(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Constructing the Story." Be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Telling the Story.")

Constructing the Story: Building a Skeleton

How do you discover the plotline that ties all the threads together? How do you discover the central clue that tells you who you as a congregation really are? Imagine that you are sitting surrounded by all your note cards and files of historical research. Pretend that you are about to create a living, breathing historical being. The materials that surround you are like clay. In the spirit of Genesis, you begin to shape a skeleton. In this case, the skeleton is made by arranging your discoveries chronologically.

A practical way to find your history's skeleton is to construct a time line, beginning with the congregation's founding and continuing until the present. (Often you have to stretch the time line back past the congregation's founding because its story is really a continuation of an older one.) As you arrange your discoveries along the time line, you will find that the story, as your congregation remembers it, contains flaws. People recall events out of their actual sequence. Or they leave huge gaps in their story. They act as if there were cause and effect relationships between events that were in fact not directly related at all. So the time line begins to correct, supplement, and enrich the congregation's memory. It helps you see the flow of the congregation's life.

After you have filled in your congregational time line, do at least two more things. First, draw several more parallel to it. Create a national time line, a denominational one, a community one, and any others that can help you relate your story to other important ones.

Some congregational stories, for example, are entangled with the story of a powerful local family. A congregation in a "company town" will be affected by the ups and downs of that one business. These parallel time lines will enhance the interest and significance of your congregation's own story. They will also occasionally reveal how events outside of the congregation's perceived life actually shaped it.

A word of caution is necessary here. Your history will be only as strong as the skeleton you build. Historians have a special responsibility to get their facts right. Because people's memories are fallible and because the traces they leave behind for future generations are equally fallible, the historian must check and double-check facts. If you mistakenly place a date one year ahead of or behind another—sometimes the error can be as small as one day or one hour—an untrue story can result.

If you unwittingly carry over a distortion or deception in a trusted source's version of past events, that error will plague another generation of members. If a longtime member claims that Pastor Erickson took a call because a new church offered a better salary, when in fact the pastor left because that same member led a group that forced him out, that account will continue to shape congregational perceptions until other versions and evidence of earlier undermining are surfaced. If your history team must rely extensively on oral traditions, you will have special concerns for accuracy. (See the "Resources" section for further reading on the unique riches and problems of oral history.)

Historians quickly learn to weigh the trustworthiness of their sources, to mine for solid evidence that something happened when a source says it did, and to search for the sources that get closest to events. Historians usually value eyewitness accounts more than recollections written 20 years later, and they seek several versions of a controversy, rather than trusting one partisan's side of the story.