Book Clubbing...

So, my calling right now in our ward is Literacy Specialist, which right now really just means "Book Club" because I haven't done much else yet. But I'm kind of excited about the book club, and our first meeting is Thursday night. I'm trying something different, and I guess although I'm apprehensive about how well it will be received, I hope there are at least a few people willing to give it a whirl.

Here's the deal. Rather than having one book everyone reads and discusses together, we've instead chosen a subject. At this point I envision getting to know people from either Church History or the scriptures, and our first subject is the Apostle Paul. I went to a conference a while back where the speaker implored the sisters to get to know scriptural characters, to study them and understand who they were and their point of view, until you could literally hear their voice in your head as a friend when you read their words. I thought that was a neat thought, so here we go.

I listed 6 or so possible options, from biographies to historical fictions, LDS authors and otherwise, and hopefully Thursday we'll meet together and talk about our thoughts, suspicions, conjectures, etc. No doctrine, just personalities. We'll talk about where they grew up and what it may have been like, their families, all kinds of things, and together hopefully with the different books we've read we'll be able to come away with a better understanding of Paul than we had before. It works in theory because nobody has to find that ONE book at the library or wait to borrow it. We left it totally open to people to decide what they wanted to read. At the very least everyone has access to their scriptures and can use that. Anyway, I made up this little flyer tonight to email a reminder to everyone... we'll see how it goes. I'll consider it a success if we get five people out on a snowy Thursday night, but maybe we can grow from there.