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Congregational
Heritage Day Offered for Fall
As part of its continuing effort to
document and share the history of Lutherans in our region, the Lutheran Historical
Society of the Mid-Atlantic is offering Congregational Heritage Day on
Saturday, September 28, in Valentine Hall at Lutheran Theological Seminary
in Gettysburg.
Registration will begin at 9:00 a.m. and there is a $25 registration fee.
Church secretaries, amateur historians, people interested in genealogical
records, and congregations planning to use archival materials for important
congregational anniversary celebrations will want to attend.
One purpose of the event is to help congrega- tions identify and use
archives. Archival materials answer the "who, what, where, when, and
why" questions of congregations (ELCA's "A Brief Guide for
Archives of Congregations"). They represent the "collective
memory of an organization," and are as common as a letter, pictures of
a congregational event, or Sunday School material. At the very least they
include minutes of council meetings and reports of committees. That is why
church secretaries are so important for the preservations of congregational
histories. The value of archives is recognized when someone in the
congregation starts to write a congregational history or the church decides
to celebrate an important anniversary. Participants will learn about the
collection, care, and use of these materials that are critical for
preserving the history of our Lutheran life together.
Congregational Heritage Day will begin with a plenary session
featuring Sharron Reissinger Lucas, Project Coordinator of the Seminary
Ridge Historic Foundation. Her talk is entitled, "Not Your Ordinary
Pickle: Preserving an Institution's Legacy and Stories." Ms. Lucas is
a graduate of the University
of Tennessee, a
professional in institutional advancement, public relations and education,
and a current Master of Divinity middler at Gettysburg Seminary. She will
relate historic preser- vation to the church's mission and will engage,
energize, and encourage individuals working in congregational record
preservation.
Following the plenary session, workshops will run concurrently in two one-
hour sessions. Registrants may choose two of the following five
workshops:
1. Organizing Archival Material: How
shall we organize our archives? What should we save? How do we find it
again? Leader: Pamela Whitenack, Director of Hershey Community Archives, Hershey, PA
2. Preserving Historical Materials:
How do we keep this book together? How do we protect it from staining and
fading? Leader: Carolyn Sung, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
3. Genealogy: How can we find our
founding members? How did they get here? Leader: Woody Crist, ELCA Region 8
Archivist, Adams
County Historical
Society
4. Writing History, Oral History
Research: How do we write? What should we ask? What should we include?
Leader: Dr. Donald Housley, Professor of History, Susquehanna University
5. Celebrating Congregational
Anniversaries: Let's celebrate! But how do we prepare? Leader: Rev. Kurt
Strause, Pastor, Emmanuel Lutheran Church,
Lancaster The day will conclude with a
catered lunch during which Ms. Leslie Hobbs will bring greetings from the
Seminary at Gettysburg
and speak of its history and future. Bishop H. George Anderson defined
Lutherans in 1996, "We are a people who are both remem- bering and
reforming" ("Just Who Are Lutherans?" The Lutheran, 1996).
In order to remember we must preserve our "collective memories"
and celebrate our past. Please join us and tell your friends about this
September 28th event where you can acquire valued analytical and archival
skills from professional archivists, librarians, scholars, pastors, and
administrators. Benefit preservation, proclamation, and celebration within
your congregation and beyond!
RESERVATION: Return the registration
form on page seven with a $25 check by Friday, September 20, to: David
Hedrick, 238 Hoffman Road, Gettysburg, PA 17325. The registration fee
includes a continental breakfast, the program, the choice of two workshops,
and lunch.
Susquehanna University: An
"American and Lutheran" College
The Missionary Institute founded in
1858 was the forerunner of Susquehanna University. Its charter made a claim
to be "An American and Lutheran College," words that were also
used in the motion by which the Institute was transformed into a college in
1894. They suggest how important College - Church relation- ships have been
in the nearly 150 years of the institution's history.
From its founding as the Missionary Institute, Susquehanna University had a
marginal status in Lutheran circles. Its founder, Benjamin Kurtz, was a
pioneer in church building, working in the middle period of American
history with Samuel S. Schmucker and others to establish a seminary and
college at Gettysburg, the General Synod, Lutherville Female Seminary, the
Parent Education Society, and other bodies of the infant Lutheran Church,
all carrying the perspective of "American Lutherans." In the late
1840's this perspective was challenged and conquered among Lutherans by an
influx of Confessional Lutherans from Germany and the transition of young,
native-born Lutheran clergy to orthodoxy. Kurtz founded the Missionary
Institute to sustain the methods of American Lutherans, serving poorer
converts and appealing directly to Lutherans predominately from rural and
poorer areas of the East. The opprobrium Benjamin Kurtz acquired among
orthodox Lutherans in the 19th Century coupled with the poverty of the
Institute's natural constituency made it a marginal institution among
Lutherans.
Still, the college and the church have sustained a relationship since 1858.
This relationship has been formal, in the form of institutional ties, and
informal, in the form of shared social and cultural values. Legal ties have
been formed solely at the will and whim of the college. Susquehanna has
from its beginning been a free standing institution. The initial Charter or
Constitution called for 26 members of the Board who were Lutheran, half lay
and half clerical, and required that faculty members accept the doctrinal
peculiarities of American Lutheranism. These conditions have been adjusted
over the years, at the instigation of the college, often in consultation
with officers of the church. Until 1971, the President had to be a Lutheran
pastor, and until 1983, a member of a Lutheran Church. Until 1971, faculty
had to be communing members of a Christian Church.
Synods have sent representatives to the Board since 1921 and almost since
the beginning of the Institute included the college among the recipients of
their benevolence. For the first century of the college's life, the
Lutheran Church was the chief source for development money, as "Field
Secretaries," often Lutheran ministers, plowed the fields of parish
charity on behalf of the school.
Legal and financial ties between the college and the church were important,
but the most telling ties between the two were social and cultural. Until
World War II, the majority of Susquehanna's students were Lutheran (in the
1970's Catholic students became a plurality of the student body). These
young people had a seamless social and cultural transition from home, to
college to postgraduate adulthood. Some of this transition was facilitated
by the pervasiveness of in loco parentis, the practice by which colleges
imposed parental-like rules aimed mostly at women, but stemming from social
and cultural affinity between the socio-cultural life on the campus at Selinsgrove
and the values and behavioral expectations of the average Lutheran or
Protestant parish.
Thus, at Susquehanna, a student would experience sit-down meals begun with
grace, Sunday vespers led often by fraternity members, and morning classes
broken by chapel services that were required of students and faculty, as
was Sunday worship. The mother-church of the college, Trinity Lutheran in
Selinsgrove, had a section set aside for college students and many of its
Sunday School teachers were members of the faculty. Until 1935, the
dominant clubs on the campus were the YMCA and the YWCA, and when they
merged in 1935 to form the Student Christian Association, that organization
became the dominant club on the campus. The Susquehanna, the student
newspaper, rarely was without an article giving a religious slant on
current events either on or off the campus.
Presidential rhetoric was the most elementary expression of affinity
between the social and cultural life of the college and the church. A good
example comes from the voice of G. Morris Smith who had the longest term of
any Susquehanna President, 1928-1958. Worrying about the effect of the
"vets" in 1946, Smith told the Board: "The opportunity
presented at Susquehanna is to rebuild in students the desire for a truly
Christian life; the hazard we face is that unless the administration and
faculty are genuinely convinced of the necessity of living by Christian
standards in all their ways, the college will soon become secularized and
differ little or none from institutions of governmental or secular
foundation.
This would rob the institution of its original purpose and give it little
reason to exist."
So for more than a century, Susquehanna's history could easily be told with
reference to the Church, as the two institutions were socially and
culturally complementary. This ended in the 1960's through a profound
on-campus cultural conflict, pitting administrators and older faculty
members against students and younger faculty members.
The flashpoint of this conflict was compulsory chapel, an ancient tradition
in American higher education, but at bottom it was about values and
behaviors. Students and younger faculty wanted freedom of life and inquiry
in a campus setting focused not on instilling Christian character, but
solely on the intellectual and emotional maturation of young people. After
five years of local battle, in 1969 the dust cleared, and the Christian
college culture of over a century was thrown, somewhat unceremoniously,
into the dust-bin of history. The remnant of the Church- college
relationship centered around a Chaplain which Susquehanna acquired in 1964
(when the whole campus is a chapel, no chaplain is needed), a Chapel
Council, Committees of Religious Life and Religious Interest. Diversity was
evident in the Catholic Campus Ministry and Hillel.
What caused this change? Some scholars think schools like Susquehanna have
become "secular," that is no longer sharing old-time social and
cultural ties to the Church, due to the weakness or ineptitude of faculty
and staff at the colleges. This argument neglects the power of social and
cultural currents working on both institutions, loosening them from ancient
moorings and connections.
Susquehanna University suddenly faced the brunt of such forces in the 1960's.
Then baby boomers flooded colleges, taking advantage of new opportunities
and responding to expectations of emergent economic structures. At
Susquehanna, the easy assurance that the majority of students would come
from Lutheran homes and all the faculty would be communicant members of a
Christian Church ended. Educational psychology, vocational preparation and
intellectual liberalism created a new culture of expectations that rubbed
against and eventually conquered the traditions of a Christian college
culture. Now an education meant more than refining cultural values and
behaviors, more than instilling Christian culture.
Just as these forces induced change at Susquehanna University, more change
faced the Lutheran Church in America. During the 1960's, the central place
mainline Protestant churches, such as the Lutheran Church, had in American
life eroded. The larger culture continued to be religious but found less
and less satisfaction in these inherited institutions. Ethnic diversity,
extraor- dinary individualism and even narcissism, dimin- ished the
influence of organized religion and enhanced the fortunes of "niche
churches." Although the Central Pennsylvania Synod of the LCA worked
hard to sustain its contribution to the college through the 1970's and
Susquehanna's adminis- tration worked to keep institutional ties alive, the
distance of time indicates that both college and church had to succor their
own wounds, worry for their own future, in a society whose values and
behavioral expectations had altered. Now, the institu- tional channels
created after the cultural revolution of the 1960's sustained the
relationships between the college and the Lutheran Church.
What's does the evolving character of these college- Church relationships
reveal about the history of Susquehanna University? The institution was
founded to fulfill specific social and culture purposes. These altered over
time in tune with changes in the larger society and culture. Adapting to
the forces of change made Susquehanna University a vital institution. The
will and commitments of Board members, administrators, and faculty
influenced the direction of the college in significant ways but have been
less crucial than what young people expect of their college experience,
expectations significantly shaped by larger social, cultural and economic
realities in America.
Donald D. Housley Degenstein,
Professor of History, Susquehanna University
Comments based on book tentatively
entitled, A Goodly Heritage: Mission and Market at Susquehanna University,
1858-1985.
Members Study Union Churches And
Approve Constitution at Annual Meeting
The discussion of Union Churches at
the Annual Meeting on April 21 was both informative and entertaining. In the
comfortable setting of the remodeled Valentine Hall at Gettysburg Seminary,
Dr. Charles Glatfelter presented an overview of the history and operation
of Union Churches from l738 when the first Union Church was formed in
Montgomery County to the present. It is a tale that reflects the changing
shape of the church in America. Dr. Glatfelter defined a Union Church as
"one in which separate Lutheran and Reformed congregations jointly own
church property, land and buildings and share the upkeep according to the
terms of an agreement, either written or oral, some of which were made 200
years ago." He described why these congregations appeared, how they
operated and their relationship to the synods in which they appeared. He
views the Union Church as a peculiarly American institution, the
"response of Lutherans and Reforms in America to a problem they
experienced in America." These problems included, but were not limited
to, small financial resources, lack of clergy and isolation of the
congregations on the American frontier.
Since the status of the Union Church was tied to the American environment,
it should not be surprising that its development shifted as the American
context changed. For instance, the greatest growth of Union Churches took
place between 1738 and 1800. In Pennsylvania, 126 Lutheran and 123 Reformed
churches were founded by 1776, of which 156 were Union Churches. However,
between 1800 and 1899 only 29 Union Churches were founded and most of these
were by people in rural areas who had had experience with Union Churches
and preferred them to separate churches. In the twentieth century no Union
Churches were formed and in fact they began to decline. A large factor in
their declension was the lack of support for these churches from their
sponsoring church bodies. Early in the nineteenth century there was some
discussion for an ecumenical alliance between Lutherans and Reformed with
regard to training clergy, but this initiative never captured much support.
Instead the denominations established separate institutions which made
support of Union Churches both difficult to understand and difficult to
staff. After World War II the sponsoring bodies increased their efforts to
separate Union Churches into one or the other denomination. The result is
that today out of an original 400 churches fewer than forty remain. Dr.
Glatfelter, himself a product of these two great traditions, is preserving
this history for future generations who may learn from it how to construct
ecumenical alliances for a new age.
Dr. Glatfelter's presentation was followed by the more immediate history of
Union Churches in Pennsylvania. Bishop Guy Edmiston, recently retired from
the Lower Susquehanna Synod of the ELCA, and The Rev. William R. Swisher,
Jr., also recently retired Area Minister for the Upper Susquehanna
Conference of the UCC, related with great humor and sympathy the recent
history of Union Churches in their regions. Of the two, Pastor Swisher has
the greater number of Union Churches in his territory. None of these
churches are typical since each has its own peculiar history, but a most
auspicious example is Himmels, a "really wonderful 1950's
congregation." Members of the church know to which congregation they
belong, but they amicably decide issues as varied as hymnals (they chose
neither a Lutheran nor UCC text, but a Methodist) to cemetery care. Swisher
and Edmiston both described the difficulty of administering a union
setting. In one case, a Union Church wanted to change its worship hours,
which would affect the worship of twenty-six other churches that were in
related charges! Bishop Edmiston spoke movingly about the ultimate union of
these congregations in their jointly owned cemeteries. Much history of
these churches can be discovered merely through visiting their graveyards.
Each of these presentations gave those present much to consider and many
questions to pursue. In the final session of the day, the membership
approved the revised constitution of the LHS, now the LHS/MA. Pastor Kurt
Strause, board member and chair of the Constitution Committee, explained
how the new and document would simplify and clarify the work of the Society
in the future. The membership was also encouraged to visit the web site of
the LHS/MA (abs.net/~lhs) to keep abreast of the business of the Society.
Thanks is extended to Susan Hill and to her Program Committee and to Kurt
Strause and his committee for making this day such a success.
Two Archives Centers serve Region
8
The area of Region 8 of the ELCA is
fortunate to be served by two Archives centers. One is located at the
Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg and serves the Synods of
Delaware - Maryland, Washington DC, Upper and Lower Susquehanna, and
Allegheny.
The other, known as the Tri-Synod Archives Center, is located at Thiel College
in Greenville, PA. This Center serves the Synods of West Virginia-Western
Maryland, North- western, and Southwestern Pennsylvania, and also includes
records from some congregations in New York and Ohio.
The Tri-Synod Archives is the institutional descendant of an archives
proposed by the pastors of the Pittsburgh Synod as early as 1858. By 1880,
the archives had been established and located at Thiel College. The
archives were consolidated under the Western Pennsylvania-West Virginia
Synod in 1962, and were operated by that Synod until the formation of the
ELCA in 1988. With the division of the predecessor Synod into three
successor synods, the management of the Archives Center and its funding
became more diverse and more complicated.
Under a restructuring of the agreements related to the Archives in the
middle 1990's, policies were clarified, relationships were formalized and
reaffirmed between the three Synods and Thiel College, and operating
policies were re-defined and established. A managing Board made up of equal
representation from the three Synods was established, and an endowment was
set- up to help with ongoing funding issues and supplement the annual
funding supplied by the three constituent Synods.
The Tri - Synod Archives Center holds over 7,000 feet of records pertaining
to congregations, synods, and individuals from Western Pennsylvania, West
Virginia, and adjacent areas of Ohio and New York. The earliest records
date to the 1700's. Records are in print, magnetic, and photographic media.
The Center also includes a small collection of genealogical materials and
artifacts from defunct congregations. The Tri - Synod Archives is the only
Archives of the ELCA located within the Appalachian region. In 1999, the
Tri-Synod Archives Center was named as the official repository of records
related to LCA and ELCA Appalachian ministry and mission by the Evangelical
Lutheran Coalition for Mission in Appalachia (ELCMA).
Archivist Sarah (Sally) Fox Roth staffs the Tri-Synod Archives Center. The
Center recently relocated to a new and larger home in the basement of the
Passavant Center at Thiel College in Greenville, PA. The Center is staffed
Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to noon, and is also open to
researchers by appointment. The Center is available to genealogical
researchers during regular operating hours. Genealogical research is
performed on a limited basis for a nominal fee. The Tri-Synod Archives
welcomes donations of materials from congregations and individuals from its
catchment area, but reserves the right to disperse excess materials that
are received in multiple copies. The Archives Board will also discuss with
interested individuals the donation of special research collections
pertaining to the history of Lutheranism and Lutheran congregations in its
catchment area or that represent unique items related to the history of
Lutheranism in any form.
President's Corner
Annabelle S. Wenzke
Recently I attended a gathering where
there was a large number of clergy, both active and retired, in attendance.
The wife of a retired pastor, who due to illness could not himself attend,
searched the room for a familiar face. Finally she introduced herself to a
young clergyman as the wife of ------. His face was blank and hers was
confused: how could she and her husband's ministry have been so quickly
forgotten? Many of us have shared similar experiences in the church, but it
reminded me of what we are trying to do in this Society. We are the
inheritors of a brave and proud tradition that is often forgotten and more
often unacknowledged, by the present generation. My college students
reflect the attitude of a generation that considers itself entitled to what
others have created. Not understanding their debt to others, it robs them
of an understanding of their own responsibilities and limitations. History
is not just a link to the past; it is a reminder of who we are. So we in
the LHS/MA are engaged in a very important task. The Congregational
Heritage Workshop that we offer in the fall is one way we have of preserving
and narrating our history. Urge those you know who are responsible for
preserving history or interested in writing about it to attend, or register
yourself. It can only benefit the important mandate we hold.
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