445 What your bookshelf says about your ministry: reading as leadership formation (Rory Shiner)

March 31
41 mins

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Episode Description

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: 

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