TL;DR: Faith leaders considering a book run into a question other professionals don’t. Is making money from a book in tension with the mission? Is using a ghostwriter honest? Is the book’s purpose ministry or marketing my memoir process, and does the answer make a difference? A short parable about a pastor who worked through these questions, told in third person, then a discussion of what the parable actually shows about the choice. Pastors, rabbis, imams, priests, and lay leaders all face versions of these questions.
Most resolve them poorly or never resolve them at all. Here’s a way to think it through that doesn’t require treating commerce and calling as enemies.
Pastor Davis had been at the church for twenty-two years.
The congregation had grown from about eighty members when he arrived to almost six hundred now. He’d baptized hundreds of people. I’ve written about a book that carried a personal mission. He’d buried more than he wanted to count. He’d taught Sunday school, led mission trips, sat with people through the worst weeks of their lives, and preached every Sunday morning except the four when he had been in the hospital with pneumonia in his second year.
For the last seven years, several members of the congregation had been telling him he should write a book. He had been pushing back. The pushing back wasn’t exactly principled. It was uneasy. The unease had something to do with what kind of person publishes a book about ministry, what their motives might be, and whether his motives would survive the question if he started asking it honestly.
This was the conversation he was avoiding with himself when his wife brought it up over dinner one Wednesday.
What his wife actually asked him
She didn’t ask him to write the book. She asked him why he was avoiding the question. For more, see micromanagers in ghostwriting.
He told her the truth, which was that he was worried about three things. First, that writing a book would feel like building a brand around himself. That wasn’t what ministry was supposed to be. Second, that the book would make money, which would change his relationship with the work in ways he couldn’t predict. Third, that he wasn’t really the writer she and the congregation seemed to think he was, and that any book worth publishing would need someone else’s help to write, which raised a different problem about honesty.
His wife thought about it for a minute. Then she asked him a question he wasn’t expecting. She asked whether he thought the sermons he had been preaching for twenty-two years were ministry or branding.
He said they were ministry. Obviously. Of course they were.
She said: a book is a sermon that reaches further than the room.
He didn’t have an answer for that.
Should a pastor make money from a book?
The money question wasn’t a small one for him. He’d watched televangelists become wealthy. He’d watched megachurch pastors build personal empires that didn’t look much like ministry. He’d watched book deals turn celebrity pastors into something he didn’t want to become.
What he’d to admit, when his wife pressed him, was that the money question wasn’t actually about money. It was about the kind of person he’d be if money entered the work. The fear was about identity, not income.
His wife pointed out that he’d taken a salary for twenty-two years. The church paid him. He paid the mortgage with it. He sent the kids to college with it. The salary hadn’t corrupted his ministry. Was a book that paid royalties categorically different from a salary that paid living expenses? If so, how? He wasn’t sure.
He spent two weeks thinking about this. The conclusion he eventually came to wasn’t that money was unproblematic in ministry. It was that he couldn’t make a principled distinction between earning a salary from preaching to six hundred people and earning royalties from reaching sixty thousand. The work was the same work. The compensation was the same kind of compensation. The identity question was real but it was the same identity question he had been navigating successfully for twenty-two years.
The ghostwriter question
The ghostwriter question was the harder one. He’d assumed, when his congregants suggested he write a book, that they were imagining him sitting down at a computer and producing the book. He hadn’t been able to imagine that. He didn’t have the time. He didn’t have the discipline. He was a preacher, not a writer.
The idea of using a ghostwriter bothered him. It felt deceptive. If his name was on the book and somebody else wrote it, was that not lying to the reader about who produced the work?
He worked through this with a colleague, another pastor who had used a ghostwriter for his own book five years earlier. The colleague asked him a question that he hadn’t considered. Did Pastor Davis think his sermons were his own work, or his secretary’s? His secretary typed them. She organized his notes. She fact-checked his quotations. She found the right Bible passages when he couldn’t remember exact references. She was, in some material sense, a co-author of every sermon he’d preached for fifteen years.
He hadn’t thought of her that way. He’d thought of her as a person who supported his work. The sermons were his because the ideas were his, the structure was his, the delivery was his, the pastoral purpose was his. The fact that she typed them didn’t make them hers.
The ghostwriter, his colleague explained, did the same kind of work. The ghostwriter would interview him at length. The ideas would be his. The structure would be his. The pastoral purpose would be his. The ghostwriter would translate those things into a manuscript that he’d then review, revise, approve, and publish. The book would be his in the same sense his sermons were his.
Pastor Davis spent another week thinking about this. He concluded that the colleague was right. The ghostwriter question, examined honestly, wasn’t a deception question. It was a craft question. The honest book would acknowledge the ghostwriter in the way published books in this category acknowledge collaborators. The dishonest book would pretend nobody helped. As long as the book did the former, it was honest. The decision was about how to disclose, not whether to write.
What he actually decided
He wrote the book. It came out about eighteen months after the conversation with his wife. It was a serious book on pastoral care during the hardest moments in a family’s life, drawing on the twenty-two years of doing that work. The book sold modestly, which he was at peace with. The book reached people he couldn’t have reached from his pulpit. That was the part he eventually came to value most.
The royalties went somewhere. He set up an arrangement with his denomination that directed a significant portion to the pastoral care fund. He kept some for his family. He was open with the congregation about the arrangement. Nobody objected.
The book didn’t change his identity. The fear had been that it would. The fear was unfounded, which is often the case with identity fears about new work. The work changed slightly. The person doing the work didn’t.
What the parable shows
Several things, each of them applicable to other faith leaders considering this question. I did exactly this with a leadership and faith guidebook.
The objection to writing is rarely an objection to writing. It’s usually an identity objection in disguise. The faith leader is worried about what kind of person they’d become if they wrote a book, not whether the book would do good work. The identity question is real but it’s the same identity question every public role brings. It can be navigated. It’s not a reason to refuse the work.
The money question is real but it’s not unique to books. Faith leaders accept salaries, fees, honoraria, and stipends throughout their careers. The book isn’t categorically different from any of those. The principled position on book royalties has to be consistent with the principled position on salaries, or the inconsistency is the actual problem.
The ghostwriter question is the question most faith leaders get wrong. Ghostwriting isn’t deception when properly disclosed. The collaborator does craft work the principal doesn’t have time or training to do, the same way every faith leader works with administrators, editors, and assistants in every other dimension of their work. The book is the leader’s in the senses that matter. The book reaches further than the leader could reach alone. The book serves the mission in ways the leader’s other work cannot.
What should a faith leader’s book be?
Not a sermon collection. Not a doctrinal exposition unless that’s the leader’s gift. Not a personal memoir unless the leader’s life is the story.
For most faith leaders, the book that serves the mission is one of three kinds. A book on a specific pastoral problem the leader has worked with congregants on for years. A book on a theological or ethical question the leader has thought through deeply in their tradition. A book on the practice of ministry itself, written for other leaders or for laypeople wanting to understand the work.
Any of these can be done in the leader’s voice with a ghostwriter’s help, can be financially self-sustaining without becoming financially exploitative, and can reach beyond the local congregation in ways that serve the mission the leader was called to.
What to do this week
If you’re a faith leader who has been pushing back on the suggestion of a book for some time, the conversation to have is the one Pastor Davis had with his wife. What’s the actual objection? Is it identity, money, or craft? Each of those has a principled response. None of them is a reason to refuse the work indefinitely.
The Book Discovery Intensive is a conversation, not a sales pitch. We work through these questions with care for the specific tradition and circumstances of the leader. Book the call if that’s useful. The case studies page has examples of how this has gone for faith leaders and other mission-driven professionals.
The book is, in Pastor Davis’s wife’s phrase, a sermon that reaches further than the room. The question this week is whether your sermon stays in the room or reaches the people the room cannot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related: my memoir process