Founded in 1991, The Good Book Company creates biblical, relevant, and accessible resources to serve the church worldwide. In 2025, we became 100% employee-owned, safeguarding our gospel mission for generations to come.
From a spare bedroom in the UK, our founders Tim and Kathy Thornborough began a publishing ministry with one goal: to create biblical, relevant, and accessible resources that would help Christians grow in their faith and share the gospel.
We began publishing Explore, a quarterly daily Bible-reading resource which quickly gained a reputation for clarity, accessibility and solid theology. We started to grow an enthusiastic and committed subscriber base who were hungry for gospel resources that they could trust and recommend to others.
As both our publishing list and staff team grew, we landed on a new name which embodied our desire to publish good books about the Good Book—the Bible—and to encourage anyone and everyone to open it up and read it for themselves. So The Good Book Company was born. That goal, of course, is still at the heart of everything we do.
We began our long and fruitful partnership with Christianity Explored, collaborating with Rico Tice and his team on a range of outreach courses, books and videos to support churches in evangelism. We’re thankful for many partnerships over the years with wonderful, Christ-centered organisations including Matthias Media, The Gospel Coalition, Truth For Life, CLC, Acts 29 and many more.
As US sales grew, we launched The Good Book Company USA in February 2009 at the Desiring God conference in Minneapolis. Initially based in Illinois and then Virginia, we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2019 and have grown our US team rapidly since then, strengthening global distribution and connecting even more closely with churches and readers across the American continent.
We continued our international growth by developing a partnership with Reformers in Sydney, enabling us to reach more churches in Australia and New Zealand and provide our customers with more efficient distribution.
Timothy Keller’s Galatians For You was published, the first in our bestselling range of accessible-level commentaries, and a further boost for our reputation as a go-to publisher of engaging and faithful resources for the church.
The Christmas Promise was published, marking the launch of our new range of children’s books underpinned with the same commitment to being biblical, relevant and accessible. We quickly grew to become a leading publisher of Christian books for children, with the Tales That Tell The Truth range alone selling over 1 million copies.
We invested in expanding our Rights and Translations activities, working with publishing partners around the globe to provide desperately-needed gospel resources at prices that churches and individuals could afford. We have now passed 750 translations in over 60 languages.
The Good Book Company became 100% employee owned. This step safeguarded our mission for generations to come, giving us a collective voice in our future and keeping Christ at the heart of all that we publish and all that we do.
Even as we respond to the challenges and opportunities that our ever-changing cultural context brings, we remain committed to our founding principle of producing biblical, relevant and accessible resources for all ages, in many languages, for the good of the church and the glory of God.
