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

Your Congregation's Public Profile: Uncovering Others' Stories

Following living members teaches us how to follow previous generations of members, whether they left through transfer, disaffection, or death. Although you can no longer wait on the doorstep to catch these past members, there are ways that their public impact can also be discovered. Most communities, for example, have local newspapers, and often these papers carry stories about the churches in the neighborhood. Often, local history societies and libraries will have materials or living resources that can help tell part of a congregation's public story.

Institutions that have had long relationships with a congregation can often be important sources of information. An orphanage founded by the congregation 50 years ago, the local council of churches, the YMCA or Rotary Club might have stories to tell if you ask about the congregation's past life and that of its members. Churchwide, regional, and synodical archives and seminaries often will have official records about the congregation that can illuminate portions of the congregation's past.

Pursuing the public side of a congregation's life could turn into an unending quest; when do you stop? Two factors help answer that question. The first is the limit of the sources at hand. In many cases you will find only a few older members whose memories can open up previous generations of the story. Only one or two diaries or scrapbooks will turn up in your committee's early inventory. The town newspapers might have burned in a fire or might have little information on your congregation. Historians constantly have to make do and work with what they have.

But even if resources are plentiful, a time will come in your research when basic patterns emerge. When people keep mentioning the same institutions or members, when a particular style of congregational engagement with its community, its denomination, and the larger world have become clear, then it might be time for you to turn to other parts of the historian's task.

The goal of this look outward is to capture the full evangelical reach of the congregation, to see how this group of people embodies its faith in the world. As you identify the ways members of your own congregation have acted collectively and individually, you probably will find that at times the congregation took stances that were quite at odds with the surrounding culture. Perhaps members boycotted a movie theater out of concern about the quality of its programming, or perhaps your congregation resisted a mass exodus to the suburbs and chose to stay in the city.

At other times your congregation might have been at the forefront of popular opinion, leading the way for a new school to be built or a new hospital to be founded. Then the congregation looks startlingly like its surrounding culture and seems to be part of the community's way of life.

Usually congregations are neither starkly opposed to their communities nor virtually identical with them. Instead, they simply do things that the community needs, often before anyone else does, but often in tandem with other members of the community. Many of the hospitals, libraries, universities, clubs, and civic organizations of our communities exist because a few members of a congregation saw some needs and organized people and resources to meet them.

But above all, you in your role as congregational historian need to watch for how your congregation cared for the "least of these." It is in the response to the homeless, the starving, the poor, the abused, the sick, and the dying that congregations most clearly reveal their character. In many cases, historians will find that the congregation has done far more to care for these people than they ever imagined.

But the record will most likely be mixed. At the same time that the congregation cared for some, it may have neglected others—either unintentionally or deliberately. A congregation's biases and blind spots, as well as its greatest compassion and faithfulness, often exist in close relation, signs of the presence of sin and grace.