A tissue of truths: The story-weaver

Ethos and mythos

First to emerge was the narrative dimension of a congregation, in contrast to its organizational identity; each faith-community had a distinct ethos and myth of its own. Their skilled priests had taken time to attend carefully to this culture and story before attempting to give the plot a twist of their own.

Gallagher and Newton, Schwartz, Ward, Chambers, Warren, Revell and Wilson et al. demonstrate how a coherent internal congregational identity, inhabited and owned by its members, is essential to the healthy functioning of the church community. ³ Ammerman et al. describe the richness of a congregational ethos in terms of its social context, unique culture, dynamic processes, resources and leadership. ⁴ All these dimensions were evident in interviews with my 103 participants, diocesan data, organizational and publicity documents, websites and observed public worship. From such rich data there emerged a strong collective identity or myth in each congregation. These are the communal stories within which individual stories are situated, whether consonant with or at variance with them.

Criostal and Miriam, for example, expressed the shared congregational myth of St Saviour’s, in their account of joining it:

Criostal: Bear in mind this church was … before Noel ((the parish priest)) had arrived, so probably a couple of years before we had got there, had dwindled down to about twelve people. There was hardly anyone in church, so they knew they had to open their doors up. So there was almost like this … like this grounding of, ‘Hang on, are we just going to accept people in our door?’ So it wasn’t the [best …

Miriam: [It might, it might … I remember having a kind of conversation with Noel and saying that they’d been praying for mature Christians to come=

Criostal: =Yeah.=

Miriam: =to this church as well and then it seemed like ourselves moved into the area and then good friends of ours now; had just moved into the area. And there was like … there was a few of us who had just suddenly moved into the area and just happened to come along to St Saviour’s, sort of thing, at roughly the same time.

Interviewer: So you felt that you were part of something=

Criostal: [Yeah.

Miriam: [Yeah. And the second service we actually went to, Noel was telling us about his vision and we were, like, ‘Yes! That's great! Yeah, that's what we were thinking of.’

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

St Saviour Total Usual Sunday Attendance 2000–9

The trend supports the essential core of the myth, however; that this was a church in decline but to which God had called first Noel and then other key lay leaders to share in a ministry that was to renew and reinvigorate it. This was a deeply held conviction shared by many in the congregation that formed a powerfully motivational shared myth that expresses the deep truth of their purpose and calling, and it was communicated not only in private talk but also in the public discourse of sermon, prayer and prophecy. It has also informed the organization and structures of the church, leading to very high levels of lay leadership and participation.

Here, as in each of the other very different congregations, participants were able to articulate the essential character, culture and story of their faith-community in their own words, without using any formulaic ‘mission statement’. Their individual stories had become interwoven with an internalized congregational story inhabited, tended, developed, told and retold in many different ways by their priest.

Transformation

How had this happened? I was investigating the processes by which non-churchgoers become committed members of faith-communities. Although each story was unique, certain common factors emerged to do with why people try out a church in the first place, decide to stay and finally weave their life into the common life of the congregation. Within these factors, a few key experiences emerged as core concepts that clarify their function:

Some factors concern participants’ self-perception.

Organized in this way, the relationship of the transformative factors to one another can be illustrated by a Venn diagram, as in Figure 2. OPEN IN VIEWER

The arrows convey the process by which concepts and factors develop. For example, Richard experienced a challenge to his self-perception through a bereavement life-change event that raised questions of identity and existential contingency. A known person, the curate at St Saviour’s, invited him to a house group at his faith-community . He meets others, asks his questions and begins to hear teaching from Christian tradition. These answers cause him to begin to adjust his self-perception.

Moreover, the arrows denote not a single turn of the circle, but a continual cycle that, with each pass, reinforces a gradual process of transformation in the way in which the participants perceive their identity (see Fig. 3). OPEN IN VIEWER

Not every factor is active during any given pass of the cycle; indeed some represent the gradual strengthening of a prior but related factor: for example, in the faith-community , welcome enables social interaction which builds friendship. It was also clear that the amount of reinforcement necessary to achieve transformation of identity differs according to individual circumstances. Someone with no church background will need many more turns of the circle than a churchgoer who relocates from another church.

Conversion studies by Kraft, Toulis, Saunders, Hefner and Rambo identify some of the elements in this process but not, perhaps, the way in which the continually reinforcing cycle continues to embed the new Christian ever more firmly in their community, faith and transformed identity. ⁵

Priest, pastor, president

A number of cross-contextual features facilitate the operation of the transformative cycle, and it is here that the role of the priest, as she or he presides over, mediates and interweaves the stories of individuals, congregation and Scripture, becomes clear.

Significant life change

Gill and Finney identify the central role of significant life change as a common starting point for those who join churches. ⁶ My participants, with one exception, had experienced a profound hiatus in the narrative of their own life that raised questions about their self-perception. Such events create a dissonance between past and future identities, with the present being in flux and pregnant with possibility. Such tension cannot be endured for long, however, and aches for resolution. And it is not confined to crises: redundancy, bereavement or divorce, for example. Even something as natural, and desirable, as child birth or development appears to engender this quality of reflection about the capacity of the past self to cope adequately with future reality, and the unsettling reformulation of a self-image that can be projected into the future. Such events led to an openness to consider church attendance as a way of resolving this tension, but was realized only through certain qualities nurtured by the pastoral awareness of the priest.

The Other

Ashworth and Farthing, Francis and Richter, Chambers, Gill, Wakefield, and Finney demonstrate the vital role of known people in introducing neighbours, friends or family to churches, while Jackson and Fisher, Schwadel, Warren, Jackson, and Olson show the importance of welcome in the initial incorporation of new members into a congregation. ⁷ It was not enough for the priests in my study to offer pastoral care to those experiencing crisis or change. They had also developed a strong congregational culture of care for others that members had internalized and from which they operated instinctively, even outside the congregation. When church members encountered colleagues, neighbours, friends or family who had undergone significant life change, they invited them to a church service or group. When newcomers arrived at such services or groups, they made them welcome and quickly incorporated them into existing relationship networks.

Teaching and worship

Putnam and Campbell, Francis and Richter, Warren, Gill, Wakefield and Finney offer evidence of the importance of engagement with the Christian tradition through teaching and worship in forming and sustaining a new Christian identity. ⁸ In my study, the priests were described as being ‘fascinating’ as they taught the Christian faith in sermons, groups and classes, and as they made connections to the deep questions with which they were struggling. They usually provided some kind of small group where newcomers would feel accepted, in which their existential questions could be asked and taken seriously. Effective learning through listening, reading, dialogue and reflection formed and sustained the new values, priorities and ethical behaviour fundamental to a distinctive Christian identity. And, once initial questions were resolved, new questions of faith were continually raised and addressed.

The worship presided over by these priests was experienced as inspiring and it helped connect this changing perspective to a sense of God’s wonder and loving concern. Whether the worship is contemporary, ancient, liturgical, informal, certain, questing, evangelical, charismatic, catholic or liberal is seen as important now. But common to all as newcomers was that worship of whatever style took them beyond themselves and gave a sense of both the transcendence and immanence of God.

Relationships and responsibility

Putnam and Campbell, Francis and Richter, Schwartz, Warren, Cameron and Escott, Jackson, Revell, Gill, and Gerald Wilson et al. demonstrate the centrality of deepening relationships and the assumption of responsibility in completing and sustaining church belonging. ⁹

In these congregations, while not all priests were extrovert, all were spoken of as approachable, friendly, caring and good listeners. They modelled the importance of relationships with their key lay leaders and by a relaxed presence at many different kinds of social setting. Many participants found that small groups helped the process of deepening relationships, but informal friendships, social functions and task-oriented teams were also highly significant for forming new relationship networks. As time went by, attenders at services became members of a community, and often spoke of the church as having become their family.

Finally, participation was a vital dimension of the process of the transformation of an identity, first in small groups where both faith and friendship could grow, and then in taking on a particular role that gave the participants a deepened sense of significance and belonging within the community. The committed contribution of time and skills, and its recognition or appreciation by others, seemed to enhance these participants’ sense of significance and embed their new-found Christian identity more firmly. Even in the larger churches time was given for each newcomer’s story to become known and their abilities and enthusiasms discovered. Each one was actively invited to fulfil an appropriate role.

A tissue of truths: The story-weaver

Telling ‘the story of God’s love’ can be seen as limited to the function of preaching, pastoral care or mission. The priests of these congregations demonstrate how complex and skilled a calling this is. They not only craft the stories of Scripture and tradition well but also have the wisdom to immerse themselves in the unique backstory of their faith-community and the pastoral sensitivity to sit with the particular stories of individuals. And then they weave. They weave themselves, first, into all these stories and then weave, again and again, each story into the other, constantly making connections and enabling their faith-community to build a skein, a woven tissue of truths about their real identity and significance. They preside over a transforming cycle in which each person’s story is made sense of by the hermeneutic of the community and the faith; the myth of the community is enriched by each unique tale and shaped by the Christian story; the eternal narrative becomes incarnate and alive in the particularity of each person’s journey and in their common life.