Not sure where to start?
Try our reading paths — books in order, with a guide for each step（5）→
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.
Written by a tinker imprisoned for preaching, the great allegory of the Christian life (1678; part two 1684): Christian flees the City of Destruction, loses his burden at the cross, and passes Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle to the Celestial City. First translated into Chinese in 1853.
The conversations and letters of Brother Lawrence, a lay brother who worked for many years in a Paris monastery kitchen, gathered after his death. A short classic on practising God's presence in every ordinary moment, cherished by Catholics and Protestants alike.
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.
E.M. Bounds (1835–1913), Methodist pastor and former Civil War chaplain, famed for his early-morning prayer. Power Through Prayer (1907) insists that the power of preaching lies not in method or eloquence but in the praying life of the preacher. Chinese translation by Philip Teng.
The creed of the first ecumenical councils. Against Arius, Nicaea (325) confessed the Son "begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father"; Constantinople (381) expanded the article on the Holy Spirit. Shared by East and West.
Compiled from the forty-odd surviving diaries of John Sung (1901–1944), China's great revivalist, together with his two dictated memoirs — My Testimony (1901–1931, recorded by Wang Minxue, 1933) and Looking Back on the Work (1931–1938, recorded by Zheng Suilan) — and his letters and hymns. Sung himself proposed the title in his diary in 1932. An intimate record of his inner life, through to his final night in 1944.
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.
Looking at Mission from Acts (1988) by James Hudson Taylor III, great-grandson of Hudson Taylor, missionary to Taiwan and founding president of China Evangelical Seminary: God's mission from Genesis to Malachi, the Great Commission, and the church's advance from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth in Acts — a call to mission for the Chinese church.