(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: Making Up a Story

It is at the point of turning all the parts into a whole that most breakdowns in history writing occur. The results of our efforts, all too often, are scrapbooks, lists of events, rosters of names, or strings of anecdotes that offer readers few connections with their own lives and convey little meaning for future generations. We have data but no history.

Part of the historian's task is to find the unifying plot in all the details of a congregation's life. In our culture, this task is difficult. On the one hand, Americans seem to be storyless people. Ask any of your congregation's members to recite his or her family lineage. Most will be able to name grandparents, but few will be able to retrieve a more complete family past. Impoverished at the level of personal history, most Americans are unaware of the larger pasts in their institutions and society.

We are unlike many other cultures, which place a premium on remembering long genealogies and revering institutional heritages. Whether or not we would say it as sharply, we act as if Henry Ford were right when he said (in a quote made infamous by Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World), "History is bunk." Ford felt that the past tied us down and that hope lay in new events—including his inventions. Like Ford, ours is a culture infatuated with tomorrow and bored by yesterday. We yearn for the new and yawn at the old.

On the other hand, whether we recognize it or not, our culture is brimming with stories. This nation of immigrants has welcomed and continues to welcome an unprecedented variety of peoples. All these newcomers bring baggage. Tucked in with all the precious cargo they packed for their journeys are their stories—familial, ethnic, religious, national, cultural.

Our congregations—and those of us who want to capture their histories—embody both sides of this paradoxical character. We do not know our own stories, yet we bear them in our habits, customs, traditions, and routines. One of the main challenges the congregational historian faces is to identify the hidden or partially submerged stories that are embedded in each congregation's life. Previous sections have provided suggestions for how to unearth many of them. (See the "Resources" section for additional strategies.) But then the congregational historian has to weave them together to see the one story in all the others.