Congregational Library

Clearing the decks

Sometimes you need to just throw things away. In my profession, this really goes with the territory. I have spent countless times agonizing over if this or that minutiae is really going to be historically relevant. In today's chores, it was my own minutiae that eventually getting the axe: little notes to myself on projects, reference, cataloging, and the like. Moments like that I need to remember that only about 10% of what we create is worth keeping, at least most of the time.

The easy part of this purge was reviewing my tech books. The offending objects dated back to the early to mid 1990s. I am pretty certain that an Access book for dummies from that time will not be helpful. I would be looking for online tutorials before I opened this kind of book. Now I have more room on my shelves for the rest of my reference books.

So let me assure you all: you can't keep everything.  

- the obsolete tech- check out that floppy disk!

History Friday : "Little Changes Which May be Noted"

One of my favorite nineteenth-century Congregationalists is Alonzo Quint. I loved his name almost immediately, and when I saw his picture I was genuinely enamored.  He had wonderful thick muttonchops and small iron-rimmed spectacles, the exact image of a bookish Victorian churchman, which of course he was. (He was also a long-time resident of Dover, New Hampshire, and represented the town in the state legislature—an intriguing connection for me as my husband begins a stint as interim pastor in the First Church there.) Alonzo Quint was also a Civil War chaplain and sometime pastor of churches, author of the 1865 Burial Hill Declaration; he’s probably best known, however, as the statistician of Congregationalism. Alonzo Quint was the denomination’s “statistical secretary” from 1856-1881, the driving force behind the compilation and publication of church membership data that’s so invaluable to historians today. And not surprisingly, Quint was an early and fervent supporter of the Congregational Library.

 

After he died in 1896, the Congregationalist published some of Quint’s best-loved articles, under the title “Common-Sense Christianity.” They are a joy to read, especially as a window into the culture of late-Victorian Congregational churches.  Here’s a snippet from a piece entitled “Little Changes Which May Be Noted,” dated March 27, 1890:

 

Some changes are visible in the parts and order of our public worship. People used to stand during the “long prayer,” but now they remain sitting or bow their heads. In the last hymn in the afternoon all the people used to rise, turn their backs upon the pulpit, and steadfastly gaze upon the performing choir. This irreverence has now ceased, perhaps somewhat because the organ is now often found at the other end of the church, and frequently absurdly placed directly behind the minister. The pew doors rattle less during the benediction, because there are fewer pew doors; nor do men dive for their hats as they once did; nor do the men now go out in a body into the vestibule and wait for the women, as was once the inflexible law.

 

Quint went on to muse that the practice of waiting for the women in the vestibule was likely a holdover from frontier days, when the men-folk left the pews first to make sure the coast was clear for the women to leave the church. “Many a custom lasts after its reasons have ceased to be,” he sighed.  All of this, of course, must have happened before the invention of coffee hour, which now requires a select group of women to muscle their way to the door and set to work frantically laying out cookies and donut holes before the men and children descend en masse, blissfully unconscious of dangers they must no longer face.

-Peggy

Tech Tuesday: more digital resources on our site

This summer has been dominated by new items we've been able to send to the Internet Archive or put up on our web site. This is a trend that is going to continue. We have started to run into the "problem" of what to send to be scanned next, even. Never fear, we haven't run out of ideas next. Our last set that we've integrated into our existing digital collections section are our ever-popular Yearbooks and the lesser known, but equally useful Vinton books. 

For more of an explanation of what those two resources are about, staff member, Robin elaborates:

Every organization has its records and statistics.  In the case of American Congregational churches during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those records were kept by a succession of national organizations and published in yearbooks.  They contain lists of active ministers, necrologies (obituaries) of recently deceased ministers, church statistics, and the denominations' annual reports.  In addition to their preceding titles, we now have digital copies of the Yearbook of the Congregational and Christian Churches (1929-39), and the Yearbook of the Congregational Christian Churches (1940-60) available online.  For the full list of titles in this series, see our Congregational Yearbooks page.

We also now have digital copies of John Vinton's biographies of missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.  They are a valuable source of information for historians and genealogists alike.  Spanning five continents and a century of work, more than two thousand missionaries traveled with the ABCFM, and often with two or three generations of their families. They founded schools, built hospitals, and chronicled the various societies they encountered.  Vinton (and later researchers who updated his work) compiled the itineraries of these industrious people.  These volumes have never been published, but now they are available to everyone.

To see what other digital resources we offer, click here.

 

Archivist Activism: Take 10 minutes to help

The New England Archivists' president, Peter Carini, sent out a call for help this week regarding House bill HR 2256. This stimulus bill would provide critical funding --$2,621,563 -- to New England's archives and millions to other states/regions.

All this money will maintain projects in dire need of support and save a number of my colleagues' jobs- and believe me, several are already out and looking for work. The PAHR site explains what needs to be done; I wrote up my own version of their template letter after getting Peter's note. Our deadline on this is September 8, so please do write today. Let's safeguard our history and the archive community.

-Your very own archivist- Jessica.

The More Things Change

Recently I ran across a survey about worship practices in Congregational churches, published in 1889.  The study was the work of a committee appointed by the National Council of Congregational Churches to inquire about changes taking place, and (they probably hoped) to rectify some problems.

The committee received back some 1500 questionnaires, about one-third of those sent out.  Most of these were from larger and more urban churches with more formal public worship than smaller rural ones; even so, the results suggest that Congregationalists were still demonstrably fixed in their tradition and wary of “rote formulas”—many of which, of course, (the Gloria Patri, Lord’s Prayer, and Doxology) have become fixed elements of so-called traditional worship today. 

The basic form of the service was pretty much unchanged from the 17^th century: an invocation, a hymn, reading of Scripture, prayer, “notices,” another hymn, the sermon, a prayer, and then the benediction. “But upon this parent stem there have been grafted many additions,” the committee reported. Actually fairly few late-nineteenth century Congregational churches (538, or about one-third of those returning a survey) repeated the Lord’s Prayer together, and even fewer (360) sang the Gloria Patri. A majority, but not all (941) took up a collection during the service. “Whie the offerings are being gathered, it will be helpful for the minister to recite appropriate passages of Scripture; and as the collectors come simultaneously before the pulpit, and stand there with the offerings still in their hands, a brief prayer for God’s willing givers, and on the work their gift is to forward, will deepen the religious impression.”) More of them sang the Doxology (913), but far fewer (49) read the Apostles Creed at the morning service or used written prayers (59).

Certainly non-Congregational formalisms like chanting, the use of quartets and paid choirs, and unison prayers were becoming increasingly popular in wealthier churches. But the committee report urged a middle way:  “A few of our ministers, chiefly in New England, are using occasionally written forms of prayer, and, as they may think, with excellent results. They think they find in them a chaste dignity, a touching tenderness, and a power to quicken the devotional spirit, not easily secured when all the prayers are extemporaneous. The large majority of our churches and pastors, on the other hand, appear to feel that the freshness and fervor of spontaneous prayer are more conducive to spirituality. It is possible, however,” the report concluded, “that the future may see a combination of the two methods in many churches.”

It’s easy to imagine Congregational forebears recoiling in absolute horror at quartets and chants and creeds and rote prayers. They fought a lot of hard battles with the Church of England to free themselves from those very practices. But I don’t think they’d be opposed in principle to changes in the worship service. After all, the basic idea behind the Congregational Way was freedom from external forms, especially when they threatened to overwhelm the subtle, quiet work of the Spirit in the lives of ordinary people and in the life of the community.

-Peggy

 

Tech Tuesday: Grant for ongoing digial projects won

We are very pleased to announce that the Central Congregational Church of Newton Legacy Trust , which was established to carry on the deceased church's memory, has awarded the Congregational Library with grant of $5,000.

When we applied for funds earlier this year, we hoped to get support our most important projects within our digital program: the church records project. This task involves identifying significant churches in Massachusetts with 16th and 17th century documents. Since these records are almost always kept at the individual churches, we collect the ledgers in order to be microfilmed and digitized. The microfilm fulfills our preservation mandate while digitizing answers the access needs. Thanks to our partnership with the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, those digital copies are presented through their site. 

Those who follow the Library's activities may already know that have also partnered with the Internet Archive and its local representatives at the Boston Public Library. With their help we have over 100 titles in their database. This funding can also keep us afloat with this as well.

Both the microfilming and particularly scanning are very costly ventures and we depend upon the CCC Legacy Trust and other similar organization's generosity to make this all happen. Thank you again, to their board.  Any person or organization who is interested in supporting this or other library projects should contact our director, Peggy Bendroth.

For those interested in knowing more about the Central church, the archive holds their records, which are open to the public for research.

Resource Monday: Dissertaions

While Rick Hartley was here with the CFTS seminar, he donated a copy of his dissertation, "Re-Discovering Intentional Use of the Church Covenant as the Basis for Self-Identity in a Congregational Church Community," to the Library. This dissertation is the capstone of his work for his degree of Doctor of Ministry. Congratulations, Rick!

The Library has collected many other dissertations that contribute to our ability to serve our community, preserve our history,and continue our work. The Library has both purchased and had dissertations donated by authors. Three other dissertations in the Library are: "Africans, Cherokees, and the ABCFM Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: An unusual Story of Redemption" by Gnimbin A. Quattara, "That Obnoxious Dogma : Future Probation and the Struggle to Construct an American Congregationalist identity" by Sharon A.Taylor, and "Ministerial Training in Eighteenth-century New England" by Mary Latimer Gambrell.

To find a dissertations in the online catalog, use the search terms: thesis ph d

History Friday: Remembering and Forgetting

Remembering and Forgetting

 

I spent some time this past week doing some reading about memory.  It’s a natural topic for a historian, as we are pretty much forced to rely on other people’s recollections of the past for our material—but as psychologists are quick to remind us, human memory is always partial, subjective, and fleeting.  Studies show over and over how easy it is for us to become absolutely convinced of an event or an image in our own past—a red dress you wore the first day of school, a field trip to an ice cream factory—if we are told enough times that it is true.

 

But as psychologists tell us, memory is necessary; it is what makes us truly human. And in a very obvious sense this is true: you cannot know who you are unless you know where you have come from. As the mother of two adopted children, one of whom has recently reunited with her birthmom, I think about this truth every day.

 

But psychological studies show that memory works the other way too. People (and I would say institutions) with a strong sense of their own identity connect most powerfully with their past; those with a weaker sense of self are more trapped in the eternal present. Many of us can probably testify that without an overarching narrative to give our recollections some order and meaning, they are a chaotic jumble, a random series of unrelated events. I would argue that it takes a certain amount of courage and confidence for a person—or a religious denomination or an educational organization—to deal with memories in a clear and constructive way. It’s not surprising, in a sense, that most modern people prefer to live in a world where everything is “new and improved,” rather than old and time-tested.

 

Modern people tend to view memories as fleeting and untrustworthy, and they often eye them suspiciously.  A person who remembers too much is urged to “let it go,” to live in the present, move beyond morbid concerns with times gone by, stop wallowing. The advice is often well-taken, but it’s also true that a thoughtful and sustained encounter with the past, both for individual people and for human institutions, deepens, enriches, and complicates our sense of the present, and restores our capacity to deal with the future.

 

Peggy

Program Thursday: Treasures of the Congregational Library

Discover some of the treasures (not just books) in this series that highlights the history, significance, and provenance of rare and special items in our collections on Wednesday, September 23 at 12 noon.

Treasures on display will include: the Chained Bible: Commentary of Strabo, a portrait of George Whitefield, the four bas reliefs on the from of the building, a bust of Edwards Park, books from the Stubbs Collection, and the chief poetical works of Tu Fu.

Bring your lunch and eat while Claudette Newhall, Associate Librarian, acquaints you with the stories of these items and more.

More yearbooks available digitally

The wonderful "loaders" at Internet Archive just completed digitizing the Congregational and Christian Yearbooks from 1928-1960. We will be linking these on our web site soon. You can find them now by searchng Internet Archive. Please also check our online catalog for full text links to other books by using the term Internet Archive. We've added more Christian Church and Congregational materials.