On My Shelf: Life And Books With Winfree Brisley

On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.

I asked Winfree Brisley—editor of several books, including the Disciplines of Devotion series—about what’s on her bedside table, her favorite fiction, the books she regularly revisits, and more.

What’s on your nightstand right now?

What’s on my nightstand and what I’m reading are two different questions. I tend to have more books sitting around than I can realistically read. But I try to always be working through at least one fiction book and one Christian nonfiction book.

For fiction, I’m currently reading Middlemarch by George Eliot. I used to alternate between contemporary fiction and classics, but more and more I find myself staying with the classics as I struggle to find contemporary works that aren’t unnecessarily dark or explicit. However, Theo of Golden was a delightful exception that I enjoyed last year.

I’m also reading Matt Smethurst’s excellent book, Tim Keller on the Christian Life. I’ve read and listened to a lot from Keller, so the teaching is familiar. But Smethurst’s use of quotes from Keller and anecdotes from his life and ministry really bring the teaching to life in a beautiful way.

Speaking of bringing teaching to life, I also recently finished Radically Whole by David Gibson. It’s a reflection on the book of James, particularly working out the theme of double-mindedness. I’ve always struggled a bit with James, but Gibson’s insights helped me appreciate it and apply it in a deeper way.

What are your favorite fiction books?

I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time in 8th grade, and I’ve been hooked on Jane Austen’s novels ever since. Though I’ll happily read any of her books, Persuasion is probably my favorite at this point.

The reason I love Austen’s books, and the reason they’re worth rereading, is that their value isn’t in the plotline. It’s in the character development. No spoiler alerts are necessary. The guy and the girl are going to get together in the end. The beauty is in getting to know the characters along the way.

What are some books you regularly reread and why?

Other than Austen’s novels, I don’t regularly reread many books in their entirety. However, there are some that I go back to again and again for particular chapters or arguments.

One of those is C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. His exploration of the different types of love is insightful on both a philosophical and a practical level—particularly his reflections on friendship. Given that love is so foundational to the character of God and to our relationships with him and one another, I often go back to this book to inform my writing and teaching.

Given that love is so foundational to the character of God and to our relationships with him and one another, I often go back to this book to inform my writing and teaching.

Jen Wilkin’s Women of the Word is another book I frequently pull off the shelf. As I consider how to best teach and train other women, I certainly can’t improve on what she has outlined there, so I gladly borrow her 5 P’s of study—giving her credit, of course.

And I return again and again to Alexander Maclaren’s Expositions of Holy Scripture. His volumes on the Gospel of John are dear to me, and his sermon on John 21:7 has probably shaped me more than any other sermon I’ve heard or read.

What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?

When I was starting out as a high school English teacher in a Christian school, I stumbled on Leland Ryken’s Realms of Gold: The Classics in Christian Perspective. I was looking for particular help teaching Shakespeare and Hawthorne and others from a biblical perspective, and I found that. In fact, although I loathed The Scarlet Letter as a student, it became one of my favorite novels to teach once I saw it from Ryken’s perspective.

But even more importantly, Ryken instilled in me something he calls the literary imagination. He writes, “It is possible to set up a profitable two-way street between the Bible and literature, with the Bible enabling me to see a lot in literature that I would otherwise miss, and literature enabling me to see and feel biblical truth better.” That became a framework that shaped not only how I taught literature but how I thought about all sorts of areas of life.

This has informed my writing over the years, my Bible teaching, the way I engage culture and nonbelievers, and even how I parent. If we’re paying attention, we can see the truth of Scripture everywhere, even in unlikely places, and we can apply the truth of Scripture to everything, even to things it doesn’t speak directly about.

Though that seems obvious to me now, at the time I first encountered Ryken’s work, my intuitive approach to the world reflected a more rigid sacred-secular divide. He helped me begin to understand how to make “every square inch” theology practical.

What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?

Rory Shiner’s One Forever: The Transforming Power of Being in Christ is well worth a pastor’s time. It not only gives you an incredibly effective analogy for explaining what it means to be “in Christ” that you can use in your teaching and preaching, but it also provides a helpful example of how to make a complicated doctrine clear and accessible to the average Christian. And it’s less than 100 pages!

The more I write and teach, the more I realize that there are so many words and phrases from Scripture that we regularly say in Christian circles without ever really explaining what they mean. “In Christ” is one of those. In fact, I didn’t realize how poorly I understood that concept until I heard a speaker use Shiner’s airplane analogy.

Well-formed illustrations and analogies can accomplish a lot more than simply engaging listener attention. They really can enable people to understand theological truths in meaningful ways.

What’s your best piece of writing advice?

When you’re ready to write, sit down at your computer. If you need to think, do it somewhere else. I need to read and think and work out arguments before I have anything worthwhile to put down on the page. If I try to do that thinking work with a blank document and a blinking cursor in front of me, I just get discouraged that I’m not making progress.

Instead, I find it helpful to identify a specific argument or illustration that I need to work out and then go on a walk to think it through or forgo a podcast and process it while I’m driving. Even once I’m well into a writing project, if I get stuck, I often walk a lap around my neighborhood to think through my problem. There’s something about getting my body moving that seems to get my mind unstuck.

As editor of TGC’s new Disciplines of Devotion series, what’s your hope for this series aimed at Christian women, and what are ways that individuals or churches can use these resources?

For years now, as I’ve talked with women about their spiritual lives, I’ve heard a consistent frustration. They want to grow in knowing the Lord. They want to have a rich devotional life. But everything else in life seems to get in the way. So I’ve been wrestling with this question of how we can equip women to grow in devotion to the Lord even as they live in an age of endless distraction.

As I’ve looked to Scripture and considered the examples of faithful believers in church history and some in my own family and church, it stands out to me that discipline helps us grow in devotion. Habits and disciplines often get a bad rap in the church because we’re concerned about legalism. But as Dallas Willard explains, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”

As I’ve looked to Scripture and considered the examples of faithful believers, it stands out to me that discipline helps us grow in devotion.

My hope for this series is to give women practical examples of the sort of effort that helps us grow in relationship with the Lord. Scripture points us to a variety of practices, and they’re not as complicated as we often think. So each booklet explores one discipline and offers three very accessible ways to practice it.

There will initially be six booklets: Prayer, Fasting, Sabbath Rest, Worship, Evangelism, and Bible Study. Readers can pick one or two that particularly interest them, or read the whole series. And the booklets include discussion questions, so they would make great content for small groups or discipleship relationships.

What are you learning about life and following Jesus?

I’m learning to turn to prayer more readily and more frequently. In a world of endless information, googling and scrolling can easily become our go-to source of help. But no parenting tip from social media has ever moved the hearts of my sons. Crying out to the Lord on their behalf has. No time management hack has ever given me peace and joy when my inbox is overflowing, deadlines are approaching, and there aren’t enough hours in the day. Crying out to the Lord has.

I’m finding the testimony of the psalmist to be true in my life day after day: “I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears” (Ps. 34:4).