On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.

I asked Matthew Bingham—author of A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation—about what’s on his bedside table, his favorite fiction, the books he regularly revisits, and more.

What’s on your nightstand right now?

My usual method is to be actively reading three different books at any given moment: a novel; a Christian book; and a non-Christian, nonfiction book.

So, at present, I’m reading Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. Slow, meandering, and strange, the story relates the work of two Catholic clergymen serving in the harsh and difficult conditions of 19th-century New Mexico. I’ve always enjoyed novels that reflect on life in ministry, even when the ministry depicted is wildly different from my own.

My current Christian book is Workers for Your Joy: The Call of Christ on Christian Leaders by David Mathis. This is an edifying, helpful, and clear book in which Mathis uses the biblical qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 to explore the task of Christian leadership more broadly. It’s an effective approach that feels both familiar and fresh. And, unlike the characters in Cather’s novel, Mathis is working out of a theological and contextual paradigm fully aligned with my own. This is a book that would be great to read with a team of elders, and it’s one I hope to read alongside students at Phoenix Seminary in years to come.

Finally, my current non-Christian, nonfiction selection is a relatively new book by the cultural critic Christine Rosen titled The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Over the years, I’ve benefited greatly from books on technology and how technological developments shape the ways we think and experience the world around us (e.g., Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, and 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You by Tony Reinke). In The Extinction of Experience, Rosen considers how digital culture, broadly conceived, alters our perception of reality by attenuating our connection with the physical world around us.

What are your favorite fiction books?

Some novels that I’ve especially enjoyed over the years include The Talented Mr. Ripley (and its sequels) by Patricia Highsmith, That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

One of the great joys of fiction is its inherent capacity to transport us to faraway places. My family lived in the United Kingdom for 10 years, and during that time I increasingly thought about the America I’d left behind. In response to this longing for home, I was drawn to novels set in big, open landscapes of the American West. During this time, I found great delight in the novels of Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, A. B. Guthrie, and others, all of which transported me from the pleasant, tame, green spaces of southeast England to the harsh, wild, unforgiving terrain in which the novels were set. Films can also communicate that sense of transport and vicarious experience, but for me, novels accomplish this in a much more intense and lasting way.

This past summer, our family left the United Kingdom, returned to the United States, and has settled in Phoenix; perhaps this will be the year that I take up novels set back in England so I can return there, if only in my mind!

What biographies or autobiographies have most influenced you and why?

Three stand out: one is the most impressive, another the most enjoyable, and a third the most edifying.

The most impressive biography I’ve ever read is The Power Broker by Robert Caro. The book chronicles the life and times of Robert Moses, an urban planner and public official in New York who wielded incredible power and influence across 40 years, despite never once being elected to public office. The subject may seem dull and obscure, but in Caro’s hands it’s absolutely gripping. He vividly brings to life his subject’s context and masterfully draws out the cross-cutting themes of Moses’s life and career. The result is a work that moves chronologically and yet maintains an impressive sense of coherence and unity.

The most enjoyable autobiography I’ve ever read is Louis L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man. The word “idiosyncratic” doesn’t even begin to do justice to this highly unusual memoir. L’Amour lived a life as exciting as any of the characters in his novels, and in this odd but delightful book he communicates a sense of adventure while also giving fascinating insight into his own reading habits and the books that shaped him.

Finally, the most edifying biography I’ve ever read is Iain Murray’s two-volume biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Though perhaps overly long at times, Murray’s vivid portrait of “the Doctor” is as absorbing and encouraging a book as you’ll find. Lloyd-Jones is presented as a man utterly convinced that Christian ministry and biblical preaching is the most important work a man can find in this life. For me, reading the life of Lloyd-Jones while living and working in London made for an especially compelling experience.

What are some books you regularly reread and why?

Though I can’t say I’ve ever properly reread it all the way through since the initial reading, I do often return to the essays collected in Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. Birkerts writes beautifully on life, memory, and the value of reading literature in a world that seems to have abandoned the practice. More than anything else I’ve ever encountered, the essays in this volume get inside the experience of reading a novel and explain why it’s so uniquely rewarding.

The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis is, however, a book that I can say honestly claim to have read and reread in the proper sense. The book manages to communicate profound wisdom in a wonderfully clever and entertaining way. I love the breadth of the book’s vision as Lewis, among other things, warns against the dangers of prosperity, extols the value of true courage, and presents to the reader a typology of laughter—the book is as wide as life itself.

What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?

Many books come to mind, but four stand out as having been especially important for me. First, Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome by Kent and Barbara Hughes helped me to meditate on what contentment in ministry looks like and to focus on faithfully doing the work the Lord had put in my hand to do rather than imagining other work that he might one day give me to do.

Second, Mark Dever’s Nine Marks of a Healthy Church totally recalibrated my philosophy of ministry and rooted me in a more biblical sense of what the church is called to do and how the church is called to do it.

Third, as I’ve transitioned from local church ministry to working in a seminary context, I’ve been shaped and inspired by David Calhoun’s two-volume history of Princeton Theological Seminary. The leaders of so-called Old Princeton—individuals like Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield—modeled courage, intellectual rigor, and godliness, and they poured that ethos into the seminary and its students. Among other things, their example should put to rest any insinuation that a genuine tension exists between the head and the heart in Christian life and learning. Rather, they model how deep thoughts about God fuel and fire an abiding love of God, and that’s something I want to communicate to our seminary students today.

What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?

I wish that every pastor would read Don Carson’s wonderful book Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson. In this account of his father’s ministry among small congregations in Canada during the mid-20th century, Carson does a service for all pastors by showing how God is glorified in and through “ordinary” ministry.

A lot of time and attention and praise is directed toward those whose careers in Christian service occupy prominent pulpits and high-profile positions. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself (see, for example, the Lloyd-Jones biography mentioned above), but if those are the only stories we ever hear, we risk forgetting that such isn’t the experience of most ministers and most ministries.

Carson’s book celebrates pastoral ministry without downplaying its challenges and strains, a feat accomplished largely by putting the mundane and often exhausting nature of the work into its proper biblical context, a context in which weary workers can rest in the promise that “in the Lord [their] labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58).

What are you learning about life and following Jesus?

I’m learning that the Christian life is lived one day at a time: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (Matt. 6:34). And the Lord is sufficient and generous to us in every stage and season: “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound” (Ps. 4:7). We often want to see far down the path, but God doesn’t promise us that sort of knowledge. Rather, he promises to go with us and be for us as we step into the unknown, and that faithfulness is more than enough.