ChristianityToday.com: Landmark titles that changed the way we think, talk, witness, worship, and live.  People and movements can be defined by the books they read and remember. The time it takes to read and digest a book requires us to engage someone else's ideas with more seriousness than almost any other activity. So it is with some trepidation that we present this list.

• In a letter with his nominations, Notre Dame historian Mark A. Noll wrote that the list "strikes me as an imposing task, because there are so many good and important books, but also because it is so hard to figure out who 'we' are." True. Our experiment is one stab at an answer to this confounding question.
  
  We look forward to the disagreement that will come our way. Tell us which books should not be on the list and which we should have included. Make your comments and suggestions by emailing us.
  
  —The Editors

50. Revivalism and Social Reform, Timothy L. Smith
The new evangelicals were rightly wary of the liberal "social gospel." Yet they knew Jesus called them to serve the oppressed. Historian Timothy L. Smith destroyed the myth of the "heavenly minded" evangelical and helped us remember our history of personal and social holiness.

43.Operation World, Patrick Johnstone
The who, where, what, why, when, and how many of unreached peoples.

32.The Cross and the Switchblade
David Wilkerson with John and Elizabeth Sherrill
Amazing things started happening when, in 1958, a country preacher arrived—Bible in hand and Holy Spirit in heart—in the ghettos of New York City. Christian Retailing reports that "more than 50 million copies are in print in 40-plus languages of the book that gave birth to the ministry of Teen Challenge."

29.Dare to Discipline
James Dobson
In the permissive '70s, Dobson did what he still does best—calling us to focus on the family.

26.Know Why You Believe
Paul E. Little
Now we do.

20.A Wrinkle In Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'Engle told CT that when she tried to be a Christian with her "mind only," she ceased to believe. But then she realized that God was a storyteller. Her 1962 classic modeled the power of imagination to energize belief.

18.The Divine Conspiracy
Dallas Willard
With this call to discipleship, "Willard joins the line of Thomas a Kempis, Luther, Fenelon, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, Zinzendorf, Wesley, Frank Laubach, Dorothy Day, and other master apprentices of Jesus," wrote Books and Culture editor John Wilson in a review, praising the University of Southern California professor's "philosophical depth" and "penetrating understanding of Scripture."

10.Evangelism Explosion
D. James Kennedy
This more than any other book ("The Four Spiritual Laws" is a pamphlet) gave evangelicals a systematic way to share their faith. It made the question, "If you were to die tonight, do you know for sure that you would go to heaven?" standard evangelistic fare.

9.Through Gates of Splendor
Elisabeth Elliot
The account of the martyrdom of five young missionaries at the hands of a feared "Stone Age" tribe in Ecuador helped launch a generation of cross-cultural evangelists into the world's hard places. Author Jerry B. Jenkins told CT, "The story left me feeling spiritually slain."

1.Prayer: Conversing With God
Rosalind Rinker
In the 1950s, evangelical prayer was characterized by Elizabethan wouldsts and shouldsts. Prayer meetings were often little more than a series of formal prayer speeches. Then Rosalind Rinker taught us something revolutionary: Prayer is a conversation with God. The idea took hold, sometimes too much (e.g., "Lord, we just really wanna …"). But today evangelicals assume that casual, colloquial, intimate prayer is the most authentic way to pray.

Go to ChristianityToday.com for the full list.