Tazewell Presbyterian Church, 1987 - 1987

The Reverend Jeff Lowrance collection contains over 1200 sermons that he wrote over the course of his thirty-two year career as a Presbyterian minister; and two other series in the collection contain additional materials pertinent to Presbyterianism (a small quantity of church records and several files on subject matter). Such a collection as this contains a wealth of information about Presbyterian theology and should be valuable to scholars of religion and also to ministers. Even in the age of typewriters, computers and word processing, Reverend Lowrance always wrote his sermons long-hand and his files contain a nearly complete accumulation of his written work. Though he originally kept each sermon in its own folder, his labeling scheme changed over time, and he did not always include a sermon title on the folders, and he almost never wrote the title, date or scriptural reference on his sermons. It seems that while he served the congregation at the Tazewell Presbyterian Church, a secretary made typed transcriptions of his sermons and the transcriptions typically contained titles, dates and scriptural references. Lowrance usually retained copies of the church bulletins to accompany the sermons; and the bulletins usually provide these data elements. The sermons whose dates could not be determined had to be arranged either according to a scriptural reference (some of the original folders had this information), or according to topic. Another series in this collection contains a small quantity of records of the churches where he served. These include a small quantity of church bulletins (arranged chronologically), a few items of correspondence, a few things from the Presbyterian General Assembly and a few records from the Hopewell, Prospect and Tazewell Presbyterian churches. The last series contains files on a wide range of subject matter concerning issues that the Presbyterian clergy had to deal with in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.