It’s official: reading is on-trend.

‘Lit girls’ are the new ‘it girls’. BookTok is flourishing, launching new genres and bringing new attention to old classics. High street clothing emblazoned with bookish slogans allows you to advertise your allegiance to the clan.

Far from being a solitary hobby pursued by introverts, this is reading as a social pursuit. Celebrity book clubs and podcasts abound, and reading retreats are the new party holidays. For Gen Z, who are leading the revolution, books are a way to start conversations, not avoid them.

I’m in a book club. Perhaps you are, too? We meet weekly at someone’s house to repeatedly read and discuss the same book, year after year: an ancient, genre-busting compendium of prophecy, poetry, and parable. The aim is not to give it a rating out of five. We expect what we read to speak to our lives. To teach us how to live, even. With this particular bestseller, reading is more than a source of entertainment. It’s access to truth.

I don’t talk about it as much as I should. I’m much more likely to extol the virtues of the latest historical fiction or memoir than, say, the Gospel of Luke. Perhaps I’m not alone. It seems many Christians now shy away from Scripture-heavy speeches for fear of ‘Bible bashing’, an approach that reduces the words of life to a blunt object with which to bludgeon people.

But the good news has always spread by word of mouth – and it’s news people are hungry for, with Bible sales skyrocketing over the last five years. So, even if it feels too much to preach a sermon to those on your frontlines, why not tell them a story? A story taken from the extraordinary collection of wisdom and wonder that forms the foundation of our faith. Or a story about how it has changed your own life. A story ‘written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts’ (2 Corinthians 3:3).

Recite it over coffee, condense it into a WhatsApp message, buy them a copy you can read and discuss together. Put the good news at the heart of your conversation. Show them the power of the Gospel stories to transform lives. And, in doing so, introduce them to the Word made flesh.

Rachel Smith
Rachel is a part-time writer and a full-time mum. She attends King’s Church Durham.