WCC Archives are open for consultation only by appointment, please write to archives@wcc-coe.org or call 022 791 62 73 or 022 791 62 74.
 | |
 |
The WCC's Archives exist to safeguard and transmit the institutional memory of the ecumenical organizations and movement. They serve as a source of information for WCC staff, the student community, researchers and the wider public. With more than 500,000 documents on microfilm, 400,000 negatives and slides and 180,000 prints, 500 videos, 3,000 sound tapes and some 12,000 archive boxes, the WCC owns a unique collection of specialised documents pertaining to the ecumenical movement and its history.
The WCC's archivists sort, describe and preserve all the documents produced by the WCC, both print and audio-visual. The Archives also hold most of the documents from all the major ecumenical organisations of the 20th century.
Among the programmes for which the International Missionary Conference (IMC) had at an early stage decided to take responsibility was the work of assisting the Churches in their mission to the Jewish people. A Committee on the Christian approach to the Jews was formed in 1930 as a sponsored agency of the IMC, and it developed a full programme of training consultation and conference. At the WCC Assembly in New Delhi 1961, when IMC and WCC were integrated, the committee was reconstituted as the WCC Committee on the Church and the Jewish People.
The World's Sunday School Association was founded at the convention in Rome in 1907. In 1924, it became a federation on a world basis of national and interdenominational bodies directed towards the interest of Christian education, and especially towards drawing the churches together in that interest. In 1947, it adopted the title of World Council of Christian education as indicative of the vast scope of its work for Christian Education. In 1950 the words "and Sunday School Association" were added to the title. During the 1960s the WCCE moved its headquarters to Geneva and increasingly shared in many activities with the WCC, chiefly in youth work and education. In 1964, a WCC/WCCE Joint Study Commission was established which presented its report to the Uppsala Assembly in 1968. A joint negotiating committee went to work in the same year and, in 1971 at its Assembly in Lima, Peru, the WCCE voted to integrate with the WCC in its Unit on Education and Renewal.
INTERVOX was a Radio broadcast created in 1970. It disappeared in 1991 with no program of replacement. The head office of Intervox was housed at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva. The organisations partners, mothers founder of Intervox, were independent of their own hierarchy. A committee met once per year for the auditing of accounts: the World the Lutheran Federation (LWF), the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). There was a specific version for the United States and another for the rest of the world. The Intervox emission was made up of topicality, of interviews of religious or political personalities, small reports on recent events. As there is no written transcription of these emissions, the sound recordings are the only trace which testify of the existence of this emission. The archives hold 223 bands, all languages mixed up (French, German, English, US version).
|