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The Christian Fiction Shelf - Novels That Preach Without Preaching
12
items The best Christian novels smuggle the sermon inside a story you cannot put down. This shelf runs from the Roman epics the genre was built on, through the modern bestsellers, to the series starters that hook a whole family - fiction with the gospel lo...
Sections
3
The Classics Shelf
Modern Voices
Series Starters and Family Reads
The Classics Shelf
The Roman-era epics and the one social-gospel novel that changed a million Sundays.
Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur is the epic the genre starts with - a Jewish nobleman's revenge story that keeps colliding with the Nazarene until revenge becomes impossible. The chariot race is chapter-length and worth every page.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Complete and Unabridged
Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis drops the first church into Nero's Rome - Peter, Paul, a bodyguard converted by the girl he loves, and a city burning. The Nobel winner wrote the early church as a thriller.
Quo Vadis: Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Kuniczak, W.S.
Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe follows the Roman soldier who won Christ's garment at the cross and cannot stop asking questions about the man who wore it. The mid-century bestseller that reads like a conversion in slow motion.
The Robe
Charles Sheldon's In His Steps asks what happens when a whole congregation pledges to ask "What would Jesus do?" before every decision for a year. The novel that invented the slogan - and it is harder than the bracelet.
In His Steps
Modern Voices
The contemporary shelf: Rivers twice, Alcorn in China, Austin in the Civil War.
Francine Rivers's Redeeming Love retells Hosea in Gold Rush California - a rancher commanded to marry a woman the world used up, and grace that will not take no for an answer. For grown-ups; the themes are honest and so is the redemption.
Redeeming Love
A Voice in the Wind opens Rivers's Mark of the Lion series in the ashes of Jerusalem - a Jewish slave girl carried to Rome, holding a faith that keeps costing her everything. The series starter readers finish at 2 a.m.
A Voice in the Wind (Mark of the Lion, #1) by Francine Rivers
Randy Alcorn's Safely Home puts an American executive back in touch with his college roommate - now a house-church leader in China - and lets the persecuted church ask the comfortable one the questions. The novel that reorders prayer lists.
Safely Home
Lynn Austin's Candle in the Darkness opens her Refiner's Fire series in Civil War Virginia - a plantation daughter whose conscience turns abolitionist one conviction at a time. Historical fiction with the research showing.
Candle in the Darkness (Refiner's Fire, #1) by Lynn Austin
Series Starters and Family Reads
First volumes and family favorites: prophecy, Vienna, Rome again, and Wingfeather.
Left Behind opens with a 747 losing passengers mid-flight - the Rapture as breaking news, and a pilot, a journalist, and a pastor's daughter left to work out what happened. The best-selling series starter of its era.
Left Behind (Left Behind, #1) by Tim LaHaye
Bodie Thoene's Vienna Prelude opens the Zion Covenant in 1930s Austria - a violinist, a journalist, and a continent walking toward war with its eyes open. Historical fiction that teaches the decade churches slept through.
Vienna Prelude (Zion Covenant, #1) by Bodie Thoene
Elizabeth George Speare's The Bronze Bow is the Newbery winner about a Zealot boy in Jesus's Galilee learning that bending the bow of vengeance takes a stronger hand than drawing it. The family read-aloud with teeth.
The Bronze Bow: A Newbery Award Winner
Andrew Peterson's On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness opens the Wingfeather Saga - three siblings, a lizard-herding grandfather, and the Fangs of Dang at the door. The family series that reads like Lewis raised in the South.
On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness