Now is a great time to contact your age group ministers, women’s ministers, men’s ministers, and other ministers to discuss how the church library can assist their plans for the new ministry year. A common question for all of them involves their disciple making approaches. Will they have group Bible studies and/or Bible-based studies? Does the library provide the materials the leaders use such as kits?
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Our church approach to making disciples involves Sunday morning Bible study (Sunday School), worship, Wednesday groups for all ages, and groups that meet on other days. I will connect with each of the church staff ministers who lead these ministries to find out what they will be doing which will impact our collection development this year. With our preschool minister, we are planning to have monthly preschool story times in the library on Mondays which is new for our church. We will add books to our collection that relate to what all the groups do including Sunday morning Bible studies. In our church, the curriculum materials are all provided to leaders and participants by the staff ministers. Consequently, we do not have leader kits in the library collection. Due to the limited space in the Enrichment Center, the preschool, children, youth, and adult areas have their own resource rooms for the teachers and leaders. We focus on what the learners need by way of self-selected supplemental materials including fiction and non-fiction. For example, we have a great collection of picture books and chapter books for parents to use with their children at home. We consider them to be the primary disciple makers for their children so we work hard to help them do that with books. We make them aware of books in our collection that relates to what their children are focusing on in Sunday School. With our Women's Minister, the Enrichment Center leads a reading group during the Wednesday morning women's discipleship groups. The morning group has a new name: Insightful Reading. Our Wednesday evening discipleship groups include a coed reading group led by the Enrichment Center. It is called Reflections.