Archives as Ministry: An Anabaptist Approach to the Historical Record
Colleen McFarland, August 5, 2012
Twenty years ago, when I was eagerly anticipating my graduation from The College
of Wooster with a shiny new Bachelor of Arts in German and History, I could not
have imagined myself standing before you today in this setting – a worship service –
as an archivist of the Mennonite Church. I would have laughed heartily at the
prospect of having any calling or ministry, and I probably would have told you it was
more likely that I would have a career in the NFL.
As my name indicates, I am not of ethnic Mennonite background. I grew up in an
alternative Presbyterian congregation in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in
the 1970s. Ecclesia Presbyterian Community was an atypical church for its
denomination and its day – the congregation owned no property and met in rented
secular spaces. The half-time minister shared preaching duties with the laity, and
there was no youth program or Sunday school. But Ecclesia was a relatively shortlived experiment in the Presbytery of Milwaukee. The church literally went out of
business the week after I was confirmed at age 13. And there, my exposure to
organized religion (or semi-organized religion, as the case may be) ended – or so I
thought.
I spent a few years reluctantly attending a large United Methodist Church with my
family while I was in high school. The large church setting was strange to me, and
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still is, I must confess. I then went off to college and graduate school, where my
sense that academe and Christianity didn’t mix well was confirmed. Life roughed
me up a bit, as it sometimes does to folks in their 20s, but I managed it though yoga,
self-help books, and alternative medicine.
I didn’t start or finish college wanting to be an archivist. I didn’t even start my
Masters in Library and Information Science graduate program wanting to be an
archivist. I decided to become an archivist when I began paying close attention to
what I loved about my work in reference librarianship – work that I did in a small
academic library for nearly three years in the early 2000s. I delighted in helping
library users find primary sources – the first-hand accounts of historical events or
phenomena that are the backbone of the study of history. And the kind of primary
source I enjoyed finding the most were people’s stories from the past-- the diary of a
gold rush bride, the life narrative of a Herrero herdsman as told to a missionary, an
oral history interview with a Hispanic migrant worker in 1950s California, the
correspondence of a French soldier to his sweetheart during World War I.
Visiting people from the past through historical documents is much like visiting
people from the present who inhabit another country or culture. We may choose to
close ourselves to them because they are not like us and condemn them for not
being like us. Or we may seek to understand the source of our difference, cultivate
compassion and love for them in spite of that difference, and welcome them into
fellowship with us. As an introvert who sometimes finds it difficult or awkward to
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talk to strangers, I’ve always found it much easier to “make friends” with strangers
in print. My friendship with the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who went through
girlhood 100 years before I did, is my only friendship that has lasted from
kindergarten through this very day.
At the time, I wasn’t really able to understand or articulate why I reveled in that
particular reference work – finding primary sources. In hindsight, I realize that I
didn’t have the spiritual vocabulary to express what was happening. Today, as a
former “spiritual but not religious” who rediscovered Christianity as an adult, I can
put it into words. I love creating relationships across the seemingly impassable
dimension of time. I love enabling present-day researchers to welcome strangers
from the past into their minds and their hearts. I love facilitating that radical
hospitality. I love it when researchers laugh with, cry for, or express outrage on
behalf of the stranger they are studying. And when I work with novice researchers, I
love cultivating in them empathy, compassion, and an appreciation for the concerted
effort required to understand those who are different. I know something amazing
has occurred when a student researcher simply cannot stop reading old letters or
diaries – despite the difficult handwriting and funny spellings – because they have to
know how things turn out in the end.
And that’s only half of it! I also love bringing new life to the dead, many of whom
“perished as though they had never existed.” I love bearing witness to their lives
and their contributions to the human experience and the historical record. I love
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honoring them simply for having lived and gone through all that living entails. I love
the exposure of the silent (or sometimes not so silent) injustices they experienced
and committed, and I love holding the hope that they know the belated work of
reconciliation has begun. The beautiful, complicated, and messy place where this
important work happens – where the living and the departed comingle, and where
the Communion of Saints is almost palpable – is the archives. And I, the archivist,
am like the boy in the miracle of the loaves and fishes as told in the Gospel of John –
the boy who brings forward the five loaves and two fish to feed the crowd. I offer
up the historical record, inadequate though it is, and I witness the miracle of
Christian community formed across time.
So, what exactly is an archives? I get that question a lot. But since you have one in
your backyard, many of you probably know exactly what an archives is! An archives
is a library of unpublished documents. It may hold the non-current records of an
organization, institution, or corporation – things like meeting minutes, annual
reports, professional correspondence, and personnel files. It may hold manuscripts
donated by private individuals and families – diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and
memoirs. We collect non-textual documents, such as home movies, educational
filmstrips, and oral history interviews. We’re trying to figure out how to collect
tweets and blogs, “born digital” documents and photographs, and email. And we
provide access to nearly everything we collect. In the Mennonite Church USA
Archives - Goshen, we host over 300 researchers in person and answer about 800
reference questions for in-person and remote researchers every year. In the past
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two years, the photographs we have put online (about 3600 to date) have received
nearly 140,000 views. Our researchers run the gamut; they include high school,
college, seminary, and other graduate students, top-notch historians and
theologians, pastors, image researchers on the payroll of PBS’s documentary
production teams, genealogists, congregational historians, former mission and
volunteer workers, people whose lives have been touched by Mennonites and their
charitable works, and denominational staff. We treat all of them and their research
questions with equal respect.
As a denominational archivist, it is interesting to me that the Christian churches, as
institutions that show reverence and respect for tradition, often engage very
superficially with their own history – as if tradition and history were two
completely unrelated things. The ancient Greek word for tradition, paradosis,
literally means “handed over.” Not “handed down,” (which, to me, suggests the
passive reception of something more for show than for use) but “handed over”
(which suggests a more active relationship with what is received, and an imperative
to use it to our best purpose). In the context of scripture, according to the Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church, tradition refers to “the revelation made by God
and delivered by Him to His faithful people through the mouth of His prophets and
apostles.” A more modern definition would perhaps best be expressed as “the
collected wisdom of the past.”
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But, unfortunately, the dominant understanding of tradition in the Church today is
one more closely related to customs manifested in worship. Liturgical custom
looms large for Christians. When Catholic priests burn incense and wear elaborate
clerical garb, or when Mennonites share in communion a few times a year rather
than every week, we see tradition at work. But do we understand the tradition? Do
we know why it evolved? Are we aware that it has been handed over to us, for us to
use as it serves us in Christian mission? Or does it just make us feel good? Does it
display our pride in what makes us different from other Christians? Does it fulfill
our nostalgia for the church of the 1950s – the church we attended because our
parents and neighbors did? Does it help us feel secure and allow us to retreat into
something safe and unchanging in a world of constant risk and change?
Religious archives provide us with clues for answering such questions. Come visit
me in the archives, and I will, quite literally, hand a box of history over to you. And
you will be invited to grapple with a past not your own, but one that is resplendent
with the trials and tribulations, joys and sufferings of another who endeavored to
become a disciple of Jesus Christ. The Christian tradition of living a life informed by
the Gospel is the most important tradition we have. That is a tradition that truly
spans all times, places, genders, and ages. That is a tradition not to be simply
revered, but to be taken up and incorporated into our lives as we seek to become
faithful disciples.
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And as faithful disciples, we must understand our role in perpetuating tradition –
making sure that we fulfill our role in the “handing over.” And here’s where we can
run into trouble. The word archives is derived from a Greek word archeion, the
name given to government repositories of documents. The root of that Greek word
reveals quite a bit about the nature of archival documents. Arche means foundation,
origin, power, and authority. It’s the same root found in words like “monarchy” or
“patriarch.” That should make us, the carriers of the Anabaptist tradition, nervous.
For all of my love of the spiritual and emotional work that happens in archives, I am
acutely aware that the potential for the abuse of power in archives is high.
Archivists spend a lot of time hashing out ethics. The Society of American
Archivists’ code of ethics has been under constant revision since I entered the
profession eight years ago. Our concern about ethics comes not from an inflated
sense of our importance, but from our realization that historical documents shape
memory, document accountability, and may be used to further just causes… or not.
Although Western governments are far from perfect, we are fortunate that access to
most government records, historic or current, is largely uncontested. Any one of us
can visit any county in the United States and ask to see regional and local records of
government, at no cost to us, without questions asked. We can do that at the state
and federal levels as well. We can even request to see our own FBI file – if we have
one – under the Freedom of Information Act. Because of government archives,
historians and journalists have been able to cast light on past injustices, such as the
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infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study, and bring them to society at large to grapple
with, to make amends for, and to safeguard against in the future. Talk to any
government archivist and you will learn that government archivists do not work for
government agencies or elected officials. They work for the people.
The openness of government archives has been critically important to Mennonite
history. Many of the accounts of Anabaptist martyrdom told in the Martyrs’s Mirror
had been forgotten until Van Braght’s research in the city archives of Amsterdam
and Dordrecht gave them new life. It was not a Mennonite archives that preserved
these stories, but a government archives. And, thankfully, the administrators of
those archives allowed a Mennonite elder and cloth merchant to conduct research,
the fruits of which continue to shape Mennonite identity and theology today.
Unlike government archives, private archives do not operate under any mandate or
expectation of open access to accurate information. As a private archives, the
Mennonite Church USA Archives – and the Pacific Northwest Mennonite Historical
Society -- could be institutions that serve only Mennonites. Those whose histories
intertwine with the history of the denomination – for example, those who were
served by Mennonite missionaries or service workers in North America and abroad
– could be told that they’re out of luck, and that our history belongs only to us. Or,
we could choose not to have an archives at all. We could pursue a records
management policy that mandates the destruction of nearly every document
produced by the denomination within seven years, to minimize legal risks.
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But I believe that God calls us to do better than that. Just as God calls us to share the
Gospel and embrace servant leadership, God also calls us to have archival programs
that promote right remembering and social justice. God calls us to recognize that
our historical records should not be used only to further the relatively narrow
interests of denominational, conference, or congregational administration. The
research table should be as open as the Communion table, where all are welcome!
I praise you – this congregation, this conference, and this regional Mennonite
historical society – for embracing this vision of archives. And I encourage you to
keep true to that vision. The resources and the gifts that you have given (and
continue to give) nurture local and regional relationships across time. You are not
chronologically chauvinistic, thinking your time on earth more important than any
other. You are not selfish with the riches passed on to you, keeping them to
yourself or allowing them to molder away, forgotten and neglected. You are
engaged in the ministry of archives. I treasure your partnership in that ministry,
and I assure you that your efforts are worth it… for us and our contemporaries, for
those who have gone before us, and for those who will come after us.
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