(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: Trust and the Gospel

Most of the time when congregations talk about their history, the power of words will remain in the background, unnoticed because the stories do not challenge the community's endurance, self-esteem, self-understandings, or conventional wisdom. But you may encounter a controversial topic and your congregation—not only your committee—will need to prove that it is a trustworthy place where genuine differences can be faced, where failure and evil can be met without fear.

What does it take to build this kind of a congregational conversation? The first ingredient is basic trust that this group of people is, indeed, the kind of mundhaus that Luther envisioned, that it is a place where anything can be talked about because the gospel is there first. Some congregations, perhaps because of conflicts experienced recently, will not enter easily into such conversation.

Your history team, however, can provide a great service to your congregation by engaging congregational leaders in discussion about the need for conversation, as well as about barriers and ways to overcome them.

Second, people must learn how to embody that gospel in specific acts of care and hospitality. Congregations have distinctive repertoires of such acts. Yours might reach out to strangers by welcoming the homeless into your basement, feeding the hungry, making room for the bereaved at the potluck supper table.

Congregations also demonstrate hospitality by the way members listen to each other, by being open to the needs and hurts of others, by offering big and little acts of care. The way arguments at church meetings are handled, the approachability of the pastor for private conversation, the way different opinions are treated in the classroom, the character of worship services—these are indicators and molders of your congregation's trustworthiness.

As your history project develops, your congregation must become adept at clearing space for people to tell their stories—both the successes and the failures—with the confidence that both storytellers and their stories will be taken seriously. Your history team might want to select a facilitator who knows how to listen openly to honest conversation and how to help people express in a caring manner even the most deeply held opinions and convictions.

Conversations might be most productive if they are conducted in small groups. Your team also might establish a ground rule that members will not gossip outside of your meetings about what is said.

You want to encourage members to be open and honest, not divisive. All members need to be equipped with an openness to be changed by the conversation that develops, with a love for the truth and for those who are different from us.

When your congregational history team begins to create a conversation about your findings and quests, you have an opportunity to enrich your congregation's overall discourse. By scheduling times for members to talk about the congregation's past, you can encourage a special kind of conversation. As you share your findings and ask for people's responses, you can improve the congregation's memory. Members will tell stories about worship life and organizational patterns that show how things have changed over the years.

Your team can lift up countless forgotten or undervalued acts and experiences in the congregation's past and present life—instances of sacrificial care that changed lives, or times of rare courage by a member in her workplace or community, for example—and help members see that far more than they ever imagined has been going on in their lives.

Because congregations routinely fail to take account of all their caring and witnessing acts, they usually see only fragments of their larger story. Conversation about difficult times in the past can build your congregation's capacity to deal with current controversies by showing how the congregation faced those moments of truth—and faithfully survived. As your team hosts this set of conversations, its main task is helping your congregation to discover who it really is.