Remembering

By Christopher Chua, Project Director, Historical Documentation Project

Every once in a while I am seized with anxiety over all the things I have forgotten in the course of time: past addresses and telephone numbers, the names of childhood friends whose faces I can still see, and just about everything I learned in calculus. More troublingly, I am from time to time dogged by the shadowy feeling that I have forgotten some event in my life that was clearly so significant at the time that I made a mental note to remember the details with deliberateness. Now all that remains is the promise to myself and no substance to the vow.

Sadly, communities are no different from individuals in this respect: they, too, forget or are mindful of only selective elements of their past. Think of the Presbyterian Church in Chinatown's life of nearly one hundred fifty years and how little flesh we can put on the bones of any story we tell of the community's early history. Pressed to the task, some of us might be able to recite a few highlights from the past century and a half, relying, perhaps, on the work of past anniversary yearbook committees. But would we be able to answer such questions as: "What did PCC members a hundred years ago like about coming to church?" "On average, how many children came to worship on a given Sunday in 1906?" "What did it mean to be a Chinese Christian when so many white Christians were supporting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882?"

What we remember of ourselves shapes who we become. This is a truism which applies not simply to individuals but to groups as well. Our history shapes our sense of self, and our sense of self is that internal fulcrum on which we leverage any effort to move the world around us. We can embrace parts of our history and we can discard others, but we can do neither unless we have the raw materials with which to work.

Enter the Historical Documentation (HDoc) Ministry. In the months to come, you will increasingly hear about this new ministry of our whole church to archive primary materials that give a sense of what this church is, what it has been, and what it aspires to become. Considering that the church has already come through fifteen decades, is it so difficult to imagine that in ten more from now church-goers and historians may wonder what PCC was like at the turn of the twenty-first century? The hope of the HDoc Ministry is that those curious parties will find at their disposal more than what we have found: two slim cartons of random clippings at the San Francisco Theological Seminary library and no official archives at the church itself. Rather than leaving these future students of PCC history to turn to secondary sources which have already seen interpretive filtering-such as books, yearbooks, and other publications — we would do well do leave them access to original documents: Session minutes, committee notes, issues of Simply Read, copies of The Rag, original photographs, and letters and notes that mention the church.

What others remember of us will contribute to shaping the world to come. That assertion may seem vaguely arrogant until we remember that PCC is the first Asian American church of any denomination in the United States. The reality of our communal past is that we were both objects of missionary zeal and subjects of a distinct strand of Asian American Christianity that has shaped the development of religion in this country. As bearers of that unique standard, every time we celebrate our history, we witness to the particularity of God's work in the world, a particularity that has paved the way for other Asian American churches all across this nation.

The preservation and rehearsal of history is, therefore, a theological task and the reason why the HDoc Project is a ministry of this church. Think of the place of remembering in the rituals of our faith. Think of its place in the sacraments of communion and baptism. Think of its place in the Jewish celebration of Passover. Church as community embraces the saints of the past, even as we look to the future.

Church as community beyond the immediacy of our own walls remembers that in the very small world of Asian American Christians, this church is a foundational institution whose leadership has always been — and continues to be — valued. Allowing others the means by which to revisit our history is a contribution we make to the understanding of Christianity in this country in general.

The Historical Documentation Ministry. The HDoc Ministry is an effort of all three congregations of this church and operates in partnership with the Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion (PANA Institute) at the Pacific School of Religion and the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. The aim of the ministry is to establish archives for PCC, which will go on to be housed at the Bancroft. Along the way, we will photograph, videotape, audiotape, and, in other ways, paint a portrait of the church, which we hope to present at the project's completion at the end of 2003. In future issues of Simply Read, expect to read about how HDoc will go about its task, what you can do to help, and some of the interesting things we discover along the way.

This ministry is our church's way of promising to honor our past. How we contribute to it is our way of honoring the promise.