It is of course fair that just because something rhymes doesn’t make it true, and that old adages also aren’t necessarily true just because they’re oft repeated. It’s also true that not everyone is going to be a hundred book a year plus person; in fact, very few people are going to be in that category.
We live in a moment where if you read 10-12 books a year, slightly less than one a month, you are one of the biggest readers in the world. Our culture is fundamentally post-literate: we still read lots of text buts it’s in short, disconnected chunks that have affected our ability to read and understand a book length argument. I notice this in myself, I’m a reasonably big reader but struggle when reading complex sustained arguments, especially those written more than a century ago. Our ability to comprehend is widely considered to be diminishing.
You might notice this just trying to read the Bible with young people. They struggle to comprehend things sometimes not because of a lack of context or how challenging an idea is, but simply because their comprehension isn’t all that great. They struggle to follow the logic of a sentence all the way to the end of it, not because they’re stupid but because they haven’t had much need to do this elsewhere in life and so haven’t learned this skill. This is true of people from all walks of life, including those we would largely judge to be ‘highly educated.’ We’re post-literate.
This post-literate world is the result of entertainment media spread over decades. We have both amused ourselves to death on television and then scrolled ourselves to death on social media. Neil Postman’s judgement that we live in Aldous Huxley’s brave new world—one dominated by pleasure that makes us docile and dumb—seems to be irrefutable.
Surely, therefore, this is the world of blog posts and podcasts, not books? Surely ‘leaders are readers’ needs to be revamped so that we instead think of leaders as consumers of quality content? Those who learn and stretch themselves? There’s nothing inherently wrong with blog posts and podcasts, though the medium is in some fashion the message. Both can be excellent media that grow us; the opposite is also true.
However, what we need to remember is that God has chosen to communicate with us via the written word. ‘Leaders are readers’ became an oft-quoted adage not because Christian books are essential, but because the Bible is a read book. It’s true that audio Bibles now exist, but the task of following the logic of the argument in one of Paul’s letters, or of following the literary flow of 2 Chronicles, are tasks of reading. Following logic and literary patterns require a reading culture, perhaps a specific one inculcated within your church, even if the individual we’re discussing isn’t much of a reader themselves. Articulating your thoughts cleanly and in a structured way requires writing, which is downstream of reading. To create a reading culture requires readers.
In other words, churches in a post-literate milieu will need to be reading cultures. That’s the case because we want people to encounter Jesus in the written word.
Ultimately, if ‘leaders’ are well steeped in the Bible, they don’t have to read good Christian books. Inevitably those books will be helpful, it would be wise to engage with them, but they don’t have to. We can’t make it law; though I don’t think anyone was really claiming that we needed to. Nevertheless, being well-steeped in the Bible requires you to be a reader belonging to a reading culture. You need to cultivate habits of thought and mind that allow you to follow a sustained argument, that allow you to notice literary patterns, that allow you to understand parts in the context of the whole. These patterns are what we mean by calling someone a reader.
Not everyone will be born with a set of intellectual gifts that makes them good at this. Everyone can improve at it. I hope I’m not claiming that all Christian leaders need to have a certain kind of post-graduate education or come from the sort of wealth that could afford that. I am claiming that all Christian ‘leaders’ need to value the Bible as the living word of God; value the breeze of the centuries that gifts us the work of Christians before us; and value the very best of what our contemporaries have produced to help us live the Christian life, shepherd churches, and understand the text of the Bible.
Ultimately that means ‘leaders’ are readers, and that more importantly they are people who construct reading cultures. Discipleship isn’t all book learning, but when we decide that it isn’t learning at all we end up stuck in the position that much of the charismatic church has found itself in where anything goes theologically. Learning doesn’t require everyone to be a big reader, but since God has chosen to gift us a book, it does require us to be part of a reading culture.
Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash
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