The One Thing 445 What your bookshelf says about your ministry: reading as leadership formation (Rory Shiner)
You can usually tell what’s going on in a pastor’s ministry by what’s on their bedside table. Not the books they recommend, but the ones they are actually reading, half-reading, or quietly avoiding.
Rory Shiner opens up his own reading habits and presses the question most of us avoid: are we still being shaped, or just repeating what we learned years ago?
Are we still the kind of people who are learning, so that when we open the Bible we are not simply repeating ourselves, but speaking with fresh clarity shaped by a life still being formed by God’s word?
In this episode:
- What your current reading habits reveal about your ministry
- Why finishing books is often the wrong goal
- The kind of reading that actually feeds preaching over time
- Why reading ahead matters more than scrambling each week
- What poetry, fiction, and biography give you that ministry books cannot
- How shallow reading shapes shallow instincts in people work
- Why curiosity fades in ministry and why it is worth protecting
Toolbox:
Biblical Critical Theory by Christopher Watkin
Collected Poems by Les Murray
Poems Chosen by Paul Kelly
The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis
One Forever by Rory Shiner
Forgiven Forever by Rory Shiner
Raised Forever by Rory Shiner
The World Next Door by Rory Shiner
Credits:
This episode was brought to you by Lending Hands Mortgage Brokers
The One Thing is brought to you by Reach Australia
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