Sheep That Have Gone Astray?: Church Record-Keeping and the Canadian Archival System

Abstract

In recent years, much has been written and said about the development of a Canadian archival "system": a network which will facilitate the sharing of information and resources, and expedite the rationalization of collection responsibilities.The 1980 Canadian Archives report, for instance, envisioned a future system that would link the archives of government, business, and private institutions.'The 1985 Report of the Advisory Committee on Archives delineated the responsibilities of private institutions within this system, stating that each archives would be responsible "for providing archival service for the administrative records of its parent body," and "for defining its acquisition interests and programs having professional regard to the legitimate interests of other archive^."^While the 1985 report acknowledges that not every private institution will be able to support a full-fledged archives, it does not resolve the dilemmas created by the division of collection responsibility between private institutions and public repo~itories.~The records of religious bodies in particular have been the subject of debate as they have been housed in various repositories, not always with satisfactory results.The following study sets the theoretical debate concerning who should collect what against the reality of the record keeping practices of the Anglican, Baptist, and United churches in British C~lumbia.~Some religious denominations exhibit much more commitment to caring for their records than others.This is readily apparent when one studies the results of a survey of archival practices in the Anglican, Baptist, and United churches conducted in the spring of1983.5 The survey was sent to the ministers of a sample of local congregations of the Anglican Church, the Baptist General Conference (formerly Swedish-speaking), the * This article is based upon my thesis, "A Comparative Study of the Record Keeping Practices of the Anglican, Baptist and United Churches in British Columbia" (Master of Archival Science diss., University of British Columbia, 1985). 1 Ian Wilson, Canadian Archives.Report to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada by the Consultative Group on Canadian Archives (Ottawa , 1980). 2 Ian Wilson, Report of the Advisory Committee on Archives (Ottawa, 1985), p. 5. 3 Ibid., p. 40. 4 This study was limited to protestant denominations in order to narrow the parameters for the purposes of comparison.5 See Sweeney, "Comparative Study of Record Keeping," pp.58-59, for results.

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