Amid the COVID-19 crisis, churches across the nation are showing themselves to be beacons of hope—providing food and social services, pastoral care, and online worship.
One way the Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) is responding to this unprecedented moment is by gathering and curating 2020 Easter Sunday worship services and sermons from PC(USA) congregations and other worshipping communities. Many will be published in PHS’s Pearl digital archives, so that going forward the whole denomination will have a body of messages relating hope in the face of fear, comfort amid suffering.
PHS archivists are looking to bring in audio or video of Easter worship services or sermons, in any format. If your worshipping community doesn’t have audio or video, prepared texts of a sermon in PDF format are welcome.
“Easter 2020 fell right in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, and people in the future will want to know how Presbyterians responded,” said Nancy Taylor, PHS Executive Director. “The Presbyterian Historical Society wants to capture that moment for the historical record. Just as people today can read our Civil War Thanksgiving sermons to learn what preachers were saying and congregants hearing about that war, we want to make sure people in the future can access the 2020 Easter services as one window into the profound impact the epidemic is having on our own time.”
If you’d like to participate in this special collecting effort, please upload your worship service or sermon here. In order to help PHS tell who's who, rename your file so that it's descriptive of your congregation or worshipping community. (Instead of "IMG0369.mov" name the file something like "OakhurstPCDecaturGA.mov" or “FirstPCPhiladelphiaPA.mp4”)
There’s no need to contact PHS after you’ve uploaded your file. Provide content by email only if you have questions about submitting a file.