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

what I'm reading: some great Australian novels (including a good choice for a book club)

I've read a few great Australian novels this year.

The first was Kate Grenville's The Secret River, which I noticed on Nic's 2010 reading list. It's the kind of novel reviewers call "powerful", and it certainly packs a punch: it's about emancipated convict William Thornhill, his wife Sal, and the bloody choices he makes to keep the land he will hand down to his children. I confess I don't usually read books about Australia's history, but this gloriously written book won me over. I was fascinated by the descriptions of London and Sydney during the early nineteenth century.

Another Australian author I've enjoyed this year is Alex Miller, recommended by my sister-in-law, who was spot-on when she told me that his great skill is his evocative description of place.

Alex Miller's Journey to the Stone Country is about the relationship between Anabelle Beck, who flees her shattered marriage in Melbourne and escapes to her childhood home in tropical northern Queensland, and Bo Rennie of the Jengga tribe, as they explore their origins together. This haunting book drew me deep into the broken landscape of the stone country.

Alex Miller's Conditions of Faith is again about a woman who flees Melbourne (what's going on here?!). History graduate Emily Stanton marries a Scottish engineer and goes to live with him in Paris during the 1920s. I found this book more interesting than The Stone Country, and it doesn't feel so Australian: its flavour is taken from France and Tunisia.

I was intrigued by how Emily frees herself from the traditional roles of wife and mother as she revisits the story of Christian martyr Perpetua. This would be a fantastic choice for a book club made up of Christians and non-Christians, because in Emily's eyes, Perpetua isn't a Christian martyr (for how could any woman give up her child and die for some myth of eternal life?) but a liberated woman whose story was rewritten by early Christian apologist Tertullion. What a great chance to talk about the reality of eternal life and the way it affects our choices as women!

I'll conclude with a few quotes from Alex Miller's Journey to the Stone Country to whet your appetite:

She remembered him, the hollow space of his absence in her heart now. To love a person, then, is to love him forever. (183)

...intuition, that delicate mode of thoughts in which the spirit of fantasy is partner to the certainty of an inner logic. (169)

Behind her in the kitchen, Matthew and Trace were doing the washing up, laughing and teasing each other, as if they played at domesticity, delicate and light in their approach; a game they might yet hope to abandon without pain. (85)

Memory, intuition, young love: they are described with such tender precision that these quotes all made it into my reading journal.