Have you wondered what’s going on in the space formerly occupied by our church library? Here’s a brief synopsis.
To accommodate our growing office staff, including our new Executive Director of Operations, we had to reconfigure the church office spaces. What originally seemed like a challenge turned into an opportunity. As it turned out, last summer our Children, Youth, and Family Ministries (CYFM) Steering Team had considered the idea of a family “Hub,” based on St. John’s “core four” (worship, grow, build community, make a difference): a place for families to meet up, have fellowship, find resources for worship and faith formation, and engage in ongoing service projects. Thus the vision was born of transforming the library into that new space, which will become a focus of CYFM activity during our evolving transition time between education and worship.
As a result, our full library collection – including children’s books – was moved to the Lounge and is now housed in beautiful, new built-in bookcases. We are still in the process of optimizing access and the lookup and checkout processes, given the recent retirement of long-time librarian Toni Hartman. A successor has been identified and will be in place soon.
We recognize this new arrangement can limit library access at times, given its location in a shared meeting space. We are making additional adjustments and we welcome your ideas and suggestions on making the library as accessible as possible within these constraints.
As for the Hub, the vision was a space to provide hospitality to newcomers, visibility of St. John’s commitment to support young families, and opportunities for midweek gatherings like child/caregiver days out, story time, J2A/teen small groups, and more.
To make this vision a reality, a designer created an exciting plan, pro bono, that met both missional and office needs. Tim Dobbyn, our resident properties expert, jumped in to oversee the design-to-build process, and funding came from a donation dedicated for this purpose. The work will be completed very soon.
We look forward to the many expanded ministry opportunities our new Hub will afford!
