Best christian ministry books according to redditors

Three books I recommend highly:

Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God. If you only read one book about the Bible before giving up on it, please make sure it's this one.

Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel does a great job of laying out the ways in which the story the Bible is trying to tell has been distorted and misunderstood by a focus on personal salvation.

N.T. Wright's How God Became King makes a similar case, but fleshes it out from a more scholarly perspective and addresses the political implications of the gospel.

Christ and the Apostles called it "the Gospel."

Modern Evangelicalism has often mixed up the Gospel with a message about individually "getting saved." But if you look at every time the Gospel is actually preached in the New Testament, it boils down to "Israel's history has reached its climax with the coming of its King."

If you're an old-school Christian (Orthodox, Catholic, traditional Anglican) then Scot McKnight's excellent The King Jesus Gospel isn't any big surprise. But for modern Evangelicals it may be an angle they've never heard before - and it resolves the conflict between what Christ actually teaches in the four Gospels, and what gets preached today and called "the Gospel."

You asked why, not for a deductive argument proving the truth of our answers.


If you have intellectual worries about God, feel free to browse the various categories of responses to questions concerning His existence.


If you have doubts about Jesus, only you can answer those for yourself. We believe that He's divine and approaches us all relationally. Read a Gospel or two (John and Mark are my favorites). Get to know the story and seriously ask yourself if this Christ person, as character, speaks to you in any way.


NT Wright is a pretty well regarded orthodox Christian scholar by both Christians and Non-Christians, so you may want to read some of his work if you have questions to address about the truth of this character. Who Was Jesus? and Simply Jesus may help you.


If you find any of that compelling and wish to dig into some Christian theology of Jesus, a couple excellent books which portray my personal take fairly well are King Jesus Gospel and Start Here.

And, of course, if you wish merely to approach the idea of Christianity in general, C.S. Lewis famously asserted many fundamentals in his classic Mere Christianity.


If you want me to assert the truth Christianity by disproving all other religions, I will not. I believe that religion is, fundamentally, a search for the divine or God. If divine truth exists, I would expect it to be echoed throughout the mythic language of all attempts to know Him (religions). Conversely, I assert the goodness and truth of Jesus Christ, who I see as central, and anything else that matters falls naturally into place.

I got you.

Gloria Fuhrman's Missional Motherhood (no, you don't need to be a mom to enjoy this topic.)

Also, Nancy Guthrie has many study materials. And she is fantastic. One of the best women to cover OT stuff.

Wendy Alsup did a study on Ephesians a while back that was excellent. I gotta be honest, I have no idea where she leans theologically these days. But this study specifically is solid.

Here's an article on how to choose studies for women's groups. I feel like most of this applies to women studying on their own.

Also, not a female author but Tim Keller has an excellent study on Galatians. Very good stuff.

Revive our Hearts/Nancy Leigh DeMoss is totally noooot my style. At all. But she co-authored a study on femininity with Mary Kassain and I bought it. It's very good.

short answer: The gospel is the story of Jesus as he answers the story of the Hebrews.

long answer: you should definitely read The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight.

To get a biblical perspective on the Gospel and the life of faith that follows I'd recommend The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight and Social Holiness: A Way of Living for God's Nation (aka Journey Towards Holiness) by Alan Kreider.

This book and this site are probably the two things I have used the most. Basically I just go line by line and translate as I read, and if I stumble upon something which is vague but important theologically, I spend more time on it and search around on jstor or google scholar.

The first step is getting the alphabet down, practice just writing it out once a day, it's ok if you're 'cheating' at first, the point initially is ust memorization through repetition, then you can move onto reading easier.

Note: The book is not a dictionary of Greek words, you can find that online anywhere, it is instead a dictionary of terms you will need to reference while you are learning Greek in general.