(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: Places of Nurture

Not everyone will race for the Kentucky farm and try to mimic the life that is so dear to Wendell Berry. But his concern about local cultures is one that is becoming widely shared. Many, in small towns and in great cities, are looking for distinctive ways of life that can allow for genuine human flourishing. We seldom speak of our congregations as if they were in the local culture business. And we have to be careful that such talk not become justification for patterns of exclusiveness, racism, classism, or sexism.

But congregations truly provide alternative ways of life for the world. They are to be places of nurture for faithful disciples. What is needed is good, rich soil that can support the new life these congregations exist to serve. Probing a congregation's history becomes a process of stirring all that has gathered in one local bucket. lt is a form of composting. Probing history takes what many regard as the dead past and finds within it both raw materials for the present and signs of new life.

By strengthening one local culture through preparing a congregational history, you have the opportunity to do important cultivating and gardening. Strengthening the culture in your congregation and preparing it for a new generation is an act of creativity that allows members to mature to their full human stature. Thus, the work of the congregational historian is participation in the Creator's work, a life-giving act that prepares the ground so that new forms of human community may emerge.

It is this vocation that awaits you as you delve into a past that most will view as small and seemingly ordinary. But the very heritage that your congregation bears proclaims that it is in the small, ordinary places that God hides, that incarnation occurs, that grace is embedded.

Midwest church (c. 1950)