On the death of the church library

There are plenty of other things worth going to war about. The loss of church libraries is no omen of coming of the "end times." It's happening, and even though I'm quite sure the vast majority of folks in, say, North America, won't be startlingly affected should church libraries disappear totally, it's clear, or so I read, that churches are dumping their libraries, getting rid of them because of plain old disuse.

Lest you think this sometime-writer about to sound the alarm, the truth is I don't remember checking books out from a church library. When I was a boy, I do remember reading some books about the Sugar Creek Gang, adolescent reading my mother insisted I read. I'm guessing I got them from the church library at First CRC, Oostburg. But standing in a library having someone check it out officially (it would have been Allie June Ver Velde, I remember that)? Nothing there in my memory. I looked. It's empty.

Furthermore, my God-fearing parents never used the church library much either, at least not that I remember. Truth be told, the home in which I was raised contained no really diligent readers, no one capable of getting lost in a book, no one who had to told to get his or her nose out of a book. I'm quite sure my parents would have been thrilled to see me lost in that fashion, but their behavior never established reading to be anything other than something that "it's a good thing to do."

We had a library in our house, as I remember, a goodly chunk of it composed of Bible commentaries that Dad inherited from his father, a pastor. My sister joined a book club when she was still a kid. One of the books she purchased was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a huge study whose spine flashed a swastika that always looked compelling to me. But Rise and Fall was a brick, a tome, a year's work in my teenage imagination--something you read when you get old and don't have to play ball somewhere.

Put bluntly, my parents' library--which wasn't bad (largely inherited) never moved much, as I remember. As I said, neither of my parents was a big reader. 

This lifelong literature teacher is publicly admitting is that I've never been much of a library patron. My billfold carries library cards from two close-by towns, but I've got them only because I use their inter-library loan systems occasionally. 

Pardon my wandering. What I meant to say is the last Christian Courier features a story that examines the demise of church libraries. Please forgive all the personal stuff I've been mumbling about; I don't want anyone to think that the topic--the demise of church libraries--is yet another sign of the times. We're all not hurdling down toward destruction just yet. 

Two men of my acquaintance, both of them quite significantly older, both of them citizens of the world and its literature, told me the same story. One of them attended Calvin in the early 1920's; the other attended Dordt in the 1950s. Both carried with them their socks and underwear, a few changes of clothes, and their own personal libraries--just two books--the Bible, of course, and Shakespeare--two books of which they were immensely proud.

To them, long ago, the book was a rare treasure. Despite their differences in age, that kind of honor and import given to books has long gone. Church libraries are dying away because few people use them. Our church doesn't have a library. It has a tall book shelf, almost always full of books people in church, including me, drop off there when we're decluttering, leave on the shelf if we can find a place, doing so in pretty much the same careful manner we drop off our empty glass bottles and jars to be recycled. 

And there the books sit. They don't move much, and they look diligent. Covenant CRC hasn't had a library for a long, long time. As far as I know, there's no movement afoot to get one, despite the fact that a significant percentage of members are profs or emeriti. 

So the back page story of Christian Courier features a story about the demise of church libraries. Evidence is all around; if the barbarians are at the gate, I've never been a warrior, even if some of the books in our church collection are mine--some having been in my possession, others adorned down the spine with my name.

The more difficult question, and a question that arises with the death of the church library, is the demise of the book? That's a more difficult question. 

That's the biggie.