Welcome

When I was a child and grew tired of conversation at potluck, I would slip upstairs, pull the church’s photo album off its shelf, and begin exploring our congregation’s past. I’d study the photographs, ranging from neatly labeled black-and-white images from the 1940s and 1950s to fading Polaroids from the 1970s to Kodak printed snapshots from the 1990s that hadn’t yet been put into place in the album, trying to figure out the stories captured by the photographs.

For they were full of stories of the past—the congregation’s and my own. Here were Missy’s parents, Gladys and Perl, who had revitalized the congregation during the Great Depression. Here was Missy, our head deaconess, with her husband Bob, our head elder, with their children before they’d grown up and moved away, with their hair darker than I’d ever seen it in my life. Here was my grandpa Russel, standing and eating during potluck because every other seat was full, and he’d given his seat up to a guest as was his usual practice. Here was my mother as a child, laughing with her friends, and then her as a grown-up, a few months away from giving birth to my youngest brother. Here I was, at the reception in the church’s basement after my baptism. Here we all were, bunched together smiling in group photographs outside the congregation’s previous building and inside the new building’s sanctuary, eating at picnics and playing at Vacation Bible Schools and enjoying Christmas programs. Here was my Adventist church family, present and past.

Like my childhood congregation, yours probably has more records than you realize, whether those records are photographs, bulletins, books, newsletters, or board minutes (to name a few types of records). Those records capture the history of your local church family. But how to preserve and share those records? Here are six recommendations for doing just that:

1. Identify what records your congregation has and where those records are stored.
It is important to know what records the congregation has, because if you do not know what records you have and where those records are, the records are essentially nonexistent, whether it's the membership roster from fifty years ago or the board minutes from last month.

2. Make an inventory of those records and where they’re located.
As you locate records, you will want to take note of what those records are and where they are stored in the church building. This list could be analog or digital, so long as it is kept in a place where it can be accessed (and edited) by church staff as needed. Sometimes a record is accompanied by a story about that record; you can take note of the story as well.

3. Store records in a place that is out of the sunlight.
While sunlight in moderation is good for humans, it is very bad for paper, and most congregational records are paper. Direct sunlight can cause book covers to fade and book spines to loosen, photographs to change colors or fade, and tapes of various types can warp. Anything that can expand and contract due to variation in temperature should be stored out of direct sunlight.¹

4. Store records in a place that is cool and dry.
Ideally, records should be kept somewhere that is both cool and dry. In practical terms that means that records should not be stored between the water heater and the furnace, or under pipes or near heating registers, or in bathrooms. In technical terms, the temperature of wherever records are stored should be below 75 degrees Fahrenheit (23.9 degrees Celsius) and the relative humidity (the amount of water vapor in the air as compared to the temperature) should be above 15% and below 65%. If the relative humidity is too low (below 15%), the records run the risk of becoming brittle. If the relative humidity is too high (above 65%), the records and their storage area run the risk of mold growth and insect infestations. These conditions vary by season and region, so you may want to invest in a device that passively measures temperature and humidity in your records storage area. One online tool that can help you visualize how temperature and relative humidity works is the Dew Point Calculator.²

5. Digitize the records.
It is equally important to care for your congregation’s digital records, whether they were physical records recently scanned by volunteers or records that were created on a computer (what records managers call “born digital”). Make sure that filenames include a date (following the international standard format, YYYY-MM-DD) and an indication of what the file is about. Software such as Adobe Bridge can be used to attach metadata (information about the file, such as who is in a photo) to the file itself. Make sure to keep a list of what physical records have been digitized in order to avoid duplication of effort.

6. Share the records.
Now that you know what records your congregation has, and where they’re stored; are ensuring that they’re kept cool, dry, and out of the sunlight; and are even digitizing records, you should make sure to share them! After all, the records capture the life of your local church family, and there are lots of ways that those stories can be shared. Host a church family night where you look at the photos and listen to stories from the older folks in the congregation. Perhaps the Pathfinders can interview those same folks for what it was like when they were in Pathfinders (and make sure that those interviews get saved as part of the church’s records!). Maybe your congregation has a strong tradition of great potlucks and so you decide to create a cookbook with the recipes from generations past and commemorate the event with a celebratory homecoming potluck featuring those dishes.

Caring for your congregation’s records is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing commitment to the congregation’s past. But with everything else that must be done to maintain the congregation and support its ongoing work, why add managing its records to the pile?
What benefit does a congregation receive from preserving its records?

When we learn family stories, we learn what it means to be a part of the family. That’s true whether it is one’s immediate family or their church family, be it local or global. It is easier to belong when one knows the family’s stories. Yes, it is important to learn about general Adventist history, but it is equally important to learn one’s local Adventist history. It’s the regular people in the pews, the people we all know and love who quietly served for decades, whose stories should also be known. Such stories—about people like Bob and Missy and Russel, all of whom I miss very much—are why taking care of your congregation’s records is crucial. After all, taking care of your congregation’s past—its records—and sharing those family stories demonstrates and implements care for your congregation’s future.

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¹ If you are interested in learning more, see the pamphlet “Protection from Light Damage” on the website of the Northeast Document Conservation Center (2012), https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/overview.

² “Dew Point Calculator,” Image Permanence Institute, accessed June 30, 2024, http://www.dpcalc.org/index.php.

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 Ashlee Chism, MSI, is the research center manager in the General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, Silver Spring, MD, USA.