Archives marks centenary – but with caveats

Lutheran Archives last week marked 100 years of gathering, preserving and sharing the records, statistics and stories of the congregations, departments, ministries and individuals of Lutheran churches in Australia and New Zealand.

However, as archivist Bethany Pietsch told those gathered for a Friends of Lutheran Archives (FoLA) meeting in North Adelaide on 26 March, the genesis of the archives can be traced back earlier in the 1920s than the ‘official beginning’ in 1926.

Bethany, who led the presentation on the history of the LCANZ’s archives along with fellow archivists Benjamin Hollister and Angela Schilling, named Oscar Bernhard Mueller, a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod in Australia (ELSA), as the church’s first statistician. Mueller was ‘appointed to the [statistician’s] role sometime between the synods of 1923 and 1926’. He was the first to organise the church’s archives, then in the keeping of the synodical president, and to make recommendations about their future preservation and access.

‘Pastor Mueller did not fill this role for very long – he died suddenly in January 1926,’ Bethany said. ‘But he left behind a very important legacy, because three months later, at the ELSA synodical convention in Tabor, Victoria, we find our very first “Statistician, Statistics and Archives” report.’ Mueller’s list of rules and regulations for management of the church archives was submitted at the same synod. Officially adopted in 1932, many of Mueller’s recommendations were close to the modern collection policy of Lutheran Archives today.

Other important milestones in terms of the preservation of Lutheran history in Australia included the formation of an ELSA Historical Committee at the 1923 synod at Tweedvale [Lobethal] in South Australia and a resolution at the same convention that committee member Pastor Alfred Brauer be asked to ‘proceed with the writing of a church history’. ‘He was later given the official title of Church Historian,’ Bethany said.

‘Come 1926, when Oscar Mueller has looked at the archives, provided his list of recommendations, and then passed away before he can carry them out, the torch is passed to these fellows [on the Historical Committee].’

While Bethany presented the history of record-keeping in the ELSA (later Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia – ELCA), Benjamin took attendees through the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Australia (UELCA) side of the story, which officially began in 1928 with a motion to establish ‘General Synod Archives’ adopted and Pastor Wolfgang Riedel appointed as Keeper of the Archives, a role in which he served from 1928 to 1934.

Pastor F J H Blaess was appointed as the ELCA’s first archivist in 1938.

Both ELCA and UELCA kept archives separately until after their closing synodical conventions in 1965, before their amalgamation and the formation of the LCA in 1966, with a single site for document storage.

Bethany said: ‘Fortunately, history was one area in which ELCA and UELCA had been cooperating for a long time’.

The newly combined archives of the LCA were rehoused several times, including for five years in a residential home in North Adelaide just off Wellington Square, which was ‘not ideal for preservation needs’. They were then relocated to Luther Seminary’s old gymnasium just around the corner, which had ‘a shed-like appearance’ and was ‘neither dust nor rat and mice proof’.

After 12 years of discussions, planning, and several locations considered, the new Archives and Research Centre opened behind Church House at 101 Archer Street, North Adelaide, on 24 July 1977. This gave the church the satisfaction that its archives were being stored and preserved appropriately for access by generations to come.

In 2003, the Archives moved once more, this time to a purpose-built facility in the inner northern Adelaide suburb of Bowden, with three times the space of the Archer Street building.

Today, the Lutheran Archives’ collection spans close to 2,700 linear metres of records, including both published and unpublished material. Formats in the collection include manuscripts, audiovisual, photographic images, artefacts, periodicals and published works.

Materials date from before the time of Lutheran migration to Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s until the present day, documenting LCANZ ministries and interactions across the globe. More than 30 linear metres of records from the Lutheran Church of New Zealand became part of the collection in 2023.

The Archives’ team is assisted by a network of volunteers, for which Benjamin, Bethany and Angela are extremely thankful.

You can watch a video of the 26 March meeting and presentation on FoLA’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/@friendsoflutheranarchives9644/live

To contact FoLA, please email FoLA@lca.org.au

To view the Lutheran Archives’ website, visit lutheranarchives.lca.org.au

– Reporting by Tanya Leech