Church History

Description

LOCAL CHURCH HISTORY ASSIGNMENT This assignment is designed to provide the student with the experience of engaging in historical research and the accurate reporting of such research through the writing of a local church history. Understanding the genesis of local congregations within the African American Christian experience is imperative to understanding the richness and godly heritage of the African American religious experience. This assignment requires that the student choose a historically and predominately African American congregation and write a local church history of the congregation. The assignment also requires that the student attend at least one worship service and report on the worship experience in the local church history in addition to the historical research. This assignment is designed to fulfill the embedded assignment requirement for core courses at the ITC. There are three parts to the assignment: 1) Historical profile of the local congregation based on the historical research, 2) A profile of the people gathered for worship and the nature of their worship, and 3) Argument for the presence of African retentions or lack of African retentions in the local congregation based on its history and worship experience. I. Historical Profile of Local Congregation The major part of this assignment is the reporting of your historical research which will constitute the historical profile of the local congregation. The historical profile is a brief history of local congregation. The brief history should be based on primary sources. Primary sources include personal papers (family records of members in bibles, diaries) church records (church conference minutes, committee records such as steward board; trustee board; deacon board; membership records showing baptisms; marriages; etc., denominational records, annual conference reports, denominational publications such as the “The Christian Recorder” of the AME Church; “The Christian Index” of the CME Church, or “The Star of Zion” of the AME Church ), public documents (property deeds, etc.), statements of faith (articles of religion, church covenants, etc.), and oral accounts (conducting interviews of church members with significant tenure at the church). Should the student engage oral accounts through interviews it is imperative that the student prepare a set of pertinent questions as the interviewer focused on people, dates, events, and structures of a particular time period. Additionally, secondary sources such as existing histories if available should be vetted and utilized. The ways in which to gather primary sources for historical research include: 1) Exploring existing written histories of the local congregation, 2) Exploring church archives, 3) Conducting oral interviews of members with significant church membership tenure, 4) Visiting the local library, 5) Exploring denominational resources as such Annual Conference minutes or local and state convention and association records, and 6) Searching the internet for documents and other pertinent information. Should you engage in interviewing church members consider the following questions for the gather of research: 1) What year did you first become associated with the church, 2) Do you have any church records or memorabilia, or do you know who may have any, or where such items may be stored, 3) What church people and events from the past stand out the most in your mind, 4) What pastor in the church’s history had the greatest impact on your life and why? When embarking on the writing of a local church history, having a writing structure for organization and content purposes is imperative. Most local churches histories are structured based on the tenure of pastors. See an example below an outline for the local church history of Shiloh Baptist Church in Chicago, Illinois based on pastoral time periods. I. Introduction II. 1846-1863 H.A. Hawkins David G. Lett Jesse Freeman Boulden III. 1863-1882 James Alfred Dunn Podd, A.B. Henry Harrison White John Francis Thomas, D.D. IV. 1903-1915 Elijah John Fisher, D.D., LLD. V. 1915-1922 George E. Duncan Lacey Kirk-Williams, A.B., D.D. II. Profile of People Gathered for Worship and Nature of their Worship • The estimated number of men, women, youth, children and babies in attendance • The socio-economic status of the congregation (mass or class) • Describe the singing during the worship. Was there congregational singing? Did the choir sing hymns, gospel songs, anthems, spirituals or rap? List the musical instruments. Was there a praise service at the beginning of the worship? • Describe other features of the service (e.g., lay participation, youth/children involvement, prayers, dancing, hand clapping, shouts, and amens). Describe the African retention in the worship, if any. • Describe the unique character and identity of the congregation • Describe the sermon: What was the sermon topic, text? Outline the main points. Did the sermon connect with our African American history, heritage liberation, and culture in any way? What was the response of the congregation to the message? III. Embedded Assignment Question- State of African Retentions in the Local Congregations of the African Diaspora Based on your observations from the worship experience as identified in Part II and considering the historical debate between Melville Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier explain whether you think the local church on which you are writing the local church history has retained African retentions or not. If not, based on your historical research would you based your argument on Frazier position that African retentions could not survive the institution of slavery in British Colonial America and the Early Republic or is your argument based on the position that African retentions were abandoned through the assimilation of enslaved Africans to European American Christianity. If yes, explain the ways in which the history and worship of the local congregation reflects the preservation of African retentions. Grading Rubric for Local Church History Part I- Historical Profile (worth 55 points and should be at least 4 pages double-spaced in Times New Roman and 12 font) Part II- Worship Profile (worth 15 points and should be at 1 page double-spaced in Times New Roman and 12 font) Part III- Embedded Assignment Question (worth 15 points and should be at least ½ of a page in Times New Roman and 12 font) Grammar and Paper Mechanics (worth 15 points- the paper should evidence grammatical accuracy, proper paragraph format, proper sentence structure, footnotes and bibliographic citations in proper Turabian format including citations for oral interviews)