Billy Graham Center Archives Annual Report - 2001 Annual Report - Introduction

Introduction



Past in Service of Present. A student in Dr. Jerry Root's Theology of Revival class studies video tapes of Corrie Ten Boom while the glass of the viewing room reflects Bob showing documents to some of her classmates.


"It is this combination of historical perspective with contemporary needs that will greatly strengthen the ministry of any mission. And the archives of the mission can thus be seen as indispensable to the present and future vision and direction of the mission."


The above quote is from the talk Dr. David Howard gave at the Consultation on Nondenominational Mission Archives hosted by the BGC Archives in November. (Anyone who would like to read his complete paper can find it at: http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/consult/howard.htm). His statement brings out what were two of our particular archives' central tasks during the year. We strove to save materials of enduring historical value and we strove - through consultations, presentations, classes, web sites, e-mail, assistance to researchers - to get these materials to people who can use them. Above all, we looked for ways to make them available to the Church, meaning the average Christian in the pew as well as minister and full-time Christian workers.

Archives are testaments to human frailty, to impermanence. People want to preserve the events of the world around them in something other than their brain cells, so they inscribe things on stone or stamp them in mud or write them on paper or encode them in databytes. And sometimes these various bits and papers and tapes and photos are gathered together in solid looking, specialized buildings, so that many generations can receive knowledge and nuture and insight from them. But as we learned this year, the solidest buildings can vanish in the blink of an eye. We should have remembered what the psalmist told us, that mountains can fall to the ocean depths. Less dramatically but just as effectively, changes in technology and the social pathways by which information is passed on can make much of our preserved data all but inaccessible or indecipherable for future generations.

Archivists carry out their ministry not by pretending that the towers they build to preserve bits of things will last forever. They serve by doing what they can to ensure that the documents they collect and file and describe are used. It is in use that value lies. The Apostle Paul spoke to the Corinthians of sowing the physical and reaping the spiritual. (We know because his words were preserved on some bits of parchment.) He was writing of great spiritual truths. But our work in the Archives is comparable in a smaller way. Our purpose at the BGC Archives is to preserve and transmit these physical vessels of human experience so that they can bless people's minds and spirits. Of course, these blessings are often not for the faint of heart, for they are as likely to show us our failures, weakness and sins as they will what we can celebrate. But it is from this whole story that we can see God's grace through Christ and our profound need of it.

Here is the record of our work in 2001.

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