equip the Church

There is a tendency in Christian publishing circles to celebrate the publisher that sells the most copies. A book that moves 50,000 units gets talked about. A book that moves 800 copies does not. But this way of measuring success imports a commercial logic into a ministry context where it does not belong, and it obscures a distinction that matters enormously for how we think about, fund, and support Christian publishing work.

There are two kinds of Christian publishers, and the Church needs both.

The formational publisher

The first kind specializes in books that train leaders. These publishers produce grammars, homiletics textbooks, systematic theologies, preaching guides, and pastoral training resources. Their audience is relatively small by definition: pastors, seminarians, biblical counselors, church planters, and theological educators. A book on preaching will not become a bestseller. A Hebrew lexicon will not go viral. But the pastor who is formed by those resources will spend the next thirty years forming a congregation, and that congregation will shape families, communities, and the next generation of leaders.

The formational publisher does not reach the masses directly. It reaches the people who reach the masses. That is not a limitation. It is the whole point.

The financial reality of formational publishing follows directly from its audience. Small, specialized readerships mean lower sales volumes, which means the ministry cannot sustain itself through revenue alone. Formational publishers depend on donors, not because they are poorly run, but because the math of specialized content and limited audiences will never close the gap through sales. Treating that donor dependence as a weakness is a category error.

The popular level publisher

The second kind reaches the wider church. These publishers produce devotionals, Christian living books, introductory theology, and accessible treatments of the faith for ordinary readers. They often publish fewer titles but sell significantly more copies per title. Over time, a healthy popular level publisher can build a self sustaining operation because their sales volume covers costs. Their reach is broad and direct, straight to the congregation, the kitchen table, and the night stand.

These publishers are doing something the formational publisher cannot do. A book like Gentle and Lowly reaches someone who will never take a seminary course. That matters. The Church is not only its pastors and leaders, and the resources it needs are not only technical or theologically deep.

A false competition

The mistake is setting these two kinds of publishing against each other, or worse, evaluating both by the same metric. Copies sold is a meaningful health indicator for the popular level publisher. It is nearly meaningless as a success measure for the formational publisher. The better question for a formational publisher is whether their books are landing in the hands of people who are training others. A pastoral training manual that reaches 400 pastors in a given region is doing exactly what it should, even if it never cracks a thousand copies.

This distinction also changes what success looks like and how we talk to donors. For the formational publisher, copies sold is the wrong number to lead with. The right question is how many formal and non-formal training programs are actually using these resources. How many seminaries have adopted this book? How many pastor training networks have built this book into their curriculum? How many biblical counselers are assigning this material to those they are counseling?

That is where the impact lives, and that is where formational publishers need to grow their presence and their tracking. A publisher that can walk a donor through that kind of reach is telling a far more compelling story than one that simply reports print runs. The case to a donor is not about sales at all. It is: these resources are shaping the men and women who will shape the Church for decades, and here is the evidence.

A personal illustration

For a number of years, I was involved in building Publications Chrétiennes to serve the French speaking world, with a particular focus on training leaders. That meant raising significant donor funding, and because of that funding, we were able to publish many books that were not commercially viable. That word requires some care. A book that is not viable is not a book that failed. It is a book that was translated and published to perform a specific task, for a specific audience, at a specific moment in the development of French evangelical leadership. Viability is a commercial category. Usefulness to the Church is a different measure entirely.

In practice, that meant producing 9Marks and Practical Shepherding resources to equip pastors in their ecclesiology and shepherding. It meant working with the Fondation du counseling biblique to produce biblical counseling resources for those training and counseling. It meant developing language resources for seminaries. None of these projects were chasing a broad audience. They were answering a specific need in a specific community of training. The donor funding made it possible to say yes to those needs without asking first whether the numbers would work.

When we did attempt popular level books, I came to see clearly that our friends at BLF were far better positioned to reach the French speaking masses with accessible resources. That is their calling, their competence, and their lane. The right response was not competition or imitation, but clarity: we were doing different things in service of the same Church, and both things needed to be done.

The limits of each model — and the challenges of crossing lanes

It is possible for a publisher to do both well, but each model carries its own temptations that need to be named and resisted. The popular level publisher struggles to justify the time and investment required to produce a book that only a few hundred people will read. The formational publisher faces the opposite temptation: reaching for popular level titles in order to reduce donor dependence or broaden impact. This is understandable, but it carries a real cost. A formational publisher that ventures into popular level books without the marketing infrastructure or the existing audience to support them will often watch those books underperform badly, not because the content is weak, but because reaching a general Christian readership requires a different set of relationships, platforms, and promotional instincts than the publisher has built. The book deserves better than that, and so does the audience it could have reached.

I experienced this firsthand. At Publications Chrétiennes we published John Piper’s God is the Gospel. I was convinced it was the perfect book for every French speaking Christian to read. And in many ways it is a remarkable book. But it is also a theologically dense and demanding work, and a candid conversation with our friends at BLF would have made clear that while excellent, it was not a book the average reader was ready to pick up and benefit from. We overestimated the popular appeal because we were so close to the content and so convinced of its value. That is a failure mode formational publishers need to watch for. Loving a book deeply is not the same as knowing who will read it.

It is also worth saying: formational publishers will by design publish more books and sell fewer copies per title. There is always room to improve, and formational publishers should never use their calling as an excuse for laziness in marketing or strategy. But the overall profile, many titles, smaller print runs, donor dependence, is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is what the model looks like when it is working.

The case for collaboration

Neither kind of publisher has to operate in isolation, and the most obvious place to begin working together is marketing. When Publications Chrétiennes published Gentle and Lowly in French, we worked closely with BLF on getting the book in front of readers. Their knowledge of the popular level audience, their design instincts, and their promotional relationships made a real difference. A formational publisher attempting that kind of campaign alone would have left reach on the table. The collaboration served the book and, more importantly, served the readers the book was meant to find.

That kind of partnership should be more common. A formational publisher with a manuscript that has genuine popular level potential would do well to ask whether a popular level publishing partner might be better positioned to carry it, or at minimum to advise on how to reach that audience well. The reverse is equally true: a popular level publisher with a title that has real training value could partner with a formational publisher who has the relationships and credibility to get it into seminary courses and pastoral training programs. Both publishers can work toward bridging the gap between their worlds, but they do it best not by trying to become each other, but by collaborating with publishers on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Conclusion

Christian publishing is not one thing. It is at minimum two distinct callings, each with its own audience, its own economics, and its own contribution to the health of the Church. The formational publisher trains the trainers. The popular level publisher feeds the congregation directly. The Church is impoverished without either.

To the popular level publishers who have been tempted to write off formational publishing as inefficient or poorly run: the numbers were never meant to look like yours. Stop measuring a different calling by your metrics. The slow, costly, donor funded work of putting the right book in the hands of the right pastor at the right moment is not waste. It is investment, and the returns show up in the health of the Church you are also trying to serve.

What is needed is not competition but mutual encouragement and, where possible, active collaboration. Formational publishers must sharpen their marketing, build genuine interest in their resources, and grow the audience for the kind of books they exist to publish. That means investing in platforms, relationships, and promotional efforts that connect training resources with the pastors, seminarians, and educators who need them. Popular level publishers should honor the work being done at the other end of the spectrum. And both should look for opportunities to serve each other, because in serving each other they serve the same Church.