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Before we get to the subject of why Christian books are so vital, a follow up from last week’s post about being a ‘conservative’. Geoff Robson, who has taken over much of the editorial work I used to do at Matthias Media, got in touch to share a great quote from Peter Jensen. Geoff writes:

You reminded me of when PFJ became Archbishop (when I’d been working at Anglican Media for just over a year), and the media picked up on the label ‘radical conservative’ that had been applied to him at some point. He said he liked the label and accepted it (I had to transcribe the press conference for work, so I still have it filed away!). PFJ said:

Only a conservative could be radical. A conservative, to my mind, is someone who takes matters through to the foundations and is convinced about the foundations. In a postmodern world, this is rare. And indeed some of the flack we get, as a Church—with complaints about the way we behave and the way we speak—are simply a misunderstanding. We are very serious people, with a serious intellectual and moral agenda in a world where these things are treated somewhat as though they don’t matter as much.

Now, we have certain base convictions which are terrifically important to us. Having those base convictions frees us to be extraordinarily flexible about things that are of secondary nature.

Precisely.

But onto this week’s post, which is about bananas and Christian books.

The road to spiritual health is paved with Christian books

As a writer arguing in favour of Christian books, I feel a bit like a banana-grower arguing in favour of bananas—like my family did when I was growing up.

My dad’s people grew bananas at Dunoon, outside Lismore. My grandfather was even the president at one time of the North Coast Banana Growers Federation (he was the Big Banana, you could say).

So it is hardly surprising that our family consumed bananas in impressive quantities and in every conceivable format. We had them mashed on bread, sliced onWeet-Bix and baked in the Queen of All Cakes (banana cake with lemon icing). We ate them raw, frittered and barbecued. They were our morning tea, our afternoon tea and our sneaky late-night snack.

We were banana people, and had the banana key rings and other banana-themed merchandise to prove it. This poster was on the wall on the back verandah:

It always struck me that having a road paved with banana peels was also quite possibly dangerous to health. But perhaps the banana lobby could be forgiven for overlooking this. What else would you expect them to be but blindly and joyously pro-banana?

I feel rather like this in arguing that the road to spiritual health is paved with Christian books. What else would I say, as a life-long Christian writer and publisher?

However, it’s a little different. I’m not sure that a conviction about the all-purpose benefits of bananas was the reason my grandfather spent his life growing and promoting them. Perhaps it was—maybe the banana passion came first, and then the desire to grow them. But it has certainly been that way with me. It’s precisely because of a strong conviction about the value of Christian books that I’ve spent my ministry life writing, editing and publishing them.

That conviction has three pillars.

The first is a theological belief in the power of the word. It’s a cliché to say that we live in a visual age where people prefer to watch rather than to read. This is true, but only in so far as it is a description of every age. People have always preferred the immediacy of the visual. This is why that little thing called idolatry—the worship of a visual representation of the divine—is condemned so widely and vigorously in the Bible. It has always been humanity’s besetting sin.

The ‘humil