That Book Inside You May Have Global Impact

Posted on 6/26/2012 by Warren Bird in the Learnings Blog

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get an inquiry from someone who’s seen a book I’ve co-authored and says, “I want to write a book. Help!” I usually point them to several blogs I’ve written that address the issues people typically ask such as: Do I need an agent? Do I write the book and then find a publisher? How do I find someone to help me write? How do the finances work with book writing? Etc. That advice is summarized in one blog here.

Lately I’ve also been encouraging people to think globally about their potential book. As an example, Pete Scazzero’s and my Emotionally Healthy Church book is now in seven languages: English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean, German and Czech.

Certainly not all books lend their message to an international audience. But my latest – Jim Tomberlin’s and my Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work – is one we knew would apply powerfully in many other countries where Christianity has been present for at least a century. So we wrote it with an international audience in mind, solicited international endorsers, and Jim has already lined up speaking engagements in several countries to help them with merger opportunities. We’re actively looking for publishing houses overseas who might want to translate it.

In today’s era church websites potentially have global impact, and our print writings should as well. My advice is to dream big about how your book can help make disciples of Jesus Christ worldwide. For instance I may not know a word of the Czechoslovakian language, but it won’t surprise me to get an email from someone who doesn’t speak a word of English, reads this blog via Google’s “translate” function, gets the Czech version of Emotionally Healthy Church, and finds help for their church or ministry. That’s a really exciting dream, whether that person lives here in the United States, in Czechoslovakia, or somewhere else on this planet!