Search

Gladys Kapenga was heavily involved with the United Church of Christ and Church Women United in Michigan. This collection documents both organizations and is particularly strong in its coverage of women’s organizations in the United Church of Christ. The collection includes administrative files for Burlingame Congregational Church, UCC Women of Michigan, the UCC Michigan Conference, the Grand West Association, and Church Women United.

The Gladys Kapenga collection contains papers related to Church Women United, Burlingame Congregational Church, and the United Church of Christ in Michigan. The collection has been organized in nine series: United Church of Christ (UCC); Church Women United; Committee Files; Events and Meetings; Outreach and Ministry; Publications and Newsletters; Topical Files; Miscellaneous Files; and Personal Files.

The Michigan Conference of the United Church of Christ was formed from the merger of the Michigan Conference of the Congregational Church and the Michigan-Indiana Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. The record group includes retired records of individual associations, conferences, and local churches. Also included are files on churches and pastors within the Conference.

This record group is comprised primarily of records of the associations and conferences that make up the United Church of Christ Michigan Conference. The records document the mergers between smaller conferences to make the larger ones of today. These records are largely made up of correspondence, minutes, agendas, conference materials, and programming information.

Besides records of the individual associations and conferences, the collection also contains an extensive amount of records from individual churches, which can be found in the "Records from individual churches" and the "Church files" series. Because their relationship to each other is unknown, these series were not combined. The "Church files" series are records that may have been stored by the Michigan Conference rather than the individual churches. The "Records from individual churches" concerns materials that belonged to the individual churches. Whether these churches belonged to the smaller associations that make up the Michigan Conference is unknown. Therefore, they were kept separate. More information on these series can be found in the individual series' description below.

The record group has been arranged into the following series: Michigan Conference; Associations and conferences; Woman's Home Missionary Union and related; Records from individual churches; Annual Meetings of Michigan Congregational Conference and of the United Church of Christ; Evangelical and Reformed Church; Church files; Photographs; Ministerial files; and Student ministry.

Association formed from the merger of the Grand Traverse, Lake Superior, and Cheboygan associations of the Congregational Church (later the United Church of Christ). Administrative records of the association and of the associations from which it was formed.

This record group contains both the records of the Grand Traverse, Lake Superior, and Cheboygan Associations prior to restructuring, and the records of efforts leading to the formation of the United Northern Association. Despite the absence of the early records of the Grand Traverse and Cheboygan Associations, this record group documents attitudes concerning the denominations which fused to form the United Church of Christ, as well as the organizational restructuring which occurred in the late 1970s.

The records of the Northern Association of the United Church of Christ are divided into five series: Michigan Conference, United Northern Association, Grand Traverse Association, Lake Superior Association, and Cheboygan Association.