guest post: Deb on the book club that's not a book club

How do you encourage other women when you don't have much time? Here's a brilliant idea from Deb: the book club that's not a book club. You could easily run something similar at your church - because it doesn't take much running at all.

Is it a regular book club? No. It all started, funnily enough, after reading your blog.

I was reading a lot about ministry and family, and some of your posts about balancing ministry and family in particular. I was also reading posts from your blog and EQUIP books about Carolyn Mahaney's Feminine Appeal.

I was ordering the book when I thought to myself, "I'm going to read this book anyway. Why not see if anyone else wants to read it too?" I thought I'd end up meeting with two people [many more came!]. I made it a one-off meeting because that's all I felt I could reasonably commit to and I thought people would be more likely to join in if it was only a single meeting time too.

This is my plan [she's done this twice now]: if I'm going to read a book I think might have wider appeal, and if it's not too soon after I've invited people to join in with the last book, I send around an email to every woman in the church directory (even if I don't know them!) and invite them to join in.

I make it clear that it's a general invite, and if they're not interested to just press delete and forget about it. So no pressure. I offer to do the ordering for them if they want, or they can chase their own copy.

I have given myself a couple of rules about the books I choose to share:

(1) It's a book I haven't read before. I don't want to start going down the path of reading a book and then thinking, "Now, the women in my church have a real problem in this area and I think they ought to all read this book." I'm working on "the plank in my own eye" principle. I try to do some firm investigating into the book to check that it's not going to have dodgy theology but that's not too hard to do.

(2) It's a book I'm going to read anyway. That links into the first rule - not choosing books because you think they are going "fix" other people - and also means that if no one, or only two, people want to join in, it's no big deal to me. I was going to read the book anyway. So I don't worry too much about the book selection in the sense of trying to find a book that the maximum number of women in the congregation will enjoy. I just pick a book I'm going to appreciate, and learn from, and go from there.

So that all flowed from the idea of balancing ministry and family. With a young family, I'm not up to much external ministry at present. But if I think about extending what I already do as an individual to include other people, I can manage to be involved in God's work without driving myself into the ground.

images are from Landahlauts and chelmsfordpubliclibrary at flickr