The Pastor's Bookshelf

Why Reading Matters for Ministry

Austin Carty

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781467460736
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Preaching Magazine Book of the Year (2022)
Hearts & Minds Best Books List (2022)
Christianity Today  Award of Merit in Church & Pastoral Leadership (2023)
It's time to give pastors permission to read books besides the Bible. 

Six months into his first senior pastorate, Austin Carty sat in his office reading—not the Bible, not a commentary, not a theological tract, but a novel  by Fyodor Dostoevsky. As the minutes turned to hours, while he sat engrossed in this book, he noticed something: he began feeling uneasy. And then anxious. And then  guilty. What would someone think if they opened the door and caught him reading  fiction? 

For busy pastors (is there any other kind?), time spent reading feels hard to justify, especially when it's not for sermon prep. But what if reading felt less like a luxury and more like a vocational responsibility—a spiritual practice that bears fruit in every aspect of ministry, from preaching to pastoral care to church leadership? 

Austin Carty believes that this is exactly how pastors ought to think about reading.  The Pastor's Bookshelf shows how worthwhile reading is more about  formation than  information and how, through reading, a pastor becomes a fuller, more enriched human being with a deeper capacity for wisdom and love, better equipped to understand and work for God's kingdom.

SECTION ONE

ALL THE READING WE DON’T REMEMBER

Reading for Formation

NOT LONG AGO I was sitting with a group of young pastors at a local coffee shop when one of the pastors asked our group what year the Korean War began.

Upon his question, a few of us at the table began hazarding educated guesses, while others pulled out their cell phones and began searching for the answer.

One of the ministers, holding up his phone, called out, “1950.”

“Yes,” another minister said, nodding to her own phone. “Began in June of 1950 with skirmishes along the border.”

Another minister, himself reading the same Wikipedia entry, pointed out that China and the Soviet Union had backed North Korea during the war while the United States had backed South Korea.

From there, a few more tidbits of trivia were read, and the conversation was just about to draw to a close, when another minister among us, a pastor named Greg, suddenly said, “One thing that gets lost in conversations about the Korean War is the way that Korea’s occupation by Japan—which was over by the time of the Korean War—fueled the antagonism between the North and the South and continued to haunt both North and South Koreans long after the Japanese were gone.”

“The Japanese?” one of the ministers asked.

“Yes,” Greg replied. “The Japanese occupied Korea for several decades in the early twentieth century—until the Allied forces pushed them out at the end of World War II.”

“I don’t think I ever knew that,” one of the ministers said.

Nodding, Greg added, “The psychological toll was enormous. Throughout the Korean War and long after—in some cases, even still today—individual Koreans were left grappling with scars left by the Japanese occupation.”

Greg went on to say more and then, wrapping up, added that, like the rest of us, he had not known the exact date the war had begun.

“How do you know all of this other stuff, though?” one of the ministers asked.

Greg shrugged and said, “Who knows. I’m not sure exactly. I picked up some of it from reading a novel called Pachinko last year that was a finalist for the National Book Award. It followed a Korean family through four generations and brought a lot about that period—and that region—to life for me.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

When Greg explained how he had come about—and had been enriched by—the things he’d read in that novel, it struck me that here was a perfect example of the kind of reader I myself aspire to be, and the kind of reader this book will encourage you to be: not a pastor who reads simply in search of information, but rather a pastor-reader.

The difference is all the difference in the world, and this first section further reveals the important distinction.

1

On Formation

IN THE OPENING CHAPTER of C. S. Lewis’s memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells a story about a moment from his boyhood when he came upon a biscuit tin filled with flowers recently picked by his brother, Warnie. Years later, Lewis writes, the memory of that biscuit tin came back to him, and with the memory came a distinct sense of longing. Lewis goes on to call this sense of longing “joy,” and he uses this simple image to set up the theme that will preoccupy the rest of his memoir. He then writes: “The reader who finds [this story] of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story … is about nothing else.”¹

I open by recalling these words because, should the story I am about to tell turn out to be of no interest, there may be no need to read this book any further, either. For, as Lewis explains of his story, so too does the story I am about to tell—simple and unexciting as it is—contain and embody the central premise of this entire book.

But in order to tell this story, I need to first tell another.

Shortly after I started seminary, I was asked by a local church to oversee a day-project for Habitat for Humanity. The project took place on a Saturday, and across the street from where we were working stood a simple, redbrick church. That morning, while pausing for a short break, I happened to see a young man—perhaps forty years old—exit the front door of a small house nearby. This young man had a Bible in his hand, and I watched him walk across the churchyard, unlock the church’s front door, and then disappear inside. It was obvious to me that this young man was the church’s pastor, and that the house from which he had just come was the church’s parsonage.

This scene—the peacefulness of the moment, the simple elegance of the church building, the thought of the pastor praying and preparing in Saturday silence—seemed quite lovely to me. And I remember thinking, “That seems like a nice life.”

Nothing more, nothing less—just: “That seems like a nice life.”

Minutes later I was back to work. Soon enough, afternoon had come. And with our work now complete, we left—and I never saw that Habitat house or that little church again. But the image of the pastor walking from his house to his church stuck with me. And in the fifteen years since, I have often—without warning—found myself remembering it. And that’s the end of the story.

But to understand why I tell you that story, you must understand this: At the time this happened, not only did I have little to no familiarity with small, traditional churches like the one in question but I had just spent the last half decade traveling the country as a guest speaker at various megachurches, my sense of identity predicated almost entirely on how big and how busy I could become. Thus, my conception of a “good church” at the time looked nothing like this one, and my conception of a “good life” looked nothing like the one this young pastor was living.

I would soon, of course, go on to live a similar life—and I don’t doubt that my decision to do so was in some small way influenced by the impression this moment made on me—but that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is to tell you about how I, fifteen years later, suddenly recognized why this moment had made such an impression on me. And to explain that, I now have to tell you another story—the one that I say encapsulates everything that is to follow.

For my birthday several years ago, some friends brought me a collection of their favorite books, and among those books was Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Unbeknownst to them, Gilead also happens to be one of my favorites: one that I have read several times and often give as a gift to others. I thanked them for the books, put them on a shelf at home, and promptly forgot all about this new copy of Gilead.

Months later, though, while browsing my shelves for a different book, I came across the copy they had given me, and I decided to pull it down. My intention was not to read the whole thing but simply to reenjoy a few key passages. But after reading one page I felt compelled to read a second; and then, after that, a third; and then, before I knew it, I was set on rereading the entire thing.

Upon reflection, it had been nearly eight years since I had last read the book, and, astonishingly, over fifteen years since I had read it for the first time. And as I got about a quarter of the way into the story—the story of an aging minister reflecting on his life and ministry—I came across this passage, and it stopped me cold: “It’s a plain old church … but I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come in. I felt much at peace those mornings, praying.”

And then, twenty pages later, I read this: “Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time.”

And suddenly, I realized with absolute certainty something that had escaped me for fifteen years, something that time was only now “opening” to me: the reconfiguring of my life—the impetus behind my becoming the kind of pastor I had become and the kind of man that I now am—had begun through spending time in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, and through observing the fictional character of John Ames, but I had never even realized it. In other words, through that novel, a transformation had begun in me at such a deep level, and in such an unassuming way, that I didn’t even know it was happening.

And here is the crucial point of the story: despite how readily I had cited the book as a favorite, and despite how many copies of it I had given away to others, never once had it occurred to me that it had played such a pivotal role in shaping who I had become.

But it had.

Had I not read Gilead two years before that Habitat build, and had the world Robinson created not appealed so deeply to me, there is no chance that, in seeing that young minister walk from his house to his church that day, I would have thought, “That seems like a nice life.” Without Gilead, the internal conditions necessary for that visceral response would simply not have been possible.

So there’s the story. And as I said in the beginning, if it does not resonate with you, or if it fails to be sufficiently compelling, the rest of this book may prove to be unhelpful as well. But before giving up on me, allow me to tell you one other story, this one about why I was even at that Habitat build to begin with.

You see, six months earlier I’d been a high school English teacher with no discernible plans of going to seminary. Still deeply desirous of fame and still deeply driven by personal ambition, I had already crashed and burned as an aspiring actor and, more recently, had published a book that, depending on one’s philosophy, may or may not have made a sound as it fell out of print.

I was still receiving invitations from churches to appear as a “guest speaker,” but those were drying up, and I was now uncertain not only of what I wanted to do but of who I wanted to be, and I had fallen into teaching by accident. A friend, knowing I needed a steadier job and knowing I had a degree in literature, had connected me with a local high school in need of an English teacher.

When I accepted the job, I told myself that it would be a stopgap thing, something to do while I figured out what was next. But I quickly found that I loved teaching—loved it so much that there were days when I would imagine myself doing it for thirty more years. Unfortunately, there were also days when I couldn’t imagine myself doing it for thirty more minutes.

I went back and forth like that for two years, vacillating between a desire to make a career out of teaching and a desire to make a break for the door. All the while I struggled to understand the pendulous nature of what was happening; I struggled to see how I could be so enthusiastic about something one minute and so disenchanted with it the next.

But then, through this experience, I underwent the first stirrings of a “call” to ministry—and it took place on account of a Leo Tolstoy short story.

The story is called “The Long Exile,” and, in assigning it, I assumed that my students would be only marginally interested. I was wrong. Because, as the story ended, my students were irate. The story had violated their basic belief in justice, and they weren’t going to suffer it quietly.

I was stunned. We had read so many great stories together that year, yet never—not once—had my students reacted to a story the way they reacted to this one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Thomas G. Long
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Permission to Read Freely
• Section One: All the Reading We Don’t Remember
• Section Two: Not Just a Luxury
• Section Three: for Whatever Reason
• Postscript
• Notes