If someone wanted to write your biography and include information about the church you grew up in or the churches you served in, where would your biographer turn for input? How could your biographer learn how your church reacted to economic ups and downs, wars, local disasters, cultural changes, and religious controversies, and how its actions and attitudes affected you?

These questions motivated me while I was researching the history of my own church, Panama Baptist Church. Nestled among the rolling hills of beautiful Chautauqua County, N.Y., we are a modest church in a small village. But I also discovered our church is historic in some ways—it was the first church in the wilderness now referred to as Harmony Township. The church’s seventh pastor, Jeremiah C. Drake, was killed at Cold Harbor, Va., during the Civil War. More recently, James T. Jeremiah began his first pastorate at the Panama church on Oct. 2, 1936.

After all of my research, I wrote and published our story in A History of the Panama BaptistsA Church in Harmony, a 180-page book that is fully indexed and supplied with source notes, photographs, and tables.

Local church history is important.

I wonder, Does your church have a written history of its own? If not, perhaps it should. Of course, compiling facts and figures and turning them into readable prose for a handful of curious readers is hardly the reason to invest significant time and energy. But there are other reasons you might consider making the effort to write a credible history of your church.

For starters, a church doesn’t have to be large or even prominent to deserve a written history. If your church is a place where “the people still matter to God, and where God still shows up,” then likely it is a church whose history is well worth researching and writing about. (In fact, as I think of it now, if those two things are not true, then perhaps it is time to sell the property and distribute the proceeds!) A well-written history acts as the memory of a local church in the way it communicates in narrative form the truths and values that a local body of believers ought never to give up.

The purpose in recording a church’s history may be twofold: A church’s story must be passed on so present-day members are able to connect with it and then exercise the greatest care to remain in continuity with it. Both connection and continuity are important. Your church has been on a trajectory of sorts over the years. It’s at a certain place, and it’s going in a certain direction. A historian’s mission is to locate where the church is now (by giving its present position in historical context) and then to help point it in such a way as to be consistent with its past. By helping a church stay on that trajectory, the church historian helps the church know how to change without veering so far to the left or the right as to lose its Biblical and baptistic identity.

We could add a third purpose: to learn from the past. A well-worn maxim applies here: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana). If your church has a grand and glorious history, those who can remember it are blessed to repeat it. For example, James Jeremiah was engaged in off-campus outreach while in Panama long before this kind of outreach was “discovered” by church-growth gurus. So doing church the way we used to doesn’t mean having to do it wrong, nor does it necessarily make us irrelevant. Your church may end up doing things smarter—those old Baptists knew a thing or two.

Every work of history needs some . . . well . . . history.

To get started, a church historian needs information, and I mean lots of information. The church clerk could be a one-stop source. Old records are the mainstay of your work. For the really old books, I had to enlist the efforts of at least two other church members before one actually (a) knew the combination to the old floor safe and (b) knew how to open it. Oh, and a word to the wise: Afterwards, only pretend to lock the safe—so you can get back in when you need to.

Other sources abound as well. Older church members love to tell what they know, so the historian should schedule a series of personal interviews (being sure to call them “visits”) and request old photos. And e-mail is a great way to contact former pastors.

Annual reports, church directories, Sunday bulletins, and special-events programs exist mostly in hidden places, such as people’s homes. These tend to come your way once word leaks out about what you’re doing. Other written sources include national, state, and local associational books and pamphlets. You’ll want to contact area churches too. And by all means, don’t be afraid to call your local American Baptist affiliate—it can be a repository of old associational minutes. For that matter, get in touch with the Methodists and Presbyterians. “Back in the day,” we used to do things together. Local historical societies (publications and archives) and the town or village historian round out the list. Oh, and don’t forget the Internet; Google will become your next best friend.

“This will only hurt a little.”

Before getting into the real details of putting together a church history, it’s time for another maxim: “No pain, no gain.” First, your history project is going to take a lot of time. For our 180-page history, I logged well over 200 hours before I stopped keeping records.

As for formatting and laying out pages, it really helps to have ample experience with Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher, or to know someone who does. When using these applications, be sure to do frequent file saves as you’re writing. After each work session, you’ll need to make backup copies of your files on a flash drive or CD—because hard drives crash at the worst possible time.

For good ideas on formatting, just pull down a few of your favorite books. A page size of 6” x 9” is fairly standard and makes for an attractive final product. For the main body of each chapter, I used a 12-point Garamond font with 15-point spacing. You’ll want to mind things like margins and gutters, as well as headers and footers. Chapter breaks and a contents page are required elements. As you scan other books, notice how new chapters always start on an odd-numbered page, without the usual header text, and with the folio (page number) at the bottom.

An index adds tremendous value to any serious work of history, as do a bibliography and ample source notes. Microsoft Word is able to auto-generate an index for you, but if you wanted the word “music” to direct readers to a page that talks about “hymnody,” for example, you would have to take the time to build your index manually. In either case, be sure to check that the index lists the correct page numbers.

In the index, focus especially on people and place-names—these are what people want to look up. Appendices are a great way to gather random tables (e.g., lists of pastors, deacons, clerks) in one place. Pay attention to all the elements up front, too, such as title and dedicatory pages.

Of course, a publisher will be glad to do all the formatting for you, but it takes a lot more money, and you’re likely to be disappointed with the result. That’s because your own vision of what the book should look like and the publisher’s standard way of doing things won’t match.

Printers are picky people.

Print shop people are generally very nice, but they’re also particular about what you hand them, so find out first. If you’ve done your own page layout and formatting, you’ll need to create a PDF file so your text and pictures don’t shift all over the place on the printer’s end, ruining everything for which you’ve worked so hard. Free PDF generators are available on the Internet—I used a product called PrimoPDF, and it worked just great after I figured out how to make it go.

As for pictures, the printer will want you to convert your images from “RGB” to” CMYK.” This has to do with the way the print shop prints your book. Applications like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Draw handle this easily. To my dismay, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Paint could not do the conversion; but an old, old copy of Micrografx Picture Publisher did the trick. Save all pictures at a resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi) when sized for publication. As you insert them into your document, include captions.

The most important “picture” will be the cover or dust jacket. Again, view several of your favorite books for some great ideas, or snag a graphic designer in your circle of friends. The printer can tell you the required dimensions, including a certain amount of “bleed” around the edges for trimming. I recommend taking as much care to design the cover as you did to write the book. A great cover grabs a person’s attention and invites him or her to examine what’s inside. Use the back cover for a synopsis of what’s inside, and possibly something about yourself. People like to know “who says.” If you’re creating a dust jacket, you’ll also have the flaps to work with. Take advantage of that space as well—you won’t save any money by leaving the flaps blank.

Much more could be said about the physical layout of the book, but don’t be discouraged by your lack of expertise. The main thing is to start collecting material and to begin writing. The rest can be done at the end, and there are likely to be people in your church who can assist you with the details. If you’re working in Microsoft Word, feel free to drop me an e-mail. I would be happy to share with you all the Microsoft Word settings I used to produce an attractive 6” x 9” hardcover edition of A History of the Panama Baptists.

The rewards are well worth the effort.

I hope you’ve been encouraged to embark on a history project of your own. There are some vital and spiritual lessons to be gained by doing so. As lead pastor at Panama Baptist Church, I developed a connection with the former pastors that I never had before. To walk among the old headstones in Panama Union Cemetery, and to see the names of elders, clerks, deacons, and other faithful members etched on stone elicits a curious mix of melancholy and ecstasy. I walk in the train of giants, and I am truly humbled at the thought of all those saints who have passed on and gone up.

Now when I look across the street at the church edifice, I am reminded of where our church has been and, how gracious God has been to preserve a Baptist witness in our community over nearly two centuries. So start looking up your church’s history and writing about it. You’ll view your church differently—more charitably, for one thing, and more gratefully too. If you’re at all like me, you’ll find yourself worshiping as you write. And keep some tissues around—at times you’ll be writing through your tears.

Charles J. Colton is pastor of Panama Baptist Church, Panama, N.Y., and professor of organizational leadership at Davis College, Johnson City, N.Y. He is the author of several books and articles, including Core Christianity: The Tie That Binds.