Book Review: Easter Reading

At church, I've put together a small selection of Easter reading. They're all fairly short books designed to help people understand and reflect on the Easter story and the Easter message. Some are focused more on the believer. Some are intended to be given away to help unbelievers engage with the gospel message. I thought I'd do a brief review of our main giveaways here and I'll do another post on some of our alternatives next time.

How One Weekend Can Give You Everything You Ever Wanted

How One Weekend Can Give you Everything You Ever Wanted is our main Easter giveaway book for adults this year. I think it a well-written and engaging book looking at the Easter message. In particular the focus is on how universal human longings like love, significance, freedom and peace are not found anywhere but in Jesus and the Easter message.

It's 60 pages long, with short chapters addressing 8 longings of the human heart met in Jesus with some surrounding material on the Easter story and our response to it.

This is less a book on the evidence for Jesus' death and resurrection and more a book on the implications of the Easter message. In some ways, I think this is a often a more helpful approach with lots of people today, who are looking not some much for proof but for meaning and hope.

Empty

Empty is our children's giveaway this year. It's a fun little book (32 pages) full of great illustrations and with the simple message that the empty tomb is great new for us. It includes a brief telling of the Easter story and an explanation (in simple terms) of what that means for us.

It's very much aimed at primary aged children (perhaps even the younger end of that), which is what we have at the moment. It would be a good Sunday School giveaway and great for schools, school services etc.

Easter: Hope for Tomorrow

Easter: Hope for Tomorrow is our main devotional giveaway. It's free from Our Daily Bread in the UK and contains 7 Easter-focused devotions plus 7 Easter-focused 5-minute Bible studies. I especially liked the Bible studied as they got you to look at a passage and answer questions for yourself.

You can read through it on their website. I think it's a lovely little booklet for a week around Easter (whether before or after) and maybe a great way to get people into daily Bible reading (something I'm always on the look out for). It has the Bible passages printed in it and you could easily fit it in a pocket to take with you on a commute or to read over a lunchtime. You can also get a large print edition if that's going to be useful in your context.

So those are our main giveaways. We're a tiny church, so don't think I've been ordering hundreds of these. The only thing we tend to do that with is the Life magazine. I deliver around 500 of those every quarter when it comes out. The goal with these books is to have a few for people who come to church to take, read and pass on.