(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: Building a Congregational Conversation

In the 16th century, Martin Luther called the local congregation a mundhaus, literally a "mouth house," to indicate that congregations were to be noisy places, full of preaching, singing, and the mutual conversation of brothers and sisters in faith. Most of our congregations live up to that description, being noisy places where the gospel is proclaimed, pastoral counseling occurs, meetings take place, countless educational events go on, and personal news is dispensed along with coffee or over potluck suppers.

Yet many observers have also noticed that congregations do not always talk about everything they should. Given the variety of values present in most congregations today and the complex contemporary issues we face, it is not surprising that many congregations are at worst silent, and at best reluctant to speak, about socially divisive issues like abortion, human sexuality, racism, just distribution of wealth, and the like.

More surprising is the fact that congregations often find it difficult to carry on deep and lasting conversations about basic matters of faith. At least some people are so disappointed by their congregations that they take their deepest spiritual questions and needs to other places that seem more hospitable—to an interdenominational Bible study group, spiritual retreat center, or self-help group. Many more simply keep quiet and deal with their questions and needs in private, where they need not risk disagreement or disapproval.

Discovering congregational history is not pastoral care—at least most of the time—and it will not require total self-disclosure from those who participate. But it will inevitably unearth sensitive, and at times, divisive topics. Because congregations are places where forgiven sinners gather, we can expect to encounter much sin and need for forgiveness. As people become more honest about their lives, sin will become ever more apparent.

So, as we open up the history of a congregation, we will find out that people hurt each other—sometimes deeply and with long-lasting consequences. Groups exclude some people as they welcome others. Certain needs are attended to while others are ignored. Alcoholism, sexual abuse, power politics, egocentrism, ethnocentrism, financial irresponsibility, and dishonesty are part of our stories. So is unfaithfulness, in the classic sense of failing to trust God's promises.

One of the challenges your congregation faces when it takes part in a congregational history project is determining what kind of mundhaus it will be. Can members talk about the issues that have troubled the congregation's life, threatened its existence, hurt its members, or weakened its ministry to the world? Or will it be a place of repression, where the painful, unconfessed sins and unhealed wounds in its life are covered up, kept out of the congregation's public conversation?

The theology of the Word that lay behind Luther's idea of the mundhaus affirmed that talking is creative and restorative. When through the human speech called "confession" sin is brought into the gracious presence of the gospel, broken lives become whole and fractured relations between humans and God are healed.