Faith of a mustard seed

A Christian Bookshop in Marlborough started 30 years ago from a women’s Bible study group.

In 1989, I was a mum with three small children, and I was going to a ladies Bible study group. A discussion arose that it would be good to have a Christian bookshop in Marlborough so we would not have to go to Swindon (which is 12 miles away). Three of us – Deborah Reynolds, Gilly Price and myself – decided to look into it. I had worked in Christian publishing so knew something about the book world.

My first job was in the Religious Publishing division of Collins Publishers – as assistant to Lady Collins, who ran it. Then I did some copy-editing, moved to a Christian publishing house as assistant editor and later became editor doing some commissioning work. I had to give up my job (but did some freelance work) when my husband’s job took us out of London and when I had children.

We decided to contact the trustees of a disused church called St Peter’s at the end of the high street. They thought it was a very improbable idea but were prepared to let us have a go. We realised that a bookshop on its own was unviable so decided to combine it with a coffeeshop. At that time there were only two coffeeshops in the town – now there are over 20!

A ‘management’ group convened and someone took on responsibility for the coffeeshop, an architect offered to design a logo and helped with the layout/ furniture. We were given a loan, and I took on sourcing books, which we initially got from the Christian bookshop in Swindon. I asked if they would sell us 100 books on trade terms. Quite quickly we opened our own trade account with STL (Send the Light wholesalers and distributers). We opened Mustard Seed Christian bookshop and café at the end of 1990.

After using the disused church, the building where we are now became available in 1997. It is a little old boathouse in Waitrose car park by the River Kennet, so it’s very central. We had a couple of Christian backers who were prepared to buy the building, and we pay them rent. To actually have a place of our own seemed very significant and, at that point, we always had two staff on at a time, and everyone was paid.

How did Mustard Seed cope during COVID?

Because our mission is to embody the presence of Jesus, and to somehow give people an experience of that, we are not into fast food and online services (unlike most of the world). So lockdown with COVID was a real challenge. We did a mixture of things: we tried to keep up with our mailing list and offered times when people could collect orders from the shop while staying outside; our helpers with special needs started colouring bookmarks with Bible verses and these were put in with all the orders – this has continued and turned out to be an important ministry.