MICHAEL D. WATSON “One woman’s family had been displaced after World
War II,” Lundeen said. “All she knew was that they’d ended up in Oregon. Since the national organization coordinated resettlement, but much of the work was done by a local agency, we figured out who now had those records.”
Another query came from a man wanting to know why his grandmother had left the deaconess community in the late 1800s. “I found out from minutes that she had resigned, and with a little more digging, why: she didn’t want to wear the garb and had taken on more than [the typical] duties of a deaconess at that time,” Lun- deen said. “She went on to have this wonderful life as a missionary.
“I love that part of our work—filling in the holes of the corporate memory.”
‘Ministry of accountability’ “Lutherans have been doing God’s work in this country for centuries,” Thoreson said. “We preserve that story and make it accessible to all. That makes the ELCA Archives a ministry of accountability.” What gives it accountability, Lundeen added, is
that “we don’t interpret the history. We leave it to oth- ers to draw conclusions, which is the sign of a healthy archives.”
She gives the example of the letters to the editor from The Lutheran magazine of the former Lutheran Church in America.
Thoreson said: “Some of those letters were pretty
crabby. Church members wrote with their views about civil rights, conscientious objection [to war], women’s ordination and homosexuality, for exam- ple. They would also write their church president and give them what for.”
Sometimes the “what for” in The Lutheran was over youth gatherings, Thoreson added. When musician “Pete Seeger was going to be singing at [a 1970] Luther League conven- tion, a group of people were very upset about that,” he said. Earlier, just before the 1961 Luther League convention, “others were upset and concerned about Martin Luther King Jr. speaking.” A black-and-white archival photo of the event reveals only interest in the faces of the young Lutherans who listened to King speak about “agape” and being “proudly malad- justed” toward a society that permits injustice. All of it adds up to a healthy institutional memory that avoids mere nostalgia in favor of an amazing historical record. “It’s the ELCA Archives, but the ELCA is the people in the pews,” Lundeen said. “These are our sto- ries and our lives. That’s important because historians don’t just ask, ‘Where has this church been?’ They ask, ‘Where is this church going?’ ”
ELCA archivists Catherine Lundeen and Joel Thoreson display an actual indul- gence from 1516, part of an array of historical documents and artifacts in the ELCA Archives in Elk Grove Village, Ill. Issued on behalf of Pope Leo X, the 27-by-17-inch mixed media document contains illustra- tions of St. Peter (left), Mary with a young Jesus and St. Paul. Dangling from hemp strings on its envelope are tin cups that would have contained wax seals.
March 2013 37
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