November 2014
Sharing Our Stories

Collecting Our Stories

This article is also available in Spanish aquí.   

Over the last several months, two people who have recently begun attending Church of the Advent have asked me how they might move more deeply into the life of the community. I have to admit I didn’t have a ready answer. They weren’t asking to be placed on a committee or to serve on the vestry. They wanted to move into our common life, that almost indefinable “something” that makes us unique.

Our adult forum has been reading a book on postmodern spirituality off and on over the last few years. The author is a friend of mine. In a previous life, he was a chaplain to an order of nuns. We invited him to come talk to us about his book, and about how we might define that “something” that our newcomers wanted to be part of. Not surprisingly, he suggested we write a rule of life that would embody our values and ways of relating. We asked him how to write that rule of life, and he told us to start by telling our stories, not our individual stories, but the shared stories of our life together as a community.

Every congregation has these stories. I’ve never forgotten the story a rector I worked for as a curate told me about a parish where he had served. Years before he arrived, the parish had flooded, and people remembered mucking out the undercroft. If you hadn’t lived through the flood, you were never really going to be a member of that congregation.

We began to collect our stories. There were stories of particularly meaningful deaths and funerals. There were the stories of the rector dismissed for sexual misconduct. There were stories of marriages of kids who had grown up in the parish, and of a widow and widower who met chopping green peppers for a salad for our monthly neighborhood senior ministry lunch. There was the story of the difficult decision the parish had made to become an Oasis congregation (in our diocese, the designation of congregations explicit in their welcome of gays and lesbians), and of the difficult conflict we had had with one gay couple who joined us for a while.

We have asked people new to our congregation to tell us what stories they have heard us tell; those stories we repeat to newcomers probably tell us a lot about who we hope we are. We’ve invited people who aren’t part of the adult forum to write the stories they remember and submit them to the parish newsletter. Over the next few months, the newsletter will run stories both from the adult forum and those submitted.

We are beginning to pour over those stories and ask what they have in common and what they reveal about us. We find as a congregation we value being able to support one another and get upset when people try to get through things on their own. We value living through significant moments together as a community, both moments in our individual lives and moments in our common life.

We have begun to discover that we connect our whole common life to our life together at the Eucharist. We offer the “stuff” of our lives, both individual and common, to God in the Eucharist, and that transformed “stuff” becomes the medium of God’s self revelation to us. We used to be able to pass the peace fairly quickly, but now it takes longer, because of the sense we have of needing to remember that common life before offering it. Surprisingly, this is quite explicit both in the stories we are telling in adult forum and in the submissions people are making to the newsletter.

We have begun to reflect on these stories using a Eucharistic framework: What do these stories reveal to us; how do they call us to intercede, to pray, to make that revelation clearer; how do we impede that revelation; what can we offer of our common life; and for what do we give thanks? This allows us to see those important moments of our life together as part of the ongoing story of God’s saving acts – the big story.

The next step will be to begin to write a rule of life emerging from these stories and our conversation. A simple example could be that we expect our members to let us know when they are living through significant moments in their lives, so we can walk through those times with them. We hope to gather as many members of the congregation as possible for a day-long retreat in the season of Advent (our nominal season) to reflect on these stories and begin crafting the rule or pattern that emerges from them.

Try This

In a group of four or five (or more, but not too large), tell your best memories of your life together as a congregation. Let each person in the group relate what they remember (or know) about that moment, and see if common themes emerge from the different stories.

Dan Handschy is rector of Episcopal Church of the Advent in Crestwood-St. Louis, Missouri. He also teaches Ethics as an adjunct professor at Eden Theological Seminary and serves as the dean and instructor of theology at the Episcopal School for Ministry in the Diocese of Missouri. “I enjoy the connection between teaching theology and practicing it in the parish ministry. Advent has taught me how to be a priest and how to do theology. There is still plenty to learn.”

Resources

  • Richard Valantasis (who lead our workshop) has a new book coming out in November called Dazzling Bodies. In it, he suggests a way of thinking about our stories.
  • So what happened here?” conversation on the importance of storytelling with Julie Lytle and Tom Brackett

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This article is part of the November 2014 Vestry Papers issue on Sharing Our Stories