I’ve never been a believer in the adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Change is constant, and adaptability is essential to success for individuals as well as organizations. We must always be open to new things, to opening new doors. Every now and then, it’s good to reopen an old door, too.
As I complete my 40th year working with books, I’ve changed my mind about an entire publishing genre that I once held at arm’s length at best, and treated with something akin to critical dismissal at worst. I feel like the proverbial old dog who has suddenly learned a new trick.
The genre? Religious fiction.
After my wife and I purchased a 2,000-sq.-ft. Logos Bookstore location near the Indiana University campus in Bloomington in 1983, the store’s fiction category comprised approximately 100 linear feet of space. We populated those shelves with books by Jan Karon, Signet Classics from Dostoyevsky and Hugo, and Frederick Buechner’s novels like Godric, Brendan, and The Wizard’s Tide. G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown novels were nestled near Susan Howatch’s Glittering Images. Annie Dillard’s The Living, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were also there.
It was an eclectic assortment of literature that undoubtedly reflected our own taste more than customer demand. Yes, we carried “faith fiction” of the era, some of which sold quite well because our store’s clientele was primarily looking for religious books of a particular persuasion. But the faith fiction we had on hand were not books I typically took home to read, nor were they generally books that I would handsell. They were not books I’d tell friends and family to read. Based on an admittedly too-small sample size in those days, I expected the books to be simplistic, didactic, and predictable. And who had time for that?
After 13 years as a bookseller, I shifted first to work with Ingram Book Company and then for 24 years worked in executive roles with InterVarsity Press, a nonfiction publisher in the Chicago area. Religious fiction was no longer on my radar at all—and it didn’t have to be.
Then in 1998, a group that included former Publishers Weekly religion editor Phyllis Tickle and other longtime industry friends came together to dream about establishing an organization and an award that would promote increased excellence in Christian fiction. One of its later planning meetings occurred around the dining room table of our home in the Chicago suburbs. The work of that group of people eventually led to the creation of the Christy Award, to “acknowledge the value and impact of the novel of faith in contemporary culture,” as its website states. The award was named after Catherine Marshall’s enduring novel Christy, first published in 1967 by McGraw-Hill and adapted into a CBS TV series in the mid-1990s.
After 17 years of being run as an independent organization, the Christy Award’s management was assumed in 2016 by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, the trade association of Christian publishing, where it remains to this day. And like a line from Joni Mitchell’s classic song that likens life to “the circle game,” in summer 2021 I assumed a new role with ECPA and quickly realized I needed to learn a new trick: in order to do my job well, I would need to revisit faith fiction.
If, indeed, the creation of the Christy Award was intended to advance excellence in this type of literature, I believe it has accomplished its goal. Authors such as Amanda Cox, Sharon Garlough Brown, Erin Bartels, Patricia Raybon, Charles Martin, Amanda Dykes, Chris Fabry, T.I. Lowe, and Sarah Loudin Thomas are among a newer crop of novelists whose story lines are intricate, believable, and free of caricatures. There is complexity and texture to their work. There is intrigue and artfulness. They create characters readers come to care about.
Additionally (and thankfully), the genre is now incorporating a more diverse set of voices and tackling a range of topics such as abuse, addiction, racial justice, trauma, and other issues that I don’t recall it doing in its earlier days.
I have no doubt that there were books of comparable quality I missed in the genre’s past simply because I held it at arm’s length and had a bias about it. But I’ve changed my mind about the whole category. As I enter my 41st year in this work, I wonder, what else am I missing?
I’m ready to explore, ready to adapt. I’m ready to learn new tricks. May we all be prepared to do the same in our spheres of work and influence in this important industry of bringing books to life.
Jeff Crosby is the president and CEO of ECPA, the trade association of Christian publishing.
