GREATER MINNEAPOLIS COUNCIL OF CHURCHES:

The Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches is a voluntary association of Christian churches organized to work together for the welfare of the community and to foster cooperation among the area's Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches. The council had its origins as the Hennepin County Sunday School Association (later known as the Minneapolis Council of Religious Education), which in 1927 merged with the Minneapolis Council of Churches to form the Minneapolis Church Federation. As an expression of its advisory and cooperative nature, as well as its interests beyond the Minneapolis city limits, the name was changed in 1951 to the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches.

True to its beginnings as the Sunday School Association, the Council had its earliest roots in the area of religious education. The organization's primary mission in these early years was the sponsoring of workshops and institutes for teachers of the city's Sunday schools. By the 1920s the group had organized weekday religious instruction on released time for children in the public schools of Minneapolis and its suburbs, an endeavor it was forced finally to abandon in 1968 after a series of Supreme Court decisions and waning interest in the community. The Council refocused its efforts on the promotion of new curricula developed to teach objectively about religion in the public schools.

The Council and its predecessor organizations were early activists in human rights and social justice, work that took on increasing emphasis and predominance in the middle and later decades of the century. Through the Church Women United, the Council founded the Circle F Club, a group that provides services and opportunities for socializing to individuals recovering from severe mental illness. The Chaplaincy Services division worked to provide chaplains and other religious services to individuals in prisons, hospitals, and nursing homes. The Council sponsored or participated in numerous groups or causes promoting racial equality and cooperation between different Christian denominations as well as between Christians and other faiths. Major activities in this area include Black Church Fund, the Minnesota Inter religious Committee on Jewish-Christian Relations, and the fair housing campaign of the early 1960s, as well as numerous other efforts. Other community work is accomplished through programs such as the Meals on Wheels Coordination Project, the Metro Paint-A-Thon, HandyWorks, Minnesota FoodShare, Congregations in Community, and Congregations Concerned for Children Child Advocacy Network.

In 1952 the Division of Indian Work was formed to help Native Americans in the greater Minneapolis area adjust to urban life by providing emergency food, clothing and housing, transportation, referral for legal assistance and medical care, as well as advice and spiritual counseling. Programs administered by the Division of Indian Work include Youth Leadership Development, Family Violence, Teen Indian Parents, and Horizons Unlimited.

Women's organizations have played a prominent role throughout the history of the Council. Known first simply as the Women's Department, then subsequently as the Minneapolis Council of Federated Church Women, the Minneapolis Council of Church Women, and the United Church Women of Greater Minneapolis, the organization has been known as the Church Women United since 1968. While formally a division within the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches, the Church Women United have their own bylaws and articles of incorporation and are extremely active in their own right. They are responsible for the founding of the Circle F Club, and organize a number of the Council's regular events including the World Day of Prayer and May Fellowship Day.

While the organization employs a staff to take care of many administrative matters, the actual membership of the organization consists of approximately 700 individual churches, each of which contributes financially to the Council and encourages its congregation members to participate in the Council's activities. The Council works in close cooperation with a number of other related church councils in the area, often forming joint committees and co-sponsoring activities. The Twin Cities Metropolitan Church Commission was organized to coordinate between the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches, the St. Paul Area Council of Churches, and the Minnesota Council of Churches.

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The Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches records document the organization's administration and governance as well as its activities in the areas of social services, religious education, human rights and social activism, and the ecumenical movement. Records date from the founding of the Minneapolis Church Federation in 1927 (name changed to Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches in 1951) to 1996. Also included is a series of records of other predecessor organizations dating back to 1900. The collection is organized into series defined primarily by divisions, or other major administrative units within the organization, followed by additional series of major programs and topical files that could not be definitely associated with any of these organizational units. Within the series for each division or department can typically be found minutes, correspondence, reports, program flyers, and clippings, as well as subject files.

While arrangement of the bulk of the materials reflects the organizational structure of the Council, the collection includes a separate series created by the Council as a chronological "archive." This series contains primarily administrative and finance-related materials as well as newspaper clippings. Materials in this series supplement and may duplicate some materials in the rest of the collection, particularly the governance and administration series.

The collection concludes with a series of printed materials, including scattered issues of the Council's newsletter, the Bulletin (continued by Expressions in 1990), and a small group of photographs, primarily of the weekday church school during the 1950s and 1960s. There are also two scrapbooks from the Church Women United (then called the Minneapolis Council of Federated Church Women) with newspaper clippings documenting that group's activities during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

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These records are organized into the following sections:

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Access Restrictions:

Access to and use of reserve material requires the curator's permission.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches Records. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples.

Accession Information:

Accession numbers: 14,212; 14,854; 15,022; 15,381; 15,575; 15,598; 16,033; 16,386; 16,545; 16,672; 17,114

Processing Information:

Processed by: Lara D. Friedman-Shedlov, August 1996 and April 1999

Additions by: David B. Peterson, September 2007; Meagan Kellom and Alex Kent, January 2011; Shelby Edwards, December 2011; David B. Peterson, July 2012 and July 2016

Processing and cataloging of this collection was generously supported with a Basic Project grant awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Catalog ID number: 990017127650104294

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The collection includes minutes and scrapbooks from several predecessor organizations. Through a complicated series of name changes and mergers, these organizations eventually became the Minneapolis Church Federation, which changed its name to the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches in 1951.

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The chronological archive was maintained by the Council office and has been retained as a separate series, rather than integrated with the rest of the collection. Unlike the following series, which are arranged primarily by division or other major organizational unit, the chronological archive is arranged first by date and then by division. Materials supplement and often overlap the rest of the collection for the years it covers (1940s-1970s, bulk 1970-1978). Records in this series are primarily administrative and finance-related, but also include clippings, program flyers, and minutes documenting other divisions of the organization.

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The governance series contains records documenting the structure and governance of the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches including official bylaws and articles of incorporation, as well as minutes and reports of board meetings, delegate assemblies, and annual meetings. Also in this series are materials relating to board membership, the nominating committee for the board of directors, and the new programs committee, which evaluates proposals for new divisions, departments, or projects within the organization. The series includes a folder of background materials such as brochures, organization charts, and scripts for presentations on the history, structure, and mission of the Council.

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The Administration series includes the records of the Administrative Division as well as other administrative departments and functions such as public relations and personnel. These records include committee minutes, correspondence, and policies. Of particular interest is a folder of materials documenting the search for a new executive secretary in 1941-1942, providing a fairly comprehensive picture of the search process, including considerable correspondence from and regarding individuals being considered for the position (some with candid comments on the merits of particular candidates) and minutes from meetings of the search committee. The largest part of the series, however, are financial records of the Council, including budgets, balance sheets, audit reports, and fund raising campaign materials. The fund raising campaign records are of particular interest as they document the manner in which financial support of the organization is divided between the annual commitments of the member churches and donations from individuals and other organizations supporting the Council's mission.

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Materials in this series include the articles of incorporation and bylaws of the Church Women United and its predecessor organizations, correspondence, and subject files. The bulk of the series consists of a nearly complete run of minutes from 1927 through 1985. Other materials document group activities such as annual World Day of Prayer and May Fellowship Day.

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One of the largest in the collection, this series documents activities that include the vacation church school program, the Life and Leadership Schools, and youth activities. Making up the largest part of the series are records documenting the weekday church school program, which organized interdenominational classes for Christian children released one hour per week from the public schools for religious instruction. The materials on this program, which include minutes, registrations, attendance records, teacher applications and training materials, as well as financial records, document the institution of organized, released time religious instruction in the Minneapolis area during the 1920s. The records describe the response to accusations that the program violated the separation of church and state, the ensuing court decisions, and the eventual demise of the program in 1968 due to these decisions and declining enrollment as community support of released time instruction waned. The series concludes with a large group of subject files, highlights of which include the Twin City Black Clergy Institutes, workshops on transactional analysis, the Environmental Program in Churches (EPIC), and the Institutes of Religious Studies.

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Records of the Division of Indian Work include bylaws, minutes, correspondence, financial records, subject files, and grant proposals. The grant proposals, which make up a significant portion of the series, provide documentation on many of the major ongoing projects within the division during the 1980s, including the Family Violence Program and the Youth Leadership Development Program. The subject files include information on a number of other programs, such as Children and Youth in Crisis and employment counseling activities.

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The Social Ministries series includes records from the unit known variously as the Public Affairs Department (through the early 1960s), the Christian Social Relations Department (early 1960s to 1966), and the Division of Social Ministries (1967 on). In addition to minutes and a small number of newsletters, this series consists primarily of subject files documenting the Council's activities and positions on issues related to human rights, especially race relations. Of particular interest are the files relating to the fair housing campaign of the early 1960s, which describe the then rampant discrimination faced by racial and religious minorities seeking housing in the Minneapolis area and the efforts to change attitudes and pass legislation to combat the problem.

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The Ecumenical Relations Division, later renamed "Faith in Dialogue," focused on efforts to promote ecumenical attitudes and activities among the member churches and between all Christian denominations in general. Of particular interest in this series are materials relating to efforts to improve relations between Catholics and Protestants. Also included in this series are several folders on plans for the Council's participation in the bicentennial celebration (1974-1976).

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The bulk of this series consists of chronological files of minutes, correspondence, budgets, reports, clippings, and other materials dating from the early 1950s through the 1980s. The series documents the Council's role in providing the services of spiritual counselors for prisoners, hospital patients, and other groups in need. Also included are materials related to fund raising activities and photographs of Council-sponsored chaplains at work in the community.

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By the 1980s, the focus of GMCC had shifted from religious education to social services in the community. The records of Congregations Concerned for Children, Meals on Wheels, Minnesota FoodShare, and the Metro Paint-A-Thon represent, in addition to the Division of Indian Work, the major activities and programs of the organization in the 1980s and 1990s.

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The subject files form the largest series in the collection. Arranged alphabetically by folder title, they include files for smaller departments, programs, or projects that could not be identified with any of the major divisions already represented by separate series, as well as materials relating to outside organizations in which the Council participated or was associated in some manner. Departments represented in this series include Church Planning and Location, Comity and Evangelism. Major programs documented include Circle F Club, Holy Week Observances, Partners in Ecumenism, and the Reformation Festival, the Minneapolis Ministerial Association, and Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church. Among the many outside organizations with which the Council worked that are represented here are the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Inter religious Committee on Jewish-Christian Relations, and the Minnesota Protestant Center. A significant portion of these files concern the Twin Cities Metropolitan Church Commission, the organization that provides cooperative programming among the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches, the St. Paul Council of Churches, and the Minnesota Council of Churches. This subseries includes extensive documentation of the Viable Futures for Congregations program, which was administered through the Twin Cities Metropolitan Church Commission. Other major topics covered in the subject files include religion in the public schools and issues concerning liquor license laws in Minneapolis.