By Mandy McFarland Editor
NAPPANEE — It has been a presence in the community for more than 60 years. Now, Christian Light Bookstore is ready to close its doors for good.
For the last several years, the chain has been slowly closing down or selling its stores nationwide. According to executive director Roger Williams, this is due to a sudden though steady decline in sales over the last few months.
“The biggest impact on the decision was the decline in sales in the last year,” Williams said. “We were holding our own in Nappanee and Goshen, but something happened in the last six months as far as sales were going.”

Williams believes that this may be due to the presence of more accessible markets with which Christian bookstores cannot compete. These include online sites like Amazon.com and other big box stores.
In addition, Williams said, many congregations now have their own bookstores and no longer rely on venues like Christian Light to provide Bibles and so forth.
“You add all those together, it gets to be sort of a negative environment for trying to stay in business,” Williams said. “There’s probably half as many Christian bookstores today as there were in the year 2000.”
According to Williams, other Christian book chains are also feeling the impact of the modern times.
“Hundreds of Christian bookstores are out of business every year,” he said. “Independent bookstores have taken a tremendous hit in the last few years, and Christian bookstores have been hit in the last eight years.”
Up until now, Williams said, Christian Light bookstores have been relatively successful.
“For the first 20 years of my time (with the store), we’ve always broken even or made a little profit,” he said.
At one time, there were more than a dozen stores throughout Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Many of these have closed or been sold in the last couple of years.
“At the beginning of last year we had 14 stores,” Williams said. “We closed four last year, we’re closing four this year and the bulk of the (remaining) stores are up for sale.”
Despite this, the closing of the Nappanee store came as a surprise for Williams and others associated with Christian Light.
“Nappanee was one of the stores that we would be committed to because it didn’t lose a lot of money,” Williams said.
A decision will be made later this week as to whether the store will be sold or will close down altogether. While the company has received an offer on the building, no offers have been made on the store itself.
Williams hopes to keep the store open through the end of July.
“We’ve had just thoroughly appreciated the support from the community,” he said. “It’s been tremendous. For a community this size to have a bookstore is unusual. We’ve just had tremendous support for the Christian message.”