(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Defining a Lutheran Congregation." Be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Your Congregation's Inner Life .")

Defining a Lutheran Congregation: Living with Paradox

For the full story of our congregations to come into view, we require an imagination lively enough to see them as paradoxical places. The early Christians proclaimed Jesus to be fully human and fully divine, and the Reformers asserted that the mundane bread and wine of human labor received at the Eucharist was at the same time the body and blood of our crucified, risen, and ascended Lord. Just so, we must be able to carry on in this tradition of paradox and see our own congregations as, at one and the same time, a gathering of the world's fallen and a community of those who have been born again—and again.

The challenge for you as the congregational historian is to resist the temptation to resolve the paradox. Instead of telling a story that is one of heaven on earth or one that portrays your congregation as entirely evil, you need to search relentlessly through the traces of your congregation's past for the interaction of sin and grace in its life. There are additional resources in the Lutheran tradition that can take you deeper into that paradoxical character. The emphasis Luther placed on the "priesthood of all believers," for example, encourages you to probe the lives of individual members for evidence that members carried the gospel into the world.

A second resource is Luther's understanding of vocation or calling. His elevated view of the daily work of Christians should embolden you to write a story about more than a congregation safely ensconced behind the walls of its building. These reformation insights will make you ask why Lutherans so often invoke the "priesthood of all believers" idea and then reduce talk about ministry to what pastors do and what church members do when they are not doing normal secular things but are involved in some special religious or church activity or cause. The goal of your history committee is not to tell a pious religious story. Rather, it is to search for the presence, and absence, of the gospel in the lives of a particular group of people.

First Evangelical Lutheran Church, Galveston, Texas