Learning to Read

If you haven’t guessed it by now, we’re a reading church. Our Book Shoppe isn’t in the business of making money, and our book table in the old Gauntlett Center was a losing proposition as well. Are we bad at business? No, we so want to get resources into your hands and minds and hearts that we are happy to simply cover our costs of having them around.

Why this emphasis on reading? Reading quality Christian books will never replace the reading of God’s word or the preaching of your pastor, but it will help you hear and understand with greater maturity. A good book will challenge your thinking and motivate your heart. It will dislodge error and give you an appetite for truth. Good books humble us by reminding us that, to paraphrase an old Irish proverb, ‘good ideas often aren’t new, and new ideas often aren’t good’.

Here at the Family Life Blog we want to stir families to read – starting with you, dads. So here is the first of some occasional posts on ‘learning to read’.

· You can assume that Christian books are written by well intentioned authors. But not every book that seems to be Christian is a good Christian book. One way to do a spot evaluation of a book is to see who endorses it. While endorsements are a part of marketing, they reveal who the author looks to for inspiration, and that can tell you a lot about what he or she wants you to get from the book.

· The test of time is very important for evaluating the quality of a Christian book. While not all old books are great books, new books tend to reflect fads in culture and can be so trendy as to have little value over the long haul.

· Sales of books don’t always reflect their ultimate value; they tend to reflect the amount of marketing behind the book or author.

· Who the author is, and what his/her life reflects matters in a Christian book – even fiction. Learn about the authors before you read their books – does their work come from a good life model?

· I tend to recommend reading deceased authors as a priority. Not that there are no good living writers, or that dying instantly makes bad writers into good ones. Its just that how someone finishes the race tells me a lot about the value of what they had to say while they were running it.

· C. S. Lewis sums up my goals in reading – to learn wisdom from those who are wise:

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are. (C.S. Lewis, The Quotable Lewis p.233)