February 15, 2023
On Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the doors of First Methodist Church in the suburb of Richardson, Texas, were kept open all day long for people to pray and seek comfort.
“(The Rev.) Bob Middlebrooks insisted that the chapel be left open on that afternoon after it happened,” said Frances Long, the archivist for what is now First United Methodist Church Richardson and historian for the South Central Jurisdiction.
It would be a shame for such an interesting nugget of information to get lost as time goes by.
“People want to know and hear stories of support and concern from a church sometimes, but it’s up to the people who love history to make sure that happens,” Long added.
The loss of some United Methodist history is quite possible if care isn’t taken as some congregations move toward disaffiliation. That’s why Long and other archivists including Ashley Boggan, top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History, are trying to get the word out.
“We have to have those local church records preserved in order to hold our future selves accountable to this moment, in order to tell this story correctly, for historians 100 years from now,” Boggan said.
Preserving the archives of disaffiliating churches “is a very important thing to do,” said the Rev. Ted A. Campbell, the Albert C. Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.
“When there’s a disaffiliating church, families and others concerned with the history of that church need to know about their records,” Campbell said. “And we as United Methodists who are not disaffiliating, we need to at least take responsibility for our history … up until the point of disaffiliation.
“That’s part of our history as well.”
The United Methodist archives are not just for people with the denomination, Boggan said.
“Our denominational repository on the campus of Drew University is open,” she said. “You don’t have to be United Methodist to come and look at our records. The same goes at the annual conference and jurisdictional levels.”
Some archives may be less convenient to access because they are volunteer-staffed and open just one or two days a week, Boggan said.
Long said that not every document in a church’s file cabinet needs to be archived.
“Our folks don’t need the journals or the disciplines or even the financial records,” she said. “We want basically their administrative board minutes or trustee’s minutes, everything that retains what the church has done for the last 20, 30, 50 years.”
Of course, church historians and genealogists frequent the archives, but they are not the only ones, Long said.
“Oh my gosh, the records in the archives are researched by people far and near,” she said. “Overall, the people who are most interested in the church records are people who want to write histories about their family’s involvement in the church.
“They want to tell their story.”
Boggan also is focused on advocating that conferences continue to support their church archives financially. Those archives are funded through their conferences, not her agency.
“There is quite a concern as to how they’ll keep preserving their records if they don’t have a budget for it,” she said. “You do have a lot of wonderful volunteers out there.”
