and that it is the largest provider of Spanish Bibles. Distribution is both a warehouse problem and a screen problem.

A nonprofit with a retail pulse

Lifeway does not publish detailed current financials on its public site, so it is better to understand the model than to fixate on a revenue estimate. The company describes itself as self-supporting. Customers pay for physical products, digital media, training and event registrations; those purchases sustain the organization and its mission. There is no venture-funding story here. Commercial discipline and ministry purpose sit in the same account.

That arrangement can be clarifying. Lifeway's stated mission - fueling the church's work of making disciples - supplies a strict filter. Its five values include treasuring biblical truth, caring about character, working better together, creating customer delight and “chart what's next.” The last two sound conspicuously like product-company language. So does its Work From Anywhere policy, which gives many employees location flexibility while bringing teams together periodically.

The market position is equally specific. Lifeway is not trying to be a general media conglomerate or the internet's religious everything store. It is deepest where teaching, discipleship and church operations overlap. Families and individual readers matter, but the local church is the organizing customer. A curriculum sale may reach a class for years. A camp registration brings a whole youth group. A training platform can touch every new volunteer.

The long game is a weekly rhythm

In 2026, Lifeway said its FUGE camps were preparing to welcome their two-millionth camper, almost five decades after the first Centrifuge summer in 1979. In 2025 alone, the camps hosted more than 120,000 young people from over 4,200 churches. Those figures show the scale, but repetition is the more useful fact. Churches return every summer. Sunday schools meet every week. Small groups start another study. New volunteers need another orientation.

Recurring behavior is the foundation beneath Lifeway's catalog. It lets a 135-year-old organization keep changing formats without changing its central job. The Sunday-school board became a publisher, retailer, researcher, event operator and digital platform because its customers kept encountering adjacent problems. The institution followed them from the bookshelf to the browser and from the classroom to the campsite.

Frost's borrowed desk is still the right image after all. Lifeway was built without excess capital, in a borrowed channel, around a clearly observed need. The desk disappeared. The method did not.