Building a Parish Resource Shelf for One Year

A parish resource shelf is a small, curated collection of study series, worship aids, program kits and reference books that a congregation owns, lends and reuses. One person usually keeps it: a volunteer librarian, a Christian education director or a pastor's assistant. The shelf exists so that a small church does not buy the same material twice and does not order a twelve week study in March that nobody will finish.

What is a parish resource shelf and who keeps it?

The shelf is not a library in the public sense. It is a working collection, usually one bookcase or two in a hallway, a classroom or the back of the sanctuary. It holds what the congregation actually uses: a Vacation Bible School kit from two summers ago, a confirmation workbook set, a hymnal supplement, a DVD series on the Lord's Prayer, a binder of children's sermons.

The keeper of the shelf is often the same person who orders the curriculum. In a congregation of sixty or eighty members, that is one volunteer. The work is unglamorous: label the spine, note the date it was added, write down who borrowed it, and check it back in. The keeper also decides what leaves. A shelf that never discards anything becomes a storage room, and nobody can find the one study that fits the season.

The wider practice of running these shelves, cataloguing them and rotating collections between congregations is covered in detail by parish resource shelf practice, which reports on how synod resource centers and the Association of Lutheran Resource Centers have handled lending and sharing for decades. That history matters because most small congregations reinvent a system that already exists.

How does a small congregation choose a study series it can finish?

Count the weeks first, then count the people. A Lenten series of six sessions sounds modest until you subtract Ash Wednesday, Holy Week and the Sunday the youth group is away. In a small desert congregation, the practical number is often four sessions, not six. The same arithmetic applies to a fall study: from the Sunday after Labor Day to the Sunday before Thanksgiving is about ten weeks, and two of those will be interrupted.

Ask who will teach it. A study series that requires a trained facilitator will sit on the shelf if the only candidate is already teaching Sunday school. A series with a printed leader guide and a short video segment asks less of the teacher and gets used.

Check the format against the room. A DVD based series needs a screen and a player that works. A streaming series needs reliable internet, which is not guaranteed in every fellowship hall. A book based series needs enough copies, and photocopying a copyrighted participant guide is not an option.

Match the series to the season. Advent and Lent are short. Ordinary time is long and forgiving. A twelve week study fits summer only if the congregation stays through summer, and in a town where the tourist season and the heat both shape attendance, that is a real question.

What should a reader check before a congregation orders anything?

Read the publisher's own description critically. Publisher copy is written to sell a kit, not to describe a Tuesday night with eight people in a cold room. Four things are worth checking before the order form goes in.

First, the session count and the session length. A description that says "eight sessions" rarely says whether each one runs forty five minutes or ninety. Look for the leader guide sample, which most publishers post as a PDF.

Second, the components. A kit may include a leader guide, a participant book, a DVD, a music CD, posters and a download code. If the congregation already owns the DVD from a previous year, buying the full kit again is waste. Many publishers sell components separately, and the description does not always make that clear.

Third, the theology and the translation. Mainline Protestant material varies. A study that quotes Scripture should name the translation it uses. A series written for a large suburban church may assume a building, a budget and a paid staff that a small congregation does not have.

Fourth, the rights. Can the congregation show the video to a group, or is that a separate license? Can it print extra participant pages? The answers are usually in a permissions page, not in the main product description.

Who pays for it, and how does the shelf stay honest?

Most small congregations fund the shelf from a line item in the annual budget, often a few hundred dollars, plus memorial gifts. The keeper should know that number before ordering. A shelf with no budget becomes a shelf of donated castoffs.

Keep a simple record. A notebook works. Write the title, the date acquired, the cost, the number of sessions and whether the congregation finished it. After three years, that record tells you which publishers and which formats actually get used. It also tells you what to stop buying.

Review the shelf once a year, ideally in late summer before the fall program starts. Pull anything that has not been used in two years. Offer it to another congregation or to a synod resource center. Rotating collections exist precisely because one church's unused kit is another church's Lenten series.

What does the desert year have to do with it?

The calendar of a small desert congregation is not the calendar of a publishing catalog. Summer heat empties the pews and pushes evening activities later. The monsoon arrives in July and August, and travel becomes uncertain. Cool nights in late fall and winter bring people back. The tourist season changes who is in the room on any given Sunday.

A shelf built for that year looks different from a shelf built for a Midwestern parish. It favors short studies, flexible formats and material a visitor can join in week three without feeling lost. It favors worship aids that a small choir or a single guitarist can carry. It favors anything that can be picked up again after a two week gap.

The test is simple. At the end of the program year, count how many sessions the congregation actually completed. If the number is close to the number printed on the cover, the shelf is working. If not, the next order should be shorter.