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Reading books together with other Christian friends provides us with a place for collective discernment, and a place for spiritual illumination.
The Inklings model is pretty simple: bring what occupies your mind and read it aloud. Stimulating the minds of others and generating conversation makes it possible to learn from one another.
The goal of a reading group is not to exhaust a book, discuss every important point, or cover every chapter equally. The goal is to use our books as scaffolding so that our discussions build up one another. This distinguishes book reading in the Christian community from Oprah’s book club.
It’s the ideas and passages from books that are discussed most carefully with friends that are sunk the furthest into the mind, and those sunk the furthest are the ones you will carry the longest. Those are the truths that remain on the tongue when you trade with other needy sinners in your life.
While reading is mostly a solitary task—and a very important one—comprehension is a community project. I am convinced that we forget so much of what we read not because we are poor readers, rather, I believe we forget so much of what we read because we are selfish readers. And we all suffer because of it.
1. Fill your home with books. Many of history’s most prolific readers, writers, and leaders were raised in homes stuffed with books.
2. Read to your kids. Perhaps the best way to prioritize book reading is to read to your children. This provides time for parents and children to bond, and it offers the parent an opportunity to help model reading.
3. Don’t stop reading to your kids. Christians appreciate the value of a life-long commitment to reading.
4. Read your books in front of your kids. Young children prize what they see their parents prize.
Celebrate the classics. This year we celebrated Hobbit Day (September 22) as a family in honor of the birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, two characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic epic The Lord of the Rings.
Cultivate your child’s moral imagination. In chapter 6 I sought to persuade you to cultivate your imagination. In the same way, imaginative literature like myth and fantasy is not only permissible for children, but it provides us with an opportunity to cultivate the moral imagination of our children.
Find books that picture moral lessons in the imagination, and savor those books with your children.
Help interpret worldviews as you read to your children. Reading vocally to your kids allows you to engage the book with a Christian worldview.
Read your favorite excerpts to your children. Sometimes we can invite our children to experience what we are reading.
Invite your children to read to the family.
I will buy him as many books as he can read, so long as he agrees to mark his five favorite pages in each book, bring those marked pages to the dinner table, explain the context, and read them to the family.
Challenge your children to improve books. When the time is appropriate, encourage your kids to disagree with a book. Ask them questions. What would you change about the book? How would you have written it? Do you have a better ending? Encourage your children to improve the book, to deconstruct the book, and to reconstruct it in a better way.
Most importantly, read the Bible together as a family. Books are a big part of our home, but the Bible is the supreme Book. Parents model the primacy of Scripture by reading the Bible together as a family on a regular basis.
Make opportunities to talk books. Encouraging men to read is as simple as getting them into your own library.
Illustrate sermon points with classic literature. Pastors can feel an enormous pressure to quote and illustrate sermons from the latest “reality” TV shows, popular movies, contemporary music, and YouTube videos. Why not pull illustrations from classic literature? To illustrate a sermon, look to the stories by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or Shakespeare. Classic literature connects with people and provides a largely untapped storehouse of soul-stirring sermon illustrations.
Pepper your sermon with direct quotes from Christian living books.
Start a church library or book table. Make good books easily available to your people. There’s no need to have a huge library or bookstore. Pick five to ten titles and quote from them or mention them at some point in your announcements or preaching.
Recommend chapters of books. Very often pastors will be asked for recommendations on a particular topic of the Christian life. C. J. Mahaney has found it helpful to recommend chapters from a book rather than an entire book.
Answer theological questions with pages from books. Inevitably people in your church will raise theological questions. When they do, find the answers in theological books, photocopy the pages, highlight the relevant material, and give it to them to read.
1. Mature readers prize wisdom. 2. Mature readers cherish old books. 3. Mature readers keep literature in its place. 4. Mature readers avoid making books into idols. 5. Mature readers cling to the Savior.
Book consumers view books as “things to get read.” Wisdom seekers view books as fuel for slow and deliberate meditation.
Dever’s annual reading schedule is structured chronologically, and it looks something like this: January: early church patristic writings (first through third centuries) February: Augustine (354–430) March: Martin Luther (1483–1546) April: John Calvin (1509–1564) May: Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) June: John Owen (1616–1683) and John Bunyan (1628–1688) July: Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) August: C. H. Spurgeon (1834–1892) September: B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) October: Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981) November: C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) and Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003) December: Contemporary authors
Consider starting with Athanasius’s book On the Incarnation, which was originally published in AD 318. Be sure to grab the version that includes Lewis’s introduction. The book is old, but it’s also simple and concise. Writes Lewis, “Only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity.”
We treasure values and priorities that far exceed the sum worth of the greatest library. Our end is not literature, no matter how true, good, and beautiful it is. Our end is God, the One from whom all truth, goodness, and beauty originates and finds its perfection.
