A few nights ago, I made a ministry visit to a local topless bar. The dressing room was smoky and busy as women prepared for their times on stage. In an economy that baffles even the wealthiest and most brilliant minds in our world, it isn’t hard to understand the desperation often heard in the life stories of the dancers. At some point many of these women looked at their small children and decided their only option was to give themselves over to the basest instincts of man.
As a publisher, I often wonder how words can cross the threshold of a dressing room to bring light into a world of darkness. What kind of writing makes sense to women who live in a culture isolated in many ways from you and me? These women who call us “The Church Ladies” have a worldview shaped by nights and days spent pleasing men whose interest has little to do with love or respect and managers willing to use women’s bodies for financial gain. How can our words gain entry into hearts where barriers of self-protection are firmly in place?
During the eight years I’ve been going to this club, I’ve been surprised at the delight women express when we give them a book. Perhaps a book is the safest encounter with the God we represent. While not every book we publish effectively enters into the lives of these women, I believe we can write in ways that build spiritual bridges to the hardest places in our world.
Even so, a book can only go where we are willing to take it. So what have you read, or what have you written, that needs to go next door, down the street, or across the city? If you don’t take it, who will? Whose life will be changed because you went?
Andrea
The Frankfurt Book Fair claims to be the largest book fair in the world. I believe it after walking every floor of a fair that fills more than six pavilions, most of which are three stories tall and the size of football stadiums.
I went to see the world of publishing so we at New Hope can be better equipped to fulfill our mission. My first experience at this global publishing event confirmed two commitments that Christian publishers, authors, agents, sales reps, and retailers must hold fast.
- We must be successful in the task God has assigned us. A lost world needs access to content that lifts the name of Jesus. The Frankfurt Book Fair provided an unforgettable picture of the smallness of the evangelical section in the world of publishing. An entire floor of a pavilion housed the publishers of the Muslim world. Another floor housed the secular humanism of Europe and Scandinavia. If we are not completely committed to success and to making Christian content available to the world, many may never know God loves them. I have never doubted that New Hope’s mission is important, but now I am evermore convinced we are involved in kingdom work.
- Our content has to be transformational. Whether it is a humorous book, a Bible study, a devotional, or fiction, it has to reveal Truth, who God is, and what He has done in Jesus Christ. I visited with publishers in countries with little or no Christian witness. I am thankful for a publishing focus that allows New Hope to lift up Christ as well as encourage readers to a radical commitment to Christ.
Many of you are preparing boxes for Operation Christmas Child. The promotional video explains that children not only receive a box of gifts, but also a small book in their language that tells them of God’s love. Even a Christmas box filled with gifts is incomplete without the message of Jesus. Everywhere a Christian message is placed in someone’s hands, the transformational value of Christian publishing is realized.
Christ himself wrote it—not with ink, but with God’s living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives—and we publish it.
—2 Corinthians 3:3 (The Message)
Andrea
