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

Your Congregation's Inner Life: Where to Look First

The place to start the search for your congregation's distinctive character or identity is so familiar and so contemporary that few will expect to find historians paying attention to it: Sunday morning worship. We normally expect historians to begin with the earliest evidence and then to work their way step by step to the present. But in this case, the inquiry begins with present practice and asks, "How did this come to be this way?"

Instead of approaching your regular worship service in a habitual manner, however, it is important that you come as if you were from another culture and that you pay attention to every detail. Suspend your familiarity with the routines and people. Try to see your congregation as if for the first time. (In fact, at this point in your work, you might want to ask your congregation's newest members for their impressions. You could even invite several people who are not members to visit and tell you what they see and experience.)

What will you see? People. But they are not just any group of people you might see at an airport, museum, or ball game. This is a particular group of people with a pattern of relations. Follow them, watching closely who they talk to and who they avoid. Eavesdrop on their conversations and pay attention to the topics discussed and language used.

Arrive early on Sunday morning and watch as they prepare a space and themselves for worship. Note how the individuals begin to become a congregation as they take their places in pews, the choir loft, or around the altar. Pay special attention to the objects that they use—both those that they bring with them into the worship space and those that are permanent fixtures. Listen to the kind of music that is played, the language that is spoken. Put all your senses to work. What peculiar tastes, smells, textures, sounds, and sights do you notice?

Every time we enter any setting, our senses process all the signals that come to us from the people, objects, and actions taking place. Most of the time that monitoring goes on automatically. We notice our noticing only when an unexpected, frightening, delightful, or unpleasant stimulus strikes us. The task here is to turn off the auto-pilot that guides you through most congregational encounters. You want to find out what is really going on when this congregation gathers.

In essence, this field trip into a congregation's inner life makes you, as the historian, a participant-observer, or what anthropologists call an "ethnographer." In this unusual role, you are above all a people watcher. By heightening your observer role, even though you normally participate, you have the opportunity to gather an amazing variety of clues about the identity of your congregation.

Bishop Nelson W. Trout, Trinity Lutheran Church, Montgomery, Alabama (1952)