Possible closing of Montreat history office raises impassioned response

A task force appointed to consider the matter has only met twice, including holding a public consultation at Montreat Conference Center on April 16 that drew more than 130 people. It’s not planning to recommend any course of action until the fall at the earliest, when it’s expected to make a preliminary report to the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly. The final report is expected in the spring of 2005.

And the task force’s mandate includes not just determining where the historic archives of the PC(USA) should be kept, but also how the history department should try to keep up with technology — deciding, for example, what’s the best way to preserve electronic records that were never stored on paper in the first place.

But already, overtures have been submitted to this year’s General Assembly in Richmond, asking that the Assembly put on hold any plans to move historical records from Montreat to Philadelphia, where Presbyterians from the north had their church offices starting in the 1700s and where the main office of the Presbyterian Historical Society is located. An overture from South Louisiana Presbytery asks the Assembly to “cancel or postpone” any plans to move denominational records from Montreat to Philadelphia and to develop a long-range funding plan to support regional sites to house the denomination’s archival records.

At the same time, however, some of those involved with the April 16 conversation at Montreat (which was followed by a day-long meeting of the task force itself), came away feeling hopeful — sensing that progress was made, even if they can’t say yet what will happen. “The consultation went really well,” said Anne Bond, an elder from Colorado, who’s co-moderator of the task force, along with Katherine Cunningham, a minister from New Jersey. “We had a great conversation with them … And we came out so much farther down the road in terms of thinking and potential partnerships than any of us anticipated.”

What those “potential partnerships” might be remains to be seen, although there has been discussion about the idea of establishing an endowment to try to keep the Montreat historical office open and perhaps of setting up partnerships with educational institutions in the region.

A group called the Friends of the Montreat Historical Center spoke at the April 16 consultation, presenting what they called an “alternative vision” — recommending that any plan for consolidation be stopped and that the Montreat center operate as a regional historical center with its own fund-raising board, although it would also receive money from the denomination.

Some representatives from Columbia Seminary in Decatur, Ga. — located about three hours from Montreat — came to the April 16 consultation. Columbia’s president, Laura Mendenhall, said in an interview that “we’re willing to be a conversation partner in this if the church needs a conversation partner … but we don’t have designs on anything, no big passion for taking over anything.”

Mendenhall added: “We don’t have any notion of what will happen. We’re not lobbying for anything.” But the natural constituencies of Montreat and of Columbia Seminary overlap, she said, and “it just seems like this is our part of the country, so we should be concerned and interested and available to be a conversation partner down the line.”

Another player in those discussions is the Montreat Conference Center, on whose grounds the Montreat office of the historical society is located.

What was made clear at the Montreat consultation in April is how strongly, even passionately, people feel about having a regional office of the historical society there — and how deeply attached many Presbyterians from the South are to the history of the denomination in that area.

In part, that’s because the Montreat office is the repository of the records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the southern branch of the denomination that merged with the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1983 to form the PC(USA). But Montreat also is the place where more than 1,000 Presbyterian congregations, from Virginia to Texas, have sent their session records — records sprinkled with the names and stories of Presbyterians from throughout the South.

In 2003, the Montreat office had about 5,000 visitors, according to William Bynum, its acting deputy director.

Many were Presbyterians who’d come to find out more about their own congregation’s history — some for a celebration of a milestone anniversary of the church, others motivated by simple curiosity.

Some attending programs at the Montreat Conference Center come to see the museum, which includes artifacts from Presbyterian mission work in the Congo and such treasures as the oldest Presbyterian pulpit from North Carolina in existence, which was stored in a barn for 85 years, made in about 1777 and came from Bethany Church near Statesville. And then there’s what’s said to be the world’s largest collection of communion tokens, Bynum said — metal objects shaped like coins, which were used like admission tickets in Presbyterian churches in the 1800s and were collected by a Texan named O.J. Rumble.

Professional historians come too, as do genealogists. And there have been visitors and correspondence from Christians overseas, from places such as Japan and Korea and the Congo, who are trying to trace the missions roots of the churches in their countries. Sometimes they come to Montreat because the records of churches in their home countries have been lost or destroyed.

James Cogswell, a former missionary to Japan who later became director of overseas ministries for the National Council of Churches and also worked in world missions for the Presbyterian church, is now retired, living in Montreat and is one of those who wants to see the office there kept open.

“The political backlash of closing Montreat would be disastrous,” Cogswell said in an interview. “Churches have put their records there with the understanding they were going to be in a permanent location … They would feel betrayed” if the records were moved.

Those who spoke at the April consultation included pastors, former missionaries and residents of the Montreat area — some of whom know that the history of their own families’ connections to Presbyterianism is told in the Montreat files.

“In Montreat, there is much more of a group that comes for commemoration, recollection, identity and a shared sense of the church and its heritage,” said Bond, the task force co-moderator. In Philadelphia, researchers come more for pure scholarship, “it’s not a place where people go to remember and share with multiple generations.”

There is, however, a financial argument to consider as well.

Currently, about 80 percent of the historical society budget comes from per capita funding, Heuser said. That comes to about $1.7 million out of an annual budget of just over $2 million, he said (most of the rest of the income comes from investments, service fees and sales of supplies), with the historical society employing 25 people (20 work in Philadelphia, one at the denomination’s headquarters in Louisville and the rest in Montreat).

It’s not known exactly how much could be saved by consolidating operations in one place, but it’s probably several hundred thousand dollars a year, perhaps as much as $400,000, Heuser said.

“Finances are really driving this,” he said, adding that “we simply don’t have the funds” to keep open offices in two locations. Heuser also said: “We don’t know where this is going to go yet. We’re hoping that Jesus has the answer, because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

And Philadelphia has a long Presbyterian history of its own. There has been a Presbyterian historical office there since 1853, moving to four or five different locations in the city during that time and settling in its current building, on Society Hill, in 1966. The first Presbyterian General Assembly in this country was held in Philadelphia, in 1789, and for decades, the national offices of the northern Presbyterian church were located there.

“Philadelphia was always seen as the home of American Presbyterianism,” Heuser said, and the Philadelphia office houses the records of nine of the 10 predecessor denominations of the PC(USA).

The Philadelphia office answers 5,000 to 6,000 reference inquiries a year, “literally from all over the world,” from genealogists, historians, scholars and folks in the denomination, Heuser said. For Presbyterian researchers “it’s what the National Archives and Library of Congress are to the American people,” he said. “We get e-mails, we get faxes, we get letters, we get phone calls,” from everyone from the British Broadcasting Corporation and the History Channel to people from local congregations.

The history department’s public catalog can be accessed online at www.history.pcusa.org — making it possible, for example, for someone to find out what papers from missionaries to Persia are available (although they’d have to come to Philadelphia to actually view the papers) — and the office publishes the quarterly Journal of Presbyterian History.

In addition to trying to figure out where the historical society offices should be located, the task force also is considering technological issues: mainly, how to preserve historic records in an age of electronic communications. “The real challenge right now is that very few of these technologies are going to last more than 10 years,” said Bond, who works professionally with the Colorado Historical Society. There are questions such as, “Do we continue to microfilm when we could scan? … Do we do both? Can we afford to do both?” And what will be the cost to “convert to the next better thing?”

The overtures coming to this year’s Assembly about the historical society argue that the Assembly itself should take up these issues and not wait for the task force to report.

The South Louisiana overture asks the Assembly to “develop a long-range funding plan to support regional archival sites for church records using modern archival methods” and states that all churches with records at Montreat would have to be informed of any plans to change how their records are kept, and would have to consent to those changes.