(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: The History Team

Let's begin by making this a community endeavor. What you want to build is a community of inquiry within your congregation, a group of people who share a desire and commitment to discover who your congregation is and has been.

Your congregation may choose to organize a history committee, thereby opening themselves to the proverbial wisdom that "a camel is a horse produced by a committee." A rejoinder might be that horses are fine when the terrain is hospitable, but that something more complex is needed to survive in the desert. Committees bring a variety of perspectives, some disagreement, and when they work, more wisdom to the table.

Whether you call your group a "committee," "task group," or "team," you want to foster a process of collaboration and conversation. Depending on the size of your congregation and the interest and talents of its members, a team of three to seven members can become co-inquirers. Your group divides up the workload, meets together to plan the project, and reviews your progress.

Above all, you talk about what you are learning. For example, one member prepares an oral history with several people who have been congregational members the longest; another reads through all the parish newsletters; a third makes a trip to the denominational archives to review all the relevant official transactions and reports housed there; a fourth reads denominational histories; a fifth scours community periodicals to see what difference the congregation has made in the neighborhood.

You divide the labor because there is much to be done if the congregation's full story is to be told. But you also take time to talk to each other about what you are learning, because you know the importance of the cliché that one thing invariably leads to another.

A comment by an older member about a particular pastor's being too busy working to build a local high school, when she would have liked him to make more pastoral calls, gives the local newspaper reader something specific to look for. A paragraph in a denominational history about a now 75-year-old controversy over "unionism" can provide perspective on correspondence between a denominational official and a pastor over whether or not it was permissible for Lutheran and non-Lutheran Christians to share Holy Communion or even to pray together.