Praying for Good Book: Design

We're conscious, here at The Good Book Company, of our need for prayer. We want to be working in God's strength - for God's glory - in God's Kingdom not just pottering about doing what we think is good and right. If you could remembers us in prayer, that would be so much appreciated. To that end, this Wednesday we're continuing to pop up some prayer requests - asking you to pray for us department by department. This week, design:

The design department oversees all things visual here at The Good Book Company. This include the development of covers and internal layouts for our books and resources, typesetting, illustration, advertising, and working with freelance illustrators and designers on larger projects.

It's a busy time at the moment, with several large projects underway.... continue reading

Forget Regret

“You’re 9 years old,” I say to my younger self. “What do you have to be sad about?”

The charcoal portrait, sketched in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur, now hangs in my father’s front room. And I look heroically gloomy. Presumably the artist did his best to capture the merriment of a family vacation, but the face is so sodden with regret it near drags the paper from its frame.

This was no isolated moment of childhood melancholy. "Cheer up," complete strangers would routinely say to me, "it might never happen." ("Too late," I would say under my breath, "it already has.")

I suppose some of us tend that way naturally. We’re always trying to swim back upstream to the moment just before we think it all went wrong. Our minds, sadly, aren’t well-behaved libraries shelved with orderly memoirs. They’re gothic charnel houses piled high with gaudy carousels, furiously spinning out past moments, past conversations, past relationships. What if I had done things differently? What if I had said something else? What if I had been someone else? The linoleum is worn through with pacing. We rehearse and re-rehearse dialogue as if we’re preparing for opening night on Broadway, except there is no play, these conversations ended long ago, and many of the people who shared them with us are long gone. Regret, the barbed wire hula-hoop, loping heavily around the brow, lacerating the skull with each revolve. Regret, the malevolent halo.

“What’s done is done.” “That tree has fallen.” “Why regret things you can’t change?”

Miserable comforters all. They may as well tell someone to ignore an itch they can’t scratch. The unreachability is what makes it so impossible to disregard.... continue reading

Praying for Good Book: Logistics and Print

We're conscious, here at The Good Book Company, of our need for prayer. We want to be working in God's strength - for God's glory - in God's Kingdom not just pottering about doing what we think is good and right. If you could remembers us in prayer, that would be so much appreciated. To that end, over the next few Wednesdays, we'll be popping up some prayer requests - asking you to pray for us department by department. This week, print and logistics:

We're a department which goes unnoticed if we're doing our job. We look after getting a finished product from the editorial department into the right place at the right time, looking right! We liaise with printers, shippers, couriers and warehouses. We print paperbacks, hardbacks, spiral bound, Christmas cards, stickers, display boxes, booklets, tracts, DVDs and CDs. We maintain 7 warehouses around the world and dispatched parcels to over 100 different countries in the last year.

We'd value prayer for:

• accuracy in the finer detail; a small mistake in getting a book printed can mean opportunities missed and gospel money wasted
• Alex as he takes over as our main print buyer from the noble Timmy (who is leaving in August)
• constant reminding and a sense of excitement that the (sometimes) mundane, unseen work we do serves countless Christians around the world

Thank you!

A mixed blessing?

An interestingly named bakery in Tooting, South London. Photo Tim Thornborough

"The weather was really hot on holiday - but it was a mixed blessing, because we all got sunburnt."
"Nuclear power is a mixed blessing - it gives us electricity but also weapons with terrible destructive power."
"Children are a mixed blessing - of course they bring us incredible joy and happiness - but the sleepless nights, the expense, the worry..."

I wonder if you've ever used this phrase in conversation? Many of us have.

We might also be tempted to think that being a Christian is a mixed blessing. The "upside" is enormous after all - forgiveness, eternal life, a new family, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the sure rock of the Bible as our guide in life, joy... I could go on.

But with it comes a whole heap of other stuff that is less pleasant. Misunderstanding, persecution, a task in life that seems impossible, the inner struggle against sin and temptation. None of these things are minor - many of them deeply painful, and last our whole lives.

So if someone said to us: "being a a Christian is a mixed blessing", we might be tempted to nod in agreement - until we looked at our Bibles.... continue reading

Six ways to pray for summer camps

They're going on now… and will throughout the summer. You may well know people you can pray these things for. If you don't, just pick a camp (Ventures is one place to find one) and pray these things for the people on it!

1. Pray for the Bible teaching: that the "gospel [would come] … not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep joy" (1 Thessalonians 1 v 5)
2. Pray that campers who aren't Christians would become Christians: that "they would turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven" (1 Thessalonians 2 v 9-10).
3. Pray that Christian campers would learn how to live out their faith: that they'd know "how to live in order to please God … [and] do this more and more" (1 Thessalonians 4 v 1)
4. Pray that leaders would have Christlike love: loving campers "so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well" (1 Thessalonians 2 v 8)
5. Pray that leaders would have eternal priorities: that they'd think of the campers as "our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ when he comes" (1 Thessalonians 2 v 19)
6. Pray that leaders would make be committed to prayer and practical support for their campers before, during and after camp: "How can we thank God enough for … you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith" (1 Thessalonians 3 v 9-10)

This post was originally posted on 24th July 2012.

My unusual prayer list

Half way down a long stretch of the A3, on my way to work last month, the smoke started pouring out of the car radio. The only time this had happened to me before the car was a blazing wreck within 5 minutes, so my heart raced a little as I looked for somewhere to pull over. But this time, with a gentle "POP" the radio went silent, the smoke stopped, and everything seemed fine.

I'm a bit of a news junkie, so the Today programme is my usual companion on the morning drive to work. It has become part of my morning ritual. Thought for the day; the headlines; the ten past eight interview have all filled my mind with thoughts on the commute. But now there is silence. An enforced "news fast".

And like the other kind of fasting, it has taken me through some stages. First of all irritation (at the cost of replacing the radio). Then hunger: "I wonder what's happening?" Then wondering what to do with my head in the silence. And then working out that this is a great opportunity to use the time proactively. Suddenly, my journey to work has become an opportunity to pray. And I've developed an unusual prayer list.

• Restaurants: Driving down the main street of the suburb I live in, I pray for the progress of the gospel in the home countries of the restaurants I pass. South and North Korea, Japan and Italy all get a look in - and later on, Turkey and India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. I know missionaries in some of those countries, so they get prayed for too.
• Road names: There are a few road names that trigger associations with people I know. So when I turn down Chesterfield Road, I remember to pray for an old friend who comes from there.
• Sports grounds: I pass a golf course and a couple of leisure centres, so Christians in Sport sometimes comes to mind.
• Churches: and of course there are dozens of churches I pass - sparking prayer for their ministry, and the work of evangelism in the local area.

I'm very thankful that the radio broke - and I'm in no hurry to fix it.

We must learn to taste

God doesn’t play fair.

Much to my parents’ concern, I hadn’t been to church for a long time. And yet here I was, in my first term at university, sliding into a pew at St Ebbe’s Church in Oxford.

This, I can promise you, was not the result of any pious yearning on my part. Rather, it was because the congregation counted among its number a particularly lovely second-year student of modern languages.

Where earnest parental pleading had failed, she had proved to be rather more convincing.... continue reading

Questions we'd really not like to think too much about

Met yesterday with an old friend who came up through the youth group I was involved in and who is now a missionary in South Africa. He thanked me for producing the Questions Christians Ask series, and then, like many others, asked me what is next on the list.

I went through the icons on the front of the books, talking about progress with each of them, and the difficulties with getting the level and approach right and with the commissioning some of the titles.

Ben reminded me of a talk I was once asked to give - that I had completely forgotten about. Apparently, I had been asked back to the youth group to talk about UFOs - a subject of deep concern to some of the teenagers at the time. I have not a clue what I said, what Bible texts I referred to, or what kind of steer I gave on the subject - but the conversation reminded me how short-lived some of our concerns can be. As a teenager, I was often involved in intense conversations about UFOs, fuelled by wild speculation from Erich von Daniken's books like Chariot of the Gods (ask any man over 55 and they will fill you in if this is a mystery to you). But it's just not something people talk about now - not in my experience anyway.

And when you read books on apologetics from 20 or 30 years ago, their lists of top questions seem strangely unfamiliar to modern ears - apart from questions about suffering and a God of love. You will search in vain for references to gender and homosexuality in the handbooks on evangelism from a previous generation - but now they are virtually top of the list. Our culture and it's questions just move on.

And our thinking and engagement must move on with them.

In memory of that talk, Ben sent me through the mock-up to the right. It's not a title we are going to publish any time soon - but perhaps there are other Questions Christians No Longer Ask titles you might like to suggest... Answers on a postcard, or by clicking the comment button below...