No, you DON’T need to read those books
In a recent article, Matt Smethurst of the Gospel Coalition asked 20 church planters for their list of 3 books every church planter should read. It provides a very instructive insight into the character of the modern western evangelical church.
Looking at the combined list, I have to say I’m dismayed, though not as surprised as I might have been a few years ago.
There are over 60 books on the list (some of the contributors took the phrase “3 books” slightly loosely). A quick glance reveals that almost all of them were written in the last 15 years. Yes, seriously. Unbelievable, right? But true.
There are a few exceptions – a shout-out to Lloyd-Jones; a couple of texts from the 20th (Leon Morris, Ronald Allen) and 19th (Spurgeon, Charles Bridges) centuries. And you need to look carefully at the lists, because in one or two cases the dates given are the dates of reprints, not the dates of first publication. But once you’ve worked through this, you discover that just four of the works hail from earlier eras: Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, and Thomas Brooks.
While it’s encouraging to see this nod to the Puritans, there’s little cause for excitement about their overall contribution of around 7% to the total. What’s astonishing is that none of the books come even from the early Reformers, never mind the Medieval or Patristic eras.
You might say that I’m being a little unfair. After all, the article (and presumably the briefing to the contributors) places emphasis on the particular challenges of church planting. Perhaps the contributors interpreted their brief within this framework – the top three books directed towards this particular ministry.
But even if we grant this point, I’m not sure the defence really holds water. After all, the article itself points out that church planting has been going on “ever since the book of Acts”. One suspects that the same mindset is at work here as is so often found in contemporary theological reflection: we grant that the apostolic era is relevant, and we gesture feebly towards our Reformation and post-Reformation heroes, but we blithely (and insultingly) ignore the rest of church history, as though nothing of relevance to the modern church was done, believed, or written during those centuries. And even when the Reformers insisted sharply on matters of church life with which some today happen to disagree (Calvin’s insistence on weekly communion springs immediately to mind, though the list could be extended almost indefinitely, especially in relational to liturgical matters), we discover that there are all kinds of modern “contextual” reasons why it doesn’t apply in the modern Western world. We’re cripplingly disconnected with the theological and ecclesial riches of the past.
Maybe it’s time to recover C. S. Lewis’s advice on the subject of reading: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.” And by “old,” you can be sure Lewis doesn’t mean, “Given away at the Gospel Coalition conference three years ago.”
I don’t mean to bash the Gospel Coalition. Far from it. I love those guys, and I certainly have the highest admiration for a number of the contributors to Matt Smethurst’s article. And the books that they recommend (OK, some of the books that they recommend) are pretty good (though frankly I do wonder whether we’ll still be making such a fuss about them all in 20 years time). But I can’t avoid seeing in this list a troubling indictment of the extraordinarily small-mindedness of the church tradition in which I serve, the western Reformed evangelical tradition.
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