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

Telling the Story: The Audience

Second, storytellers know their audience. They know what this specific group is interested in, what moves them, what their hopes and fears are. As you prepare to write your congregational history, it is important that you consider your audience. Whom are you addressing? Whom do you seek to interest in this story? And why should they be interested?

There are several answers to the audience question. The most obvious answer is that you are writing for your congregation. This group, whether it has 150 or 2000 members, is your primary audience. How well do you know them? What interests them? How do they learn? What is the hook or the bait that you can use to draw them into your story?

But your congregation is not your only audience. People in your community, members of other congregations—within and beyond your denomination—can join the audience if you reach out to them when you tell the story. Your audience also includes those who come after this generation. Twenty-five or fifty years from now, your congregation might still be alive, and others will be trying to discover their story through a fresh probing of its history. Historians are trail makers for those who follow after. In what they write and in what they save for others to sort through in archives, they provide the raw materials for succeeding generations to fashion their story anew and to connect to something greater than themselves.

As odd as it sounds, historians also write for those who have gone before, for the dead as well as for the living and the not-yet-born. Part of keeping faith with the past is telling the story as if the dead—parents and grandparents, congregational founders and clergy, theologians and saints of the church—were listening in. In so doing, historians hold themselves accountable to those who told and lived the earlier stories on which ours depend. Addressing the dead keeps us from losing the longer and broader plot lines of the ages in all the bustle of contemporary life. They provide perspective and reference points.

Envisioning your audience has several practical payoffs. First, it will help you determine the appropriate style and voice for the narrative you intend to write. Format, length of chapters, tone, and (to a certain extent) even the subject matter follow from the interests and needs of your audience. The sharper the profile you draw, the more likely you will be able to write for people who will want to read what you have labored to write.

Second, establishing an audience, which consists of more than just those who are currently on the scene, means that the way you will write recognizes that not everyone in your congregation knows all the things the insiders do. As soon as other generations and people outside the congregation enter your audience, you will find how much you take for granted about your story. When you write for those who do not know what "everybody knows," the book will be more intelligible for them, too.