3 n° 2, December 2012
Content
2013
Lecture Sébastien Fath
Internship
Public activities
French-speaking Belgium
Commitee of Recommendation
International Contacts
Acquisitions
Donations
2013
Evadoc wishes you all the best for this new year! Two thousand and thirteen is for us the start of a new policy period. In October 2012, Joke Schauvliege, Flemish Minister of Culture, announced her decisions about the KADOC-KU Leuven policy plan 2013-2017. As you may have read in the last e-newsletter, the Evadoc activities are included in this plan. The subsidy for the Evadoc activities remains at the same level as previous years. With that, we can continue our base tasks. It will not be entirely possible to realize all the extra initiatives that Evadoc wants to carry out in the upcoming years, like the initiatives with reference to the migrant churches. We are convinced that, because of the steady growth of documentation and archives, Evadoc will be able to be of service to more and more researchers, with the study of the Protestant Evangelical churches and movements in Flanders, in the Belgian and international context. At least as important is our task to advise and assist churches and organizations in the field of generating and storage of archives. Besides that, we will continue to contribute in different ways to familiarize the public with the Protestant-Evangelical heritage.
Lecture Sébastien Fath
The French historian and sociologist Sébastien Fath is coming to Leuven on February 14th 2013 at the invitation of Evadoc, KADOC and the Evangelical Theological Faculty, ETF. He will give a lecture entitled ‘Immigrant Evangelical Churches in Europe and Social Integration: Mapping the Phenomenon’. This lecture, with the opportunity to ask questions, will be given from 2 pm to 4 pm at ETF and from 5 pm to 7 pm at KADOC as part of the KADOC-KU Leuven Seminaries. The lecture at ETF is intended for students in theology, for those involved from the new immigrant churches, but also elders, pastors and other leaders from the Protestant and Evangelical churches. The lecture at KADOC is addressed to researchers from within KU Leuven as well as external researchers. As the title indicates, Dr. Fath will discuss the Evangelical migrant churches, which grew the last two decennia everywhere in Europe. Among others, he will go into the question what this phenomenon means for the established churches, and how these new churches do or do not stimulate social integration. Dr. Fath is the author of about fifteen books and a permanent researcher at the Centre national de recherche scientifique, CNRS, in Paris. Besides that, he is a member of GSRL (Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités), an organization that does research into religion and secularization. Dr. Fath mainly examines the intercultural reflection on society, politics and religion..
Seminar ETF Seminar KADOC
Internship
This academic year there is a student from the ETF, who is doing her internship at Evadoc. She has written a brief description of what she will be doing:.
My name is Marina Lamparter. I am 22 years old and I study at the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Leuven. I am in the third year of the bachelor program. In this year we have to do an internship of eight weeks. I was looking for an internship with a focus on research. My interest in history and the current reality of the different churches in Belgium brought me to Evadoc. I got the proposal to do research into the immaterial cultural heritage of Protestant-Evangelical churches in Flanders. This means that I am going to visit different churches and their pastors to ask some questions about what is specific for that church and denomination, what their practices are and how their practices have changed during the years. The results of this research will be documented at Evadoc. Another part of my internship is recording oral history of the Protestant-Evangelical movement in Belgium. For this, I will interview Christians at the end of an eventful career who want to tell about their experiences. These interviews will be recorded and retained in the archives of Evadoc, so that these interesting histories will be saved. I think this will be a very interesting internship, I look forward to gain more insight in the interview techniques and am curious about what the research will yield.Public Activities
Evadoc was closely associated with Tandem, a once only magazine of the denominations Vrije Evangelische Gemeenten (VEG) and Evangelische Christengemeenten Vlaanderen (ECV). Illustrations were delivered from the BEZ-archive and Aaldert Prins was the general editor and wrote some of the articles. The magazine, that wants to give a helicopter view of the Evangelical movement in Flanders, was presented on November first 2012 in the Capitole in Gent during the special evening programme of the Vlaamse Evangelische Familydag, a yearly conference.
In the e-newsletter of December 2011 you may have read about our cooperation in the exhibition Gott mit uns in the IJzertoren in Diksmuide. The programm of 7 november 2012 of ERTS, a Flemish evangelical broadcaster, was devoted entitely to this exhibition. Coördinator Peter Verplancke provided professional commentary, completed with contributions by Johnny Stroobant and Aaldert Prins.
On December 6th 2012, the Center for Religious Art and Culture, CRKC, organized a workshop about religious immaterial cultural heritage. Evadoc discussed the appointment of pastors in the United Protestant Church in Belgium as an example from Protestant-Evangelical side. Immaterial cultural heritage includes practices and knowledge that are part of the collective memory and that often survived until today, whether or not in a changed form. It is intended to make an inventory of the entire Flemish Protestant-Evangelical immaterial heritage in its Belgian and international context. .
French-speaking Belgium
The leaflet, in which Evadoc explains its origin and activities, is now also available in French. It was handed out at ‘La Convention,’ the yearly conference of the French-speaking churches of the BEM and the Association des Eglises Protestantes Evangélique Belge (AEPEB).In the upcoming weeks the leaflet will be sent to the French-speaking Protestant-Evangelical churches in Belgium. You can also request this leaflet yourself.
Committee of Reccomendation
With pleasure I give the word to Jean Louis Simonet, about why he recommends Evadoc.
“Why an Evangelical archives centre in Belgium?
The existence of the Evangelical church, as an important part of God’s salvation plan for all mankind, is part of human history. Being a Christian, we are glad that Jesus became part of history when he was born in Bethlehem. God took the difficulty to ‘archive’ this happening in His Word. He took care, that this was preserved in written form, until today, available for everyone who wants to read it.
The history of our churches, organizations and Evangelicals, of course does not have such an importance as the incarnation of Jesus, but still, historians, sociologists and other researchers may have interest in this. And when we, in spite of weaknesses that are inherent to our human existence, have nothing to hide, it is regrettable that documents with reference to our Protestant-Evangelical service, can disappear without a trace, because of negligence, ignorance or a lack of responsibility. It is regretful that we know so little about churches or organizations that have already disappeared, even when we have the fortune that there are people still alive who have known these churches or organizations! I appreciate that our Flemish brothers founded Evadoc in order to retain this information, moreover, that they opened the door to French-speaking Evangelicals, so that they too can take advantage of the skills that God gave them with reference to the preservation of our archives. May God bless Evadoc!
International Contacts
This summer, our archives consultant, Aaldert Prins, was present at a quadrennial conference of the International Association for Missionary Studies (IAMS) in Toronto. This seems to have nothing to do with Evadoc but nothing is further from the truth. One of the study groups is entitled DABOH, an abbreviation for Documentation, Archives, Bibliography and Oral History. In this seminar, various papers were read about mission archives. These papers discussed both the content of archives as well as the conditions in which they are preserved and the possibilities and/or difficulties to describe them. Aaldert Prins presented the BEM-archives. Firstly, the efforts of the Americans Ralph and Edith Norton for the Belgian soldiers during the First World War were discussed. Thereafter it was shown how the archives were transferred to the archive deposit of KADOC in order to preserve it in the best conditions. At the conclusion, the description and the inventory of the archives in scopeArchiv were given. The lectures of the last four conferences of this study group will be published in a book in the beginning of 2013. In Toronto, the preparations were also made for a conference in 2014 in Rome. The theme of that conference will be ‘the possibilities and obstacles of new technology for the preservation and description of mission archives and the study of these archives.’
Acquisitions
The last six months the Evadoc collection was enriched with several archives and documentation. We want to introduce some of these acquisitions.
Indispensable for everyone who wants to know more about the genesis of the Pentecostal movement in Flanders is Ignace Demaerel’s licentiate’s thesis from 1990, entitled ‘‘Tachtig jaar Pinksterbeweging in Vlaanderen (1909-1989) : een historisch onderzoek met korte theologische en sociologische analyse.’
The VEG gave us ‘Onderweg met God’ (On the way with God), in which twelve people testify about their daily walk with God. Besides that we received some important books on Belgian Protestantism in French.
From Jean Dontaine, we got the Périodique du Comité de Jeunesse des Eglises Evangéliques Francophones from November 1992 until now.
The Institut Biblique Belge (IBB) gave her duplicate copies of Le Messager Evangélique, a magazine about the second half and the beginning of this century that reported on Protestantism in Belgium. We are still looking for lacking numbers. Possibly you can help us with this.
Furthermore, Evadoc received the archives of the closed Eglise Evangélique Libre in Damprémy and personal archives of Jean Louis Simonet.
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The archives donated by Gisella van Brusselt is particular indeed. She was closely associated with the establishment of the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost in Belgium. The archives not only contain the information about the origin and functioning, but also the registrations of various uses that are part of religious immaterial cultural heritage.
For both the archives of Wycliffe-Belgium as well as the archives of the Evangelische Gemeente Leuven (EGL) we received some additions. For the EGL it contains the audio-collection of sermons and services. For Wycliffe we received documentation that was published as part of Bible translation projects.
The biography of Elisabeth Lemière is also special. As a seventeen year old girl she set off to Congo, together with Abe and Mary Kroeker. There she worked for years as a missionary. This special woman currently lives in a home for the elderly in Canada. Her daughter compiled the biography by means of letters and interviews and illustrated it with pictures. This document gives a rare glimpse in the Evangelical movement in Flanders in the Interbellum and the Protestant Evangelical mission in Congo before the Second World War.
Donations
Thanks to the close collaboration with KADOC, Evadoc can enjoy indirectly grants of the Flemish government. Nevertheless, extra means are desirable to keep up the quality of the service and to expand the Evadoc activities. Everyone who is well disposed to Evadoc’s activity can show this by giving financial support. Evadoc is grateful for every contribution it receives. You can deposit your donations to account number BE92 7340 2819 9323 of Evadoc in Heverlee (IBAN KREDBEBB).
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This page of the Evadoc e-newsletter was last modified on 23 January 2013
