Starting a Parish Lending Library

This article is written in the hope that, with God’s help, you will pray for and build a parish or mission lending library for the good of your own community and also for your own formation. Enough detail will be given for you to begin in earnest with the information provided. Consider these main propositions:

First: parish lending libraries are an important part of the lifelong discipleship of the Orthodox Church, from generation to generation, with the great goal of deification – by God’s grace and with our cooperation – for everyone.

Second: lending libraries are easy and enjoyable to set up and to keep running in a parish or mission, but only if three important rules are continually observed in practice: keep it small, simple and spiritual (“SSS”).

Third: if the priest and his parish council consciously agree with the above, and if one or two parishioners are at first willing to act in accordance with that willingness, then a lending library can be up and running within three months.

Nine years ago, during an adult education class in the parish of which I am a member, someone said: “You know, we could all learn more about the faith if we had good Orthodox materials at our disposal here. We ought to have a parish library.” About two dozen people said: “Amen. What a wonderful idea.” It was four years after that remark before we were actually able to begin a library, chiefly because we struggled to make the reasons for a library clear to others, because we had no shared concept of the operating principles that should guide us towards the right kind of library for an Orthodox parish, and because the priest and the council reasonably saw other needs as a regular priority above a library.

Once we had agreed on the basic concepts described in this article, we were able, within three months, to lend good Orthodox materials to the faithful. And now, more than five years later, we still lend out an average of 400 items a year in a parish of 187 households. We have reached our target of 500 Orthodox items and continue to concentrate on encouraging our fellow parishioners to make use of these materials. Almost any parish or mission can have a parish lending library within a calendar quarter. I have seen this happen successfully in a mission not far from our parish.

Two things need to be said here about the word library. First, parish or mission lending libraries should simply not be seen as comparable to, or in competition with, either of the following:

(a) seminary libraries, with all their many obligations and aims, including research and scholarly publication; or

(b) public libraries, with their remarkable, apparent mandate to be all things to all interest groups in society.

Second, the word library (from the Latin word for book) today communicates not so much a format (which in the narrower sense might mean only “books”) as the idea of help in gaining access to Orthodox information, which may consist 80% of books and 20% of “other” formats, such as Orthodox music CDs, CD-ROMs, audio cassettes, video tapes, internet providers, and so on.

What, then, is a lending library that suits the needs of an Orthodox Christian parish or mission? Let us look again at proposition number one.

We are – like the twelve Disciples – “in training” as we accompany Christ in His Church. Our ultimate goal is “deification”, or the restoration, by God’s grace, of the image and likeness of God in us. Orthodoxy holds that we must cooperate with God throughout our lives to achieve this goal. There are many good ways of doing this, of which a lending library is only one – but it is one. Christ reads, and we imitate Him.

Next we must consider which guidelines best describe how a library should function in order to serve this general goal of discipleship. To that end we can revisit our second proposition.

This SSS device is a way of keeping the parish lending library on the right course “for ever”, since it will be confronted with many unpredictable situations.

Small means that you do not need much space and often do not need to have an “extra room with four walls” available. Small means that you can start and maintain a really good library with 150–200 Orthodox paperbacks in an attractive lockable cabinet standing on a sturdy trolley with wheels (both available from your office stationer). When the floor needs to be waxed or space is urgently needed for a parish feast, that is no problem. The library is simply rolled into a corner until the bustle is over. To expand, you simply buy a second cabinet.

If you are a mission in rented premises that have to be set up every Sunday, you can have a lending library too. Aim for 50 paperbacks in a small cabinet that is brought along to the gathering after the Divine Liturgy on Sunday. The point is that every parish or mission needs a library; do not let fantasies about what a library “should be” keep you from doing what you can with your present facilities.

But from the beginning you must set limits on the size of your library yourself. You must keep the growth of your collection in check, because over time your library can easily get out of hand and become too large for the other, competing and legitimate needs for space. A mission renting space for Sundays, with 25 households and a “portable foot-library”, should limit the size to 50–75 titles. The mission with 50 households and a space of its own for a “rolling cabinet” should limit the collection to about 150–200 titles. The small to medium-sized parish of 100–200 households can have 5 cabinets and 500–750 titles. Even large parishes should have clear limits. Think small for success.

An effective parish lending library is never merely a warehouse for books. You want a library with a relatively small collection that is genuinely used (10–15% should be out on loan at any time). Weekly notices in the Sunday bulletin, posters to promote reading, and personal persuasion of members of the congregation help to keep circulation high. A large collection with 1% in circulation is a net waste of resources. And if you grow too large, you can become intimidating.

Another reason for a small lending library is to place it deliberately “in the way” of the parishioners. The best place is often by the coffee stands where people gather for fellowship. A small library (in proportion to the size of your parish) of good Orthodox books that are actually borrowed and read is ideal.

Simplicity is possible for you, whereas it would be an absolute disaster for the larger, multidisciplinary library. You have no need of a complicated book classification system when your library is essentially about one discipline called “Orthodoxy”. You can set virtually all your books on the shelves in alphabetical order by the first significant word of the title on the spine. Books for young people and children, however, can often best be kept in their own section and shelved by the different ages or classes.

Circulation of materials means that what goes out must also come back in. If the library is not looked after, it must be locked or otherwise secured, or before long there will be no library at all. The books will all be with well-meaning people who certainly intended to return them but simply forgot. A simple three-part (white, yellow, pink) carbonless form can be printed at your local office stationer as a loan card. Everyone who borrows a book is helped to fill in the form with their name, daytime and evening telephone number, the title and author of the item, the volume number, the copy number and the purchase cost (details easily noted on the title page of any book), the month in which it is borrowed and the following month (which is the month of return). The idea is to give busy people a full month or more to read the book.

The three-part forms are used like this: the top (white) copy and the yellow (second) copy are filed (stuck together) in a loan-card box behind a tab for the month in which the book is due, for example “September” (a book lent in August must be returned in September). The pink (third) copy is put into the book at the time of lending, to remind the borrower in which month the book must be returned. The borrower leaves the pink copy in the book when it is returned to the “Book Return Box”. A large “X” can be drawn on the white copy, which is placed behind a “returned books” tab in the loan-card box as permanent evidence of circulation for that calendar year. Only then is the book put back on the shelf.

But what if the book is still not back at the end of September? The yellow copy is pulled from the white copy, given to the library helper and used by him or her to get the book back, by telephoning the borrower every week to remind him or her to return the book until it has been returned. Lost or destroyed books must be replaced or paid for by the borrower. Perseverance is crucial to the survival of the library.

Spiritual. Not every “spirituality” is good, since we confine ourselves to the lending libraries of Orthodox parishes. Everything that falls “outside” the holy Orthodox faith must be kept out of the lending library. Keeping out heretical material is surprisingly difficult over time. For that reason every book given to the library or proposed for purchase must be approved beforehand by the priest. The delay this entails is certainly worth it to keep the library Orthodox and not “something else”.

Non-spiritual items that have no connection with the holy Orthodox faith must likewise be kept out of the Orthodox parish lending library, lest the library degenerate into a sad and wholly under-resourced attempt to duplicate the collection of the local public library. A parish library can in fact do only one thing well: provide good, sound, spiritual Orthodox materials to Orthodox people who, with God’s help, are striving towards deification. If the parish library can do that one thing, it has done well.

One of the best first sources of materials for starting parish libraries is simply to let every household in the parish know that a library is being started and to ask for contributions of Orthodox books (with the usual condition of automatic review by the priest). The truth is that a well-run library enables us to share our books with one another, so that they do not gather dust on our shelves at home after being read once. If we ever want to read “our” book again, the library lends it back to us. Good stewardship also means that 24 people read a book rather than only the buyer. Sharing books simply makes sense.

Besides asking parishioners for donations of “used books”, the other way to obtain books and materials is to buy them. Happily, there are now several Orthodox publishers in English. To begin with, you need only know that the bookstore of Saint Vladimir’s Seminary offers two excellent services: (1) SVS will sell your parish an “instant library” (called packages) of 50 to 150 Orthodox books in English at a reasonable price; and (2) SVS has the Press Club, through which your library receives a few newly published Orthodox books every few months. Conciliar Press, too, has a display and a starter set especially for visitors and enquirers, made up of current booklets and brochures. The library is the perfect parish base for low-threshold, personal Orthodox evangelisation of visitors and enquirers.

The third and last suggestion is this: if the priest and his parish council consciously agree to the above, and if one or two parishioners are at first willing to act in accordance with that willingness, then a lending library can be up and running within three months.

The parish lending library should be seen as “owned” by the whole parish and as a normal part of the parish discipleship programme. The priest and the council must agree that a lending library is desirable for the parish. Given agreement on the need for a library, the parish council should approve a special account (“the library fund”) to receive and spend both annually budgeted and specially offered monies under the supervision of the parish treasurer.

About half of the annual costs should be included in the budget and the other half raised by individual targeted offerings. This automatically places the library and its finances under the existing oversight programmes and increases the library’s credibility. Start-up costs currently average $10 or $12 per paperback, or about $500 for the “bookcase library” and from $1,000 to $2,000 for the “rolling cabinet library”.

If there is a parish bookstore, the library may choose to buy books at cost and so enjoy the publishers’ 20% trade discount. Again, to achieve cooperation the priest and the council must encourage this by seeing both the bookstore and the library as compatible ways of encouraging discipleship throughout the parish.

The first continuing priestly role in supporting the library is the prior approval of library materials. The other continuing priestly role is helping to identify those with God-given talents to work in the library team. Two library coordinators can lead the overall effort. One coordinator is concerned with the development of the collection (finances, acquisition, inventory, physical arrangement) and the other with circulation (including marketing the library, recovering overdue items and recruiting helpers).

To prevent burn-out, helpers who open the library after the service should rotate only once every two months. Helpers on duty should be recognisable by a blue ribbon pinned on with “LIBRARY” on it (available from the office stationer). Remind the helpers of their duty times, train them, and thank them regularly.

John W. Truslow, Jr. is coordinator of the Library Ministry Team at St Elias.