equip the Church

This article is written for international Christian publishers who are building publishing ministries in contexts where the Church is small, resources are scarce, and the standard publishing playbook does not apply. Even if you are in a more developed context, this article will still offer some insight to help you sharpen your mission.

There are two kinds of minority contexts that I try to address in this article.

Type 1: The Gospel Minority Context. Few believers. A small, fragile church ecosystem. Your total addressable market for any title may be smaller than a single suburban congregation elsewhere.

Type 2: The Depth Minority Context. Many Christians, but shallow theological formation. The audience exists but does not yet know it needs what you are offering. Purchasing power is low. Free and shallow content is everywhere.

Both contexts are hard. Both are worth serving. The math, however, in both contexts, does not work. It has never worked. And if you are waiting for it to work before you start publishing, you might be waiting forever.

Most minority context publishers fail in one of three places: title selection, distribution, or community building. Everything in this article is about fixing those three problems.

Minority context publishing is not fundamentally about producing books. It is about building theological ecosystems.

What to stop doing

Before we get into the solution, we need to name the problems clearly.

As publishers, we need to stop:

• Translating books without a distribution plan
• Measuring success only by print runs
• Adding titles faster than readers can absorb them
• Building catalogs without building communities
• Waiting for financial sustainability before acting
• Choosing titles based on what impresses donors rather than what the Church needs
• Treating digital content as lost revenue instead of as seeds
• Measuring success by catalog size rather than community depth
• Skipping the stories — publishing the next book before gathering testimonies from the last one
• Expecting local authors to emerge without intentionally developing them

The first trap: translating more than you can distribute

The most common mistake is not publishing too little. It is translating far more than the community can absorb while neglecting to distribute what already exists.

This happens for three reasons that tend to compound each other. Donors fund translation because it is visible and tangible and increases the potential reach of their content. Publishers translate what they love rather than what the community needs right now. And most minority context publishers have never developed serious distribution skills, so they default to what feels like ministry, producing content, and hope distribution takes care of itself.

It does not.

Sometimes we publish to signal theological seriousness rather than to solve pastoral problems. Theologically rich does not automatically mean strategically timely. A brilliant book on penal substitution may not be what a young church movement first needs if its leaders are struggling with preaching, family discipleship, or basic ecclesiology.

Before you translate the next book, ask: have we fully distributed the last one?

Before you publish anything: five questions to ask

Before committing to any translation project, discuss with your team:

• Does this book solve a real pastoral or discipleship problem in our specific context?
• Is our audience ready for this level of content right now?
• Can we name the first 50 readers?
• Do we have a plan to build community around it?
• Should this be a book? or should we publish a series of articles?
• Is this a book that should be written by someone locally rather than a translation?
• Are we the best publisher to work on this particilar project, or is there someone else who would be a better steward?
• Would we still publish it if donors were not offering funding?

That last question is the most revealing. If the honest answer is no any of these questions, you still have work to do before pursuing any specific project.

What “fully distributed” actually means

Good. The checklist stays but the framing around it needs to change. Right now it sounds like a hard gate — pass all six or you cannot move forward. What you actually want is a conscience check that keeps distribution front of mind without paralyzing the publishing pipeline.

Let me rewrite just that section:

---

What “fully distributed” actually means

We are not suggesting you wait until every possible reader has been reached before translating the next book. That standard is impossible and would grind any publishing ministry to a halt.

However, before the next translation project is approved, distribution should be an active conversation, not an afterthought. The real work of publishing is not translation. It is getting ideas into the hands and hearts of people who need them. Translation is preparation. Distribution is the mission.

Use this checklist not as a gate but as a conscience. Before approving a new title, ask honestly where you stand on your most recent one:

• Has every key pastor and church leader in our network heard about this book personally?
• Have we done at least one live event or online training built around it?
• Has it been broken into digital excerpts, articles, clips, or social content?
• Has it been introduced in WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook communities where our readers gather?
• Have at least three local leaders recommended it publicly?
• Have we gathered and shared testimonies from readers?

If most of these remain undone, the next translation decision should come with a distribution commitment, not just an editorial one. Approve the new title and build the distribution plan into the project from day one, not as an afterthought once the books arrive from the printer.

The question is not whether you have finished distributing. It is whether distribution is driving your decisions the way translation always has.e and publish the next resource only when it has been fully distributed.

The hybrid model: sell print, give the rest away

As publishers, we must work towards selling print books; we need to price them fairly, invest in the relationships that get them into the right hands, and pursue that revenue seriously. A typical translation project of a 200 page book including translation, editing, design, and print might cost between $4,000 and $8,000. In a Gospel Minority Context where perhaps only a few hundred serious buyers exist, selling every copy may not recover the investment. That is not failure. That is the economic reality of serving a minority Church. The math shows us why donor support is so important in these early years.

But be generous with everything else. A PDF costs nothing to distribute. A short article shared in a pastor’s messaging group travels across a diaspora community overnight. A teaching video released freely plants seeds in readers who will eventually want the book. Digital generosity is not a threat to print sales. In most cases it is the engine that drives them.

Treat digital content as seeds, not as lost revenue. Remember, your mission is not to sell books. It is to spread ideas.

A word about sustainability

Demanding financial independence too early is one of the fastest ways to sabotage a minority context publishing ministry.

It is important to say that most content ministries in the west do not depend primarily on sales either. We must remember as well that even publishers who depend primarily on sales have no guarantee those sales will continue. Donor funding, grants, and institutional support are not minority context peculiarities. They are how Christian content minsitries works across almost every context. The minority context publisher who feels shame about donor dependence is measuring themselves against a standard their majority context peers have not actually achieved.

Here is a warning that comes with working with donors thats worth mentioning. When funding rewards visible production more than reader engagement, publishers will naturally optimize for output instead of impact. If donors celebrate completed translations and ignore distribution results, publishers will produce translations and neglect distribution. The incentive structures that donors create shape the decisions publishers make. If you want different decisions, change what gets funded and what gets reported. What gets measured gets built.

Work toward sustainability, but hold that goal with open hands. Financial sustainability is downstream of community, not upstream of it. Build the community first. The economics follow.

Where the two contexts diverge

Both contexts share the same hybrid model. But distribution looks different in each.

In the Gospel Minority Context, your community is small enough to know everyone you need to know personally. Therefore, distribution should be relational, get into the churches, share meals with pastors. A small training event with the right people in attendence does more than any catalog can do, it builds the community that gives the books meaning and gives isolated believers the experience of fellowship with others who share their convictions.

In the Depth Minority Context, the potential audience exists but must be cultivated. The scaffolding work is longer and slower. We need to create reading guides, accessible entry points, communities of readers, events that create a sense of belonging. Remember, you are not just distributing books, you are constructing the path that makes the theological journey possible.

In both contexts, prioritize spending time and money on people and relationships.

Your first strategic hire is not another title

Publishers cannot scale without people. In minority contexts, your early major investment may not be another translation. It may be the first staff member who can build relationships, run events, and keep the flywheel moving.

This person is not overhead. They are a key part to the distribution strategy. The person on your team who is invested in knowing every pastor by name may be more valuable to the mission than the next three titles combined.

From translation to local voices

Translation of good resources seeds a theological ecosystem. But healthy ecosystems must eventually produce local authors, local teachers, and local voices who speak into local realities.

Local authors cost less to produce. They are available for events and community building in ways translated authors cannot be. They speak with cultural authority that no translated resource can replicate. And they create ownership and a sense that the theological tradition belongs to this community.

Start sooner than feels comfortable. Commission a local pastor to write a booklet on a practical issue that the church is facing. Invite a local teacher to produce a series of articles. A publishing ministry that is still translating everything a decade in, with no local authors developed, has missed something fundamental about its own mission.

What success actually looks like

Do not measure success only by copies sold. Measure:

• Pastors reached personally
• Churches actively engaged with your resources
• Reading groups launched
• Repeat buyers
• Digital shares and downloads
• Testimonials collected
• Leaders trained at events

These numbers tell the real story. They also make the most compelling case to donors and boards when the print run feels small.

The Minority Context Publishing Flywheel

Discern the Need → Acquire the Right Content → Secure Funding → Translate → Seed Digitally → Build Community → Sell Print → Gather Stories → Secure Funding for Next Project

Each stage feeds the next. Stories become donor cases. Community becomes audience. Digital seeds grow print demand. As the community grows, sales grow with it. Revenue increases naturally, progressively reducing the gap that donor funding has to cover. The flywheel is the argument for hope in a hard context — not because the math suddenly works, but because faithfulness compounds over time.

Most minority context publishers stall after translation. They produce and they wait. Understanding where your flywheel is stalling is the most useful diagnostic you can run on your ministry.

The multiplier the numbers miss

A book placed in the hands of a pastor in a majority context lands in a library that already has fifty good books. Useful. But one resource among many.

A book placed in the hands of a pastor who has nothing, or almost nothing, in his language or theological tradition is not one resource among many. It is the resource. He teaches from it. He lends it to his elders. He references it in counseling. He recommends it to the church planter he is mentoring. That single copy does the work of twenty in a saturated market.

The Church in a minority context is of small and theologically thin. But, it is also always growing. This means that every investment in content, in relationships, in ideas shared freely plants seeds today that will sprout tomorrow.

This will cost you more than you planned

You may be reading this while watching friends in ministry take salaries you will not see for years, if ever. They are serving larger organizations who are better resourced and doing good work and being compensated fairly. And you are faithfully serving doing work that your market will not reward, that donors only partially understand, that your community cannot yet sustain.

That is real reality and it deserves to be named.

This work will ask blood, sweat, and tears from you. It will ask you to believe in a future you cannot yet see, to plant seeds that will not yield a harvest on your timeline, to pour yourself into a community that may not fully grasp what you are giving up to serve them.

Stay anyway.

The pastor with nothing in his language, the believer who has never encountered biblical Christianity are not abstractions. They are people whose faith will be shaped, or not shaped, by whether someone chose to do this work faithfully. The returns do not show up in your budget. They show up in the health of the Church, in the lives of people you may never meet, in the theological formation of a community that will outlast you.