Preserving and Sharing Our Heritage: Establishing the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center
The Church of God will celebrate 125 years of Pentecostal witness on August 19, 2011. This is the third article in a series relating our commitment to preserve and pass on our heritage to our children and grandchildren.
The primary agency designated for preserving the history and heritage of the Church of God is the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center. The center shares a building with the William G. Squires Library on the campus of Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.
It is a resource for Church of God congregations and offices around the world, serves students and faculty of Lee University and the Pentecostal Theological Seminary, and regularly hosts visiting scholars writing books and articles about the Pentecostal movement. Lee University manages the center, while principal funding comes from the Church of God International Offices.
The Dixon Pentecostal Research Center began as a special collection of Church of God and Pentecostal materials in the Lee College Memorial Library. Lee librarians had long recognized the need to collect books written by Church of God and other Pentecostal authors. When Dr. Charles W. Conn became president of Lee College in 1970, he recognized the potential for establishing one of the world’s premier centers for the study of the Pentecostal movement. Consulting with Head Librarian LeMoyne Swiger and Lee’s alumni director, Hoyt E. Stone, the vision for the establishing the Pentecostal Research Center was born and nurtured.
Establishing the center reflected the passion of Charles Conn as well as a significant stage of maturity for the Church of God. Conn was a prolific writer and came to Lee from the office of general overseer. As author of the Church of God’s official history, Like A Mighty Army, he had a profound sense of the importance of our history and heritage. He understood that preserving our heritage is fundamental to our future. He wrote in the definitive edition of Like A Mighty Army, “As the church’s hope for the future lay in its institutions, so its heritage was preserved by them. In its formative days the church only had a future; in the 1970s it also had a past….. One advantage maturity has over youth is its capacity for reflecting on the past as well as contemplating the future. With perspective from the past, the Church of God could keep its bearing on the future.” According to Conn, the purpose of the center is “to preserve for future generations those things of the past that have made us what we are.”
The collection grew rapidly and came to be known as the Pentecostal Research Center. From its beginning the center was considered a treasure for Lee College and the Church of God. According to Like A Mighty Army, the center was one of the significant reasons the National Bicentennial Committee designated Lee College as a Bicentennial Campus during the nation’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. By that time the Church of God had established the seminary, and there was an immediate need for additional library facilities.
The presidents of the two schools developed a plan for a new facility that would meet the needs of the college, the seminary, and the Pentecostal Research Center. The enormity of their vision made it necessary to take the plan to the General Assembly in 1980. To everyone’s surprise, when the General Council heard the proposal the delegates spontaneously began to give for the project. General Overseer Ray H. Hughes later described the moment, “The Holy Spirit gripped the congregation in an extraordinary fashion. The people began to come forward and lay their gifts upon the pulpit, amidst the rejoicing and shouts of the congregation. This move of the Holy Spirit resulted in an offering of $200,000…. This sovereign act of the Holy Spirit brought healing to the body of Christ and the entire General Assembly was refreshed through an offering.” Dr. Charles Conn described the response of the delegate’s giving as “one of the most marvelous breakthroughs of the Spirit I have seen. For more than an hour the people marched down and gave….”
It would be five more years before the new facility containing the library and research center was completed. Opening in September 1985, the research center was formally named the Hal Bernard Dixon Jr. Pentecostal Research Center in honor of the son of Hal Bernard and Starr Dixon. With the additional space, the general church assigned the center the responsibility of serving as the archives of the Church of God. Today the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center continues to collect, arrange, preserve and make available those library and archival materials needed to pass our history and heritage to coming generations.
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Dr. David G. Roebuck is director of the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center and an assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Lee University. He also serves as church historian for the Church of God.
