Growing a reading church

Do you want to get your church reading more? Do people pass by your bookstall (if you have one) without a second glance? Do your brothers and sisters struggle to find the time or motivation to read?

The Good Book Company is here to help…

I am a member of a church that wouldn’t consider itself a reading church. Yes we have had a bookstall for many, many years, but it isn’t in a prominent position and can be easily overlooked. Once upon a time we also did regular book reviews from the front but that too dropped off.

So how do you get a non-reading church like that to a place where books and resources are of interest? Well, this is how my church did it.

Firstly, and you may think this bizarre, we scaled down the bookstall. What? Fewer books?! I thought we were trying to increase the amount of books people read! Well, in this case, less is more. With the help of the church leadership we focused the bookstall on a small core number of titles. People were less confused and distracted by a wide choice of books and therefore made decisions on what to buy more easily.

After that we looked at two specific areas of book ministry. Those were a regular Reading Sunday, once a term and then an even more focused Book Of The Term.

What is a Reading Sunday and what might it look like? In our case, Reading Sunday actually takes place across three consecutive Sundays where books are promoted, samples are available to look at and eventually orders are taken. The range typically might be 8 to 10 adult titles, 3 or 4 books for young people and a similar number for younger children. We do this once a term. Which titles are used will depend on your church and the aims and direction of the leadership team but I am always happy to help and advise on this.

Our Book Of The Term is (without stating the obvious) a single title that the church team would like every single person in the congregation to read. We are currently using Passion by Mike McKinley in the run up to Easter. As we are looking at the second half of Luke’s Gospel in our sermon series it is great background reading to that as well. For our younger people we also used the brilliant new The Third Day as the must read book. Again these titles are promoted and available to purchase across three or four consecutive Sundays at ALL services.

What has this approach done for our non “booky”, non reading type church? Well our bookstall continues to tick along much as before (well a little better actually), but the book Sundays have been able to showcase titles that wouldn’t have been on the radar of a great number of our congregation and we sell roughly the equivalent of about five months worth of bookstall sales on these Sundays.

The books of the term are equally as successful and have been taken up on average by about 60% of our membership on each title promoted. So our “non reading” congregation are actually beginning to warm to the great books and content that is available to help them in their walk with our Lord and Saviour. All of which means that our church members are being fed a more regular diet of biblically focused reading that points back to the Bible itself.

If you would like to know more or discuss specifically how we might be able to help your church or ministry develop these ideas then drop me a line on Dean.Faulkner@thegoodbook.co.uk