Archiving to the Glory of God

Because I am an archivist in a religious institution, I often get the question, “How should I take care of my Church’s records.” This is a vitally important question, especially if your church and denomination stresses local church autonomy like mine does. In a Baptist context, each individual church is largely responsible for keeping up with their own records and archives because Baptists do not have a hierarchical ecclesiastical structure. Basically, no one is going to make a church preserve their records. If the records are going to be preserved, the church administration or church members will have to care about it.

While I could make several posts on this subject myself, I think it would be difficult to improve upon some resources that others have already produced. The Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville produced a series of helps on how to start and maintain an archive in your church. These articles cover a broad range of topics such as arrangement, description, records management, and microfilming. They also address what to do with those pesky scrapbooks. In addition to these articles, you may want to go to your local library and see if you can find Robert Shuster’s article, “Documenting the Spirit” from American Archivist 45, Spring 1982. Shuster is the archivist at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton. This article isn’t necessary for getting started, but when you have put in a long day’s work organizing your church’s records, and you sit back and ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” you will probably find Shuster an encouragement.

Finally, there are a couple of books that I would recommend for starting an archive in your church. The first is Elizabeth Yakel’s Starting an Archives and the second is David Carmichael’s Organizing Archival Records.
Both of these books are pretty simple, and the Carmichael book even comes with a nice little piece CD-ROM that you can use to help organize your records if you have a computer with Microsoft Access on it.