by Jon Dykstra

For the bargain rate of 25 cents I recently acquired an ancient guide on how church libraries were done in the Christian Reformed Churches years ago. Church Library Handbook was first published in 1954, and while some of it is now outdated - like the price list on the “Book Suggestions” page - the book’s theme is relevant today. A church library, the authors suggest, can be as influential as the church’s minister, and should be treated with the same level of respect.

Is your library complimenting,
or competing with your minister?

This might strike you as an overstatement. After all, the only church libraries that some of us know consist of a couple dusty half-filled bookshelves tucked into a corner of a back room in the basement.  But the comparison isn’t so outlandish when the library we’re looking at is one of the newer sort springing up in our churches, the sort that has current and classic books, fiction and non-fiction, neatly ordered on shelves that never gather dust because the books are being read and reshelved at regular intervals.

First Impressions by Debra White is a medium-sized Christian romance novel – the kind of book that might be checked out one Sunday and returned the next. It is 327 pages long with roughly 330 words per page, which works out to just over 100,000 words. In comparison, every service a minister will speak to the congregation for about 40 minutes, and each Sunday he will conduct two services. If he speaks at a good, average rate of 150 words per minute, the congregation will receive a total of about 12,000 words from the pulpit or roughly one eighth as many words as a typical Christian romance novel.

Of course the extent of a library’s, or a minister’s influence can’t be calculated with simple word totals. But this comparison does show how a library can have a potent impact on the church, for good or for ill. A minister may only preach a sermon on a topic like marriage once a year, while the church library may be filled to the brim with Christian romance fiction. If a young woman devours a book every week or so and makes a regular diet of this sort of fiction, it is easy to see how the library could exert a stronger influence on her thinking on this topic than anything the minister might preach.

It seems then that comparing the library’s influence to the minister’s isn’t so outlandish. That’s why, if a church is going to have a library, they need to exercise a similar level of concern and care in its creation and maintenance as they might do in the calling of a minister, because a well-used library will be influential... for good or for ill.

Warning labels

So how to ensure that influence is of the good sort? Well, one approach being used involves the insertion of warning or “discernment labels” in each book.

It’s a given that care needs to be taken in the selection of books, but we live in a sin-stained world, so it is a given too that even the best of books will have problems. One of the more obvious examples is that it is next to impossible to find Christian fiction free of Arminianism - almost without exception, every title contains at least a flavoring of it. Many times though, it is merely a flavoring and the only real concern is that it might sneak up on readers undetected. A short summary of the book’s flaws, pasted on the inside of the cover ensures that this won’t happen.

In our library in Lynden, Washington we’ve made only a small start of this. Our discernment labels amount to short book reviews ordered under three headings: Content, Cautions and Conclusion. Content provides a short summary of the book, Cautions is where the warnings are noted, and under Conclusion readers can find to whom and for what reason the book is recommended. This is how the “discernment label” for A Journey in Grace reads:

A JOURNEY IN GRACE
by Richard P. Belcher

CONTENT: This is a different sort of novel – the cover describes it as a “theological novel.” Seminary student Ira Fife Pointer, is forced into a spiritual journey when he’s asked a question he’s never heard before: “Young man – are you a Calvinist?” Ira doesn’t know, but he’s definitely going to find out. The plot centers around Ira’s quest to find out what Calvinism is, and what the Bible says about depravity, election, atonement, grace, and perseverance.

CAUTION: The author is a Reformed Baptist, who understands both baptism and the covenant in a markedly different way than we do, but these issues are only incidental in this volume.

CONCLUSION: As fiction Journey in Grace doesn’t really measure up, but as a theological text, this “novel” approach to teaching Calvinism is nothing short of brilliant.

Of course the “Cautions” don’t always need to be of a strictly theological nature. On a discernment label for the great children’s DVD The Creation Adventure Team: Six Short Days, One Big Adventure I noted: “CAUTION: This video has been designed to appeal to the attention-deficit set, with cuts from one camera angle to the next every few seconds. Fascinating material, but so fast-paced and frenetic, I almost had a headache after watching it.” And in creating a label for the 1953 film Martin Luther I noted “CAUTION: Though there is nothing in the film that is graphic, some scenes are psychologically intense, so it may not be appropriate for the very young.”

Another approach

While these labels are helpful, they are time-consuming. We’ve only just started on them and seem to be falling behind as we buy more books than we label. To make it work we’ll need to recruit at least a few more book reviewers.

A better approach might be the one used by the Glanbrook Canadian Reformed Church. They’ve decided to go with less detailed labels, so they can get them placed in many more books. Rather than write a separate caution for every book, some general caution labels, like “This book has Arminian overtones,” have been created for whole categories of books. This label is short and succinct and can be used again and again on a variety of Christian fiction titles.

Conclusion

A good library can be a great help to a church’s ministry, providing resources for the study groups, and books that expand on and compliment the message being preached each Sunday. They can also provide edifying fiction for the congregation’s enjoyment.

But they aren’t necessary. While every church needs a minister - every church needs to hear the Word preached regularly – libraries are an option that we can choose to have or do without. That’s why there is no reason to have a mediocre library, one that passes on both harmful and helpful ideas. If proper care and attention can’t be spared to make your church’s library a great one then it would be best to get rid of it altogether. Let’s not allow the preaching to be undermined by what our library is teaching.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2010 issue