Billy Graham Center
Archives

Into All the World - Social History Reflected in Mission Archives.
Script for a Powerpoint presentation Bob Shuster gave to the Michigan Archival Association,
June 21, 2013




As archivists what we preserve is not so much paper and data bits, but context. We keep not just the individual photo and letter and film, but the files and filing system they were part of, the setting in which they sat, hoping that in respecting the order of these files, we can get clues to the disorderly humans who created them.
 
In the Internet age, all knowledge and insight is broken down into its littlest bits, all boiling together in the same soup, all eras and historical personages sit together on the same darkening plain. Obama and Elvis, or maybe Hammurabi and Elvis shake hands, Washington crosses the Delaware on a jet ski. Rembrandt paints a Picasso. The world will have an increasing need for work of archivists, as we make it possible amid this blizzard of sameness to recapture the particular, the unique, the solid touch of the real and strange and different which we must feel if we are going to have any chance of truly visiting that foreign field called the past.
 
The missionary movement particularly needs this archival gift of context. Because the Christian missionary and evangelism enterprise is one that cuts against many of the assumptions of modern secular American society. Those within the movement see is as a witness to salvation, a carrying out by imperfect people of a commission given them by Jesus, the Son of God. To those with a secular viewpoint, it is often perceived and portrayed as expression of arrogant, ignorant cultural imperialism. To truly understand the American mission movement and its great and continuing impact on the world and in particular the United States, the sources are needed, the archives are needed. So what I would like to do this morning is provide some context for mission archives. Actually for one kind, nondenominational mission archives, which are the only ones I know much about: - their history, their structure, the kinds of records they generate, what kind of data those records contain and how they have been used, at least as reflected in the use at my own institution. I would also like to touch on the dual aspect of mission archives, how while documenting an effort to convert the world, they reflect so much of the nature and society of that world.
 
[5] In the last chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, the resurrected Jesus Christ tells his disciples to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every living creature. [Matthew 28: 18-20] Evangelism has always had a place in the Christian church, and a large part of evangelism has been the preaching of the Christian Gospel where it had never been heard before. But there have been times when this mission of the church been much more actively pursued than others. One such time is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, perhaps the greatest age of Christian missions.
 
In the nineteenth century, something new emerged in missions. In addition to churches - Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, etc - that sent out missionaries, as they had for centuries, there were now independent agencies, not part of any church. These nondenominational, parachurch agencies blossomed in the United States. Perhaps their non aligned, independent nature was especially well fitted to American Christianity or to the American character. At any rate, parachurch organizations were important elements in Protestant Evangelicalism from the early 19th century on. These agencies were the means for a large percentage of American Christians to testify to their faith and spread the Word, either through direct action or by their support. From a different perspective, these nonchurch mission agencies grew out of both the philanthropic and business methods developed in America in the 19th century. They were part of a larger movement to develop new institutions for a changing society and economy. The mission agencies were not the preaching orders or monasteries or congregations developed in previous ages of church history. They were corporations, with a structure similar in many ways to an international business, although usually small and much more decentralized than most business enterprises.
 
From 1810 on, American Protestant Christians began to place great emphasis on their duty to send missionaries overseas. This was especially seen as a responsibility to send workers to lands where Christianity was virtually unknown. And an increasingly large percentage of these overseas workers came from the nondenominational agencies. Besides the part they played in the development of Christianity globally, the American missionaries were a recognized part of American society, as can seen reflected in such writers as Twain and Melville. And for the better part of a century they were one of the most important liaisons, for the average American , to the world outside America and Europe, informing and interpreting.
 
[6] From an archival point of view, the records of these Evangelical and Fundamentalist parachurch organizations are in the void. There are perhaps six organizations in the vast kaleidoscope of ministries that make up the nondenominational Evangelical movement that have internal archives. And to the best of my knowledge, only two or three archives apart from the BGC Archives have any interest at all in collecting nondenominational ministries as a class.
 
The Billy Graham Center Archives has endeavored since its founding in 1975 to fill at least a small part of this void. The Center as a whole exists to accelerate global evangelism by a variety of methods. It includes a museum of evangelism and us, the BGC Archives.
 
[7] Our mission statement declares that “The Archives gathers, preserves and makes available for use unpublished documents on the history of North American nondenominational Protestant efforts to spread the Christian Gospel. Although anyone may come and use the collections, these materials are especially intended as a resource for the evangelistic mission of the church.” What we are documenting is not Evangelicalism, a tradition within Christianity, but rather evangelism, the effort to share with others the Christian Good News. As I mentioned at the start, evangelism has been a part of the Christian story since the beginning. We are only going after a tiny part of that great universe of the documents of evangelism , the part played by North American Evangelicals through nondenominational agencies, outside of church structures. Even so, there is a vast amount of material that could be collected and we, because of limitations in resources and space, have to limit ourselves to trying to acquire samples of various types. And one type of evangelism, of course, is overseas missions.
 
At the BGC Archives, we have hundreds of collections that document this missionary movement and the documents in those collections have many interwoven themes, for both American and world history. The types of collections fall into five non exclusive categories:
 
[8] Mission organizations - These are the organizations that actual recruit and train missionaries, send out evangelists, plant churches, run hospitals and schools, supervise Bible translation. Internally they are divided between home boards, that recruit and send out workers from particular countries and the field boards, which overseas the actual work of the mission. Most of our collections are the files of the United States home board of various missions, the files of which of course contain many reports and other information on the work done in the field. We have the records of the American branch of ongoing missions such as Africa Inland Mission, Overseas Missionary Fellowship (formerly China Inland Mission), South America Mission.
 
[9] One interesting collection grew out of the aftermath of World War II. A group of American G.I.s in Japan and the Philippines started a radio program called the GI Gospel Hour. From that grew the mission today called SEND International. From being concerned mostly with American G.I.s,
 
[10] it became agency for preaching the Gospel and starting churches throughout southeast Asia. Out of SEND came important Evangelical institutions like the Far East Bible Institute and Seminary, FEBIAS, which now has its own archives collecting on Evangelicalism in the Philippines.
 
[11] Next there are the organizations that provide needed services to mission agencies. One example is Mission Aviation Fellowship, started after World War II by experienced air force pilots such as Elisabeth Greene to provide transport and communications for missionaries in the remote parts of the world. Then there was Short Terms Abroad, created a the very beginning of the IT age to use computers to help missions match their needs for teachers, electricians, dentists, printers and a range of other vocations with Christian laypeople who wanted to volunteer their services for a year or two.
 
 [12]Third, we have the private papers of American missionaries who served in all parts of the world. These are particularly heavy in diaries and letters sent to family and friends. Also important are the prayer letters they sent to supporters, describing their daily activities so as to generate prayer and financial support. Depending upon what the missionary’s work was, you might have in her or his private papers maps or linguistic notes and hand made dictionaries or curriculum plans or medical records. Not to mention sermons.
 
[13] Judi Culberton’s book, Games Christians Play, in the definition of
 
[14] Missionary-Ladies wrote: “All are camera fiends.” For good reason. Missionary often made scrapbooks not for their own enjoyment, but
 
[15] as something to be used when missionaries went back to the United States on furlough.
 
[16] They would visit the churches that supported them or speak at mission conference and they would use carefully prepared scrapbooks to explain what they were doing in their corner of the world.
 
[17] First there were scrapbooks, then lantern slides, then home movies. In the mid-twentieth century, missionaries on furlough had a reputation for never being far from their slide projector.
 
[18] Fourth, oral histories. The kind of interviews we do at the BGC Archives are based on life experience. We trace people about their family background, earliest memories, education, childhood, ; changing thoughts about God, their conversion experience, why they went where they went; what they did, what they saw. We always try to get a description of the culture and characteristics of the church in their part of the world - methods of worship, social life, the part that church played in the life of the country, changes they have seen over time.
 
[19] Finally we have the records of congresses other meetings on mission topics. The files of these particular meetings are good snapshot of a particular moment in time, giving an idea of who was involved in missions, what their expectations were, what were attitudes and issues of Evangelical missions in the 1950s, the 1960s, and so forth. Among the collections we have are the files of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization which one of the major events in the global evangelical movement in the last century, involving both missionaries and indigenous church leaders.
 
So these are the different kind of records we have. What kind of documents do these collections contain? What exactly do they document?
 
[20] Different parts of the mission recorded different things. The home boards or sending arm of the mission contains personnel files on the individual missionaries sent out, as well as budgets, fund raising letters, publications put out by the mission. These records can be used to address such questions as: How do Americans see other parts of the world? How do they see missionaries? How are the values and beliefs of the larger American society reflected or rejected in the American missionary movement? How does the missionary movement influence American foreign policy and other aspects of American society? Who becomes missionaries and why? How do these American missionaries understand and live their faith? Who supports the independent missionary?
 
[21] And then there are the records from the field boards. These minutes, field council reports, letters, and other documents talk about the evangelistic, pastoral, educational, medical activities of the mission. They illustrate how missions functions as organization in the field, how missionaries relate to local Christians and to the general population, the development of an indigenous church and an indigenous Christianity and theology and the church’s influence on its own society and society’s influence on the church; the translation of the Bible and its impact on local culture; the social, economic, political history of the region as reflected in the mission’s files, relations between different Christian traditions, as well as relations between Christianity and other religions
 
[22] The papers of individuals contain the usual odds and ends that turn up in anyone’s private papers, as well as materials related particularly to missions.
 
[23] They tell the story of an the development of an individual’s relationship with God, they show the development of ministries and churches in different part of the world, they contain an American outsider’s eyewitness account of the social, political, and economic changes in most part of the world during the 20th century. They are also document an important part of the story of America’s impact on the rest of the world at the grass roots level.
 
[24] So who uses these baskets full of fragments and why? The categories of users are not different from what you would find with other types of records, although sometimes with a particular mission flavor. Because we have the records of several active, ongoing missions, we are contacted by their staff for photos or films from their own holdings or for a particular piece of data or documents that they need for administrative purposes or for planning or legal purposes or for the celebration of the mission’s history.
 
[25] When the Africa Inland Mission’s Rift Valley Academy in Kenya celebrated its hundredth birthday in 2009, the archives put up a web page and supplied other information about the school’s dedication in 1908, including the text of the speech given by Theodore Roosevelt, who spared the nearby big game long enough to talk about the need for industrial education in Africa.
 
[26] Another example of missions researching their own history comes from Gospel Recordings, a ministry started by Joy Ridderhof in 1938. Their goal was to produce recordings made by people speaking in their own tongues and dialects, reading scripture, singing local hymns, and giving brief messages attuned to the indigenous culture. These recording were used by national church leaders and missionaries for evangelism. The linguistic work GR did in Alaska was some of the earliest with some Alaskan tongues and in 2010 we had workers from the mission visiting to see if they could find some of Ridderhof’s earliest notes and linguistic records for use in ongoing language work and translation.
 
[27] Churches too in many parts of the world have come to us in need. For many groups of Christian believers, a date only a few generations past is year one for the introduction of the Christian faith and the Bible to their people. For them, the 20th century is the age of the Apostles. And like the very early Christian church, hardly anything survives from the founding years. No one thought to preserve the documents of how this church, this Bible Institute came to be or documents were destroyed or lost in natural disasters or war or political upheaval or the church’s own indifference. But there are often copies or parallel documents in the files of missionaries, files that have wound up at 500 College Avenue in Wheaton. Church ins Sri Lanka and Tanzania and Kenya and Ecuador have found in our holdings the pamphlets, the minutes, the photos that they thought no longer existed.
 
[28] Then there is classroom use. We are part of a Christian college. Part of our responsibility in the BGC Archives is to help support the training students receive by providing some of the historical perspective that can be glimpsed by perusing and thinking about some of the stories our documents tell. We have had orientation sessions and prepared research assignments for classes in courses such as the administration of Christian organization, mission history, cross cultural communication and research, the theory and practice of Christian education.
 
[29] And mission records provide also useful for projects in many other classes such as those on African, East Asian, Latin American cultures, gender studies, social psychology, religion and American politics, historiography. We also have classes come from nearby schools, both high schools and
 
[30] institutions of higher learning such as Moody Bible Institute, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, University of Chicago and Huntington College.
 
[31] At a different level of educations, for decades we had what we called the Home School Treasure Hunt. Parents in various local home school associations would bring their students to the Archives Reading Room. We would talk to them about history, show them how documents tell stories and then let them rummage through selected documents to find answers to a variety of questions and puzzles. Part of this was hearing the oral history interviews of missionaries and talking to retired missionaries about life in Tibet or the Congo.
 
[32] Nor should we neglect the genealogists. If we collected material about baseball or physics or oceanography, we would be contacted about ancestors who were catchers or rocket scientists or deep sea divers. We collect material about missions, so people want to find out about relations who were missionaries. In some cases, it is made more difficult, because why most people have a good idea how baseball is organized and what a catcher does, for many coming to the Archives seeking genealogical information, the missionary enterprise and what a missionary does exactly is a closed book. Trying to find out about an aunt who went to China in the 1930s means not only finding the date of her departure from Vancouver, but also what her faith in Jesus Christ meant to her and how it was related to her traveling to a distant corner of the earth.
 
[33] The oral histories, letters, diaries in the Archives have often allowed our visitors to get in touch with their own people on a deep personal and even spiritual level, And then there are families for whom missions is an ongoing tradition. We have had family groups of two or three or four or more, of varying generations, come in to look through the documents of a variety of ancestors - genealogy as a communal experience and cross-generational bond.
 
[34] Besides all this, of course, people came to the Archives who were working on dissertations or books or articles or web pages or documentaries. People are looking at, in broad terms such subjects as , the history of Christianity or the history of missions or the history of a particular church or country or how American impacted a certain part of the world or globalization; how American Evangelicals understood the world or how they impacted American culture.
 
[35] Let me provide a brief listing of some actual topics. Naturally there are many directly concerned with the general history of individual missions and institutions, especially schools, they started: The Evangelical Alliance Mission and the Domi Church in Japan; the Slavic Gospel Association in Great Britain; and the story of the Woman’s Union Missionary Society, WUMS. This last group is particularly interesting. In 1860, there was no approved organizational route for a single woman to go overseas as a missionary.
 
[36] A woman missionary who managed to make it to Burma sent back a message to several wealthy American woman involved in philanthropic work. She begged for single woman missionaries, since for cultural reasons, they were the only ones who could minister effectively to women. In this certificate from the 1880s you see a mother and her children contributing their offerings to the sailing ship that will take missionaries overseas.
 
[37] These wealthy woman organized the WUMS, the first American mission to be dedicated to recruiting only single women. By the twentieth century, about 75% of American missionaries were single women.
 
[38] We have many researchers studying the lives of individual missionaries, because of the peculiar interest of that particular life or because of what that life symbolizes or represents in missions history or American Christianity or the history of a particular country or the church in a particular country. Some actual topics studied recently in the Archives include: Donald McGavran, missionary to India and founder of the school of church growth theory; Belle Sherwood Hawkes and 19th century missions to Persia; Frederick Franson, evangelist and founder of Swedish Alliance Mission; Charles Hurlburt and the founding of Africa Inland Mission; Isobel Kuhn’s experiences as a woman missionary and author.
 
[39] Several researchers have been interested in the life of Elisabeth Howard Elliot Gren, missionary to Ecuador. In addition to the enormous influence her story and books had on American Evangelicals in the 1950s and 60s,
 
[40] she was an important speaker and writer for decades on topics of the male/female roles, marriage and family life and dealing with suffering, old age and death.
 
[41] Besides mission-related topics, there were also many studies of Christianity worldwide or episodes and topics in the history of Christianity in a particular country, including the United States. Some sample topics: the world wide ministry of Korean pastor Kyung Chik Han of Seoul; the Christian response to the caste system in India; Modernization process in American evangelicalism in the 20th Century and its influence on Germany; American Evangelical Perspectives on Israel; Protestantism in Cuba, 1950-1965
 
[42] Rene Padilla and the biblical foundations of radical discipleship; influence on American slaves of African Christianity, 1650-1750; the Evangelical Church in Chile during the in the time of Pinochet, 1973-1998; Festo Kivengere of Uganda and the East African Revival has been the subject of several projects.

[43] Here is an audio document from the Archives, a portion of Bishop Kivengere’ speech at the 1974 Lausanne Congress in which he described some of the inner history of that important event in the history of African Christianity.
 
[44] There have also been much research in gender history. These include: Gender and American Evangelical religion in the post World War II era; gender perspectives on missions; Protestant Fundamentalism and masculinity; the American women missionaries nurse in China; the role women play in mission leadership; female circumcision vs female rights in Africa; foot binding among Chinese women
 
[45] And finally there are what might be called secular topics, that is research projects with seemingly no overt connection to Christianity or missions or religion but for which, because we have mission collections, we have some relevant information: the status of women in the Sudan; Masai land claims; the culture and natural history of Mongolia; education in Tanganyika during the colonial period; the history of the Armenian genocide.
 
[46] A few months ago a researcher found some missionary letters uniquely relevant for her study the 1938 Yellow River flood in China and its continuing effects on geography and society.
 
I would dispute, though, any meaningful division between secular and spiritual topics. For a Christian such as myself, the spiritual and material are planes of existence that are irrevocably joined. A study of the theology of Kenyan pastors in the Africa Inland Church in the 1960s is as much a part of East African intellectual history as of Kenyan church history. A study of development of the Amazon basin is an investigation of the expression of human desires, needs, hopes, and fears in economic and social terms with spiritual implications.
 
[47] Christ sent his disciples into the world, therefore the story of his church reflects the social history of the world. The handful of examples I have mentioned tell the story of missions. They also reflect in myriad ways the societies in which missions functioned. The files of SEND mission help traces of the means and outward signs of the expansion of American cultural influence in the Pacific and Asia after World War II; the files of the WUMS chart over a hundred years the changing expectations of and opportunities for women world wide; within hundreds of oral history interviews we find intertwined with expressions of faith and spiritual insights descriptions of the concrete realities of a particular person’s social, economic and racial background as factors in their education and life experience in America and elsewhere.
 
In conclusion, he great missionary of movement of the 18th through the mid 20th century was a unique and distinct moment in Christian history and the history of the world, resulting in the planting of strong Christian churches in dozens of regions. It had a deep and continuing impact on the religious, intellectual, social and political life of individual countries and the world. From it came today’s continuing missionary movement that is being being taken up by Christians in Korea, Kenya, Brazil, and other nonwestern churches, who often find their mission field in the United States and Europe. The archives of missions and missionaries, denominational and nondenominational, tell an important story. These archives are significant not only for the incidental information they contain on western and non western societies, but for the story that is central to the creation and in most cases the preservation of these documents, the proclamation of the Christian Gospel and its singular impact on humans and human culture in all its variety.

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