As we celebrate the start of a new year, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections looks back at some of the interesting accessions of historical documents that the Archives received in 2024 and the new or updated collections we processed and opened to researchers.

New Accessions

For almost seventy years, the story of missionaries’ attempts to bring Christianity to the Waorani people of the Amazon (called the Aucas by their enemies) has been well known to American evangelicals. This year we received the files of Dr. Kathryn Long, who wrote God in the Rainforest (2017), which tells the story from the killing of the five missionaries who first made the attempt to reach the Waorani in 1956 through the development of an Indigenous Christian community among the Waorani in later years. She generously gave her voluminous research files and relevant books to the Archives, including material from her own trips to Ecuador and documents about her work on the staff of Campus Crusade in South America in the 1980s.

The year also saw major acquisitions from mission organizations. The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) gave the bulk of their organizational archives in 2022. This year they added to it with material about the mission’s work in India, Nepal and Japan as well as the files of an affiliated mission, the Door of Hope, which worked among Taiwanese orphans. An even larger addition was the archives of CrossWorld (originally Unevangelized Field Missions), an agency that specialized in discipleship and planting national churches under national leadership. Their files document almost a century of work in about three dozen countries around the world. Additional donations from American evangelical organizations include substantial supplements to the records of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) and World Relief.

A third category of mission related material are the papers of individual missionaries and mission leaders. The Archives was fortunate to receive several such collections in 2024 including those of: Abe Van Der Puy, leader of missionary short wave radio station HCJB/World Radio in Ecuador, also president of National Religious Broadcasters (1937-2003), Robert Glover, missionary to China and later North American director of China Inland Mission (1895-1953), Paul and Maria Contento, who worked with the Overseas Missionary Fellowship in China, Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore (1919-2022), Fran White, missionary for Africa Inland Mission in the Belgian Congo (1929-2024), Louise Marqueling, who worked with Child Evangelism Fellowship in China, Taiwan, and Japan (1927-2004), Hester Withey, of the World Evangelization Crusade in Tibet and India (1913-2006), and the letters of Plymouth Brethren missionaries Wilfried and Gwen Tidmarsh in Ecuador (1939-1985).

Evangelism is the other main emphasis of the Archives. In this area, our major accession of 2024 was the papers of Samuel Escobar. Dr. Escobar is a theologian who has taught in many seminaries in the Americas and has also been a leader in the Lausanne Movement and in the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in South America and Spain and the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of Canada (1958-2023). For more information on this accession, see our September blog post. Concerning the Lausanne Movement, we also received from several sources memorabilia, DVDs, and papers from the 2010 Cape Town Congress and the 2024 Seoul Congress.

Other additions to our collections of the papers of Christian writers, artists, and evangelists include accessions of materials on Percy Crawford and his wife, musician Ruth Crawford Porter (1922-2019), photos of Billy Sunday’s 1917 Boston meetings, a letter from Leighton Ford about his 1987 New Zealand campaign, notebooks and other documents from Billy Graham’s meetings in Indianapolis (1959, 1980), Sacramento (1983) and Anaheim (1985), nine boxes of research, articles, and correspondence from journalist Marvin Olasky, as well as several binders of biographical material and art from DeWitt Whistler Jayne. We also received a large collection of evangelistic tracts and memorabilia covering several decades, including a photo of hymn writer Fanny Crosby.

In December, almost at the end of the year, we received a very special accession. A local businessman donated a collection of materials gathered from years of visits to open-air markets in China, where people would sell personal belongings to help support themselves. In these markets he often found not only old books about Christianity in China and missions to China, but many diaries, documents, minutes, letters, and reports from the country before the Communist takeover in 1950. For years he bought and preserved these precious fragments and now he donated them to the Archives, “a branch saved from the burning.”

The staff also conducted oral history interviews through the year – Some with Indigenous church leaders from Mongolia and Uganda about their ministry and several hours of interviews with a former editor of Christianity Today magazine about the history of this Evangelical institution. There was also an interview with an American missionary who grew up in Slovakia and is returning to that country.

New and Updated Collections

Accessions are materials the Archives received which will one day be processed into collections, after they have been thoroughly arranged, stored in archival quality folders and boxes, received any necessary conservation work, and described on our archival database. Sometimes a completely new collection is created, sometimes new material is added to an existing collection. Below are the collections completed or updated in 2024:

• CN 215: China Inland Mission/Overseas Missionary Fellowship (Update). Diaries, missionary reports and prayer letters, slide. Work in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Tibet.
• CN 237: Slavic Gospel Association (Update). Reports on Christianity and evangelism in Armenia, Belorussia, the Caucasus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Lithuania, Russia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
• CN 278: Papers of Elisabeth Elliot (Update). Correspondence between 1949 and 1956 with her fiancé and later husband Jim Elliot and others about their plans for mission work.
• CN 599: Ephemera of the “Auca Incident” (Update). English transcripts of statements from the Waorani involved in the killing of five missionaries in 1956 and a statement by one Quichua man about the rescue attempt.
• CN 661: Eastern European Mission/Eurovision (New). Archives of the mission agency active in Eastern Europe, 1925-1990.
• CN 719: Papers of Janet Wismer (Update). Correspondence, transcripts of broadcasts and other material from Wismer, friend to Elisabeth Elliot and producer of her radio program.
• CN 726: Gospel Films/Gospel Communication Oral History Interviews (New). Interviews with executives of the company about the Christian film industry in America and the move of Gospel Films onto the Internet.
• CN 731: Oral history interview with Lisa Whitney Stackpole (New). Discussion of her work with Prison Fellowship.
• CN 740: Oral History Interview with David Harley (New). Discussion of, among other things, his time as head of Overseas Missionary Fellowship.
• CN 741: Papers of Daniel W. Nelson (New). Consists entirely of copies of documents by and about the career of evangelist B. Fay Mills (1857-1916) gathered for Nelson’s dissertation.

The staff also transcribed 11 interview tapes from five different collections, totaling 12.5 hours. These included interviews about interviews about outreach to Jewish communities in America, mission work in China, Philippines, and Nigeria; the history of Latin American Mission, and the Lawndale Community Church of Chicago.

Explore all the accessions and collections held by Wheaton Archives & Special Collections through our archival database at archives.wheaton.edu. Join the Archives & Special Collections’ mailing list for more collection updates and event announcements.