(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: What Is Required

  •  A Truthful and Fair Story

Those attributes seem self-evident and attainable, at least at first. But inevitably, because congregations are communities of saints who are also real sinners, historians will discover places where the truth—at least all of it—has not been told. What happens when you encounter the underside of a story? Will you continue to cover up the dark side, or will you take this opportunity to shed light on what has long been hidden? How a community deals with questions of honesty and truthfulness is a sign of its character. Historians have no less a burden to bear.

Although we often idealize them, congregations are places of argument, disagreement, and conflict. Granted, historians can never become purely objective reporters. You nonetheless have a responsibility to help succeeding generations understand how things have come to be. For your project, this means you need to treat fairly both or all sides of the many controversies that are a part of congregational life.

A bit of introspection will help you here. You will have strong feelings or commitments about some of the issues you handle as a historian—say the role of women, or the degree of formality in worship. You need to recognize and name those feelings and commitments. As much as possible, you should try to keep your project balanced, so that your history does not become a religious western where the good folks wear certain kinds of hats and the villains others. Be honest with your team members (and with your future readers) about your convictions. We all have a point of view of which we must be aware. And then we must be open to the insights of others who may see things differently.

Although few of us like to deal with conflict, points of controversy in congregational life are the places where congregations define themselves. Faced with a controversial social ministry or building renovation proposal, members of your congregation will most likely disagree. As they work to reach a decision, however, the congregation will opt for one way of acting over another. Each decision like this expresses a congregation's self-understanding. If you skip over the conflicts, therefore, you will most likely be omitting some of the most important aspects of your story. Without turning your enterprise into muckraking, you need to deal with decisive conflicts truthfully and fairly.

  •  A Whole Story

We also seek to tell whole stories. Whole here does not mean that you must tell everything. An occupational hazard for the historian is the pressure to tell everything he or she knows. Good historians learn how to throwaway (mentally) extraneous things—or better, to preserve in archives and files what will overwhelm or distract from the final written product.

Your challenge is to choose from your research those key pieces of information that will allow you to prepare histories that are rich rather than poor, thick rather than thin, full rather than empty. So your story must deal with all the dimensions of the congregation's life. The history you are probing is not just of pastors or just of laypeople. It is not devoted only to worship or only to social ministry. The congregation's whole life—its strengths and flaws, its great moments and its times of failure—must come into view.

To tell the whole story without telling everything sounds like an impossible dream. Historians respond by finding a representative incident or a telling example to make a point. Thus if your congregation struggled throughout its history to find ways to root its young people in the Christian faith, you need to search for the most compelling or vivid example of that struggle. After describing that example fully, generalize about how that struggle recurs throughout your congregation's life. If the struggle is central to your congregation's story, talk about the different ways the struggle manifested itself in succeeding eras, but without telling everything about each moment along the way.

  •  A Human Story

The story we tell should also be a human one. Given that the actors in this story are humans, that again seems self-evident. But you might be tempted to write a story in which, because God is believed to be involved, the human dimensions disappear. Some congregational histories read as though only angels belong to that congregation. Events seem to happen miraculously, no one seems to have an ulterior motive, no harsh words or human failures darken the pages. The new congregational histories we write need not be so other-worldly. Since the gospel is that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the histories that we write should be full of all the quirks and differences that make humans human.

  •  An Interesting Story

A final goal, perhaps more intimidating than the others, is to write an interesting and engaging history. All of us have been in the presence of someone who had a passion for something, but who managed to smother our own interest in the process of trying to kindle it. Or perhaps we ourselves have watched in dismay as we bored someone to tears about a matter of great importance. The histories we write will ultimately fail if we do not find ways to interest subsequent generations in the story we are telling. Here it is important to know your audience, to write well, and to select materials and fashion them into a story that is important. This story should focus on the biggest concerns of people—life and death, their future, what they value most.