What to do When Authors We Love Sin

It’s one of those emails you dread receiving as a writer: a request for a correction.

I had written several articles for a business magazine recently, and on one page I misstated a fact about a new product. It required correcting.

So, working with the publisher, we apologized, updated the document online, and moved on. What else could we do? 10,000 physical copies had already gone out, and we certainly would not be chasing all of those down.

Of course, it was easy for me to brush the error off. I wrote a lot of words and it was one little error…that we knew about. Could have happened to anyone. I was tired when I wrote it. Did I mention it was a small error?

But it was certainly annoying for the company. Perhaps it makes their product look inferior to the competition. Maybe the error will get indexed by AI and repeated elsewhere. Could they even lose sales over it?

All the while, I walk away free. Someone else ‘paid’ for my mistake, you could say.

The whole episode reminded me of my time working as a radio news anchor, where some of my past verbal misfires undoubtedly caused issues. One time, I promoted a charity walk on the wrong day. On another occasion, during an overnight shift, I gave out the wrong time of day to listeners. Don’t get me started on my butchery of those European tennis player names. And those are just some of the sillier and more public errors in my professional life!

And so it was, with great awareness of my own foibles and shortcomings, that I sat down recently with a few friends to sit in judgement of some well-known and, if not presently then at least once, respected Christian theologians.

Some backstory: I started volunteering in my Baptist church’s small library in 2023. I regularly read Christian non-fiction, and this was a section that needed some attention despite the fact it was (and remains, much to my chagrin) one of the least used sections of the library.

By this time, the Ravi Zacharias books were long gone following feedback from the church’s elders board to the lead librarian, another volunteer. However, as I spent more time with our still-considerable list of remaining books, I started to notice other questionable names: Bill Hybels and James Macdonald, to name two in our (former) holdings. Shortly after I raised their names for consideration, their books were quickly jettisoned. 

Over the years, other books that had been donated or were an existing part of our holdings made their way out the door, whether for theological reasons, or author issues, or more. A book that the author himself discredited, gone. A prolific author whose views on the virgin birth and universal salvation didn’t align with our church’s teachings, gone. Questionable reads on young earth creationism and end times prophecies, gone. 

Then, as our newfound power started to really flex its muscles, it turned to pre-emptively banning authors for their affiliation with certain controversial churches or rumblings about their leadership styles. 

So it went until we finally hit a wall in 2026 with Philip Yancey.

See, it wasn’t just the chief librarian and myself involved in this process. We were also consulting an elder within the church and, as of fall of 2025, our new lead pastor. 

And when it came time to decide whether the works of Yancey, following the disclosure of his multi-year affair, should remain in the library, we were split. Or at least not all in perfect agreement.

While I, being of a younger generation, did not necessarily ‘grow up’ with Yancey’s books and had no emotional attachment to them, they were among the favourites of our church elder representative. While it was basically just a business decision to me, the issue was personal for him.

Should we simply stop acquiring new Yancey books, or did we need to remove some or all of his works? Does it matter that he confessed? What might our congregants think to see his works still on our shelves? Do we need to consult our denomination? What if we added an informative bookmark? Don’t we have enough other books on the same topics…why not just feature those instead?

Suddenly, this caused our little review committee to ask deeper questions about what we were doing, and why.

The church has wrestled with these questions long before our little committee ever did. 

There are stories like the Wicked Bible, where a printing mistake (whether deliberate, accidental, or a work of sabotage – all possibilities) carried serious consequences, and other moments in history when error was met with far heavier hands. Scripture itself warns plainly about false teaching and the responsibility to guard against it, while also including wisdom from flawed leaders such as David and Solomon. Actually, it does more than include those leaders: it documents and condemns David’s sin with Bathsheba and Solomon’s idolatry and polygamy, and yet goes on to praise both men and include their stories and writings in the Bible we carry today.

The Scriptures also remind us that judgment belongs to God, and that vengeance is His alone. Living in that tension, between protecting our fellow congregants and overstepping our place, is not a new challenge, though it felt very real as we debate which books deserve a place on our shelves. Judgement is not necessarily negative, but it is also not neutral, and decisions still had to be made.

The debate about church library policy tipped into an important discussion, left unresolved, about how a church library fit into our overall mission and purpose as a church. Our primary users were children and parents within the church community seeking age-appropriate books. While no one was arguing for the outright removal of adult non-fiction or any of the other sections, we had yet to articulate a goal for those other, lesser used sections, or the library as a whole. 

The contrast between what we offered and what was available at the public library helped make the case for our continued existence. If I asked most local librarians about him, I suspect most would have tilted their heads and said, “Who?” So, we had the outline of a purpose at least - being different from the public library by carrying Christian materials - but had not articulated a greater reason for being. 

We were all working as volunteers with the best intentions: to ensure we were providing quality materials to our congregants and not bringing the church or our faith into disrepute. Besides, we had limited shelf space; we couldn’t stock everything, so why settle for reads that were sub-optimal if alternatives existed?

On the other hand, you can't make consistent decisions about what belongs on the shelf until you've decided what the shelf is for. A small, laminated paper label which says “Non-fiction” only provides so much guidance.

Despite all the reasonable and compelling arguments being made by the various committee members, as the Yancey debate reached its zenith I obviously hadn’t fully convinced myself we were in the right. I started to critically evaluate my own recommendations for the church library. For instance, I had suggested we add books by Brennan Manning, whose books had been helpful to me. And yet, Manning was a long-time alcoholic. Even as I tried to justify to myself the differences in conduct of the two men, I was left with the question: who was I to judge someone else who found the adulterer Philip Yancey’s books helpful? 

I also noticed the way I developed a hypersensitivity to who I was reading, sometimes at the expense of what I was reading. During a church mentorship program, a couple of months after Yancey’s news was announced, I was assigned a Christian lifestyle book which was written by yet another author who had confessed to an affair a few years after its publication. Vague references were made to the issue in this updated version of the book, and further research identified an affair as the issue. It left a sour taste in my mouth for the book’s ‘wisdom.’ 

Yet, this book had sold over one million copies and had undoubtedly helped some people along the way. Is the quippy quote that “a truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone” sound advice even for church librarians, or a recipe for heresy and hurt?

In that vein, our pastor observed that we didn’t want to retain authors whose presence could cause harm to congregants. “If there was someone within the church whose spouse cheated on them, and they saw we were promoting a book by an unfaithful author…” The consequences of our choices weren’t simply whether a Yancey fan who wanted to borrow a book went away empty handed, but whether we were potentially contributing to harm within our congregation.

Our little library had also stocked quite a few John MacArthur books, and the debate about whether his church’s push back against COVID restrictions was faithful and God honouring or a failure to honour God’s chosen leaders remained unsettled. Ultimately, we kept the MacArthur books, and I kept my personal MacArthur study Bible, which was a gift from my wife at the outset of my faith journey. I guess emotional attachments are fine, as long as they’re mine?

Working in public relations and marketing as I do, I recognized my instinct to contribute to a good public image for my church. Yet, this wasn’t an optics exercise. I failed to take seriously the ways I was sitting in judgement of my fellow Christians.

Had I stopped to take a ‘log and speck’ perspective, I wonder what some of these authors might have said about my book (which, conveniently for me, is no longer in print, so don’t bother looking for it) and my life. I suspect they would have said, echoing John 8, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

Our little cull started as a judgement on the work and ministries of these authors, but it was more than that. We may have been depriving potential readers of books that might have benefited their walk or reached the next step in their faith journey. While it’s true that we can’t stock everything, our shelves can’t be empty either.

Evaluating the lives of our authors was, indirectly, also a judgement on our existing authors, deeming them and their ideas worthy of inclusion despite not knowing each one, their story, their intent, or the quality of their teaching. It was applying pressure to them that was unfair, with a fickle approval that could be suddenly and silently withdrawn by a committee applying an inconsistent standard.

The discussions within our little committee continue back and forth with an effort to find a more consistent pattern, and particularly one that is slower to ban and instead seeks to practice discernment informed by grace. It’s messy, in a good way, as we unpack people’s personal biases, their emotional attachments, and their learning styles and try to balance that with good theology, a focus on serving our congregation, and an effort to honour our God and Saviour through our work. Or at least to try and sit in His judgement seat a little less frequently, as we remind ourselves “this author has disqualified himself from a particular ministry" is not necessarily the same as "God cannot use anything this author has written.”

It does not mean abandoning all standards, or accepting all Christian literature. No one advocated for undoing the bans on Ravi Zacharias’s books, for example. 

If anything, by arriving at the inevitable conclusion of our book review debate where we realize our own limitations, we’ve been helpfully and deliberately confronted with a mirror, a challenge to articulate a purpose for our work, and a reminder that discernment and judgement are not the same thing.

The whole episode made me wonder what would be in Jesus’ library, if He had one. Would He admire the efforts of His children to write books, like a parent admires their child’s school crafts? Would He restrict Himself to the Scriptures, as some more conservative denominations might? Would He see past the author’s sins and judge the content on its own merit? 

Perhaps the better question is this: when we build our libraries, whether personal or church, are we better off trying to protect ourselves from flawed voices, or giving ourselves space to recognize that God can even work through sinful and broken people, including some of the Biblical heroes we read about in Scriptures?

Because if the answer is the former, we may find that in trying to guard the shelves, we have made them far smaller and emptier than they were ever meant to be.

When I learned about the error in my work, I was quick to explain away my own mistake as small, understandable, and human. I’m not sure I offered the same generosity to others when I reduced their lives and ministries to their failures.

Perhaps that is the tension we are left to live with, not just in our little church library, but everywhere.