I've been thinking about...

The Church Archives.

Or should I say, “The Recently Returned Church Archives.”
We owe a great debt of thanks to Phoebe Wilson (Gwen Vowles’ daughter) who has been housing and organizing our church archives for years. About two weeks ago Phoebe asked me if the church would be willing to take back the archives and house them inside the church building, and a couple of days later Phoebe met me here at the church with a car full of documents, pictures, and official records detailing the life and history of the Encanto Community Church. It is AMAZING!

Presently, the Church Archives are contained in five 12-gallon industrial plastic bins. That is 60-gallons of history! (Okay, fine, maybe you don’t measure history that way, but nonetheless it is a tremendous collection; heavy too!)

At Church Council’s consent, the five bins have been moved downstairs to the basement where they currently sit on the top two shelves in one of the closets. One of my goals for the summer is to go through those bins and finish off some of the good organizational work that Phoebe started. My hope is to catalog the contents of each of those bins so that we might know exactly what pieces of our history and heritage we have ready and waiting for us. I also hope to liberate some old photos and memorabilia to display around the church.

Remember, one of our Interim Tasks is “to take seriously the stories and history of the church.” What better way to do that than to sort through our recently returned archives! If anyone would like to give me a hand with the project, just let me know! Thanks for your help, and thank you to Phoebe!

Yours in the journey, Rev. Brian