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

Introduction: Questions of Identity

Questions of identity pervade the American culture. All of our religious and cultural institutions face such questions. We need to understand that our congregational attempts to answer identity questions will be saturated with this larger cultural burden. It is not just that congregations are struggling to define themselves. Members bring with them into a congregation's pews, boardrooms, and classes the identity questions of the voluntary associations they serve, the corporations they work for, the schools their children attend, and the local, regional, and national institutions to which they relate.

If there ever were a golden age when a congregation's members all came from identical backgrounds, held common theological understandings of the world, and shared ethnic and cultural values and ways of life, those days are gone. Congregations now teem with heritages. Higher education, specialized career paths, changing family patterns, and the increasing racial diversity of some communities have all contributed to the diversity of our congregations. The increasing tendency of Americans to migrate across denominational lines adds to the local color and confusion that now characterize so many congregations.

Congregations have become worlds of difference. Our congregations are becoming assemblies of individuals in search of their own answers to the "who are we?" question. As North America becomes multicultural, the challenges facing congregations only increase.

By clarifying their own identities, congregations might be able to help build the identities of their members, who can in turn strengthen many of the other institutions that join with us in a search for a clearer sense of who we are. Thus our congregational searches may have a larger public significance, and we need not view our attempts to probe our histories as merely "private affairs." They can be great gifts to our communities and culture.

Here an image from the work of Wendell Berry can help us. Berry—a Kentucky farmer who is also a nationally known poet, novelist, and essayist—writes movingly about the beauty and fragility of local ways of life. In one especially important essay, he describes "The Work of Making Local Culture." He likens our small towns and local communities to an old wooden bucket hung on a fence post. Most passersby never gave the bucket a second glance. But Berry took the time to look into the bucket. There he found the natural process of earth making going on. Leaves, twigs, and other debris from life were collecting in the bucket, decaying, and becoming black soil. Berry likens this process of turning the debris of life into the soil from which new life can spring to the work of our local communities, where memories of the past are gathered into a "communal compost pile" forming the basic material for new community life.

Berry's great concern is that our local communities are being overwhelmed by national, economic, technological, and other modem forces, which crush these local buckets. Our communities provide little soil from which distinctive and healthy ways of life can emerge.

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