Not Enough Time to Read?

As "idea professionals," pastors can never read enough. You have to keep up on church growth literature, business/management/leadership practices, and theological and cultural trends. And you have to make time to feed your own soul.

Here are a few great resources:

ChristianBookSummaries.com - FREE. This site has a large library of summarized Christian books. Most are contemporary. Some are classics. You can sign up to get an email each time they upload a new summary. The books are well-summarized (about 8 pages each) and easy to move through quickly. You might find the quick summary read-through is enough (it took 200 pages to say that???). Or you might find that you want to buy the whole book. Either way, you've saved quite a bit of time and kept up on some recent Christian thought.

Tarrant Baptist Association - FREE. Also has a bunch of great Christian (and some business) book summaries. They seem to be less professional and all html-based, but I've gotten a lot of interesting reading out of them. They also seem to have some more up-to-the-minute titles.

PastorResources.com - FREE. If you go to the "bookshelf" section, you can see summaries (and/or excerpts) of very recently published books. I've actually found several very interesting books from here that I have put on my amazon.com wish list. You can also sign up for a weekly email that includes 4-5 book summaries each week.

Executive Book Summaries - NOT FREE. The site that started it all. Get all of the best and most recent books on management, leadership, sales, marketing, cultural trends, etc. This is a subscription service. It's a little pricey, but not nearly as much as you'd pay for the books (and time to read them, to boot). Download some free samples, while you're there.