archives

Say what you want about the end-times views of these 19th Century reformers, but don’t miss the point that our forebears firmly believed that the way they lived their lives…the manner in which they served Christ…and the way in which they shared with their neighbors actually enabled them to (as Barack Obama might say): “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.” They believed that their actions influenced the coming Christ and the coming Kingdom. They saw themselves as participants in the heavenly drama. They weren’t hanging around waiting for God to straighten everything out. They were co-workers in the Kingdom of God.

A couple of months ago, I got a call from the Library here at Milligan. “Hey, we’ve unearthed a couple of boxes of Hopwood archives. Are you interested?” Was I interested? Finding this stuff was like stumbling across the long-lost book of the law in the wall of the temple. The boxes arrived and I went through the notebooks and documents as gently as one might handle newly discovered Dead Sea scrolls. I carefully opened the brittle pages, and treasured the words set down so long ago. There were working notes from Mrs. Thompson’s long lost history of Hopwood. There was a registry from 1915. There were minutes of elders’ meetings from 50 years ago. We don’t want to forget our history. We’re making plans to celebrate 175 years together on Buffalo Creek. We’re actually a few years older than that, but you know how people tend to round downward once you reach a certain age. The Buffalo Creek Christian Church, later known as Hopwood Memorial, may have been established here as early as the late 1820’s. Church historian Addie Thompson wrote that “For several years there was no building for weekly services so (the church) met on the banks of the creek, in barns, mills, cemeteries, homes, groves, or any place they found suitable. Later a log church was built on land donated by Joshua Williams.”