For as long as I’ve wanted to be a pastor, I’ve wanted to be a “pastor who reads books.” I remember
walking into my pastor’s office as a child and being blown away by floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with knowledge and ideas. In an instant, that was the ideal.

There’s a difference between collecting books and reading them. I became a collector . . . for years, I would stash volumes away like a squirrel prepping for a literary winter. I always wanted to want to read, but despite a whole childhood of library trips and summer reading clubs, I didn’t really love reading until about halfway through college.

I decided I would read every single day, whether for a full hour or a half-page. A modest Goodreads reading goal and 15–30 minutes a day stacked up across the weeks and months, and soon I had a full-blown hobby that I was ready to share with friends! I started a few book clubs during that year. The commitment was minimal. We read 150-page Christian nonfiction books that were nice, but didn’t offer much in the way of depth or fodder for discussion. These clubs disintegrated, often before the final pages could even be turned.

While at Martin Luther College (MLC), I was taking Introduction to Philosophy with Prof. Luke Thompson, a fellow bookworm who I thought might sympathize with my plight. When I shared my book club woes with him, he smiled knowingly. His advice? More commitment. More pages. He suggested I create the book club I really wanted to be in, and the right people would come and stay. He had gone through a similar situation when pastoring a campus ministry in Canada, and had decided that from then on, his group would read only the greatest books ever written. That was the moment the Great Books Club was born.

“‘Great Books’ are considered the greatest books of all time because they contribute in major ways to the great ideas that have shaped our world,” Luke Thompson says. “When you read and discuss a Great Book with friends, a bit of that greatness rubs off on to you. Exposure to great writing will help you become a great writer. Exposure to great ideas helps you think greatly.”

We read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov first, meeting once a month in Professor Thompson’s living room. As my graduation from MLC approached that spring, Prof. Thompson and I decided the club would continue at MLC and a new chapter would begin at the seminary. After all, who could benefit from reading Great Books more than men who hope to make a career of reading and writing beautiful things?

At the beginning of each semester, seminarians, their wives, faculty, and staff receive an email with a flowery title like “The Literary Adventure of a Lifetime.” Inside is a map for the quest to which they’re being invited—an opportunity to immerse or escape, depending on how an interested traveler looks at it.

So far, we’ve chased Jean Valjean through nineteenth-century France and mingled with Russian aristocrats during war and peacetime alike. We narrowly escaped a barrow-wight with an unlikely band of hobbit heroes and watched with stunned awe as Eve plucked the fruit from the tree and Paradise was lost. At the time of this writing, we’ve only just made it out of Inferno alongside Dante and Virgil! Plenty of adventure awaits.

But while the Great Books Club is certainly fun, I’d be remiss to leave you with the impression that pleasure is the club’s only aim. There are moments when a bit of epic poetry or a classic work translated from Russian is the last thing we want to read after a busy day of translating, memorizing, or writing papers. But Paul calls us to meditate on the true, the good, and the beautiful when he says, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Philippians 4:8NIV).

Reading and discussing the Great Books is one way to do that. Reading Great Books and discussing them with friends is a deeply enriching experience. But the best part of all? All the time spent surrounded by beautiful words and perspective-altering stories conditions us to be all the more ready to immerse ourselves in the greatest story ever told—the story of a God who made a wayward people his own.

Cameron Schroeder is serving as a vicar during the 2025–2026 school year.