Share A Book Walk with Your Presbytery

Share this with your Clerk of Presbytery!

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Picture a familiar stretch of your neighbourhood. A churchyard. A trail beside the sanctuary. A quiet block where people already walk their dogs on a Saturday morning.

Now picture the pages of a children's picture book set along it, one sign at a time, so that walking the path means reading the story together.

A grandparent and a four-year-old, stopping at every page.

A young family who might never come through the front doors of the church, out in the fresh air, drawn in by curiosity.

A congregation, outdoors and unhurried, offering something generous to the people right around it.

That's a Book Walk. And we'd love to help more of your congregations experience one!

Our partner in the Book Walk project is Storytime Trail, a non-profit who are coordinating the sale of these kits at cost. Ministry Forum doesn't make a cent on it either. This isn't a product we're selling you. It's simply something we believe in: that a meaningful, outdoor, intergenerational experience can do real good in the life of a congregation, and open a creative, welcoming door to the wider community. We'd love to see as many congregations as possible have that experience.

As we’ve journeyed through our Pilot Project, we knew that the obstacle would be the cost. The kit itself is $785 plus HST, or roughly $1,800 for two. For one congregation, that's a real investment to carry alone, especially for something they might set up only once or twice a year. Which is exactly where a presbytery can do what a single congregation can't.

Reach out to your Clerk of Presbytery: what if your presbytery bought one or two kits, and shared them? Here is how simple it could be.

The presbytery:

• purchases the kit, or two;

• finds one congregation willing to store them; and

• asks that whoever uses a kit passes it along to the next congregation when they're finished. The last user becomes the courier.

That's the whole model. One or two kits, circulating from congregation to congregation across your presbytery, so that many communities get the experience for something close to the cost that once bought it for one.

And you won't have to build a system to run it. If a kit is ever damaged or a part goes missing along the way, you don't need to solve that on your own. Reach out to us at Ministry Forum and we'll get replacement parts to you as quickly as we can.

You won't need to manage a booking calendar either. Once your presbytery has kits, we'll simply note it in the Book Walk section of our website: which presbyteries hold kits, and which titles. Down the road, that means congregations might borrow across presbytery lines too. Over time, we hope to see these paths quietly criss-crossing the whole church.

One thought as you imagine where a Book Walk might do its deepest work. The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, on September 30, is a moment many of us are still learning to mark well. A Book Walk by an Indigenous author, set along a path where a whole community can walk and read together, offers a gentle, honest way in, one that honours Indigenous voices by letting them tell their own stories. Three titles in the collection are especially fitting:

• On the Trapline by David A. Robertson (Norway House Cree Nation) and Julie Flett (Cree-Métis), a Governor General's Award winner about a boy, his grandfather, and the land that holds their family's memory.

• Encounter by Brittany Luby (Anishinaabe) and Michaela Goade (Tlingit), which imagines a first meeting between a Stadaconan fisher and a European sailor with curiosity rather than conquest.

• Go Show the World by Wab Kinew (Anishinaabe), a celebration of Indigenous heroes across history, carried by the refrain that we are people who matter.

For Quebec and Quebec-adjacent presbyteries, two of these carry an added resonance. On the Trapline is also available in French, as Ligne de trappe, so a bilingual or Francophone congregation can walk it in either language. And Encounter is rooted in the St. Lawrence world itself, imagining that 1534 meeting on the lands of the Stadaconan people, whose home stood where Quebec City stands today. To walk it there is to walk a story on the very ground where it began.

These are stories worth walking well beyond September, of course. But the day gives us a good reason to begin.

We're not asking you to take on a program. We're inviting you to make one good, shareable thing possible for the congregations in your care, and then to let the story do its own gentle work.

Reach out to your Clerk of Presbytery today!