Lifeway Newsroom
Lifeway Newsroom is the online news service of Lifeway Christian Resources, based in Nashville, Tennessee, in the United States. Published at news.lifeway.com, it distributes news releases, feature stories, and research findings from Lifeway, an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, to Baptist and wider Christian media, to pastors and church leaders, and to the general public. Its best-known output is the stream of survey research from Lifeway Research, whose studies of pastors, churchgoers, and American religious life are regularly reported by Christian and secular news outlets across the United States.
The Newsroom serves two functions at once. It is the public record of Lifeway itself — its publishing programs, leadership, conferences, camps, and ministry initiatives — and it is a distribution channel for data about American Protestant church life, presented in ready-to-publish form with quotations, methodology notes, and links to fuller reports. Baptist state newspapers, denominational outlets, and Christian news sites routinely republish or report its releases, which is why the service is classified in media directories as a news agency-style source for Southern Baptist and evangelical news.
Institutional Background: From Sunday School Board to Lifeway
Lifeway's own published history traces the organization to 1891, when the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, established the Sunday School Board and entrusted its work to Dr. James Marion Frost. According to that history, Frost began with a desk in a corner of the office of Tennessee's Baptist newspaper, the Baptist and Reflector, a little money borrowed from his wife, and the convention's blessing — but no allocated funds. The board's first assignment was the publication of Sunday school literature for Southern Baptist churches.
Frost's early leadership was brief, ending in 1893, and T. P. Bell led the board from 1893 to 1896, defending its legitimacy against critics. Frost returned in 1896 for a second term lasting twenty years, until 1916, which consolidated the board's mission. He was followed by I. J. Van Ness, president from 1916 to 1935, who elevated Christian education within the convention's life, and by T. L. Holcomb, who served from 1935 to 1953 and emphasized the agency's connection to the local church. Over the following decades the board's assignments multiplied well beyond Sunday school literature into the broad portfolio the Newsroom now reports on.
The Lifeway Name
For most of its history the agency was known as the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Lifeway name entered its operations earlier than the corporate change: in 1972 the board opened two experimental retail stores under the name Lifeway Stores, and although those stores closed a few years later, the board retained and registered the name, and Lifeway later became one of its publishing imprints. The board had operated bookstores since 1925, when it purchased the Baptist Book Concern in Louisville, Kentucky; the chain, long known as Baptist Book Stores, grew to dozens of locations across the South and beyond.
In September 1997 the board's trustees voted unanimously at the Glorieta Baptist Conference Center in New Mexico to recommend renaming the agency Lifeway Christian Resources, choosing the name from more than 400 possibilities. President James T. Draper Jr. explained that the name drew on John 14:6, in which Jesus describes himself as the way, the truth, and the life. Southern Baptist messengers approved the change at their June 1998 annual meeting in Salt Lake City, noting that Sunday school literature, the founding assignment, had come to represent only about a quarter of the agency's work. The stores were renamed Lifeway Christian Stores in 1999.
What the Newsroom Publishes
The Newsroom publishes several distinct kinds of material. News releases report Lifeway's own activities: new Bible studies and books, Vacation Bible School themes, conference and camp programs, leadership appointments, trustee actions, and ministry partnerships. Research releases present Lifeway Research studies, typically built around a survey of pastors or churchgoers, with headline findings, analysis, and comment from the research team's leadership. Feature stories and articles by staff writers cover trends in church life — discipleship, preaching, worship, and ministry practice — often drawing on the same research base.
Recent releases illustrate the pattern. A State of Discipleship study surveyed more than 2,600 Protestant pastors and more than 2,100 Protestant churchgoers, finding that about half of pastors were satisfied with discipleship in their churches while few strongly agreed, and that only a minority of churches had specific methods for measuring discipleship. A study of sermon length found that four in five Protestant pastors said their sermons lasted less than forty minutes, that pastors reported preaching longer than in a comparable 2019 study, and that most churchgoers preferred sermons of at least half an hour. Such releases state their sample sizes, field dates, and sampling error, allowing other outlets to report the findings with the same methodological information.
Lifeway Research
Lifeway Research is the research arm whose work gives the Newsroom its widest reach. It conducts surveys of Protestant pastors, churchgoers, and the American public on worship, discipleship, evangelism, church practice, and cultural questions, and it produces recurring studies that let journalists track change over time by comparing new results with earlier waves conducted by the same methodology. Its executive director, Scott McConnell, is the most frequently quoted figure in its releases, providing interpretation of the findings for church leaders.
The unit's studies are a staple source for religion reporters because they quantify practices that are otherwise described anecdotally: how long pastors preach, how churches measure spiritual growth, how churchgoers' views of biblical truth shift by age. In one widely reported study, a survey of 1,200 United States Protestant churchgoers conducted in September 2025 was compared with a 2019 survey, finding growth in the share of churchgoers who agreed that some biblical truths become obsolete as culture changes, with the youngest adults the most likely to agree. Christian media reported the study with McConnell's comment that the findings contrasted the changing views of readers with the unchanging character of the Bible's source as Christians understand it.
The Wider Lifeway Ministry Portfolio
The Newsroom's subject matter reflects the convention assignments Lifeway lists in its own institutional summaries. Those assignments have included church ministries, ministries to college and university students, Christian schools and home school ministries, ministries to men and women, operation of conference centers and camps, publication of books and Bibles, operation of Lifeway Christian Stores, stewardship education, church architecture consultation, and capital fund raising. Its publishing has included, through the B&H Publishing Group, the Holman Christian Standard Bible, described by the organization as one of its major Bible translations.
Lifeway describes itself as a religious nonprofit organization and an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention that receives no funding from the denomination, reinvesting income above operating expenses in mission work and other ministries. Its stated vision is that, as God works through the organization, it will help individuals and churches by providing biblical solutions for life. Its Nashville presence historically included more than a million square feet of office, retail, parking, conference, and warehouse space, around 1,500 regular employees, and a large distribution warehouse in nearby Lebanon, Tennessee, according to its institutional profile. In recent years its news releases have frequently carried a Brentwood, Tennessee dateline, the suburb south of Nashville.
Audience and Republication
The Newsroom's primary audience is the network of Southern Baptist and evangelical media: Baptist Press and state Baptist papers, Christian news services, church leadership magazines, and pastors who follow its research directly. Because its releases are written as complete news stories — with datelines, bylines such as staff reports and named writers including Aaron Earls, quotations, and methodology — they are frequently republished in full or reported at length, extending Lifeway's research and announcements into local church media nationwide.
Secular outlets also draw on Lifeway Research when covering American religion, because few other organizations survey Protestant pastors and churchgoers as regularly. The Newsroom thus functions as a bridge between the internal life of the nation's largest Protestant denomination and the wider public conversation about faith in the United States.
How the Research Is Presented
Lifeway Newsroom research releases follow a consistent evidentiary format designed for republication. A release states who was surveyed, how many people took part, when the fieldwork was conducted, and what sampling error applies at the 95 percent confidence level. Findings are given as percentages, comparisons with earlier studies using the same methodology are identified as such, and interpretation is attributed to a named researcher — most often Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research — rather than presented as unattributed editorial opinion. That format is one reason other outlets can report the studies confidently: the methodological information a journalist needs travels with the findings themselves, whether the study concerns discipleship measurement in more than 2,600 pastors and 2,100 churchgoers, sermon length, or changing churchgoer attitudes across survey waves in 2019 and 2025.
Place in Southern Baptist Media
Within Southern Baptist life, Lifeway Newsroom sits alongside Baptist Press, the denomination's official news service, but with a different remit: Baptist Press covers the convention as a whole, while Lifeway Newsroom covers one agency in depth and supplies the research output for which that agency is known. Its archive is consequently a record of both institutional history — name changes, store milestones, leadership transitions — and of the measurable life of American Protestant churches over the past two decades.
For the WorldNM directory, Lifeway Newsroom is classified as a denominational news service and agency-style source, based in Nashville, Tennessee, publishing in English at news.lifeway.com, and distributing news and Lifeway Research findings to Baptist, Christian, and general media throughout the United States.
