Y By Elizabeth Hunter Y


ou probably remember learning in Christian education or world history classes about Mar- tin Luther’s objections to his church’s sale of indulgences—after all, those 95 Theses helped spark the Protestant Reformation. But at the ELCA Archives you can actually see one of these glorified hall passes that unscrupulous “pardoners” used to “sell” forgiveness. But more importantly, you’ll find what is arguably one of the best archives in the country and a treasure trove of artifacts, documents, photographs, films and recordings that bear witness to the history of Lutherans in America.


For its part, the 500-year-old indulgence in the ELCA collection is an immediate visual reminder of why Luther’s insistence on justification by faith (sola fide) matters. Based on its size, “it was probably intended for display on a church door,” said Joel Thoreson, archivist. The indulgence came to the ELCA in 1988 when the denomination inherited the archives of the now-defunct National Lutheran Council (a cooperative effort of sev- eral ELCA predecessor bodies), said Catherine Lundeen, archivist. It was a gift from a German production com- pany that worked with the council and Lutheran Church Productions on the 1953 film Martin Luther.


Open access Open to the general public, the archives can be accessed via its bricks-and-mortar site in Elk Grove Village, Ill. (visitors must schedule an appointment) or its website (www.elca.org/archives), where one can quickly get lost in a vast collection of photos, documents and videos. “We make our records more visible than any other denomination,” Thoreson said. “We keep an open policy, with the exception of some personnel records and cases where the donor has asked for a period of restricted access.”


Seekers can even find videos from the ELCA Archives on YouTube. Yet what’s online is just a fraction of available materials. “For the most part, we’ve only digitized what people have requested,” Thoreson said. During the workweek, staff juggle requests from churchwide staff, pastors, laity, historians, students, sociologists and other researchers. “We serve each of the expressions of the church: congregations, synod, church- wide and other institutions,” Lundeen said. She said inquiries run the gamut: from “interim pas- tors who need to clean up the parish register or transition


Hunter is a section editor of The Lutheran.


On each shelf, many stories


ELCA Archives show the life of the church, then and now


to an electronic format,” to Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service staff seeking the reasons behind past changes in the organization’s bylaws, to ELCA World Hunger staff who need to know where to direct a bequest that came in under the name of a unit of a predecessor church body. Lundeen and Thoreson are quick to emphasize that


staff work in concert with the ELCA’s regional archives (www.elca.org/archives), where many of the records most relevant to congregations can be accessed. Currently the most requested collections relate to


Lutheran deaconesses, global mission efforts and Anna Kugler, who is such a “rock star … not just with theo- logians or church members, but with [non-ELCA and secular] people,” Lundeen said. The ELCA Archives houses Kugler’s diaries, notes, correspondence and more. In 1883 Lutheran leaders told this medical doctor that she could teach women in Guntur, India, but couldn’t serve as a medical mission- ary. “She basically said, ‘Fine. I’ll go as a teacher if I can bring my medical bag and my uniform,’ ” Lundeen said. Kugler won out, and began officially serving as a


medical missionary in December 1885. When she died in 1930, the hospital she helped build was renamed Kugler Hospital.


Family matters


Perhaps 40 percent of the inquiries staff receive are genealogical from those who make the archives their first stop “when they hear or read ‘Lutheran’ or ‘Evan- gelical Lutheran,’ ” Thoreson said.


36 The Lutheran • www.thelutheran.org


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