WACO, Texas -- The Rev. George W. Truett, the namesake of Baylor University's seminary, was known for being an eloquent preacher with a knack for using everyday events to make Scripture more relatable for his congregation.
Now, researchers and ministers from across the country can glean lessons from his preaching style through a new digital audio archive of Truett's sermons recently completed and published online by Baylor University.
The archive, created by Baylor's Ray I. Riley Digitization Center, located in the basement of the Moody Memorial Library, contains 66 sermons recorded between 1941 and 1943, toward the end of Truett's ministry at the First Baptist Church of Dallas.
The digitization center took the original recordings, which were made on large 16-inch-wide transcription records, and migrated them to audio files using a variable-speed turntable and analog-to-digital converter. The process was completed during the course of two years and included transcriptions of the sermons.
"This has become a valuable repository of the wonderful preaching of one of the greatest preachers of the 20th century," said Hulitt Gloer, professor of preaching and Christian scriptures at Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminary.
"It gives access to anybody who's interested. These are things nobody could really have access to for 60 years. Now they're available for anybody and everybody," Gloer told the Waco Tribune-Herald.
The records were produced by sound engineering company Sellers Inc. First Baptist Church of Dallas shared them with Mexican radio station XEAW, which would broadcast the message to towns along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The university acquired the recordings in the 1950s or 1960s, but they were kept in storage boxes at the Texas Collection, untouched and unused. While reorganizing its holdings a few years ago, the Texas Collection suggested that the records be digitized and archived through the digital collections library.
"There were 90 separate discs," said Eric Ames, curator of digital collections. "These were recorded live in the pulpit ... and they had two turntables that were connected to that microphone. They would put a disc on turntable one, side one and start recording, and when that disc started to get full, they switched the feed to the second disc. When that side was full, they'd flip disc one over."
Each sermon was combined into a single digital audio file instead of splitting them up by separate discs.
Ames said the library decided transcribing the sermons would make the collection more searchable and user-friendly to seminary students, researchers and theologians interested in studying Truett's spiritual insight.
He listened to all 33 hours of the collection, typing the more than 250,000 words Truett preached. Ames also titled each sermon according to the phrase or idea Truett repeated most, and captured the main scriptures the message focused on.
Ames estimates that it took him an hour and a half to transcribe each hour of audio, or roughly 50 hours during the course of the two-year digitization process. The digital library staff worked on the records in stages while handling other audio and document collections.
"We wanted to make sure this wasn't just, 'Click on this link to listen to the audio, here's a picture of the label on the disk,' and that's it," Ames said. "Because that would require you to sit down and listen to every one and see what was in it. Those keyword-searchable transcripts took the most amount of time, but we think they will probably be the most helpful."
The original records will remain stored at the Texas Collection and likely will only be accessed for special projects to preserve their original integrity. Ames said the vinyl can swell or shrink if not properly maintained and eventually break, which would make the records unusable.
Gloer heads the seminary's Kyle Lake Center for Effective Preaching, which hosts ministers throughout the year for various conferences on commanding the pulpit. He expects the digital Truett sermons will be useful resources for those participants, as well as Truett students who are already assigned to listen to or watch sermons for Gloer's class.
"He spoke to his own context beautifully," Gloer said. "He knew the language people would understand, and he would translate heavier concepts into language that any person could understand. He was a great wordsmith, his use of language was magnificent, and he was a great speaker."
The sermons also reveal tidbits about the culture and current events of the day. World War II was underway in Europe and as the U.S. entered the conflict, Truett preached with greater urgency on the importance of accepting salvation through Jesus Christ.
Ames said Truett also preached about ensuring the rights of all men, and to connect with black churches and consider them equals.
"I didn't expect him to be against it, but I wasn't sure if he would even bring that up," Ames said. "The war is a big enough deal, but he does mention that just because it is happening, there's still plenty of things that need to happen here for us to get right with God, and that includes the work that our African-American brothers and sisters are doing. That was a great thing to find."
Ames said the biggest challenge was getting used to Truett's slow cadence and Carolina accent.
"He grows up in the Deep South after the Civil War, he goes to Baylor and he goes on and lives in Texas the rest of his life, so you'd think he'd sound more like a Texan," Ames said. "But he still sounds like a 19th-century southerner, so the things he says -- to me, a modern Texan -- it just sounds so bizarre, and I'd laugh, but certain times I would have to go back in the audio like, 'What did he just say? What is this word?' "
Though the archive is complete, Ames continues to work with the collection and promote new interest in the sermons. He is in charge of the @GWTruettSermons Twitter feed, which shares excerpts of sermons and link to the corresponding audio from the digital archive on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
"I feel like he's in my head sometimes now. I can hear George Truett talking to me, not that I would ever profess to coming close to that kind of eloquence," Ames said. "If you listen to the sermons and you spend any real time reading things he said and listening to him, you can't walk away unchanged. You'll see something differently."
Religion on 09/13/2014