equip the Church

There are two way you can tell everyone you have the biggest publisher.

The first way: define the rules so narrowly that only you can win.

You decide what counts as serious publishing. Which authors are worth reading. Which theological tradition is rigorous enough to deserve shelf space. You build a catalog that quietly signals: if it didn’t come from us, you should be suspicious of it.

The second way: tear down everyone else until you’re the last one standing.

You stop recommending books you didn’t publish. You compete for the same author, the same conference slot, the same church relationship, not because you’ll serve them better, but because you’d rather win the account than see someone else serve them well. You measure success by market share.

Both strategies exist in Christian publishing. You’ve probably seen them. You may have practiced one of them without realizing it.

Neither serves the Church.

Here’s what both have in common: they are playing a finite game in an infinite one.

Simon Sinek, in his book, The Infinite Game, draws a distinction that cuts right through most publishing strategy conversations. Finite games have agreed-upon rules, a fixed number of players, and a clear winner. Infinite games have no finish line. Players come and go. The rules evolve. The goal is not to win. The goal is to keep playing.

The problem, Sinek argues, is that most organizations apply finite thinking to infinite games. Despite the fact that they are playing in a game that cannot be won, too many leaders keep playing as if they can.

Christian publishing is an infinite game. The mission of equipping the Church, spreading ideas, forming leaders, reaching readers, has no finish line. There is no moment when the game ends and someone is declared the winner. There is only faithful participation, or the absence of it.

Finite thinking in Christian publishing sounds like this: we need to be the biggest publisher in our language. We need to win that author before another publisher does. We need to protect our market position. We need to beat our numbers from last year.

None of these questions are wrong on their face. Revenue matters. Growth matters. Sustainability matters. But when these questions set the direction, when they become the game you are actually playing, something quietly shifts. You start optimizing for outcomes that have almost nothing to do with whether the Church is being served.

Finite players play to beat the people around them. Infinite players play to be better than themselves.

For a Christian publisher, better means the Church is more resourced at the end of the year than it was at the beginning.

That sentence reframes everything. The question is not whether you are ahead of your competitors. It is whether you are better than you were. Are more pastors being reached? Are more readers finding the ideas they need? Is the theological ecosystem in your language richer this year than it was last year? Those are infinite game questions. They point you toward the mission instead of the scoreboard.

Sinek also introduces the concept of the Worthy Rival, a competitor you respect not in order to defeat them, but to learn from them. Traditional competition forces us to take on an attitude of winning. A worthy rival inspires us to take an attitude of improvement. The publisher down the road who is doing something you are not doing well is not a threat. They are a mirror. They show you where you have room to grow.

In the infinite game, we accept that being the best is a fool’s errand and that multiple players can do well at the same time.

This is where the theology should be doing more work than the strategy. The Church is not a market. The gospel does not operate on scarcity. There is no version of Christian faithfulness in which your publisher’s gain requires another publisher’s loss. When a reader is formed by a book you didn’t publish, the mission is still advancing. When a church grows in theological depth through resources from a different organization, that is still a win. The goal was never for your name to be on the spine. The goal was for the ideas to arrive.

Luther understood this instinctively. He allowed printers across Europe to reproduce his works freely, never collecting a penny in royalties. He had no publishing empire to protect, no catalog to defend, no market position to hold. He had ideas that needed to travel, and he got out of their way. The Reformation spread not because one printer controlled the output, but because Luther was more interested in the reach of the ideas than the recognition of his name.

The publisher who recommends a competitor’s book because it is exactly what the pastor needs is not losing ground. They are doing their actual job. The publisher who sends a reader to a better-resourced organization for a tool they cannot provide is not failing. They are acting like someone who genuinely cares about the reader.

We achieve more when we chase the dream instead of the competition.

The dream, for a Christian publisher, is not catalog size or market share or the year you finally turned a profit. The dream is a Church that is theologically formed, pastorally resourced, and equipped to make disciples. That dream is large enough for every publisher in your language to work toward simultaneously. It is large enough that no single publisher will ever fully achieve it.

Which means the game will go on long after you are gone. The question is whether you played it in a way that made the whole ecosystem stronger.

What would change about your decisions this year if you stopped trying to win and started trying to keep the whole game going?