For many years the Billy Graham Center Museum staff with diligence and discernment collected postcards that had a religious theme, especially cards were related in any way to Christian evangelism. The collection grew to include thousands of items from throughout the 20th century, mostly American, and of great variety. There are images of meeting tents, churches, activities, denominations, individual evangelists, illustrations of passages of scripture, Gospel messages and much more. In 2006, this collection was transferred to the BGC Archives.

Several times during 2008 we are going to highlight particular sets of cards with particular themes. This month the theme is The Lord's Prayer

Among the postcards in the Archives are many sets in which several cards are used to show graphically a particularly well known passage from the Bible, such as the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17, Deuteronomy 5:1-21), the 23rd Psalm, the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-11, Luke 6: 20-23). This month's Bulletin Board highlights one set (there are many others) that illustrates The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6: 9-13) The Archives staff has no further information on images used in this set, but they appear to be typical scenes in northern or central Europe. Perhaps they were originally distributed in continental Europe and then reprinted with English captions in England and the United States. The cards have no dates, but are probably very late 19th century or early 20th century.

The first card in the series is on this page. Click here to see the rest.