Part of the task in doing theological reflection on placements is to hear the story of what has happened and is occuring. The latter is generally understood in terms of the former and the story selects usually the most propitious moments and slants for the current understanding of the church. And this gives rise to a danger:

The danger of a single story line in telling congregational history is that it presents a very flat perception of what the struggles were, who the people were that engaged those struggles, and what real values were brought to bear on difficult decision making. If we discipline ourselves to tell more complete and well rounded story lines that represent a variety of perspectives on what really happened we stand to learn better leadership lessons.

The trick may be to seek out the way the story might be told by leavers, marginalised or simply more alert or savvy members. Sometimes glimpses of alternative renderings can be heard in tangential tales from left-field which disclose events by the way of telling another story. Sometimes documents tell us things; attendance figures, confirmation registers … sometimes it is buildings where oddments of furnishings or fittings remain as ‘fossil’ testimony to another spin or a fuller story.

The value, sometimes, of first impressions is that they are not necessarily ‘contaminated’ by the dominant narrative. Sometimes first impressions pick up (something of) the main story by virtue of reading ‘correctly’ the cues in buildings and people’s demeanor.

via The Danger of a Single Storyline « Inside the Large Congregation.