A Significant Composition Project

In 2008 it will be 50 years since our church was organized. In honor of that event, and at my request, the students in my composition class are compiling an account of the events surrounding the church's beginning and during the ensuing 50 years. All the students have family roots in this church or its offspring groups, so it is, in a way, their own history.

We've had eleven people in their 60's, 70's, and 80's come to our class in groups of two or three. All of them had the opportunity to answer questions or volunteer information. We've gathered and pored over records that people in the community have kept, looked through genealogy books, and Beachy church record books. We have distributed surveys, and made many phone calls. From this information we are making lists of births, deaths, baptisms, weddings, ordinations, church members, and voluntary service, education, and teaching involvements. Each decade will get its own narrative treatment. This kind of information has never been gathered in one place before.

Last week I saw my uncle Paul at the bank. He is a retired bishop and principal, and currently teaches a Bible class at the high school. "Do your students have any idea of the significance of the project they're working on?" he asked.

"I don't know," I answered. I'm still trying to figure out if he meant significance, as in enormity, or significance, as in importance. Right now, I suspect the first meaning is clearer to the students than the second. They've worked furiously to finish assignments in time. On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I allowed them to email me the narrative accounts after school hours. Midnight was the deadline. One of them apparently came in at 11:59, only I didn't see it till late the next day when the student followed up with a phone call and I found it in my junk file--sent there automatically because I'd never gotten an email from that person before.

Underlying my desire to expose my students to the experience of doing research from primary sources, and my desire to see them participate in a project that won't get lost permanently in some stack of old school assignments, is the wish to assist in forging connections between these students and the community that nurtures and supports them. I'm confident that this will happen in the course of uncovering truth and hearing people's stories.

Already they have heard the story of how the vision that eventually became Pilgrim Christian High School was born on the seat of a tractor in the heart of one who had listened to parents' concern for a safe place in which their children could receive a high school education. They've heard how intensely people treasured the privilege of having midweek services where lay people participated and learned. They've heard the story of how hard people worked fifty years ago to maintain respectful and warm relationships even when irreconcilable differences made them decide to go separate ways.

When the deadlines are past and the books have passed from the hands of their student creators into the hands of the audience, I hope these composition class lessons will have become life lessons, informing each student's choices and providing direction for lives lived purposefully, close to God and the people they are called to serve.

Composition is so much more than writing. It involves sorting through trivia for that which is significant. The significance of one detail must be linked to other significant details to create a picture of truth so compelling that no reader can ignore it. I'm asking a lot of my students, and can do so confidently, knowing that someday soon they will understand that what they're doing is significant, that is, important, because they will see its power to impact their own lives and the lives of others.