The key to spiritual growth, faith leaders say, is to practice within a community. Today book lovers on a spiritual path are pursuing their journeys in groups, forming religion- and spirituality-based book clubs in their homes, places of worship and cafes across the country. No one knows how many of these informal reading groups exist, but publishers and booksellers alike believe they are making their presence felt in the sales lift they give the books they select.

But in number and size the real action may be in online book clubs. Virtual book clubs afford like-minded members an outlet for discussion about what they are reading. Today a reader can go online and find fellow book lovers across the faith spectrum. In the past six months, two new clubs have launched a presence on the Web, and more are poised to come this year.

While online religion book clubs appear to be thriving, the same is not always true for clubs that gather under a real roof. Many bookstore owners told PW that while general fiction book clubs organized through their stores or meeting in their communities are popular, religion and spirituality book clubs, in general, are not. The Tattered Cover in Denver supports four in-store book clubs and has a full-time liaison to book clubs, long-time employee Virginia Valentine. Asked about spiritually oriented book clubs in the Denver area, she was unable to come up with a single one. "I know there used to be one, but I don't know what happened to it," said Valentine.

Even some bookstores supported by large congregations say they have been unable to cook up enough interest to sustain a book club. At Willowcreek Community Church, a nondenominational megachurch in suburban Chicago that attracts as many as 17,000 people each weekend, Seeds bookstore manager Cynthia Hoppe said a book club launched last fall failed to attract even a half-dozen members. "I don't know why that is," she said. "I think people are just more solitary." Similarly, a book club launched last fall at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, the largest Episcopal congregation in the city, has attracted only about eight core members.

But at Congregation Agudath Shalom in Stanford, Conn., the largest modern Orthodox congregation in New England, the experience has been quite different. Rabbi (and book club facilitator) Mark Drath reported a turnout of 45 to discuss The Da Vinci Code; these are just some of the 100-plus people who attend book club meetings in a year. "It's an opportunity for us to get together and talk about issues in a less traditional way than we do in a religious setting," Dratch said. He added, "We are interested in attracting a wide variety of people, and a book discussion may attract a different group than a Bible study."

Some Stores Succeed

Not all bricks-and-mortar retailers are gloomy about clubs. In Cincinnati, Ohio, Micheal Fraser of Joseph-Beth Booksellers said book clubs affiliated with local churches often order enough books to catch their notice. He noted one club ordered 150 copies of a single title. "We have had to reorder [some book club titles] three or four times," Fraser said. Interest is so strong, Joseph-Beth is considering placing all book club selections on one shelf. "I think that will generate more sales because people like to see what other people are reading," said Fraser.

Another retailer that has witnessed interest in book clubs is Transitions Bookplace in Chicago. This store, with a focus on Eastern religions, metaphysics and body-mind-spirit titles, sustains several "reading groups" on subjects including Buddhism, meditation, Christian mysticism and about a dozen that focus on individual authors, including Ekhart Tolle, Thomas Keating and Byron Katie. Group leaders prepare their own reading guides and handouts with a focus on applying the book's insights to participants' lives. The most popular to date has been the "Be Here Now" Buddhist group, which store co-owner Gayle Seminara Mandel based on Ram Dass's book of the same name. It attracted up to 25 people per meeting, and explored a number of Buddhist-oriented texts. Mandel cites the groups as key to maintaining a strong customer base—to a point. "Are they helpful? I think they are," she said. "But I really believe the most successful were not market-driven. In the Buddhist reading group I sold more books because I had a passion. I was really looking to serve. If we say 'Let's do this because it seems hot' " it doesn't work, Mandel said, adding that the key is to find something that meets a need in the community.

Action Online

That seems to be what has been at work with online religion book clubs. Offering convenience, wide range and easy access, these virtual groups seem to be meeting a real need within religious communities for an outlet to discuss books. The Jewish community is served by several online book clubs, including the Mazornet Jewish Book Club (www.mazornet.com/jewishcl/bookclub/home.asp). Muslims talk about books at the Islamic Book Club (www.al-usrah.net/programs/bookclub), which also includes a site for children. Catholics have a variety of online clubs, including one for Catholic parents at www.catholicmom.com/book_club.htm. And Beliefnet, the multi-faith Web site, has a books page with fiction and nonfiction recommendations, author interviews, reviews and chat boards where readers can discuss books about everything from to Buddhism to neo-paganism. With so much variety, founders of online book clubs with religion and spirituality themes report growing memberships. And while most retailers and church-based groups see waning interest in their religion book clubs, publishers and other online moderators are demonstrating their faith in virtual book clubs by launching more of them.

Among the newest is Catholics Read (www.catholicsread.com), a project of the Catholic Book Publishers Association that debuted the first week of February. The club is structured around the books of the Bible—three will be chosen each year, until the entire Bible is covered—and features books from member publishers that apply to the themes of those biblical texts. This year's biblical texts are Job, Luke and Romans. For Job, the list of allied books includes Amazing Grace for Those Who Suffer by Jeff Covins and Matthew Pinto (Ascension Press, 2002) and From Hurting to Happy by Barbara Bartocci (Ave Maria Press, 2002). Participation ranges from publishers, who will pay $50 each to feature up to three books, to bookstores, who will be given signage and other materials to advertise the program, to individual dioceses and parishes, where the establishment of book clubs and reading groups will be encouraged.

The goal, said Terry Wessels, CBPA executive director, is to unite Catholics through reading. "It'll be a little cell here, a little cell there, but it will be connected across the country by what they read," she said. "We are looking for some commonality across the Catholic culture in the U.S. and beyond." To facilitate this, the club offers its chosen biblical texts online in three translations favored by Catholics: the New American Bible, the New Revised Standard Version and a Spanish-language translation. CBPA will promote Catholics Read at conferences, book trade shows, and through direct mail to the 19,000 Catholic parishes around the country.

Another new online club is Faithful Reader (www.faithfulreader.com), launched last November by the Book Report Network (BRN), which promotes reading through six Web sites aimed at adults, teens and children. Faithful Reader is a direct result of conversations between BRN's co-founder and president, Carol Fitzgerald, and the marketing and publicity team behind the Left Behind series, Tyndale's Dan Balow and independent publicist Beverly Rykerd. The pair invited Fitzgerald to attend a Christian Booksellers Association convention last year where she began asking what publishers, authors, booksellers and readers would like to see in a Christian book club site. The result launched in November with author interviews and biographies, reading guides, excerpts and reviews. Most interesting to publishers is a page where readers can describe what "physical" (not online) book clubs they belong to, what books they read and why. There is another place for clergy to list the same.

The site is so new Fitzgerald has not yet had time to peruse the replies. "What I am interested in seeing is if they are interested in fiction as well as nonfiction," she said. "Most people, it seems, when they sit down to talk about books are talking about fiction, everything from Flabbergasted [by Ray Blackston; Revell, 2003] to The Dead Don't Dance [by Charles Martin; WestBow Press, May 2004]. Or they are discussing The Purpose-Driven Life [by Rick Warren; Zondervan, 2002]." One thing is certain, Fitzgerald said: "These people are bonded by faith and that makes a difference to the way they are going to look at the subject matter. They are coming to this through a faith-based experience, which makes it different from clubs based on 'we are all moms' or 'we just like to read.' "

If interest in BRN's other sites is any indication, Faithful Reader could go far. The Networks' reading guide site (www.readinggroupguides.com) logged 109,000 unique visitors in January, and at least 5,400 of them checked out the guide for The Da Vinci Code, which discusses its many religion-related themes. Fitzgerald plans to expand Faithful Reader to include teen and children's sections, probably before the end of the year.

The Novel Approach

The need among readers of Christian fiction for a place to meet and chat about books is evident in the rise of The Good Girl Book Club (www.goodgirlbookclubonline.com), a Chicago-based online club with an emphasis on Christian spiritual growth and development, especially for African-American women. Good Girl was founded five years ago by Marina Woods after she read The Prayer of Jabez (Multnomah, 2000), itself then a staple of many Christian book clubs. Monthly "picks" for Good Girl are always fiction and come from a range of publishers. This year, members will read A Change is Gonna Come by Jacqueline Thomas (BET Books, 2003), The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom (Hyperion, 2003) and Living Water by Obery Hendricks (Harper SF, 2003), among others. There is also a list of 40 or 50 recommended books that include nonfiction. The books are chosen quarterly by a panel of seven women volunteers between the ages of 18 and 55 who pore over 200—300 submissions, some from publishers, many from members and a healthy portion from authors themselves, some of them self-published. Good Girl logs 71,000 visits to its site each month. Members are almost all women, though "a few fellas sneak in," Woods reported. About half are between the ages of 18 and 35 and identify as Baptists, Southern Baptists and Apostolic Christians. Approximately 28 percent are Catholic.

Woods, who self-financed the site until this year, said Good Girl is an affiliate of Amazon, so members can click on the book on the Good Girl site and be linked to Amazon to purchase it. The club gets a small percentage for each of these sales, about 20 cents per paperback. Still, she said, most members get the books on their own. "They seem to want to touch the book, to feel the book before they make their decision," she noted. Then if they want to participate in moderated discussions, chat rooms or online interviews with authors, they must register as a member. About 400 people do this per month, and another 10,000 want to be contacted so they can watch a live chat without participating.

Why Not Face to Face?

Why are physical religion book clubs so hard to find? Willowcreek's Hoppe has a couple of theories. First, she said, general interest in book clubs has waned. "I think the Oprah effect has passed," she said, recounting how, when she was a buyer for Barnes & Noble, she saw many people returning Oprah's picks without having read them. "It seems there is more purchasing going on than reading. People just don't seem to have the time." She also cited a lack of quality Christian fiction that might lure readers and drive a club. "I have trouble finding people who will even review them," she said. Publishers have tried several things to promote clubs, but from her point of view, to little avail. "They've tried study guides, they've tried all sorts of things," she said. "You can put a good study guide together, but you need a good, strong leader, and if you don't have that you can lose control of the group."

There is another advantage to the online clubs that may be of special benefit to those who want to discuss religion: anonymity. "What people are getting is connection in a community in a very non-structured and private way," said Good Girl's Woods. "They can say 'This really gave me hope, this really encouraged me.' Those are the things that people take away from it that may different from a physical book club." Willowcreek's Hoppe put it this way: "It is easier to talk about yourself in terms of the characters in a novel than it is to talk about going through a spiritual struggle in front of a whole bunch of people you don't know."

Do Reading Guides Work?

What about those reading guides that so many publishers, both CBA and ABA, include either in the backs of books or online? In some cases, facilitators who spoke with PW said they were not even aware such guides existed. "I usually write my own," said Merrill Meltz, founder and facilitator of Grace Cathedral's book club. "I had no idea they were even out there." Mandel at Transitions doesn't use them, either. "I could probably publish a book of Buddhist reading guides," she said. Joseph-Beth's Fraser believes this is one place Christian publishers have dropped the ball. "If the publisher sends them to us, we stick them in [with the books], but we just don't get a whole lot of them." Faithful Reader's Fitzgerald has only to point to the reading guide page of her new site, where just a handful are available. "Publishers have to pay to put their guides on there, and there has been resistance to that," she said. "But we really feel this is what the consumer is looking for." At Tyndale, Balow said the point has been made. "More and more now, Christian authors are including study questions in the back of their books because they realize people are using them" either in small group ministries or in book clubs, he said.

Ask publishers what they think of religion book clubs and the answer is unanimous—they love them. Participants buy multiple copies of their books and build the buzz. "You get word of mouth," said Andrew Corbin, an editor at Doubleday Religious. But, he added, they remain a great unknown, an untapped resource that operates just below publishers' radar. "I just don't know how many there are. But I can't imagine how they are not effective and I can only think they will be more so in the future," he said. Balow said Tyndale has enough faith in them that they have bought advertising on at least one site. But they would like to know more about what they are dealing with. "They are very important in the Christian market, but we don't have the tools to quantify them," he continued. "It is the classic fragmented market, an underground movement, a fascinating thing when you think about it."

Book clubs may be the great unknown, but they are probably a permanent fixture in the spiritual marketplace because they afford a unique outlet for growth. "I think book clubs as a way of opening people up are very valuable," said Transitions' Mandel. "You might hear something that annoys you, something that changes your mind or fills your heart. All of that is important. There is a real grittiness about life that comes out in these groups."