Rescuing the Memory

 

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Rescuing the Memory of our Peoples
Project for Archives Documentation and Oral History
A mission project of the  International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS)

Many memories of people of faith are not being recorded. Where those memories are recorded often their preservation is uncertain, their location hazardous, and access and documentation non-existent.

We are all involved in doing what we can. Together we can do more. We can help create a climate which values the past at the same time as we address the urgent needs of the present.

We seek to bring together archivists, researchers and church representatives from around the world, with a special emphasis on the needs of the regions of Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.

See also IAMS Documentation, Archives and Bibliography Project.


Rescuing the Memory of our Peoples Archives Manual available in English, French and Chinese


A report on our 2002 Conference:
Rescuing Memory:
John Allen Word from Rome,
National Catholic Reporter 4 October, 2002:

     This week an ecumenical group of librarians, archivists and scholars of mission studies is meeting under the aegis of the International Association for Mission Studies and the International Association of Catholic Missiologists. The conference, entitled “Rescuing the Memory of Our Peoples,” is taking place at the Centro Internazionale di Animazione Missionaria at the Urban University, run by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. 

     The group of 50 some experts, including Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Anglicans, is in effect trying to organize a race against the clock to preserve the historical memory of Christianity, and especially its missions, in the Third World. Under the pressures of globalization, poverty, war, and neglect, lots of irreplaceable historical resources – documents, oral traditions, physical remains – are in danger in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

     Andrew Walls, a Scottish Methodist who is among the leading experts on Christianity in the Third World, summed up the archivist’s spirit: “Never destroy a piece of paper until you make at least two copies of it.”

     Walls gave a fascinating keynote address in which he reviewed the well-known statistics about the 20th century inversion in Christian demography. At the beginning of the century, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America; today 60 percent live in the Southern Hemisphere. “We begin the new century with a post-Christian West, and a post-Western Christianity,” he said.

     In this context, Walls argued, building archival resources in Africa, Asia and Latin America is a matter of survival for Christians everywhere. Given that theological reflection arises out of the lived faith experience of a community, if it doesn’t happen in the South, “there won’t be theological studies anywhere much worth caring about.”

     One thing that struck me was the way conference participants seemed to hold together their high ideals and the nitty-gritty details their work necessarily involves. I never thought I’d hear a discussion about the best way to combat paper rot in front of the bright red flag of Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra, or movement of the landless, but there it was.


"A people is defined and unified not by blood but by shared memory."
"Deciding to remember, and what to re-member, is how we decide who we are."

Robert Pinsky