Pentecostal Memory Must Not Be Surrendered to the Platform

On 27 October, archives and memory institutions mark the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. The International Federation of Film Archives explains that sound recordings and moving images are vulnerable to neglect, material decay, technological obsolescence and deliberate destruction. It traces the observance to UNESCO's 1980 recommendation on moving images and the formal establishment of the day in 2005. This is an international observance and preservation mandate, not evidence that vulnerable collections have actually been secured. FIAF, World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

Pentecostalism has created an extraordinary audiovisual inheritance: sermons, altar calls, songs, testimonies, prayer meetings, revivals, radio programmes, convention recordings, Bible-college lectures and the voices of women and men whose ministries were rarely documented in official histories. Much of that inheritance now sits on ageing cassettes, volunteers' phones, leaders' laptops and commercial platforms whose purposes are not archival.

Our movement knows how to broadcast. We have been slower to ask what should be preserved, who may preserve it, whose account becomes authoritative, what consent survives the moment of recording and whether future generations will receive a trustworthy record or only the content that algorithms rewarded. A livestream is not yet an archive, visibility is not custody, and virality is not faithful memory.

UNESCO opened the third national consultation on its 2015 Recommendation concerning documentary heritage on 17 August 2026, with state reporting continuing to 27…