Services: What We Can Do For an Anniversary Church....

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List of Churches with Anniversaries: 2005 2004 2003

1. Send us the list of your ministers. We can supply biographical data on those deceased, addresses for those still living. If your list of settled ministers is known to be incomplete, we may be able to fill in the gaps. The same kind of data can be had for those ministers and missionaries “raised up” by a local church.
2. If you so desire, some statistical data on your church’s development can be extrapolated for you from the succession of yearbook entries. For that reason, some churches ask for a photocopy of every fifth year’s line-item report. (To be sure, no national yearbooks were published until 1854, but some state conference yearbooks --particularly here in the Northeast -- were started decades earlier.)
3. Sample anniversary year programs, special worship services, litanies, etc., are also available for the asking. While the most satisfying programs obviously emerge from the local scene, speaking to local traditions and issues, even so churches can learn from each other, thereby getting a better sense of “what’s been tried,” and imagining ways “we can do that and do it better!”
4. Copies of sermons, psalm and hymn selections, orders of worship from specified years or decades: these too are yours for the asking!
5. Costuming: by and large we prefer to turn this one over to professional costumers, but we can supply some general guidelines if you like.
6. We can loan you samples of published local church histories (and pictorial directories that include historical notes), ranging from the very modest to the very elaborate. This is how one gets a better notion of the wide varieties of approach and format.
7. We can research and report on specific topics in the background of the Congrega- tional/Christian/United Church of Christ traditions.
8. We can advise your local church archivist/historian on the preservation and use of local church records.

THE BOTTOM LINE (almost) IS YOUR COST; you reimburse us for photocopying--25 cents per exposure, and for what we spend on first class postage. “That’s all, folks.”