Keeping the Story Going

The difference between a living story and a dead one is that people keep telling the one, while they forget the other. The Christian story, for example, stays alive through the process of telling and retelling. Jesus told stories to his disciples, often borrowing elements or making specific connections with the stories of the ancient Hebrews. Those stories, along with others told about Jesus, became part of a large oral tradition that spread throughout the ancient Roman world. Those stories, along with recollections about the earliest Christian communities, spread further in written form, in the gospels, epistles, and historical writings of the early church.

The ancient collection of stories was not the end of Christian storytelling and historical reconstruction, however. As new communities formed across centuries and continents, people gathered local legends and documents and passed them on—first orally and then in written form. Through the rising and falling of empires, in one ethnic region after another, in songs, poems, scholarly tomes, and sermons, through rare acts of martyrdom and countless acts of daily faithfulness, the story kept unfolding.

That rich heritage is the background that informs the work of the modem congregational historian. There is something about the Christian tradition that requires continued storytelling and makes our historical work necessary. That something is ultimately the character of the gospel itself that God acts in and through history to save humans. Again and again, we read in the Scriptures and in subsequent historical documents of the church how new generations experience freedom and come to new life when they hear the old stories of God's saving acts and then dare to live with trust that God is not finished.

For many reasons, some sacred and some secular, modem congregations do not see much significance in their own stories. They listen faithfully to the ancient stories of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Hosea and Gomer, or Jesus and Mary. They may even relish stories of Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, or Dorothy Day. But they seem to have little zeal for their own stories.

Part of this lack of interest in our own stories is the influence of the paradoxical American response to history noted earlier. But more is involved. There seems to be a modem suspicion that if God had anything to do with history, it was only in ancient times. The idea that the ministry of Pilgrim Lutheran Church in Indianapolis or St. Stephen's in the Bronx might be 21st-century sequels to the Acts of the Apostles seems absurd at worst, quaint at best. Our doubts about the significance of our own stories seem to testify to our desire to keep God free from guilt by association with people like us. In fact, we seem to doubt that God acts in a history that is as complex and as saturated with evil as the last century has been with world wars, totalitarianism, materialism, and injustice.

Yet the promise of the gospel assures us that God is hidden in the mundane, sinful, and broken communities of faith that we call congregations. The same God that our forebears in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures sometimes had such trouble finding in their own stories, but somehow dared to trust, is at work in our own.

The challenge facing our congregations is to find connections between the story of the Christian faith and the stories of our lives. At stake in the occasionally tedious and often arduous work of the congregational historian is the next link in the Christian tradition. If we fail to tell stories that forge those links, the tradition fragments, a living tradition becomes weak and ill.

To be sure, the stories that we tell will be partial, fragmentary, broken, fill of human failure. But as we retrace our steps, we have the chance to confront the deceptions and distortions, the fallenness in our past, in light of the greater grace that keeps the story going and gives historians the chance to recover something of value from the shards of the past.

The work of the congregational historian is part of making local culture. If we succeed in our efforts, we will give a new generation the raw material necessary for sustaining life. As we tell our congregation's stories, we help extend the story of the gospel a bit further. This story makes its way congregation by congregation, sometimes thrilling its hearers, sometimes disappointing them, but often inspiring them to revise their individual life stories in light of the Christian one, to add a chapter, to extend its reach.

For centuries, Lutherans have echoed their namesake by asking, "What does this mean?" That catechetical question is still the right one. We need to ask again what the commandments, creed, sacraments, and disciplines of the church mean for us. One way to do that is to ask what is really going on in the story of the place where we worship—the place where chief parts of the faith are tested once again. We need to find out what our own history—both its dark side and its brighter side—means. That is the vocation of the congregation historian.

Our purpose is to prepare a history that takes seriously who we really are and what we have really done. We are challenged to capture the latest installments and local versions of the Christian tradition's encounter with the world. And we intensify the encounter by stirring up the past once more and by giving people a new occasion to discover who they really are.

Grace Lutheran Church