Reflections on the Role and Purpose of Archives and Oral History Ministries from a Southeast Asian Context

Herbert  R. Swanson, Office of History, Church of Christ in Thailand, May 2002

 Introduction

 The tendency when establishing a church-related archives and/or oral history program is to focus on immediate goals and the almost countless number of specific tasks at hand, minor as well as major.  The foundational vision is often the desire to "save the stories" of the churches, their agencies, and individual local church members.  The motivation underlying the efforts to start and then maintain archival and oral history ministries is assumed to be clear and the formation of the archives a valuable contribution to church life.  Who, in the Information Age and the Age of Local Wisdom, could deny the importance of collecting, conserving, and making available ecclesiastical information and the wisdom of the churches? Those involved in founding or maintaining a church archives, thus, move quickly from the vision to the practical issues of how to proceed or continue proceeding.

 It was with just such a vision that Payap College founded its Manuscript Division in May 1978.  Leaders of the Church of Christ in Thailand (CCT) had discovered in the preceding year that the denominational godown housed an important collection of American Presbyterian missionary records, some dating back to the 1840s, which had been stored in the godown for a number of years and forgotten.  They also learned, sadly, that a part of those records had been destroyed to "make room" for more storage.  Eventually and after a long series of discussions, these Presbyterian missionary records were turned over to Payap College to form the nucleus of what is today the Payap University Archives. The Payap College Manuscript Division, as it was known then, began its work with more than 20 battered old cardboard boxes of dusty, heat-damaged archival records crammed into one small room with two part-time staff people and a student assistant. 

 Over the next six years, with significant support from the Payap College administration and the officers of the CCT, the Payap Archives collected over 1,000 feet of records as well as dozens of reels of microfilm, many rare books and thousands of photographs; and it established a "full-service" archives including a reading room, records processing department, and a document repair lab. 

 In 1978, Thailand had only one functioning archives, the National Archives in Bangkok.  The staff at the Payap archives, located many hours to the North, thus, worked in an archival vacuum, and the number of problems the staff had to solve was staggering, sometimes bewildering: Establish a numbering system for records collections.  Create a unified accessions process and card catalog for a variety of records types.  Find the proper paper to use for document repair.  Locate sources of paper clips and staples that wouldn't rust and document boxes that were of roughly archival standards - emphasis on the "roughly".  Work out a way to fumigate documents that didn't jeopardize the health of the staff.  Obtain a small book press.  Learn how to bind books. Work out reading room regulations.  Decide how much to charge for photocopying. 

 The archives subscribed to several overseas journals, notably the American Archivist, and I had the opportunity to visit archives in both the United States and Australia.  The archives also developed a working relationship with the Thai National Archives and a close relationship with the embryonic archives office of the National Bank of Thailand, which in the early 1980s was still in the beginning stages of its operation. 

 It was an exciting and a nerve-racking time, made worthwhile by the growing number of readers who stopped by to glance at the archives' and ended up staying a full day or a week to work through its collections. The discoveries of rare documents, books, and photographs that would have otherwise been lost made the work all the more meaningful.

 Embedded within our success, however, lay a gnawing, growing disquiet.  By the mid-1980s, the Payap Archives had become an important academic resource with a growing clientele of professors, instructors, and graduate students. Yet, it was collecting its holdings from local churches and denominational agencies by assuring its donors that if they deposited their records at Payap they themselves would benefit.  Their story would be saved.  They would have "access" to their own past.  The list of the archives' readers, however, proved that statement false.  It was deceitful - not intentionally, to be sure, but dishonest nonetheless.

 From its inception, the Payap University Archives intended to serve the churches and agencies of the Church of Christ in Thailand as its primary users, and a few CCT administrators did use of the archives' resources, almost entirely to meet immediate administrative needs.  Only rarely did a member of a local church come to the reading room, usually looking for pre-packaged information on the histories of their churches in preparation for one anniversary or another.  The "information flow" emanating from the archival headwaters to an overwhelming extent thus surged in the direction of secular academia.  That the archives could serve the academic world was not at all a "bad thing," but that role did not fulfill its central purpose as a church archives, which was to collect, preserve, and provide access to historical materials to the substantial benefit of the work and life of the church.

 The CCT founded the Office of History on 1 January 1988 to address this failure of the church itself to make substantial, effective use of its archival heritage.  The Office intended to use the study of the past for the present benefit and future development of local churches and the CCT collectively.  Although not stated as such, it also sought to facilitate the flow of useful data held in the Payap Archives and elsewhere into the CCT's churches and agencies.  It sought to move, in short, beyond a custodial model of information management - which is the classic model for church archives - to a new model that intended to make local churches the chief beneficiaries of the CCT's information processes.

 The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the role of archives and oral history ministries in light of the research experience of the Office of History, Church of Christ in Thailand.  In recounting the historical experience of the Office of History, however, it is important to understand what is meant by custodial model.  That model generally defines the "proper" method and mindset for establishing church archives and other ecclesiastical information agencies, including theological libraries. 

 The message in what follows is that reliance on a custodial model for information management in the church is a two-edged sword.  While it succeeds in saving the church's past, it fails to do so in a way local churches and other agencies of the church can use.

 The Custodial Model Revisited

 By a custodial model for church archives and other ecclesiastical information storage and retrieval agencies is meant that model, which gives precedence to the collection and preservation of records and generally limits its reader services to a passive role.  Readers, according to this model, must actively seek out the repository before reader service takes place. 

 The primary role of the archives as custodian is to protect fragile, frequently unique sources of information and to make those sources available in a closely controlled environment that will assure their continued existence.  Such control also ensures donors that individuals who purposely or inadvertently intend to use information contained in those records for malicious or injudicious ends will not misuse their records. The relationship between the custodian and the user is an ambivalent one because the greatest single enemy of historical records is human beings, including-potentially-the reader. 

 Access to the records, therefore, has to be restricted and carefully controlled. The relationship between the reader and the reading room always has the potential to turn adversarial when the reader wants (sometimes desperately) to see an item or collection that the reading room refuses to serve for reasons that do not seem sufficient to the reader. From a public, outsider's point of view there is something defensive and closed about archives.  Responsible archivist will agree, arguing that if its donors want their archival heritage to survive intact the archives must defend and protect that heritage. 

 This argument must be granted.  It is compelling.  But, for those who want to see the Body of Christ derive benefit from the information contained in an archives it is also frustrating.  Archives seem to be designed to exclude the churches from effective access to their past.  Only trained, knowledgeable academics, generally speaking, can manoeuvre their way through the protective maze that stands between archival data and the public.

 In a Thai context, the defensive barriers inherent in the custodial model raise important ethical questions for church-based archival ministries. The churches, whose stories are housed in the archives in the form of "raw data," are frequently poor.  They include marginalized peoples, particularly hill tribal churches.  The number of members educated beyond six years' of schooling is relatively few.  While their churches, agencies, and elderly members provide materials for the denominational archives and interviews for oral history projects, little if anything is returned to them.  Cherished photographs are removed with the promise that they will survive forever.  Hours of taped interviews are removed with the promise that the interviewees' stories will live forever. 

 At the other end of the system, as already stated, doctoral students delve into the records, photographs, and interview transcripts to write their dissertations, which will be used only by other academics writing their dissertations, books, and articles.  While the matter can be over-stated, this is a potential reversal of the Robinhood role by which the (informationally) wealthy rob the (informationally) poor to increase their own (informational and material) well-being.

 It is important, however, to avoid a good-guy versus bad-guy Western dualistic attitude about the relationship of church archives and oral history programs to the churches themselves.  If ecclesiastical agencies, in all good conscience, want to preserve their historical records for future use, those records do have to be protected and limits must be imposed on access to them.  Yet, if those same agencies want to see the information their records contain is used for the benefit of local church peoples, poor as well as wealthy, some way must be found to share that information with the churches in a meaningful, active, creative, and supportive manner.  The church is called to service.  Church archivists cannot ignore the overwhelming urgency of that call. Those church agencies that want to establish and maintain an archives must contend, in sum, with two conflicting sets of informational mandates.  One set demands careful, controlled protection of information while the other demands an open, enabling outpouring of information.  What to do?

 Moving Beyond the Custodial Model: A Case Study from Thailand

 What to do, indeed.  As indicated above, the CCT founded the Office of History in January 1988, with the intention of using historical research methods to serve local churches and the CCT's national bodies and agencies. The founding vision was a relatively simple one, namely to use the study of the past to help better equip the churches to carry out their present and future ministries.  Stated somewhat differently, we intended to use the Payap University Archives for the churches and share with them what we found there-as well, of course, as what we learned from the churches themselves and from other sources.  We did not expect local church people to go to the archives individually, and we did not expect that they would do their own historical research.  Our intention was to do these things for the churches so that we could provide them with useable, reliable historical information.  We believed that historical research could be a tool for church renewal.

 Phase One: Doing Research for the Churches

 Over the years, our staff has grown from three permanent researchers to five, with the addition of two short-term researchers.  We have carried out a wide range of activities, and as the CCT's only established research office have frequently involved ourselves in projects that are not identifiably historiographical in nature. 

 In simplest terms, however, we have found ourselves carrying out two very different types of research activity.  First, we have invested great amounts of time in studying local church histories as well as various facets of Thai church history generally, in pursuit of our fundamental goal of providing the churches with relevant historical information.  Second, we have been called upon repeatedly to teach our research skills to others in the CCT. 

 Since 1988, the first function, research for others, has receded to a degree while the second function, training others to do research has grown immensely in importance.  And therein lies the lesson behind this case study, one that has potential importance for those involved in ecclesiastical information management. In short, we found that local churches did not derive substantial benefit from the Office of History's research into their histories.  Although the Office staff tried to involve local people in the research process in various ways, in the end the staff did the actual research and learned first hand the lessons to be learned.  The special events, seminars, local meetings, celebrations, and books that the Office sponsored to promote local church historical understanding did not lead in the direction of local church renewal.  Sometimes, the Office of History was not able to explain its interpretation of the issues and problems facing churches with sufficient clarity.  Church members and leaders did not understand the staff's findings because it was the staff who found them.  At other times, local leaders understood the findings but rejected them as being fallacious, biased.  One congregation even threatened to sue the Office for misrepresenting its past in a book it published after more than two year's research with the church.  More frequently, local members and leaders understood and accepted the insights into their history provided by the Office, but were not able to move from insights to programs that could effectively address systemic weaknesses.  The Office of History's research strategy, in sum, provided local churches with information but not the means to use that information.

 During the 1990s, the Office tried to address the failure of its research to effect local church renewal by refocusing its attention on districts rather than local congregations singly.  It was felt, incorrectly, that the districts could better use the results of our research than could local churches.  Having failed at the district level, the Office turned to hiring short-term and then permanent field researchers, theologically trained local people who could interpret the historical data in the idiom of the churches.  The results have still been insubstantial in terms of local church renewal.  The fundamental problem that has dogged all of these research approaches is that the Office of History carried over basic attitudes from the custodial model of church informational ministry.  It sought to retain control of the research process and the production of information.  It still viewed local church people, consequently, as the end-product consumers of its work.

 Phase Two:  Training Others to do Research

 In the meantime, from early in its history, a variety of church agencies have called upon the Office of History to teach research skills to individuals who had some need to learn them.  Those research skills, frequently, are drawn from the social sciences rather than historiography. While the Office struggled to find a model for effectively interpreting its local church history research findings, its training activities seemed to grow almost of themselves.  It reached an important turning point in its training efforts during the hot season (March-April) of 1998, when it involved nine Karen tribal seminarians studying in Thai-language seminaries in a seven-week local church history research project.  The project sought to put these theology students back into their Karen context, a context that had almost become alien to them after several years of Thai-language theological training.  It did this by providing the students with basic oral history research skills and then sending them out to the churches to find out for themselves what they should know. 

 What they learned was not only the history of certain churches but, more importantly, the beauty and importance of their Karen heritage.  They learned this lesson by spending many hours interviewing elderly Karen, hearing their stories and learning from them what traditional Karen life was about. What was most important about this hot season project from the Office of History's perspective, however, was the enthusiasm and dedication nearly all of the students had for the research process - attitudes strikingly different from their demeanour in the classroom.  They learned more than we could ever have hoped, and what they learned "stuck" with them because they had learned it for themselves. 

 Since 1998, the Office of History has sponsored a total of seven hot season student research projects with a total of 47 students, and in the great majority of cases the students have enjoyed their research experiences and avow that they learned important things about themselves and about the churches they studied.  This past hot season, 2002, the Office experimented with involving Karen and Lahu tribal Bible school students, wondering if these less highly educated students could successfully do local church history research.  Most of them did as well or nearly as well as the seminarians, although all of them come from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. The Office of History has found that the general reaction of the students matches that of the most of the other individuals it has trained in research techniques.  They are often surprised to learn that they enjoy doing research because of the personal involvement it encourages. 

 From the Office's own perspective, what takes place is a transfer of more than research skills; actual ownership of the process of acquiring and managing information is shifted from the Office of History to those it has trained. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a personal experience is worth a thousand pictures.

 Phase Three:  Training Churches to do Research

 Given its experience, the Office of History, then, is in the process of shifting its the focus of its research with local churches away from doing research for local churches to finding ways to do equip the churches to do their own research, using their own resources and addressing their own issues.  In spite of its name, it is also reducing its emphasis on historical research as such, seeking especially to find ways to teach a basic, low-math use of questionnaires to local church people.  The Office of History continues to conduct a significant amount of original historical research as well as an increasing amount of sociological and theological research.  The information produced by such research still has an important role to play in the life of the CCT.  The direction and trend, however, is increasingly to teach research skills to others and enable them to successfully carry out their own research. 

 To that end, the Office of History plans to initiate two local church research projects in the coming year, one designed to work with Karen tribal churches and the other aimed at ethnic northern Thai churches. 

 Modest pilot projects are now underway in preparation for those larger projects.  It will be sometime before concrete results are known and new lessons are learned. The lesson the Office of History has learned is obvious.  Research is not simply an accumulation of data.  It is a learning process.  As such, research is most useful to those most directly involved in it.  If the goal of local church research is growth and renewal at the congregational level, then the church itself has to participate in the research process in a meaningful manner.  It is not enough for the outside research agency to invite local members to sit on an advisory committee.  It is not enough to explain carefully to church members the research process and receive the official blessing of the church's council.  A transfer of skills has to take place, one that will equip local churches to take ownership of the information process for themselves.

 Reflections

The experience of the Office of History indicates that the conduct of church-based research, like the existence of church archives, raises central questions concerning the production, storage, and use of information within the church.  To an important degree, they are the same questions of ownership of ecclesiastical information systems.  It is one thing to communicate the results of a research project done by research specialists for a local church, which is what the Office did in the beginning; it is quite another to involve the church in its own research, which is what we are seeking to do now. 

 In the first approach, the Office of History retained custodial control over the total research process and remained the "owner" of the data it collected.  It, inadvertently, limited the church's effective access to information concerning its own life. Church archivists and information specialists generally must address the same custodial issue of ownership.  Once local records and other records relevant to the local church are removed to the archives, effective access to them is lost to the church.  If, by some chance, the donor should want access to the information contained in the originals, photocopying the originals or even temporarily returning them to the donor, if necessary, can address the issue.  From an archivist's point of view, access is a matter of a user contacting the archivist. 

However satisfying the theory, in actual practice churches, particularly poorer churches, derive virtually no benefit from this process.  They generally don't realize the informational value of their records and memories.  In any event, the whole process of visiting the archives is not something poorer church members are apt to do. It would be overstating the case to argue that archivists are committing an injustice when they collecting historical records from churches and ecclesiastical agencies.  As has already been indicated, in one very real, pressing sense they perform an invaluable service by doing so.  It is a service, as has also been stated, which primarily benefits the informationally advantaged.  The injustice, if that word applies, is that no one in the ecclesiastical information system has troubled themselves to equip the churches to know how to use those records themselves - to know, that is, how to gather, interpret, and use information to the end that their churches will grow in faith and in service.

 The history of the Payap University Archives from 1978 to 1984 and the Office of History over the past fourteen years suggests that how information is stored and made accessible is an important and difficult issue.  It is not a foregone conclusion that church archives and oral history projects are the best way to utilize the documentary and living memories of the church, if we take into consideration the actual information needs of the churches themselves.  This is not to say that ecclesiastical bodies and denominations should not establish their own archives.  It is to say that setting up a repository to act as a custodian of ecclesiastical information is not and end in itself.  Church archives, oral history programs, information centers, news agencies, and even theological libraries need to be looked upon as elements or agencies in a Christian, Christ-like, information system. Churches, denominations, and their agencies already utilize systems of information, however seldom they are conceived of as such.  They are complex systems, involving numerous information "consumers" and a range of information producers, and people within the system will use its information for any number of purposes, from pure entertainment to meeting administrative needs to carrying out Christian education activities.  The whole system, if it is Christ-like, is directed to equipping the saints for ministry, promoting peace making and reconciliation, and communicating Jesus' Good News to the world.  It is a system that will follow Christ's example of favoring the world's disadvantaged, which means that it will pay special attention to delivering ecclesiastical information to the margins of the church and society. 

 Christian information specialists, therefore, will be particularly sensitive to what we might call the economics and politics of knowledge capitalism.  They will understand that the church, like the world at large, contains both the informationally advantaged and disadvantaged and that it is in the best faith-interests of the church at large to bring a balance in the availability and use of ecclesiastical information.

 It is at this point that those involved in the management of Christian information systems must reflect on the place of archives and other information repositories in the system itself.  The dynamic of a Christian information system faces the very real prospect of coming into conflict with the mandates and values of archival custodianship.  The point of potential conflict is effective access to archival holdings.  Reading rooms and a passive approach to reader service benefit only the informationally advantaged who, as we saw above, are frequently not even related to the church. 

 A related issue is the question of who will determine the role of church archives and other types of repositories and seek to overcome the informational gap (chasm?) between those repositories and local churches, including poorer churches.  On what grounds will they make that determination?  What is the responsibility of the custodians themselves in determining how larger ecclesiastical information systems serve the whole church?

 These questions are not simply "interesting" side issues to the "real" work of the church.  The truism that our modern world is driven by information, that information is wealth, and that it is not longer "who you know" but "what you know" that matters the most-all of these glib claims to wisdom are true.  If churches are to thrive in this age as servants of and witnesses to Jesus of Nazareth, they have to be info-churches, churches that know how to obtain and use information.  The incarnational model enjoins us to be the church in the world and to risk immersion in the world for the sake of the world.  Incarnation, in our age, means that the churches must cultivate informational skills if they are to serve, let alone survive, in the Information Age.  Local churches and ecclesiastical agencies, thus, need to master the basic skills involved in gathering, collating, and interpreting various kinds of information.  They, no less than the greatest of the transnational corporations, need to carry out marketing research, in-house evaluations, and utilize a wide range of publicly available information if they are to be effective agents of ministry in their various contexts. 

 Establishing a church archives achieves none of these vital ends. Developing informational skills at the local level is particularly pressing for the churches of Asia (and other churches in what we once called the Third World).  Most Asian churches the products of Western missionary efforts, and they frequently have to wrestle with fundamental issues of identity.  Asian Christians, most especially Protestant Christians, have generally been spiritually and cognitively de-culturalized to an extent, which historical experience hampers their religious lives in numerous ways. They frequently live in tension with their neighbors of other faiths.  They are unable to communicate the Gospel relevantly.  Their attempts at ministry are sometimes greeted with mistrust. 

 Local Asian Christians are often confronted thus with the need to re-learn important aspects of their Asian-ness.  That process requires basic research and informational skills presently lacking in the vast majority of churches, especially rural ones.

 Conclusion

 Access to information, in sum, is a pressing issue.  Creating an equitable, effective ecclesiastical information system is an equally pressing issue for the church.  Establishing an archives or setting up an oral history project, let it be said yet again, does not address these issues at all. Such activities can even detract from addressing the underlying issue of how local churches, especially those at the margins of the church, can achieve meaningful access to important information for themselves.  Church archivists must also deal with the inherent tensions between the mandates of their custodial model of information management to control and limit access to information and the mandates of faith, which call for an effectively open, accessible information system that equitably equips and informs the whole church.  The point is not that setting up a church archives or conducting an oral history project are "bad" things to do, but rather that they are not sufficient acts in themselves.  At the last, all of those involved in ecclesiastical information systems have to wrestle with these central issues in 21st century Christian ethics, not just church archivists and oral historians.

 In late May of this year, two Karen colleagues and I visited a Karen hill church to finalize our very first pilot project aimed at training local church members to do their own research projects.  After an evening worship service, we sat with some twenty men and women discussing the project and its possible benefits for them. We claimed that basic research skills can be used to deal with local problems and issues.  When asked if their church had problems the immediate response was, "Yes.  More than you can imagine." One of those present went on to say, "And we can't solve them."  To which another member immediately responded, "We don't have the skills to solve them."  That, we again stated, was what we wanted to do-teach them those skills.  We were careful to tell them that we have never done anything like this project with any other church in Thailand.  They were the first.  We could not guarantee anything.  Our question was, "Do you want to invest your time and some of your own money in this project?"  Their answer was, "Yes."  It was a firm answers followed by the vow to do what they could to make the project a success. 

 It was a dark, rainy evening in the Karen hills.  The participants in the discussion have little education and scratch along from day to day and week to week to make a simple living. But their church is a central part of their lives.  They want it and their community to prosper.  They are also practical people who understand the importance of knowledge and skills to making a living.  It made sense to them that certain basic research skills could help them increase their knowledge and thereby gain an increased chance to address effectively basic issues facing their church and community. Their answer was, "Yes." My point is that somebody had to go to them.  Somebody had to take the reading room to them.  And give them the skills to take it over for themselves.