I am a book geek. I love reading. I love perusing dusty used book stores. My favorite day of the year is the day I get to buy new textbooks for the semester. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration.

Jordon Cooper, blogger and publisher of Resonate Journal (a resource for Canadien pastors), is putting together a list the 40 essential books for a Masters of Divinity degree. The idea for this came from some other bloggers brainstorming if one could obtain a better education from the 40 best business books rather than forking over $150,000 for an MBA.

By no means is Cooper disparaging a seminary education. He’s rather proposing a list of the 40 “most essential books that we have read to minister today.” It’s a fun little exercise. He and his colleagues at Resonate have proposed a preliminary list from which readers can choose the 40 best.

Personally, I’m a sucker for “Top 5/10/40/whatever” lists, but as I browse the list, I don’t see 40 books I’m familiar with. And what catches my attention most is that the books that have most impacted me in my one year in pursuit of an MDiv are missing from the list.

I see works by Drs. Snyder and Mulholland, but there are other Asbury faculty whose works I would consider essential seminary reading (that’s my own educational bias). I see Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, a book I could read over and over again. There’s Zimmermann’s Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, a very deep read and one I don’t know if I’d recommend to the armchair theologian. There’s Oden’s systematic theology trilogy. Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott are two authors whose writings I can’t live without, but if I only get 40 books for my theology library I don’t think they’d make the cut.

There are a handful of books that I would have to add to this list, too. No minister should go without reading Vincent Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered, that continually challenges me to incarnational living. The Art of Reading Scripture hooked me like nobody’s business and has changed the way I read and teach the Bible. McLaren’s New Christian trilogy gave me permission to ask questions outloud that no Christian I knew wanted to hear. I like history and I love stories, and I found Justo Gonzalez’s Story of Christianity a very engaging and enlightening read of church history. Right now I’m working through Practical Theology, a reader edited by Miroslav Volf, that has my full attention. And the most glaring omission of all is the Holy Bible, of all things. Can’t very well bring redemption into our world without that, now can we?

So my question to you, dear Asbury community, is what books have impacted your faith journey, and specifically journey in preparation for ministry the most? What books are essential to your faith? What would make your Top 40 list?