This is the final instalment in my series of posts introducing the range of new Matthias Media resources that have just arrived in. And today's takes a bit of explaining. Here goes...

One of the issues we've grappled with for many years at Matthias Media relates to our monthly magazine, The Briefing. Each year, writers and editors pour countless hours of thought and hard work into putting together helpful magazine-length articles on a wide range of important topics. The people who happen to be subscribing to The Briefing at that time get the benefit of reading that article. But once it is published, that's pretty much it; it's unlikely to see the light of day again or be read by anyone else.

Frankly, magazine publishing often feels a bit ‘vapour-ish’ in an Ecclesiastes kind of a way: here one month, gone the next. Which is a shame, because the articles we publish are extremely useful material.

At times, we've contemplated whether to bundle up good articles—articles on a mixture of topics or a collection of articles on the same theme—and put them out in book form. But it somehow didn't feel right. The collections of articles on one theme just didn't seem to be quite what we wanted to say in totality about that theme: the sum of the parts did not equal the whole. And did people really want to buy a whole collection of articles on all sorts of different topics? Better, surely, to put them all on CD-ROM and make them a searchable collection.

But then the penny dropped for us: magazine articles are designed to be published in a magazine format. (Yes, I know; it doesn't seem like rocket science, but for some reason it did take us quite a few years to work this out.)

Wouldn't it be terrific, we thought, if we could collect up three useful articles on an important topic, and put them out in the format they were intended for: a magazine? A ‘MiniZine’, in fact—a small, inexpensive magazine with just enough input and insights to help Christians with their thinking and to start a meaningful conversation together on that topic.

So that's what we've done. The first two MiniZines are Help for a Sick Prayer Life and Purity in the Age of Porn.

As they say, “Do yourself a favour” and get hold of a copy of each of these new MiniZines. Better yet, do your brothers (and sisters) a favour and buy them in bulk to give away on the assumption that quite a few of your Christian friends struggle with at least one of these topics (and might be embarrassed to admit it). And please drop us a line to tell us what you think of the idea and the format. We have two more in the pipeline, but whether we continue with them will depend a little on the feedback (and the sales!).

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