The Divinity Library and the World Council of Churches (WCC) have signed a formal agreement to microfilm selected materials from the WCC archives, building on five years of previous collaboration between the institutions that resulted in the microfilming of four major council collections.
The WCC brings together more than 340 churches, denominations and church fellowships in over 100 countries and territories throughout the world, representing some 400 million Christians and including most of the world's Orthodox churches.
The agreement will help preserve additional archival holdings documenting the WCC's work around the world, as well as that of some affiliated organizations and its predecessor bodies. Funding will be provided through the Divinity School's Kenneth Scott Latourette Initiative for the Documentation of World Christianity.
"These archives are important primary documents for understanding the history of Christianity in the 20th century," says Paul Stuehrenberg, Yale Divinity librarian. "We are delighted that this project both preserves this important documentation and makes it available to scholars and the church."
According to Stuehrenberg, the agreement solidifies a collaboration that until now has proceeded on an ad hoc, project-by-project basis. He estimated that there is at least five years of microfilm work to be done in the near term.
In previous years, the Divinity Library has underwritten the cost of microfilming World War II era material (1938-1948) documenting the founding of the WCC; the World Student Christian Federation archives; and archives of the Programme To Combat Racism, a controversial WCC program that supported liberation movements in underdeveloped countries. A fourth collection, the archives of the Dialogue with People of Living Faiths, a program to encourage Christians to be open to persons of different religious traditions, is currently being microfilmed. These microfilm collections are distributed by IDC Publishers of Leiden, the Netherlands.
The Latourette Initiative provides funding for the microfilming of published and archival resources documenting the history of Christian missions and the life of the churches in countries where missionaries served. It is named for Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884-1968), who was the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale. Latourette was instrumental in changing the focus of the Day Missions Collection at Yale from a resource for training missionaries to a collection documenting the history of Christian missions.
Other microfilming projects supported by the initiative include the archives of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union, held at the University of Edinburgh; monographs related to the "Old Believers" held by the Russian National Library; and the missions archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
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