By Grace Thornton
Correspondent, The Alabama Baptist
Lonette Berg has put more than 368,000 miles on her blue Honda CRV. She’s burned up Alabama’s highways and back roads carrying around three plastic boxes full of stuff to help state Baptist churches tell their story.
Just ask her — she’ll bring them to your church. There’s really no question.
“When I took this job, my goal was always to be able to say ‘yes’ in some way,” said Berg, executive director of the Alabama Baptist Historical Commission (ABHC). “I don’t think we’ve been asked to do a workshop or presentation and not been able to help.”
One thing Berg does on a fairly frequent basis is put on workshops to help churches plan their anniversary celebrations.
“I’ve been to hundreds of church anniversaries, and I have photographs of decorations and big boxes of stuff that I’ve collected up over the years to give people ideas on what they might like to do at their church,” she said.
Celebrating faithfulness
She’ll go to a church, spread those things out on the table and talk through different ways they can celebrate God’s faithfulness in the church’s history, she said.
“How are we going to involve our children? How are we going to involve our young people? How are we going to build this event for everybody to participate in some way if they would like to? How are we going to use it to reach people through evangelism? There’s a lot to consider,” Berg said. “We try to help them accomplish the same goal with the resources we have.”
And ABHC offers that service at no cost to the church, thanks to Cooperative Program funding.
Berg or other ABHC representatives also travel to every 25-year-milestone church anniversary celebration they are invited to attend.
“We can present a framed certificate at that event, if the church would like, and for other milestone anniversaries such as pastor anniversaries, etc., we can also provide letters of commendation,” she said.
Another free service the commission offers is microfilming of church records in order to save those documents safely for future generations.
“We can always do another certificate, but once your church records are gone, they are gone forever,” she said. “If the clerk has always kept the records and there’s a fire and we haven’t microfilmed them, all that written record of God’s story is gone, and we can’t get it back.”
ABHC can take those records, sort and index them and save each page on microfilm, she said. “We handle them very carefully.”
One copy is kept at the library of Samford University in Birmingham — where the commission has its office — and another is kept at a secure offsite location, Berg said.
“It’s really important for churches to have their records microfilmed, because those records reflect the story of what God has done among us,” she said. “They are stories of salvation, rededication, discipleship, weddings, fellowship — all the parts of church life are reflected in our church records, and so I think it’s important for us to keep those stories for future generations.”
It’s because of those stories and their importance that ABHC also offers guided tours for church groups at Samford, where the Alabama Baptist historical collection is housed.
Display items
“We show them some treasures, we tell them some wonderful stories, we make them laugh and we have a good time,” Berg said.
Items on display range from a foot-binding shoe brought back from China by an Alabama Baptist missionary in the early 1900s to Charles Spurgeon’s original sermon notes.
“When you hold in your hand the same paper that Spurgeon did when he preached, it’s just a high moment,” Berg said.
“I want people to know there’s life in history, there’s not just dusty books.”
‘Help them look back’
The tour also includes an all-you-can-eat buffet and an old-
fashioned hymn sing led by a pianist on a concert Steinway piano.
“We try to help them look back on where we’ve been and remind them how important their own story is, that it’s important for them to keep journals and record their own stories,” Berg said. “So much of what we rely on now are journals and diaries kept by regular Alabama Baptists telling the stories of what was happening in their lives and churches.”
These stories put flesh on the bones of church history and that’s so important to pass down, she said.
Rick Lance, executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM), said that without a memory of the past, a map for the future is difficult to foresee.
SBOM and ABHC “work as true partners in assisting our churches to celebrate their past and to anticipate their future as people of faith on mission with the Great Commission,” he said. “The Alabama Baptist Historical Commission is vital to Alabama Baptists in numerous ways.”
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