They're not quite what I want in the church library.
I had not considered what I would want in a church library, certainly nothing divisive or advocating doctrines not believed to be valid according to the church's doctrinal statement.
I'm new to the church, we began attending in October.
Their doctrinal statement hits the basics and doesn't stray into the secondary issues.
The proposed idea is to begin a home school co-op at the church.
With this in mind, they were given a sum of money to purchase new books.
Soon after their purchase they approached me (my wife and I attend one of their small groups and knew I enjoyed reading).
The books they purchased are everything (and more) that I read to my kids... Dr. Seuss, Little House, Mike Mulligan's Steam Shovel, as well as various Science books and Encyclopedias, quite a few are faith oriented... love the title of some, like the
Dead Sea Squirrel's, but my favorite title is The Ology Book.
I wrote up broad objectives for the Children and Adults:
To cultivate a space of wisdom, exploration, and imagination, centered on the truth of Scripture and the Lordship of Christ.
To serve as a reservoir of valuable theological resources for a student, a teacher, a leader, or a researcher of Scripture.
And provided an outline of what I want in the library:
The library will include:
- Theological Works: Biblical theology, commentary, instruction, doctrine, church history, apologetics, etc.
- Christian Living & Spiritual Formation Literature: Books that interact with family dynamics, politics, finance, science, the arts, social issues, from a biblical worldview.
- Fiction & Classic Literature: Include works that incorporate or encourage exploration of Christian themes, even if not explicitly Christian
- Children’s & Young Adult Books: Age-appropriate, biblically grounded, and imaginatively rich (popular series, graphic novels, comics, joke books, sports, etc)
We're going to drop the Dewey Decimal System and work with broader categories, alphabetizing by author.
I'm working on an age-differentiated, color-coded identification for children's books.
We are using a
General Honor System Lending Policy with old-fashioned library cards in each book's back pocket.
I'm considering an unfiltered,
"Take a Book, Leave a Book" section for popular books that people might read that might not pass my sniff test. No library stamp or check-out needed...if you're interested take it.
~~~~~~~
I found only a few interesting books among the few thousand or so in their old, current collection.
One was Richard Weymouth's,
The Resultant Text (1892), in fair condition with brittle pages. Weymouth compared a great variety of composite texts as well as Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and other uncials that earlier editors did not have available.
His text was one of the three comparative texts used in
the first edition of Eberhard Nestle's Greek New Testament (1898).
Anyway... looks like I'll be recycling Hagee's books.
Rob
