videos and study guide

Becoming Worldly Saints was published last Tuesday, and this Tuesday we are releasing free videos and Bible lessons for an eight week small group study. If you enjoy the book and think the content is worth passing on, these videos and study questions will lead your group into the Scriptures and some provocative conversations.

I want to add a word about the business side of publishing. This part makes me uncomfortable, so I’ll only say it this one time. We live in a free market, which gives us the opportunity to vote with our dollars. Every purchase is a vote. Whenever we attend a movie, eat at Chick-Fil-A, or fly to Florida, we are telling the producers of films, chicken sandwiches, and airplanes to make more of them. We inevitably get more of whatever we buy and less of whatever we don’t. That’s a privilege, and also a responsibility (hint: buying a ticket to Fifty Shades of Gray is wrong for more reasons than you might think).

You may have heard that people seem to be buying fewer books these days, which has thrown the publishing world into a bit of turmoil. It’s still easy for famous people to publish books, as enough people care about what Joel Osteen or Justin Bieber thinks about any subject. It’s the same reason I ask who is in the movie before I say whether I’m interested in watching it. I get it.

The downside is that less famous authors have a less certain future. Nearly every publisher now asks potential authors about the size of their platform. The author may have a terrific book that addresses a real need, but it will be tough sledding if her following is too small. One of my friends in publishing says: “The door in publishing will stay open as long as your book sells. It will begin to close when it doesn’t.”

I don’t mean to sound like a politician, but I am asking for your vote. If you would like to have more books like Becoming Worldly Saints, you can vote for it buy purchasing a copy, leaving a review on Amazon (this is important!), blogging, tweeting, or commenting on Facebook or other social media sites. Word of mouth still works too. The more votes that are cast, the more likely that publishers will continue printing Becoming Worldly Saints, and books like it.

That’s all I ever want to say about that. I hope you and your group enjoy the videos. If you do, please tell others about them. Together we can increase the number of worldly saints—people who enjoy earthly pleasure while pursuing heavenly purpose.