Not sure where to start?
Try our reading paths — books in order, with a guide for each step（5）→
As a young British missionary, James O. Fraser went alone into the borderlands of Yunnan. He planted churches, devised a written script for the Lisu language, translated the Bible and recorded the history of the Lisu people, giving his whole life for them. Written by his daughter Eileen Crossman, Mountain Rain draws on the diaries and letters of Fraser's thirty years of missionary service, giving a true picture of the fierce spiritual battles he faced and the renewal and breakthroughs that came amid pressures from without and within.
J. Oswald Sanders, General Director of the China Inland Mission (OMF) 1954–1969, on leadership as servanthood (1967): the qualities of a spiritual leader drawn from Scripture and missionary lives, and the costs of leading. A staple of church leadership training.
Dever's account (2000) of what makes a church healthy by the Bible's measure rather than by size: expositional preaching, biblical theology, the gospel, conversion, evangelism, membership, discipline, discipleship and leadership.
Tripp's widely translated guide (1995) from Proverbs 4:23: behaviour flows from the heart, so parenting aims not at mere compliance but at leading children to the gospel, with practical counsel for each stage from infancy to the teenage years. Published in Chinese as 子女心，父母情 (simplified) and 牧養孩子的心 (traditional).
Gary Thomas's Sacred Marriage (2000; Chinese edition 2006) asks: what if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy? Marriage as a spiritual discipline in which we learn to love, forgive, persevere, pray and serve.
The best-known introduction to reading Scripture well (1981, many revisions). Two scholars show how to ask what a text meant then and means now, genre by genre: epistles, narrative, Acts, Gospels, parables, law, prophets, Psalms, wisdom and Revelation.
Elisabeth Elliot's account (1957) of her husband Jim and four fellow missionaries speared to death in 1956 while seeking to reach the Waorani of Ecuador, drawn from their diaries and letters. A classic of missionary obedience.
Wang Mingdao's autobiography at fifty (1950): childhood, conversion, years alone with the Bible in Beijing, the founding of the Christian Tabernacle, and his refusal to join the Japanese-sponsored church union during the war. Soon after, he spent over twenty years in prison.
Timothy and Kathy Keller's 2011 book, from a sermon series on Ephesians 5: marriage as covenant rather than feeling, shaped by the gospel of Christ's self-giving love, with chapters on singleness and on complementary roles.
Gary Chapman's 1992 bestseller: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Learning to speak your spouse's love language fills their "love tank" — the most practical book on this path.
Robert E. Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism (1963): not techniques but the method of Jesus himself — selection, association, consecration, impartation, demonstration, delegation, supervision and reproduction. His plan was not to win crowds but to raise up disciples who would make disciples.
Elisabeth Elliot's Quest for Love (1996), a companion to Passion and Purity: thirty chapters built on letters from readers about singleness, waiting, purity, failure and grace, and marriage, with the love stories of missionaries such as Adoniram Judson and Hudson and Maria Taylor. Chinese edition 1998.