From Brush Arbors to Digital Archives
From Brush Arbors to Digital Archives
What the Bethlehem United Methodist Church Homecoming Programs Reveal About the Lived Experience of African Americans in Waller County, Texas
By T. DeWayne Moore, Zha’Mauri Howard & Evelyn Todd
Preventing the Erasure of
Black History
For generations, the Bethlehem United Methodist Church (BUMC) preserved its own history—one homecoming program, photograph, financial report, memorial, and handwritten note at a time. Now, BUMC and the Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab (WDPL) are making sure not only that BUMC’s rich history survives, but that it is available to scholars and students across the nation…
Our
Shared Mission
BUMC and WDPL share similar philosophies and missions regarding historic preservation. History does not disappear all at once. Sometimes it vanishes one funeral program at a time. One photograph sits in an archive without a name or date written on the back. One church booklet gets discarded during a move. One church elder ascends to that upper room before anyone records what she remembers.
That is why this collaboration between Bethlehem United Methodist Church (BUMC) in Hempstead and Prairie View A&M University’s Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab (WDPL) matters.
The documents being preserved are not merely church souvenirs. Read across nearly half a century, Bethlehem’s homecoming programs become an extraordinary community archive. They record Black religious life, education, mutual aid, women’s leadership, youth programs, institutional finances, family networks, encounters with racial change, and a surprisingly deep relationship between Bethlehem and Prairie View A&M University.
They also reveal something more fundamental:
Bethlehem was preserving Black history long before anyone called the work “digital preservation.”
This digital exhibition contains some of the most remarkable stories from the homecoming programs digitized by WDPL students so far.
1967 — A Black Church Confronts a Nation in Crisis
Bethlehem’s 1967 program appeared during one of the most turbulent moments in twentieth-century American history. Its trustees did not pretend the church existed outside that world.
They wrote about sweeping changes affecting “our schools, churches and communities,” alongside urban riots and a war that was “virtually tearing our homes to pieces.” Their response was not retreat. Homecoming was presented as an opportunity to rededicate the congregation to service—to their “fellowman, Community, Church and Nation.”
That language makes the program more than a record of worship. It captures how a Black congregation in rural Texas interpreted the upheavals of the late 1960s in real time.
Homecoming, in other words, was never only about looking backward. It was also a place to decide what the church should do next.
1969 — “There Is Much to Be Done as a Church and as a Race”
By 1969, Bethlehem was navigating change both within Methodism and beyond it. The program carried the new United Methodist cross-and-flame emblem and explained its meaning as a symbol of “sacrifices, witness, and service.”
But the program’s trustees went further. In assessing contemporary social change, they declared that there was “much to be done as a church and as a race,” warning that opportunities could disappear if Black communities lacked people prepared to claim them.
That sentence places education, race advancement, leadership, and Christian responsibility in the same conversation.
The pastor’s message likewise urged members to remember people suffering in “war-torn areas, storm sections, and flood areas” and to send aid.
Bethlehem was local—but its moral imagination was not.
1970 — The Church as a Laboratory for Community Life
The 1970 program offers a fascinating window into how Bethlehem understood the relationship between family life and social responsibility.
Pastor Ezekiel Taylor called the Christian home a “Christian laboratory.” His point was that gratitude, cooperation, responsibility, sharing, stewardship, reverence, and love were first practiced at home—and then carried into the wider community.
The program also celebrated something remarkably modern: cooperation between generations. Senior and youth choirs were praised for demonstrating that “The Generation Gap” could be bridged.
This is a recurring theme in the collection. Bethlehem survived because elders did not simply guard an institution. They continually created places for younger people to inherit it.
1973 — Don’t Worship the Past So Much That You Miss the Present
One of the collection’s most thought-provoking essays appeared in 1973.
“The Glamour of Yesterday” warned readers against assuming that all great leaders belonged to previous generations. Its examples included Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy—figures whose significance, the writer argued, was often contested while they were alive.
“It is easier and more comfortable to build tombs of dead prophets than to recognize…present greatness.”
For a historical exhibition, that is an extraordinary warning.
Memory should inspire action—not become an excuse for avoiding it.
1975 — A Church Building, a Community Investment
By the middle of the 1970s, Bethlehem was making substantial investments in its physical and educational infrastructure.
A historical account records an extensive renovation planned by Houston architect John Chase. The project cost $28,270 and included sanctuary modernization, new flooring, heating and cooling, lighting, improvements to the pastor’s study, a new entrance and usher’s booth, and additional furnishings and repairs.
But Bethlehem was building people as seriously as it was building facilities. Its church school was fundraising for audiovisual equipment, books, magazines, recorded tapes, classroom furniture, and educational materials for classes ranging from kindergarten through adulthood.
And Prairie View was already part of this ecosystem. The program carried material for Prairie View A&M University’s Upward Bound Project, then recruiting eleventh- and twelfth-grade students.
The church and university were not separate worlds. They belonged to the same Black educational landscape.
1976/77 — Tutoring Was Ministry
One of the most distinctive programs in the collection is the working copy of the 1977 program, which contains handwritten notes throughout. It appears to be a 1976 booklet reused and extensively annotated for the 1977 Homecoming service — demonstrating why careful processing matters.
More importantly, the document records young people turning religious commitment into educational work.
Bethlehem’s Methodist Youth Fellowship operated a weekly Tutoring-Enrichment Program for students in grades 1–12, concentrating on reading and mathematics.
The same section imagined Christian responsibility globally, calling upon people to understand an “international, multi-racial, transcultural community.”
At Bethlehem, ministry could mean preaching on Sunday—but it could also mean helping a child with fractions on Tuesday evening.
1978 — Bethlehem Was Already Asking People to Build Its Archive
Perhaps no page speaks more directly to the work of the WDPL than the church’s 1978 historical sketch.
After recounting Bethlehem’s development, its homecoming committee inserted a plea:
“Those of you with records and documents…please share them with us.”
Why?
Because they wanted to “fill in all the missing periods.”
That is archival work.
The same program lists dozens of people who had served Bethlehem for twenty-five or even fifty years or more. Every one of those names represents a possible family archive—a Bible, photograph album, letter, obituary, oral history, or set of papers that might fill another missing piece.
The WDPL is continuing a preservation project that Bethlehem’s own members explicitly called for nearly fifty years ago.
1979 — The Homecoming Program Declares Itself an Archive
The 1979 booklet is astonishingly self-aware.
Its foreword says that the book was prepared to “capture the Spiritual growth” of Bethlehem over eleven decades and to commemorate the people and events responsible for its growth and unity.
That makes the program an intentional historical document—not simply an event handout.
And what a story it preserves.
By the late 1970s, Bethlehem reported a weekday senior-citizens program providing recreation and hot meals; a year-round Tutorial Enrichment Program supported by the United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race; a Cub Scout pack open to Hempstead boys; a nursing-home ministry; ecumenical worship; and educational initiatives in reading and mathematics.
The program even records the church’s financial machinery: as of September 14, 1979, homecoming-related contributions totaled $5,190.60.
Preserving Black history also means preserving how Black institutions funded their work.
1980 — Black History, Tutoring, and Prairie View Were Already Connected
The 1980 program could almost serve as an early blueprint for the WDPL’s present-day mission.
Bethlehem’s youth reported presenting a Black History Program and Black History Display while continuing a Tuesday tutorial program supported by a $500 Youth Service Fund grant.
The program also honored Samuel Montgomery, whose leadership crossed institutional boundaries. He was associated with Bethlehem’s ministries and trustees, served as president of the Prairie View Wesley Foundation Board of Directors, and worked on the college campus, where the program credited him with guiding young people.
This is one of the clearest reminders in the collection that the histories of Bethlehem, Hempstead, Prairie View, and PVAMU overlap constantly.
They cannot be adequately interpreted in isolation.
1981 — Meet Dora Ellington, a Human Bridge to the Nineteenth Century
The 1981 homecoming was dedicated to Dora Ellington, then eighty-seven years old.
Her significance was not merely longevity. The program stated that her mother and grandmother had also belonged to Bethlehem, placing her family roots in the congregation back into the nineteenth century. Ellington herself had sung in the senior choir for more than fifty years, participated in the old prayer-meeting band, served with the United Methodist Women and Communion Stewards, and was described as Bethlehem’s oldest continuously serving member.
A single biography suddenly connects several generations.
That is precisely why names matter in archives.
A name can become the thread that links church records to census schedules, land records, university records, photographs, family collections, and oral histories.
1982 — Homecoming Had Its Own Origin Story
Two surviving 1982 documents provide complementary views of the same celebration: the souvenir program and its organizational materials.
The program records an important piece of institutional memory: Bethlehem traced the beginning of its Homecoming Services to 1952 and the “spiritual vision” of Mrs. Ollie Mayes Singleton. The 1982 theme was “Strengthening Our Prayer Life Through Worship.”
The companion material shows how much organization sat behind the celebration. Women chaired worship, publication, food, youth, and other areas; fundraising was structured across generations, with suggested contributions assigned separately to adults, young adults, youth, and children.
Homecoming was therefore not a spontaneous reunion.
It was an annual act of institution-building, fundraising, collective labor, and memory-making.
1983 — Bethlehem Records the End of a Segregated Methodist Structure
The 1983 program places Bethlehem’s denominational history within the history of race.
Its historical account explains that Bethlehem emerged from the all-Black Gulf Coast Conference and records that the conference was dissolved in 1968 as the congregation became part of the integrated Texas Conference.
That transition gives the church archive significance far beyond one congregation. It offers evidence for studying how Black Methodist institutions experienced denominational desegregation.
The church school’s language that year was equally striking. Christian education, it said, should teach people to “rejoice,” “cry,” and “struggle with them for justice and liberation and healing.”
That is not passive Christianity. It is a theology of solidarity.
1992 — “Come As You Are” Meant Rejecting Status
The 1992 theme was “Come As You Are—Proof That God Provides.”
Pastor Francis E. W. Guidry contrasted church homecoming with reunions where people might feel pressure to “come to impress.” Bethlehem, he argued, should instead be a place where people could gather without anxiety about possessions or social standing.
Meanwhile, the tutorial ministry was serving approximately thirty-five children in reading, mathematics, homework assistance, and creative writing. Its cultural outing took children and parents to see Ain’t No Teacher Gonna Hit My Child at Prairie View A&M University.
That is what makes these documents so useful: theology, education, childhood, culture, and PVAMU appear on the same pages.
1994 — “Not Simply in the Community. It Must Be of the Community.”
Bethlehem celebrated its 125th anniversary by asking a remarkably forward-looking question: what kind of church should enter the twenty-first century?
The answer was memorable:
“Bethlehem cannot afford to be a church which is simply in the community. It must be of the community.”
The congregation was already acting on that philosophy.
Its tutorial program had operated for seventeen years, using volunteer labor to teach reading, mathematics, creative writing, and self-esteem. That year, PVAMU professor Dr. Joan Clark led a parenting workshop for participating families.
The program also preserved Bethlehem’s Reconstruction-era origin story: worship in brush arbors, barns, and homes; the 1871 conveyance of property for a church; and the names of Black men associated with that acquisition.
The 1994 booklet effectively looks backward and forward at once.
2004 — A PVAMU Historian Had Already Been Preserving Bethlehem’s Story
The connection becomes explicit in 2004.
The homecoming program reprinted a substantial church history titled “Bethlehem — The Years — The Experiences.” Its compiler was identified as Dr. Purvis Carter, a Bethlehem member and Professor of History at Prairie View A&M University.
That fact gives the present Bethlehem–WDPL collaboration a deeper history.
A PVAMU historian was already helping Bethlehem document its past decades before the WDPL began digitizing the congregation’s records.
Meanwhile, Bethlehem’s tutorial ministry continued working with children from surrounding communities, emphasizing academic skills, belonging, and self-worth.
The archive reveals an enduring partnership between scholarship and service.
2013 — The Archive Becomes a Record of Who Was Lost
The following year, Bethlehem recorded the deaths of members between September 2012 and September 2013. Among the names was Dr. Purvis Carter, the PVAMU historian whose church history had appeared in earlier homecoming programs.
That single entry demonstrates one of the quiet powers of homecoming programs.
They are also memorial books.
People who might receive only a line in another historical source are named as musicians, trustees, teachers, ushers, cooks, youth sponsors, financial captains, historians, mothers, fathers, and servants of the community.
And Bethlehem’s 2013 vision remained firmly outward-facing. The congregation described Christian service as healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the stranger, freeing the oppressed, and developing more just social structures.
After 144 years, remembering the past still meant accepting responsibility for the present.
What These Programs Really Preserve
Taken one at a time, these documents can look modest: staples, fading paper, advertisements, committee lists, worship orders, photographs, memorial pages, and financial reports.
Taken together, they tell a much larger story.
They reveal a Black institution founded in the aftermath of slavery that educated children, fed elders, cared for the sick, trained young leaders, raised money, repaired buildings, confronted racial change, built relationships across denominations, maintained ties to Prairie View, employed university expertise, recorded its dead, celebrated its elders, and repeatedly asked what responsibility one generation owed the next.
And again and again, Bethlehem’s members wrote the names down.
That may be their most important gift to us.
The Next Missing Piece May Be in Your House
The Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab and Bethlehem United Methodist Church are now carrying this work into a new generation.
But no laboratory can preserve what it never receives.
If you are a PVAMU alumnus, former employee, Waller County resident, Bethlehem member or descendant, local church member, or keeper of a family collection, look again at the boxes in your closet, the photographs in your albums, the programs inside old Bibles, the VHS tapes, newsletters, letters, funeral programs, scrapbooks, and documents that someone once decided were worth saving.
They may contain the missing name.
The missing photograph.
The missing chapter.
In 1978, Bethlehem’s own Homecoming Committee asked people with records and documents to share them so the church could “fill in all the missing periods.”
Nearly fifty years later, the invitation remains open.
Help the Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab prevent the erasure of African American history. Help us preserve the evidence that says: we were here, we built this, we served, we remembered—and we left something for those who came next.
Help Us Find the Missing Pieces!
If you are a PVAMU alumnus, former employee, Waller County resident, Bethlehem member or descendant, local church member, or keeper of a family collection, please take this short survey and find out how you can help us prevent the erasure of African American history!
