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Southwood Baptist Church An archive · Fort Worth, Texas

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Photographs: The Life of the Congregation

Southwood Baptist Church, an independent Baptist congregation in southwest Fort Worth, Texas, kept a photograph section on its website. The congregation no longer meets, and this page is a historical account of that section rather than a reproduction of it.

The photographs are not reproduced here, and that is deliberate

The original galleries are withheld in full. They are photographs of a real congregation, taken for that congregation, and a large proportion of them are of children — at egg hunts, in the nursery, at fellowship events. The people in them are private individuals, most of them living, and the children in them are now adults who had no say in the matter. Nobody photographed at a church picnic in 2009 agreed to be published on the open web in perpetuity, and the fact that the images were once online does not carry any consent forward.

So what is preserved here is the gallery list, and nothing else. That turns out to be more informative than it sounds, because the titles a congregation gives its photo albums are a fair index of what it thought was worth remembering.

The gallery list

Eight galleries existed:

Read as a list, that is a year. Two of the eight are seasonal events with fixed dates, two are about children, one is about the congregation's own faces, one is about honouring somebody, one is about worship and one is the drawer everything else went into. There is no gallery of the building, no gallery of a construction project, and no gallery of visiting dignitaries — which are the three things a church preoccupied with its own institutional standing tends to photograph most.

The annual calendar the list implies

Easter and the last week of October anchor the year. Between them sit the fellowship events, the appreciation day and the ordinary Sundays. That is a congregational calendar built around families with school-age children, and it matches the rest of what the church published: the graded Sunday School, the junior high fellowship, the youth camps and the seasonal outreach events set out in the outreach record.

The Easter egg hunt is the older of the two seasonal events, and the more straightforward. A church lawn, plastic eggs, an age-graded start so the smallest are not trampled, and coffee for the parents. It is a hospitality event as much as a religious one: the sort of thing a family who does not attend can be invited to without anybody feeling recruited.

Trunk-or-Treat

Trunk-or-Treat deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is one of the few genuinely new American church customs of recent decades and it is largely invisible outside the United States.

The form is simple. Members park their cars in the church lot in a ring or a row, open the boots, decorate them, and hand out sweets from them; children move from car to car instead of from door to door. It emerged in the 1990s and spread very quickly through Protestant and Catholic congregations alike across the 2000s. Two motives drove it, and they pulled in the same direction. The first was straightforwardly practical: parents were increasingly uneasy about door-to-door trick-or-treating in neighbourhoods where they did not know everyone, and a supervised church car park in daylight solved that. The second was theological. Evangelical congregations that were uncomfortable with Hallowe'en, and unwilling either to ignore the evening or to forbid it outright, could offer a version of it they had built themselves — which is why so many were called Fall Festivals, harvest parties or Trunk-or-Treats rather than anything with Hallowe'en in the name. Southwood's own outreach inventory lists a Fall Festival and Carnival alongside the Trunk-or-Treat.

It also functioned as outreach, and everybody involved knew it. The event is easy to invite a neighbour to, costs a family nothing, and puts them on church property with no expectation attached. American folklife collections at the Smithsonian Institution have documented this kind of adapted seasonal custom as it developed.

Appreciation Day

Appreciation days are a fixture of congregational life — occasions set aside to honour a group within the church: pastors, teachers, veterans, long-serving volunteers. The surviving directory name for Southwood's gallery suggests it honoured veterans, which is unremarkable in a Texas congregation and in a city with the military and civic history documented by the Handbook of Texas. The point of such a day is recognition in public, in front of the whole body, of work or service that is usually invisible.

A congregation photographing itself

“The faces of Southwood” is the most telling title in the list. It is not an album of an event. It is an album of people, gathered for no reason except that they were the church.

Congregations have always kept this sort of record — pictorial directories, anniversary booklets, framed photographs along a corridor — and the impulse behind it is not vanity. A church is a body of people who mostly know each other by face, and the photographs are how a congregation shows itself to itself: this is who we are, this many of us, these ages, these families. When a congregation closes, that self-portrait is normally the first thing to disperse, because it exists in private hands and in the fabric of a building somebody else now uses. Family and community photograph collections of exactly this kind, from across Texas, have been digitised through the Portal to Texas History, but Southwood's are not among them.

Where the congregation met is described in the campus record, and the junior high fellowship that appears in the last gallery sat within the youth programme set out in the youth ministry record.