The Effects of an MC-GC Merger on
Archives and Historical Activities

by John D. Thiesen

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How would a Mennonite Church-General Conference Mennonite Church merger affect historical activities? Given the impending vote at Wichita 95, this is an important question. First I'll describe the current situation in Mennonite historical activities, then list some principles or axioms that could guide us in moving toward a new structure for historical activities, and then describe what I think a new historical network would look like and some of the challenges facing it in the near future.

The current situation
The Mennonite Church has a denomination-wide, bi-national Historical Committee with a fairly large budget. This committee reports to the MC General Board and runs the archives in Goshen, in addition to doing more general promotional and educational activities concerning church history. There is also a "Mennonite Church Historical Association" which operates out of the archives in Goshen, a membership organization for those interested in MC historical activities. It publishes the Mennonite Historical Bulletin.

The Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen is separate from the archives and is not under the MC Historical Committee. Rather, it is under the auspices of the college and seminary. There is also a Mennonite Historical Society operating out of the seminary and college context, whose purposes and membership seem to have been somewhat unclear over the years. Certainly, it seems to be in flux now.

On the General Conference side, there has been a denomination-wide historical committee off and on over the years. The last one was eliminated by budget cuts. I was appointed as the GC participant/observer to the MC Historical Committee after the GC committee's demise. The General Conference has its archives and historical library combined in the Mennonite Library and Archives at Bethel College. The college operates the Mennonite Library and Archives for the General Conference under a memo of understanding. The budget for the archives, and for the historical committee when it still existed, came from the Commission on Education rather than the GC General Board or Division of Administration.

The GCs in Canada, the Conference of Mennonites in Canada, has a History/Archives Committee and their official archives at Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg. Their budget is about twice as large as the budget for the binational GC archives at Bethel College. The provincial area conferences generally don't have historical committees.

To turn away from denominational bureaucracies, we are seeing an explosion of local and regional Mennonite historical organizations. A quick check of the Mennonite Yearbook shows that about half of all the historical societies, archives, and museums listed have originated in the last 20 years. The Yearbook listing is by no means complete, either. The last 4 or 5 years have seen a real spate of such new organizations: Nebraska, Michiana, Cumberland Valley. There have also been reorganizations and revitalizations; in California, the Mennonite Brethren Historical Society of the West Coast was reformed into the California Mennonite Historical Society.

This last example illustrates the fact that many such local and regional organizations are inter-Mennonite, sometimes aggressively so. At the denominational level, the GC and MC committees worked on several cooperative projects and tried to organize some exchange of committee members and attendance at each other's meetings. I'm the remnant of that intention. There has also been such interaction with the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission. I think there was even a 3-way meeting in Goshen once, GC, MC, and MB. The MC committee plans to meet with the MB committee on the West Coast in May.

Now I want to propose several principles or axioms that could guide the planning of historical activities in the merger era.

Principles for Historical Activities in the Merger Era
First of all, we want to have a historical committee and archives. I don't know if I should comment on this, but I've heard an oral tradition among MCs that in 1971, with the change from a "general conference" to a "general assembly," the historical committee was deliberately left out of the plan of the new organization; it was put back in by floor action at the conference that approved the reorganization. Whether or not this is really true, we don't want something like that to happen now. Furthermore, we don't want to have a historical committee and archives without a budget.

I don't know exactly how we go about impressing on the denominational bureaucracies what we want. We certainly haven't been successful on the GC side. I think the big push is going to have to come from the MC side and from the MC Historical Committee in particular.

Second, I think we want to rock the boat as little as possible. We don't want to throw all the papers in the archives up in the air and see where they come down, so to speak. This principle has consequences mostly for the archives: I don't think it's a good use of resources to move archival records around geographically as a result of integration; I don't think we want to close any archives; and I don't think we want to reduce the budget of the historical committee or any of the archives. Indeed, to reduce the current budgets of the archives would be equivalent to closing them.

A New Historical Network
So what would a merged Mennonite historical system look like and what things -- both new and old -- would it do?

First, from the denominational bureaucracy viewpoint, I think historical activities will end up at the national rather than the binational or continental level. I think the trend toward nationalization is pretty much inevitable. What I'm going to say here is fairly generic, so it could apply to both the U.S. and Canada, but since the dominant Canadian Mennonite denomination already has an active history/Archives committee, what I'm going to say is mostly directed at the U.S. situation.

We should have a historical committee that reports to the General Board at the national level. It should be placed under the General Board rather than elsewhere in the organization chart (remember the GC committee was under the Commission on Education) because the Historical Committee has two functions, or major groups of functions. They are 1) records management and 2) history education. Neither of these two functions should overshadow the other. In MC and GC historical committees in the past, for example, the records management function -- developing archival and library holdings, gathering obscure 16th-century sources for the scholars to use -- was the dominant activity. In the present, I think the temptation is the opposite. Both functions are necessary and interdependent. Without some kind of interpretation to a wider audience, the records in the archives are not of much use; but the foundation of such history interpretation to the church at large is the documents in the archives. You can't really have one without the other.

Now some more detail about what I foresee for each of these two functions: I think we can plan for a regionalization of archives; we, in fact, already have it. Certain archives would be officially sponsored by the historical committee; initially these would be at Goshen and Bethel, although I think in the long run there would be others, especially farther to the East and West. The archives that officially relate to the historical committee would receive part of their budget from the committee; in effect, this is a continuation of the situation we have now. I envision these archives as each being located at one of the Mennonite schools (not necessarily at the colleges, since in Oregon, for example, we might eventually have a committee-funded archives at Western Mennonite School) and would receive additional funding from the school and be operated by the school. The schools are used to hiring academic, professional personnel and could easily manage each of the archives in connection with their existing libraries. Such local management would be easier than trying to manage regional archives by long-distance from a centrally located historical committee office. Each archives/historical library would be governed by a board representing three constituencies: the historical committee, the school where it is located, and local users (such as local historical societies and area conferences). I would expect that each archives would get funding from all three of these constituencies, with a major emphasis on endowment-based funding.

There will probably be some policies that would apply to all of the archives sponsored by the historical committee. Certainly the effort to maintain professional archival and library standards and practices will be enforced by the committee; but each archives will need to be responsive to local conditions. For example, at Bethel we have acquired a number of local records that are not particularly Mennonite (for example, the papers of a local non-Mennonite poet), simply because there is no active non-Mennonite archives in our area to take responsibility. If we didn't keep these records, they would simply be destroyed. A governing board like I have described could balance the universal and local interests and funding sources.

There are certain tasks and challenges the various archives could face together, coordinated by the Historical Committee. For example, we need to be more active with the various Mennonite organizations, to offer a service to them in keeping their records of long-term value, and to challenge them to good stewardship of their records. We need to do some common advertising to educate the public -- individuals and families -- about what archives do and how we can help them -- to challenge families to preserve the many significant documents they have. We need to create a way to help train and educate persons who are archivists for regional and local historical societies, for congregations, or for Mennonite agencies who choose to keep their own records. We all will face a serious challenge in the next couple of decades with the growing use of electronic documents -- even by individuals -- and the growing expectation of archives users that everything -- no matter how obscure--should be available instantaneously on-line. The archives are beginning to be connected via the Internet already. There is also a Mennonite listserver or discussion group on the Internet. These are some of the things we could do together.

The second major function of the historical committee is and will be education. This is the hard one. How do we do this successfully? This is not a problem just for educating people about history, but for other subjects as well. It seems to me that there is a general decline of interest in Mennonite churches in all sorts of things, not just church history, but doctrine, ethics, and Bible knowledge. It sometimes seems that there are fewer and fewer people in the church who are literate enough or educated enough to have an interest in learning about anything.

In spite of being pessimistic, there are a couple of comments I want to make about our educational task. First, I think we should be concerned about teaching church history generally, not just Mennonite history, certainly not just 16th century Anabaptist history, but the whole story of the church from the first century down through the stories of the church in non-European countries today, encompassing the whole spectrum of Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and other versions of Christianity.

Second, we probably need to move more aggressively and creatively into new media: video, computer-based multimedia, and the like. These things get a lot of totally unjustified hype these days, and they have their definite weaknesses, but this is an area that history education needs to be more aware of.

Third, we need to have history education linked closely to Christian education generally. What we often have now is history education in its own little box, and then Christian education about the Bible and so on is a whole separate world. These things need to be together, which means that the Historical Committee in its education activities needs to work closely with whatever agency is developing educational resources for the church on these other subjects.

I've noted the two tasks of the historical committee: records management and education, but there is one other area I want to mention. Most of the local and regional Mennonite history organizations are broadly inter-Mennonite; they include everyone interested in Mennonite history. They are pointing the direction for the future. A new Historical Committee after an MC-GC merger will not exist in isolation. It will need to work consciously on cooperation with other persons and organizations interested in Mennonite history.

One model that comes to mind is something called the Lutheran Historical Conference. I don't know a great deal about it, but I do know that this is a group that brings Lutherans together across their intra-Lutheran divisions (which are much more bitter than Mennonite divisions) in the interests of historical activity. They have, I think, an annual meeting, and some on-going programs. We probably need to move toward some kind of well-organized inter-Mennonite historical activity. There is currently no national or binational, inter-Mennonite historical society. This is a direction we need to explore further.

Conclusion
I'm somewhat nervous about the Mennonite future. The example of the Dutch Mennonites is perhaps a warning. In 1700 there 160,000 Mennonites in the Netherlands; in 1808 there were only 27,000, a decline of 83 percent. In other words, Mennonites almost disappeared from that country in the course of one century. Sometimes I wonder if we are just on the verge of a similar kind of experience. Do we have so much assimilation to society at large that we are getting collective amnesia, that we're forgetting who we are? I don't mean assimilation in externals, but in mental attitudes and beliefs. Collective amnesia is common to society at large; many Americans are completely ignorant of their history, whether it be personal or national. Mennonites are becoming much the same.

Our challenge is to maintain some kind of identity that reaches beyond mere external signs to attitudes and beliefs.

--John Thiesen presented this paper at the conference on "The Experience of Mennonite Women" in Harleysville, PA, Oct. 22, 1994. He is archivist of the Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas.

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, July, 1995