Churches have good precedent for preserving their records and historical materials for future generations:

The Lord said to Moses . . they shall make an ark of acacia wood. . . and you shall put into the ark the testimony which I shall give you.(Exodus 25:1, 10, 16)

...the ark of the covenant . . contained a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant (Hebrews 9:4)

We Christians are a history-centered people. We cherish the Bible as an historical record of God's mighty acts over thousands of years. Our faith in Jesus Christ is grounded in the four historical accounts of his earthly life and ministry preserved in the Gospels. We rely on the Book of Acts and the Epistles for much of the history of the early Church. Since that time thousands of Christians have faithfully recorded the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in their own lives.

The Holy Spirit, of course, is still inspiring us today, but we seldom think of our own experiences as part of the long history of the Church. Events in the past are revered for their age and for the traditions they have produced, but what we are doing as a Church today or did yesterday is often considered transient and hardly worth recording.

The fact is that we are all a part of that long Christian heritage. The work that we are doing as Christians in the world today is the beginning of a new chapter in the Church's history, and a record of that work deserves to be preserved.

Of all religious groups in America, none is more historically rooted than the Episcopal Church. As early as 1804, only fifteen years after the organization of the American Church the General Convention approved a canon prescribing the preservation of certain vital records, and in 1820 the House of Deputies passed a resolution to provide for the collection and permanent deposit of the church's historical records. In 1835 the General Convention appointed the first historiographer, and in 1841 the House of Bishops appointed the first registrar, who was to act as the official archivist of the house. In 1853 the House of Bishops created the Standing Committee on Records, and in 1865 the Convention created the Joint Commission on Church Archives. The Church Historical Society, now the custodian of the church's archives, was organized in 1910.