A new Christian library in Gloucester is providing a free loan and delivery service for Christian reading materials during lock down. The books, CDs and DVDs were donated by members of Kingfisher Church or bought through a grant and are now available for anyone in Gloucester, Cheltenham and the surrounding areas to borrow.
Andrew Gatt, Christian library manager shares how the project came about.
“In September 2019 Pastor Ollie Bennett of Kingfisher Church gave a series of talks entitled ‘Into The Stretch Zone’. Through this series he encouraged people to grow resilience in their faith by moving out of the comfort zone and into activity for God even where we didn’t feel equipped to do so. Out of this series came a number of initiatives. One was an idea to create a church library as a Christian book resource to help church members in their Christian journeys.
“Pastor Ollie announced the idea at church services and asked if people could donate books to help stock the library. At the same time we made an application for a grant to Speaking Volumes, a Christian charity which funds the provision of Christian books for libraries in schools, prisons, hospitals, churches and anywhere where books can be loaned and read by many people. In November 2019 we were delighted to receive a grant from Speaking Volumes and used this to buy a selection of books from our local Christian bookshop, Books Plus Gloucester.
“While waiting for the grant decision, we received many generous donations of books from our church members as well as DVDs and CDs. So with these and the Speaking Volumes books we had a good selection of titles. We also received a financial donation and this was used to buy good second hand books. These were purchased from Scrolleaters Christian Bookshop in Stroud as, in addition to stocking new books, they have an excellent range of second hand books.
“All the books were registered and are now on our Kingfisher Church website, a simple loan process was set up, and we were left with one question: where to put the books? Heather Gatt suggested a mobile set of bookshelves, as often used in schools, and Mark Jones designed, supplied the materials and, with some help, put the bookshelves together.
“The library was opened on 5 January 2020 and since then it has been well used by church members and even more book donations have been received. As a result the library currently contains 547 items including 500 books, 25 DVDs and 22 CDs. Due to the growth of donations we planned to build a second set of mobile bookshelves, as the first one was full and we had more book donations needing storage space. Unfortunately before we could do so lock down for COVID-19 occurred.
“But with setbacks come opportunities and we have just started a home delivery service to church members. While this has only just commenced, it occurred to us that our library could be helpful to other local Christians. So we are now offering to loan and deliver our books, DVDs and CDs to any Christians in Gloucester, Cheltenham and the surrounding local areas.”
If you would like to borrow a book, just look at the Kingfisher Library list , decide what you would like and call us on 07775 439093 and we will deliver to your home address on the next Thursday.
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