Somewhere near you is a piece of the Black church’s story that no one has labeled: a funeral program, a recorded sermon, a hymnal with handwriting in the margins, an older believer who has never been asked how they came to faith. What you can do this week is preserve one of those records so that someone after you can find it, read it and understand it. Scripture treats that kind of keeping as faithful work. You can work through these pages alone, or with a group over one or two meetings. Plan for the practice in the middle to take a few hours spread across the week.
Before you read further, take two minutes and write an honest answer to this: Who keeps the record of my church’s faith? Maybe you think of a historian, a denomination, a pastor’s office or nobody in particular. Keep what you wrote. You will come back to it at the end.
Start with what is already in the house
Dr. Martha Simmons co-edited Preaching with Sacred Fire, an anthology of African American sermons from 1750 to the present. In her conversation with Lisa Fields, the hardest part of that project was discovering what was already gone. She describes preachers who served their communities well, but whose “material had been thrown away by their children and their families.” Of those families she adds that “they didn’t appreciate the richness.”
The cause she names is ignorance close to home. The people nearest the material did not know what they were holding. That makes it a problem ordinary people can do something about, because the material she describes was sitting in ordinary homes.
A first observation. Spend ten minutes looking, not deciding. Walk through your home, or think through your church, and list every item that carries part of a faith story: programs, booklets, photos of baptisms, recordings, letters, and the people who have never been interviewed. Write the list down. Do not rank it yet. Next to each item, note where it is stored now.
How Scripture keeps memory
The Bible does not leave memory to chance. Read these passages slowly. For each one, notice first what kind of text it is. That keeps you from making a passage say more than it does.
Psalm 78:1-8. This is a teaching psalm that retells Israel’s history. The writer commits to passing it on: “We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done” (Psalm 78:4). The goal is stated three verses later: “That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments” (Psalm 78:7). The psalm remembers so that the next generation will trust God. Notice also that verse 8 does not flatter the ancestors. It names “a stubborn and rebellious generation” (Psalm 78:8). Biblical memory is honest memory.
Joshua 4:1-7. This is narrative. After crossing the Jordan, Israel sets up twelve stones so that later, “when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?” (Joshua 4:6), there will be a story to tell. Narrative describes what happened. It does not command you to pile up stones. What the passage shows is that God’s people made physical markers on purpose, expecting the next generation to ask questions. A marker with no one to explain it is just a rock. The stones and the telling belonged together.
Malachi 3:16. This is prophecy. In a discouraging time, the faithful kept talking to one another about God, “and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.” Here God is the one who keeps the record. Your work of preserving a story recognizes a worth God already sees.
2 Timothy 4:13. This is a personal letter, and the request is occasional, not a rule for every believer. Near the end of his life Paul asks Timothy to bring his cloak, “and the books, but especially the parchments.” We do not know exactly what those parchments contained. What we can say is modest and still useful: the apostle cared about written material and wanted it carried forward.
Read across the four passages and write one sentence about what they share. Then write one sentence about how they differ. A careful reader will notice that some keep memory through speech, some through objects and some through writing. That matters for your practice, because the record you keep this week may be any of the three.
What one anthology could not print
The anthology itself shows why this matters. Simmons recalls that the editors began with close to 200 people under consideration and published a little more than a hundred sermons. For many preachers, “All we had were brief snapshots.” Even when material survived, families sometimes could not agree on who had the right to release it. In one case, she says, the editors spoke with a family for three years and still could not use the material. In many other cases, “we simply could not get the permissions.”
That detail turns a vague concern into three concrete problems. A record can be missing, because no one saved it. It can be stranded, because it exists but no one can say what it is or who made it. It can be locked, because no one settled who may share it. Each problem calls for a different action.
Simmons also explains why the anthology printed a biography with every sermon: “all preaching is particular.” A sermon preached under danger, poverty or exclusion means something different from the same words preached in comfort. A record with no context is half kept.
Lisa Fields names the cost of all this. She points to “this assumption that African Americans didn’t have much to contribute because it wasn’t documented.” Simmons puts the warning more starkly: “If we don’t write it down, it won’t occur.” She does not mean the events never happened. She means that what goes unrecorded drops out of the story people are able to tell. Her plea to preachers carries over to anyone holding these materials: “please keep your records, keep your records, your records matter.” She is practical about how: “Don’t just keep them on a computer. Keep them so that the world can get access to them in the future.” If family is not interested, she advises, “give them to a school.”
The assignment: one record, kept well
Go back to your list from the first observation. Choose one item: the one most at risk, or the one you can actually finish this week. Do not choose five. Then work through four steps, each of which answers one of the problems above.
- Secure it (against missing). If it is paper or a photo, make a clear scan or phone photo of every page, and store the original somewhere dry and labeled. If it is a person’s memory, ask permission first, then record a conversation. Simple questions work well: How did you come to faith? Who taught you? What was the church like then? What did God carry you through? Save at least two copies in two different places. One device is not enough.
- Describe it (against stranding). Write one paragraph that would let a stranger understand it fifty years from now. Who made it or spoke it? Roughly when? Where? What was happening in that person’s life, church or community at the time? Write only what you know, and mark plainly anything you are unsure of. Simmons’s point that preaching is particular applies here. The context is part of the record.
- Clear it (against locking). Ask whoever has a claim to the item, the speaker or the family, what they are willing to have shared, and write down their answer with the date.
- Place it. Decide where it will live once you are gone. Choose a named person who will receive it, or start a conversation with your church, a school or a library about whether they will take copies. You do not have to finish this step this week. You do have to name one next step.
If you are working with a group, have each person announce their choice at the end of the first meeting, and begin the next meeting by letting people show what they kept. Showing a recording or reading a context paragraph aloud teaches more than a discussion about preservation. Some people will report that the item they hoped to save is already gone. Give that loss a moment of quiet acknowledgment instead of hurrying to a fix. Then ask whether someone still alive remembers enough to tell part of the story.
Hard questions about keeping
A serious objection deserves a hearing before you begin: should amateurs be doing this at all? Well-meaning people can damage what they mean to save. Tape, lamination, glue, flattening a brittle page or pulling a photo out of an old album can cause harm that cannot be undone. So treat the original gently. Photograph it as it is, handle it as little as possible, and if an item is fragile or valuable, leave it untouched and ask a library or archive for advice before doing more. A good copy taken carefully protects the story even when the original should wait for skilled hands.
A second objection runs deeper: whose story is it? A sermon belongs in some sense to the church that heard it, but the notes, the recording and the memories often belong to a family. Simmons’s account shows how much this matters. Families who disagreed kept material out of the anthology for years. Her account shows the cost of that disagreement. It does not settle who was right, and this guide cannot settle questions of legal rights for you. What it can say is this: a private copy kept safely is different from publishing something. If a family or speaker declines to have a record shared, honor that, and keep your notes private. Preservation done without consent damages the trust that future keepers will need.
A third tension is quieter. If you preserve your church’s story partly to answer false claims about it, you may be tempted to keep only the impressive parts. Psalm 78 resists that. It hands down Israel’s failures along with God’s faithfulness. Simmons pictures believers who answer a distorted story by saying, “here’s how I see it. Here’s how I have lived it. Here’s how I understand it.” That is testimony, and testimony is credible because it does not pretend. Some material involves living people and real hurt, so discretion about what to share publicly is part of wisdom.
Questions for the table
- Of the three ways Scripture keeps memory in these passages (speech, objects, writing), which comes most naturally in your family or church, and which is most neglected?
- Simmons describes families throwing away sermons because they did not know what they had. What makes something feel ordinary to the people closest to it, and how could that change?
- Psalm 78 records the ancestors’ rebellion alongside God’s works. What would an honest record of your own congregation include that a celebratory one might leave out?
- When a family and a church disagree about a record, what should each owe the other? What would change your mind?
- When you wrote your context paragraph, what did you not know that you wish you did? Who could still tell you?
- Lisa Fields connects missing documentation with the assumption that there was little to contribute. Where have you seen an absence of records treated as an absence of faith or thought?
Coming back to where you started
Find the sentence you wrote at the beginning about who keeps the record of your church’s faith. Read it again beside what you did this week. Has your answer changed? If you named an institution at the start, notice where the record you kept was actually sitting, and who kept it this week. You do not need a degree to scan a program, write a paragraph of context or ask an elder a good question.
Before the week ends, decide on the second record. Write it down where you will see it.