(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: Fleshing Out the Story

Skeletons by themselves are dead bones. They need to be filled with organs and wrapped in flesh. The major organs of your congregation's historical body are the ideas, beliefs, traditions, and values that called it into life and sustained it. Here is where the kinds of concerns addressed in "Defining a Lutheran Congregation" are especially important. What has your congregation believed, said, and done? What have been its central concerns and commitments? What does it treasure most? By what has it been most frightened? And, most importantly, how have these beliefs, commitments, and fears changed over time?

Because these ideas, values, beliefs, and commitments must be hung on a skeleton made up of names, dates, events, and places, your history team's discussion of them must be specific. It will not be enough to assert that St. Paul's was Lutheran, Norwegian, and middle-class American in the 1890s. You need to go further and show how this group of people worked out the relationship between what happened in worship on Sundays and what the congregation decided at its congregational meetings on Monday, or in its response to racism in its community throughout the rest of the week. How did your congregation reveal its Lutheran character in specific actions? When was the congregation's Lutheran heritage clearest? When did your congregation submerge its confessional identity or contradict it by responding first to ethnic, national, or socioeconomic loyalties?

Many times the answer to such inquiries will be ambiguous. Did St. Paul's begin its parochial school because of a commitment to teach the faith, or did it create the school as a way of building a fortress around its ethnic enclave? Or were both motivations involved? Was the congregation's embrace of an inner-city ministry a response to Jesus' command to care for the least of these, or was it a way to avoid social and economic injustices in its own life or right around the corner? Or both? Or neither? Your task here is to report the congregation's actions and, to the extent possible, the reasons for those actions, without taking sides or passing judgment.

Skeletons also need muscles and flesh. Here fit the major actions and activities of your congregation. The kind of buildings constructed, the types of benevolences sponsored, the patterns of social interaction, the organizations created within your congregation, the network of care it has constructed will drape your skeleton and give it a distinctive body shape. The lives of individual members cover the almost complete body with particular colors and textures. And the style and character of the members—the way they behave at church suppers, in meetings, in their dispersed lives—will etch in the body's finer features. How do members care for one another, offer hospitality to strangers, or solve problems? The congregation's local customs, demeanor, emotional hues, and idiosyncrasies help this congregation stand out from others.