My pastor said something Wednesday that has hung with me all week. We were in a Bible study, and he we were talking about some books that would be great for men in the church to read to help them grow. Our pastor pointed out that men don't read and thought it might be a wasted investment to buy books to give men. He shared with us a quarterly devotional that might be a better option, because it was short and required less daily reading.
Admittedly, I don't do a lot of "free reading" at the moment outside of reading my Bible, but I am also in graduate school and my reading is spent on textbooks. Even with my reduced "free reading," I still read when I can.
Do you believe men in general read less than women? Why or why not? Would not a desire for growth and change be a motivating factor?
The majority of people don't read a lot, either for fun or to improve themselves. I had to search for the statistics but here is a good overview of reading trends. It's not a men or women issue; it's an everyone issue.
A 2004 study reported that “literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among allgroups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young. This reflects amassive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information.” Consider thefollowing statistics:
- 58% of the U.S. adult population never read another book after high school.
- 42% of U.S. university graduates never read another book.
- Adults in the U.S. spend four hours per day watching TV, three hours listening to the
radio and 14 minutes reading magazines.
- British teenagers’ pleasure reading declined by about a third from 1991-1998.
- In Denmark on-third of adults do not do any significant amount of reading.
- More than half the adults in the Netherlands hardly ever read a book.
But if I can totally hijack your thread, and if not everyone feel free just to ignore me, the questions I think are relevant to discipline (oops that was supposed to be discipling but sometimes you just have to leave the spell check "corrections" in) non-readers in the church would be: How can we get people who can't / won't read to engage with the truth of scripture on a deep life changing level? How can we make sure that we're not setting up a lack of reading ability as a hurdle to someone knowing and growing in the Lord?
As for this particular situation, I'm hugely in favor of the church library system where the church may have one or two copies of books they'd recommend to people (or maybe choose several books to put together as small group kits) and then those who wish to can check them out and read them. And while I personally love to read and have a bookshelf full of books and a kindle full of other books, my eyes have been opened to the fact that one of the unacknowledged prejudices of Christian ministry is that if you love God enough, you'll love reading the Bible and other Christian books too and it usually leads us to discount the sincerity or faith of those who prefer to take in information about God and everything else in other means.
Sorry if I soapboxed a bit, but the whole idea of orality and reaching those who prefer other means of learning and being informed than reading was what I spent the last 3 years of my life on. And if anyone wants to know more, there's a great PDF (I think it's ) online called making disciples of oral learners, as well as all sorts of stuff you can find by googling orality or chronological Bible storying.