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

Getting Started: Developing the Basic Skills

Historians reach back into the past to make sense of what they are experiencing in the present. They are detectives who look for clues and then seek relationships between the clues they find. They seek patterns and threads. They are convinced that time makes a difference, that yesterday had to happen for today to become possible. They try to see how things change and stay the same.

To be a good historian, you need to be curious and always ask "why?" Why is this congregation still alive? Why did its members choose this pastor instead of another? Why do our members behave this way at worship, in the classroom, or at the congregational dinner?

A second key quality in the historian is a healthy bit of skepticism. Because you study people, you need to be constantly aware of the finitude and fallenness of your subject matter. People's memories deceive them. Sometimes individuals and communities deliberately distort the past because it contains a truth too painful to face or too explosive to share with others.

Even when they do not deliberately deceive, humans experience the same events differently. The mother of the bride, the organist, the custodian, and the groom will all have different versions of the same wedding. The same is true for parties in a major congregational controversy. So, as a historian you always must test your sources by comparing them with others to see how they are true and false.

A third key quality is imagination. Historians are not mere chroniclers who compile lists of facts. While you cannot succeed if you do not have facts, you must have imagination as well. You must be able to think your way into the other person's shoes, to see the world through the eyes of those who acted in the past.

These qualities must be combined with certain organizational and research skills. Historians need techniques and skills to ensure accurate note taking, a file system that organizes the material gathered, the ability to listen to what is said and not said and then come to an independent judgment.

But history is as much an art as it is technique or science. While you must be certain the claims you make are accurate and carefully evaluate all the available sources, as a historian you must love learning about the human story and must love the particular group, in this case the congregation, that you seek to understand.

Gabriela Cuervos (center), first Puerto Rican confirmed in the Lutheran Church (1898)