Books without borders

PITY THE POOR BOOK. Its obituary has been written many times as prognosticators glance over the horizon and predict that the Internet and downloadable literature and e-books will soon replace pages-between-covers.

These prophecies are stirring debate in America and Western Europe, where computers are widely available and Internet access is cheap. But the same prophecies do not apply to the developing world, where even a relatively wealthy country like South Africa has only 62 computers per 1,000 people. Fewer than one in five people in Africa have reliable access to electricity. A pastor in Kenya has to pay $225 per month for dial-up Internet access in his rural area--service that is out of operation for weeks at a time. Church historian Kurt Berends observes, "We in the 'minority world' take political stability and infrastructure for granted."

Bibliophiles, take heart. People are clamoring for theological books in many places where the church is growing fastest. In an effort to meet this need, Berends and his business partner, Wayne Bornholdt, cofounded the Theological Book Network (TBN) in 2004. Their goal is to send high-quality theological literature to fledgling seminaries overseas.

With an endorsement from the American Theological Library Association, which encourages its 267 member libraries to send its unwanted volumes to TBN, the organization has received hundreds of thousands of books. As the church continues its spectacular growth in the non-Western or "majority world," theological educators struggle to keep up. When Berends hears reports about this growth, he asks, "What kind of church do we want?" Majority world and minority world Christians alike hope that the church will have a clergy that is not just enthusiastic, but learned.

Jack Graves, who came to TBN from Overseas Council International, estimates that during the 1990s two new graduate programs were opening in the non-Western world every month. Seminaries overseas have been enrolling more ministerial candidates than their counterparts in the West. These schools do not lack for students or zeal, but they do lack resources for teaching.

Shipping books abroad is not a new idea. Other organizations, both religious and secular, run similar programs. But TBN does the job more efficiently and cheaply by sending large quantities in each shipment. During the past fiscal year, for example, TBN shipped 200,000 books to dozens of places in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, and did so for a mere $2.80 per volume. For the amount of money that a single church or school would pay to ship 500 volumes overseas, TBN sends 12,000--and provides the required labor.

Word spreads fast. Of the 73 institutions receiving TBN books in 2005-2006, 70 initiated contact with the organization through its Web site (theologicalbooknetwork.org). After a participating school describes its library's needs in an online application, TBN tries to meet those needs. It asks schools to share the costs if they can, but it knows that many Third World seminaries have $200 or less in their annual budget for book buying.

Normally it costs about $20 to add a single volume to an African library collection. With TBN, a library can add a volume for ten cents--stretching that annual budget of $200 to buy not just ten volumes, but 2,000. Lillian Sullivan, a librarian at St. Paul's Seminary in Fort Portal, Uganda, where enrollment has been doubling every year, could spend her entire budget on one book. But TBN provided Sullivan with 650 books in one year and thereby quadrupled St. Paul's collection.

TBN's motto is "Converting EXCESS in our world to ACCESS in the rest of the world." Theology texts are so plentiful in the U.S. that it is difficult to give them away. School libraries receive boxes of books from alumni or faculty--books that they do not need. If the schools refuse the donations, the donor may be offended. If the books are accepted, the librarians must hunt through thousands of volumes to find a few usable ones. Then the schools hold used-book sales for the rest, which undercuts local bookstores--and provides clever students with a way to make money by reselling the books.

Publishers have hundreds of leftover new books that they cannot sell, in addition to damaged "seconds." To unload these books on the used market would undercut their Sales of new books even more.

In each of these cases TBN can help. Individuals and institutions can ship donations of fewer than 1,000 books to TBN's warehouse in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (The location is ideal. Eerdmans and Baker Books are also located there, and donate generously.) TBN picks up the larger loads. Its full-time staff of four cull through the donations, discard those that are inappropriate, organize the rest by theological field, and package and ship them. Seventy percent of the books shipped are used, 30 percent are new. Professors overseas, accustomed to getting books only after they have known about them for years via the Internet, have been astounded to receive newly published works.