How to Build a Reading Life as a Pastor: Theological Reading That Actually Forms You

Pillar: Leadership Formation | Read Time: 9 min

The Pastor Who Has Stopped Reading

I can almost always tell when I'm talking to a pastor who has stopped reading seriously. Not from what they say, but from the texture of how they think — the absence of new complexity, the reliance on the same frameworks they've had for years, the inability to surprise me with an idea I haven't encountered.

The pastor who has stopped reading has stopped growing. Not stopped working — they may be working very hard. But growing, in the direction of genuine theological depth, intellectual suppleness, and the capacity to say new things to old questions.

The Distinction That Changes Everything: Reading for Information vs. Reading for Formation

Most of us were trained to read for information: reading to obtain content that we can use, that we can preach, that we can reference, that we can quote. This is not bad. But it is insufficient.

Reading for formation is different in its purpose and its pace. It is reading that allows the text to work on you — to confront you, to reshape you, to expand your capacity for thought and feeling. It is slower. It requires sitting with passages rather than extracting them. It often produces not notes but silence.

The pastor who reads only for information will have a full notebook and a shallow soul. The pastor who reads for formation will have a different quality of interior life — the kind that produces depth in preaching, wisdom in pastoral care, and the authority that comes from genuine encounter with great ideas.

What to Read

Scripture (again, differently)

The pastor who has preached through much of the canon sometimes loses the ability to read Scripture as a reader rather than as a professional. The exegetical distance that technical study requires can become an obstacle to genuine encounter.

Read the Bible in a translation you don't normally use. Read long passages without stopping to exegete. Read the Psalms at night. Read Job in one sitting. Let it be strange again.

The Great Theologians

The pastors who have the deepest theological instincts in my experience have read widely in the history of Christian thought — not because they are academic theologians, but because exposure to great theological minds stretches the range of available thought.

Recommended starting points: Augustine's Confessions and City of God. Calvin's Institutes. Wesley's sermons. Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections. Karl Barth's Dogmatics in Outline. N.T. Wright's Christian Origins and the Question of God series.

You will not agree with all of them. That is exactly the point. Disagreeing with a theological giant is more formative than agreeing with a competent contemporary.

Pastoral Theology and Biography

The lives of pastors who have gone before — their struggles, their failures, their formation — are among the most valuable reading a pastor can do. Eugene Peterson's memoirs. Charles Spurgeon's autobiography. Amy Carmichael's letters. John Newton's correspondence. These are not abstract theology — they are theology lived out in ordinary human lives.

Literature and the Humanities

The pastor who reads only theology will produce sermons that know about human beings but do not know them. Fiction, poetry, history, and biography develop the imaginative capacity to inhabit other people's experience — the capacity that pastoral empathy requires.

Read Dostoevsky. Read Marilynne Robinson. Read Wendell Berry. Read poetry. Read history. Let the fullness of human experience that literature contains do its work on you.

Building the Practice

Protect morning reading time

The reading that forms you cannot happen in the margins of a busy day. It requires protected time — ideally at the beginning of the day, before the demands of ministry crowd out everything else.

Even 30 minutes of serious reading in the morning, five days a week, produces 130 hours of reading per year. At a modest pace, that is 20-30 books. Over a 30-year ministry, that is 600-900 books. The compounding effect is significant.

Read with a pencil

Underlining, marginal notes, and genuine annotation engage your mind with the text in a way that passive reading cannot. You are not just receiving; you are responding, questioning, connecting.

Keep a reading journal

A simple record of what you've read, with one or two paragraphs of honest response to each book, serves multiple purposes: it forces genuine engagement (you cannot write honestly about something you've only skimmed), it creates a record of intellectual development, and it makes connections between ideas more visible over time.

Build a library worth owning

The congregation that calls a pastor to serve them is also calling them to think seriously on their behalf. A genuine library — books selected with care, read with attention, annotated with honesty — is a pastoral tool as important as anything in your ministry toolkit.

Don't just download. Own books. Mark them. Return to them. The relationship with a book you've lived with for twenty years is different from the relationship with a book you read once.

Conclusion

The reading life of a pastor is not a luxury for those with spare time. It is a basic component of pastoral formation — the ongoing investment in the mind and soul that ministry requires and that the congregation deserves.

Read widely. Read slowly. Read for formation, not just information. And never stop.

The pastor who keeps reading has, over the decades, an inexhaustible supply of what ministry most requires: genuine depth, the capacity for genuine surprise, and the intellectual humility that comes from years of encountering minds greater than your own.