Faith Works 11-21-2025

Faith Works 11-21-2025
Jeff Gill

A reflection on authority and abuse and our response
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For anyone who might be hurt by reading about abuse, the story I want to tell here does not get into any details, but certainly can evoke the circumstances around such events for some. It's not about abuse that happened to me; it's about how we've tried as a society to change how we respond to suspicions of abusive behavior over the last fifty years or so. Perhaps we're in a better place; I think so.

Just over forty years ago, I was 22 and in a position of responsibility at a summer camp. I would turn 23 just as the summer ends, heading back to college and with a growing sense I would enter seminary soon after graduation.

It would have been about this week in November, 42 years ago, I returned home from college to a surprising message. The chief executive of the organization which ran the summer camp, where I had been program director for three summers at that point, wanted me to call him.

In truth, I rarely talked to this person. There was a camp director over me on site, but as a full-time professional himself in this youth serving organization, he was out of camp more than present, but he reported to the chief, not me. I had seen him in person maybe half a dozen times, spoken less, called him never. We all knew he flew B-17s over Europe in World War II, and was a man of few words; we had spoken last in the middle of the previous summer.

He called me at camp after I fired a staff member for violating youth protection guidelines. This staffer was new to us, about my age, already in seminary, and our chaplain. He was seen bringing a young staffer into his cabin, was warned, and he did so a second time. I spoke to the camp director, as I had other concerns with this person. I was told the chief had personally asked we hire this staffer as chaplain, because the head of his seminary was a friend who had recommended him.

The next weekend, before the new week's worth of youth arrived, he was reported to me as having again violated the "two-deep" rule for adults and youth in his cabin. The camp director was off site; I got a senior member of staff to witness with me a conversation where the young man in question, the chaplain, admitted he had again violated a guideline he had been warned about previously, saying "but it was a minor infraction, I wanted to show him something." I told him he was fired, and to pack.

The camp director on returning was furious, and said I couldn't fire any staffer without his consent (though he had me do the firing every year because he didn't like doing it, which was an interesting learning experience). I explained what had happened; next I knew I was on the phone to the organization's CEO, who heard me out, grunted, told me to follow the camp director's instructions, and hung up.

As you've guessed, the chaplain violated the two-deep rule again before the week was out, and he was sent packing… but my boss said "the chief won't like it." However, that was the last I heard about it.

Until November. The chief picked up when I called. He told me his friend from the seminary had called him in tears; the young man I'd fired had been arrested for sexual abuse of a minor at his church. Apparently he called to apologize to his friend, my boss's boss. Who in turn now told me "I owe you an apology. I should have supported you from the start. I was wrong. Thank you for what you did."

We've come a long way in forty years. I hope.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows the children services number without looking it up. Tell him how you've dealt with hard situations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 11-14-2025

Faith Works 11-14-2025
Jeff Gill

When thankfulness becomes giving
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This is the time of year when many faith communities, and in truth many non-profits of all sorts, conduct some sort of campaign around stewardship and finances and invitations to give.

As a long-time parish pastor, I've seen many different approaches to this need to prepare and to plan as an institution, because if a faith community has a church building and staff who are compensated on any basis, you are an institution whether you like it or not.

Some congregations have a standard system they've used for years with pledge cards and promotional pieces in the bulletin, perhaps some special sermons in worship about stewardship or other speakers talking about their own experience with tithing as a spiritual discipline, and why they give.

Since most churches have already done theirs for the year by the time you read this, I'll take a risk here and offer my own ideas, which for the record, no church I've served has liked or adopted. So YMMV! (Your mileage may vary.)

I dislike pledge cards, or commitment cards, or estimate of giving cards. It brings up echoes of layaway and club dues and membership in the wrong sort of way. I love fall stewardship campaigns: as education campaigns. Tell your community here's what we intend to do, here's what it will cost. Use your finance team's time to research that, have good answers to it, and refine how to share it with the church community in multiple ways.

If you have a $300,000 projected budget, and a hundred giving units, then you're telling them the work of the church anticipates an average of $250 per month from each giver. Sure, some will give less, some will give more, but almost everyone thinks of themselves as above average. I've heard all the arguments for why a giving campaign should come first, and budget making second, but without getting into too much detail, I'm just not convinced.

I'm also on the fence about how much to talk about tithing. I talk about it, I preach on it, and I've served congregations where it was common conversation, and where it wasn't, and just as an opening comment: the number of tithers wasn't much different in either. The reality is 2-3% of income is common among U.S. Christians of all sorts, and 10% (however you calculate, pre- or post-taxes, another long discussion I'll skip for now) is a heavy lift. What I do eagerly talk about is proportional giving: see Luke 21.

Because at minimum, at bare minimum, people of faith should know a) how much they make, and b) how much they give. You'd be amazed to know how few people know their income. I. Am. Not. Kidding. You may know your biweekly take-home pay and not much else, which is a great way to end up in a hole.

Stewardship starts with clarity and honesty about what you make, what you spend, and what you give. Don't tell me you're a tither if you're unclear what's coming in. And for some, God's call puts much more than ten percent on the table. If you know your situation, and it's 2% and tight, making a firm commitment to 2.5% is something I would honor. You start there, and work up.

Local churches are struggling, and I honor their struggle. The costs of owning a property, grand or humble, and the expenses of staffing, even for part-time positions, are significantly higher than they were in the 1980s. Not just inflation, but there are costs of compliance & operations (starting with insurance!) which are a bigger percentage of church budgets than they once were. My prayer is that we support where we worship, and listen to those dealing with hard questions around finances. If our assumptions are rooted in how we've always done it, we might just be wrong.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's preached quite a few Consecration Sunday sermons. Tell him your views on stewardship at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 11-20-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 11-20-2025
Jeff Gill

On the reckoning of time
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With this winter, we move out of the lunar northern maximum, a point in visible astronomy which comes around every 18.6 years, thanks to the irregular orbit of the Moon around our lovely Earth.

This is only the second such cycle I have gotten to observe consciously, thanks to the work of professors Ray Hively and Robert Horn, who in the early 1980s published their results from having surveyed the Newark Earthworks in general, and the Octagon Earthworks in particular, with an eye to archaeoastronomy.

Brad Lepper, then site archaeologist, introduced me to their work in 1990, and when we sat down to figure out the cycle in relation to where we were, it turned out we'd just missed it. So we marked our calendars for 2004 when the monthly swing of the moonrises from north to south would start veering close to the lunar maximum again, peaking in 2006 then narrowing back to a minimum range in the fall of 2015; we and many others got to watch both. Now we're back in the maximums, the peak last March, but regular swings still close enough to the center line or "symmetry axis" of the Octagon's enclosures to be worth viewing, just a full moon's diameter or two away from the maximal alignment.

To view a third will require me to make it into my 80s. Not impossible, but getting old enough I want to enjoy the experience as much as I can now, and I have been. The public events at the Octagon Earthworks have maxed out the attendance limits given our logistical issues (as much to protect the site as for the safety of visitors after dark, but both play a role in capping the number allowed entry). Last fall and again this year we've had hundreds of people getting to view a moonrise as the Octagon is set up to emphasize, a total of a thousand witnesses by the time we reach the end of the year.
In some ways, the Octagon Earthworks remind me of a vast, horizontal astronomical clock. The pendulum is the line between the viewer, whether on the axis in the middle of the enclosure, or perhaps originally atop the Observatory Mound to the southwest, and the rise point of the moon. That "pendulum" swings back and forth, "ticks" the seconds, except the seconds are lunar months. Imagine a clock face laying flat, and not marking twelve hours, but 18.6 years.

Europe has some historic astronomical clocks in public squares, of great antiquity even if less than half the age of our earthworks. They contain multiple dials on them, one tracking the zodiac, another the seasons, another the days of the week, the day's time the largest dial and hands sweeping around. Cinderella's castle at Disney World has a suggestion of such a clock on the central tower, a reminder of how a central clock was once at the center of a community, like the timepieces on today's Courthouse towers.

I do hope to witness the silent tolling of this timepiece, the turning of this immense calendar, one more time. But my hope now is more to spend the time ahead helping to teach this story to others, passing along the wisdom we have and the questions that continue, now in relationship with the descendants of the builders here. They, and we, will continue our stewardship of these antiquities to generations still to come: which might well be a key element of why these were built. To communicate our understandings to generations yet unborn.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's enjoyed some nights at the Octagon when we didn't see a thing, but that's part of the story, too. Tell him what you look forward to at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 11-7-2025

Faith Works 11-7-2025
Jeff Gill

Anticipation at war with nostalgia
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We live in a consumer capitalist economy, designed to reward those who most effectively stimulate our desire to purchase things.

When we're hungry, this takes the form of how advertising and product placement and manufactured convenience causes us to make choices between ready to eat goods out in the marketplace, or items prepared for consumption at home. Why buy one burger rather than another? Some of it is habit, some of it is location, and today's acme of consumer capitalism can be found in loyalty programs, most recently translated as "in app" purchases.

Just to clarify, I'm largely a fan of capitalism and markets. That's a longer debate for another day if you favor socialism and centralized control. But my frustration, if that's the right word for a confused feeling of discontent, is around how poorly most of us stay awake, aware, and mindful of how consumerism works. It's not complicated, and it's easy to resist, but most of us let it blow us around and be nudged in directions not in our longer term best interests.

As my doctor likes to remind me, because he's a very good doctor, I can make purchases in advance of my hungers that are better for me than the ones I make out of convenience, from impulse, which are often both more expensive and less healthy. But it takes intentionality.

Being a Christian minister I am thinking along these lines as I watch the Christmasification of absolutely everything, starting roughly fifteen minutes after trick-or-treating ended (or mid-September if you go by TV ads). Now, I am not wanting to be a Scrooge here. At home we could put out one of those self-declaration signs, but ours saying "In this house, we watch Hallmark Channel films all the year round, without judgment." You may or may not know that those fine folks have branched out into Spring themed movies, Summer as well, along with Hanukkah Hallmark stories, etc. But in July, you get a month of Christmas movies, and they pop up all year round . . . and we're here for it. Plus, other channels have launched to pick up an echo of that holiday two-hour neat package story vibe.

It's just that pushing all the Christmas-y stuff back into November a) obscures Thanksgiving and fall and apples and roast turkey and the rest of this month's pleasures, and b) continues to overwhelm the quiet ancient and proper understanding of the liturgical season of Christmas, which goes AFTER Dec. 25 to at least January 6 and Epiphany, the twelve days of Christmas you know, and on traditional worship calendars all the way to February 2 and Candlemas. The groundhog is a later addition to the cultural round.

Make Christmas LAST, I would plead, not start sooner. But that's where consumer capitalism kicks in. Anticipation can trigger more purchasing than even the mystic power of nostalgia, and for longer. You can start marketing decor and accents and plan-ahead gifts in August, for pity's sake, five months worth of sales. After? The energy isn't there.

I know I'm both shouting into the wind, and preaching to the choir, all at the same time. But I feel sad at how ruthlessly and thoroughly we see Christmas peeled back and tossed aside on Dec. 26, when in practice we should be just getting going on it. Some of the Christmas music stations have started carrying on into New Year's Eve, which is something; not long ago they switched back their format Christmas evening, as the stores all started putting up Valentine's decor.

Put up your lights as early as you want, friends, just don't be in such a hurry to take them down. Let's allow Christmas to last this year, even into next.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his practice is putting up the tree on St. Nicholas's Day and taking it down on Epiphany. Tell him how you make Christmas last at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 11-6-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 11-6-2025
Jeff Gill

Preparing for senior life situations
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One of many things my wife and I have learned over the last five or six years is just how many people are worried about elderly relatives, whether parents or grandparents or others they feel some level of responsibility for.

Seniors who are showing signs of fragility when it comes to driving, living alone, or just taking care of business generally, are nothing new to me. I entered parish ministry forty years ago, and such situations were among my first pastoral challenges. People would ask if I'd checked on Mary Alice or George, and it would turn out there were many reasons for concern, and few tools to use in response.

I've been part of at least a dozen "interventions" around the car keys, and some don't end well, despite the best efforts of adult children and close friends, let alone ministers who get called Judas for their troubles. There's no one map or path through this.

You may notice, especially if you're in this age bracket of feeling your years, yet being the active helper for those much older, that around November and December, there's a spike in TV ads about finding "help for Mom" sorts of services. There's a hard practical reason for that. You can kid yourself for months on the phone or in quick visits, but often the Thanksgiving dinner is where the kids see things they'd missed before. Lack of care, loss of memory, confusion on the basics. There are huddles on the porch, and conversations outside about what could be done, what might be offered.

Here's a few thoughts for those entering this anxious cohort. First, a parent or family member on their own still gets to make choices - even bad ones. Interventions are harder than you might realize. But: you can prepare without permission. There's no court hearing needed to allow you to start making preparations. Scout motto and all, you know.

For pity's sake, don't wait for a trip to the emergency department to start. That's when many people gear up, and there are some shocks to come if you don't start researching options sooner. Starting with the hard fact: senior or assisted living is not available on the day or even the week you need it. You will encounter waitlists, and the best facilities have months long ones.

You need to know what the options are in your area; Medicare has a good website to help you get started, but if you say "only three or four star facilities for my X" you need to look at the full range, because when it was a fall or hospitalization that took a person out of their house, it's the hospital that says when they leave, and not always back to the home. Sometimes what's available isn't what looks best on paper, and you will have to adapt.

Planning ahead isn't being pessimistic or mean (even if you might end up being told that, by the person in question if they realize you've done so). It's the difference between choosing and having choices made for you.

Hope is not a plan. Sean Grady, our county emergency management head, reminds me of this truism often. It ain't, either. Being ready and knowing what questions to ask is a gift, one that may not be appreciated in the moment it's needed, but you'll be glad you did.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been asking questions about senior care for what seems like forever, and now he is one. Tell him your solutions at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 10-31-2025

Faith Works 10-31-2025
Jeff Gill

It's the great mass cultural experience, Charlie Brown
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Almost sixty years ago, for nearly three generations, you could at the end of October assume a set of cultural references shared by everyone.

Not religion or church-going, not even football in Ohio or basketball in Indiana.

"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" aired in 1966, and became a yearly tradition (first on CBS, later ABC), much anticipated in days before VHS tape or digital media. If you missed it, that was it for the year, and few missed it.

What's hard to believe is that the whole program, credits included, is just twenty-five minutes long. Within that tight time frame, you have Lucy pulling away the football as Charlie Brown tries to kick it. There's Linus explaining to Sally the peculiar theology of the Great Pumpkin, rooted in sincerity as well as the pumpkin patch. We get trick-or-treating, and "I got a rock" not once, but three times. And the idea of a Hallowe'en party with bobbing for apples and kids costumes, not the first time anyone had seen one, but possibly an origin point for the explosion of such events into the festivals we see today from rec centers to High Streets.

And there is the incredible sequence woven in of Snoopy, the World War I fighting ace, shot down by the Red Baron, then making his way behind enemy lines, mournful train whistles in the distance, past ruined farmsteads and French signposts (all geographically accurate at Schulz's insistence) until our hero makes his way to… you know. That "smash cut" is still a vital memory of childhood for me, still delightfully jarring today.

I suspect most of you are remembering each of these scenes with me, in sight and sound, nodding along. Even the subtler elements, such as the usually flat, two-dimensional scenes shifting in Snoopy's fantasy (it is a fantasy, right?) to perspectives and deep background, blending into painted skies which evoke mixed memories with so many autumnal sunsets: it's all quite real to most of us.

We don't have this story, though, as a mass cultural experience anymore. That lament went up first with "A Charlie Brown Christmas" leaving public airwaves, and we've discussed the subject before. From holiday animated specials to MASH finales, the idea of anything being a common touchstone for over 50% of all of us is fading into the rear-view mirror. Many of us have seen "Great Pumpkin," but not everyone, and certainly not all children.

As much as the show is beloved for the reasons I shared above, what makes me want to keep putting this complicated yet simple story in front of children (of all ages) is the ending. The credits include a final closing sequence, but the ending to me is with Lucy and Linus.

Lucy, cranky, mischievous, cantankerous Lucy, wakes up at 4 am (do not ask where their parents are, that's a different universe anyhow), checks her blockhead brother's bed, and finds it empty. She makes a face, dons coat and scarf and hat, heading for the pumpkin patch. She finds the dozing Linus, shivering in the pre-dawn cold; sister walks brother back to the house still mostly asleep, and to his bed. She takes off his shoes, and covers him up. She still looks irritated, but she does all this, then back to bed herself.

Love. Cranky love, but it's still love. Not announced with trumpets or phalanxes of violins, just a simple quiet scene of caring, compassion, and love.

That's what Hallowe'en is all about, Charlie Brown. May you have a delightful one, whatever you do to mark the day.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he gets a chill every year when he hears that train whistle on Snoopy's journey. Tell him where you find love shown unexpectedly at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Coda: https://youtu.be/NIWh_YIRQuM

Faith Works 10-25-2025

Faith Works 10-25-2025
Jeff Gill

Saints have a foot in heaven
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All Saints Day in the Christian calendar arrives November 1, which is part of the story of how we ended up with the eve of All Saints, or All Hallows in an older English, being October 31.

But the core observance for the faithful is November the first, with the second marked as All Souls Day. This crossed the Atlantic and mixed with ancient Mexican traditions to give them, and us, the "Day of the Dead" which in much of central America is a multi-day observance centered in and around both churches and cemeteries.

Why both? Why a day for all the saints, and a day for all souls? Keep in mind that the declaration of a saint in the Catholic tradition is the church saying someone has displayed heroic virtue in some form, and has given proof that they are in heaven. This is why the process of sainthood involves the verification of miracles on earth as a sign of the honored person's presence with God.

All souls is exactly what it sounds like: all the honored dead. But without the assumption that just by being deceased they are in heaven. Some we might be pretty sure about, others we wonder "but who of us knows for sure?" And a few we're pretty certain went somewhere else entirely… diplomatically, we honor them all, everyone on All Souls Day.

If you are of a universalist frame of mind, a subject for a different column I'll just say now, you would have no problem saying all who have died are in God's presence, and one observance covers saints and sinners alike. But it wasn't that long ago that the general funerial assumption was we asked prayers for the repose of the soul of the dearly departed, and for God to welcome them into the heavenly habitations.

This has changed. The general expectation is that the presiding clergy or speakers fairly explicitly describe the deceased as being in heaven, now, assuredly: do not pass Go, do not collect $200 dollars (because you can't take it with you). More liturgical traditions will still hew to a more cautious line, if you listen closely and pay attention, but the idea is that it's not up to us to decide, or to say, who is or isn't in heaven.

I will admit I have done a few funerals where the deceased was, well, not unmourned, but whose antisocial and unpleasant qualities made most in attendance uneasy when it came time to hear the funeral message. This is where the more cautious approach, if not a more liturgical formula for funerals, can benefit one and all by putting the emphasis where I would say it belongs: no one gets into heaven without God doing the heavy lifting. (Was I talking about this last week?) There is an encouragement to all in attendance in being reminded that, now that all is said and done, the relationship is entirely between the departed, and the divine. God has them in care, and God has promised to be merciful.

Saints, whose number we should all aspire to joining, can skip the miracle requirement by dying as a witness (in Greek, martyr simply means witness) to their faith. Such martyrdom has proven itself; other lives of heroic virtue need a bit more validation. The noted Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor said of a character in one of her stories "She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick."

We mark the passing of those who have "gone on before" in most churches, in some form or another, around Nov. 1. It's wise to be careful about making just anyone a saint, an example to follow, but I think the historic church would concede there are many more saints in heaven than our mechanisms honor.

Whose lives have inspired your own? Who are your patron saints, official or informal?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still working on sainthood, but has hopes. Tell him who has inspired your hope of heaven at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 10-23-2025

Jeff Gill

Election Day endorsements
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We have an election coming up on Tuesday (naturally), November 4th.

Your polling places will be open from 6:30 am to 7:30 pm that day, with some of you using early voting in downtown Newark, or absentee voting which has to be turned in by mail that day or to the drop box off Courthouse Square by 7:30 as well.

Do I have endorsements for this primary election cycle, a year before the already discussed to the point of weariness midterm elections in 2026? Sure I do.

We have a number of county and local issues on the ballot, school boards and village councils and township trustees. There are complex matters on the slate, and some pretty straightforward questions.

My endorsements: I endorse talking to someone.

"You mean a candidate for office?" one asks. Well, sure, that's a great idea. Many eligible voters don't do that; I worry about how many haven't talked to anyone. I don't mean trading barbs on a comment thread or scrolling on your phone, I mean talk to someone. A person you respect, whose opinion is worth noting. Ask them what they think. It could be a spouse, it might even be your child, and who knows, someone might talk to their neighbor, but that's my endorsement. Talk to somebody about the election.

Another electoral endorsement: read something. It could be a candidate survey in the Sentinel, Advocate, or Dispatch, on paper or online. You may find a candidate webpage or public profile, and while it's easy to say they're crafted to win the election, these platforms or pitches are information. Read them skeptically? Sure, I assume most of you read my columns skeptically, and that's how it should be. But take in some information from a coherent, solid source; read an account where you can, versus a hot take in a social media blip.

What I would also endorse: think about it. Yes, you may know who you are voting for already. Turn those choices over in your mind a bit. Take a walk, mull it over for a minute or two. Sometimes people vote against certain candidates as much as they vote for another. That's part of how the process works.

In my neck of the woods, I have the interesting advantage of knowing most of the people I have to consider on my ballot. Truthfully, I could give you at least one reason to vote for, and one to not vote, for each of them. Hey, they're people. As Madison said in Federalist Paper Number 51, "if men were angels, no government would be necessary." We ain't choosing between angels, or saints. Women and men are listed for us to pick from.

So to review my endorsements: talk to someone about the election (or more than one somebody, of course), read about the election's issues and candidate positions, and think about your vote. That pretty well sums it up. You could read the Federalist Papers, too; they're easy to find online, 85 of them, but you don't have to absorb the whole thing right now.

But you might want to give them all a look-see before next November…


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has many endorsements of people and priorities, not all of which you get to read here. Tell him your endorsements at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 10-14-2025

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Jeff Gill

Donald Trump can go to heaven
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President Trump said on his way to Israel he doesn't think he can get into heaven.

To the press section of his plane, high over the Atlantic, he said "I don't think there's anything that's gonna get me in heaven. I really don't. I think I'm not, maybe, heaven-bound."

He did not appear to me to be joking or sarcastic, but rather meditative: "I may be in heaven right now as we fly in Air Force One. I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to make heaven. But I've made life a lot better for a lot of people."

My observations here are meant purely in a pastoral mode. He has a number of clergy among his advisers, and perhaps some have tried to share a better witness to him on this, but since the President of the United States has said it, as a Christian minister I need to clarify: this is not how redemption and blessing and grace work.

With all due respect, I can hear in the portion quoted above, and his statements that follow, that he's focused on fairness and balance; he moves pretty directly to complaints about rigged elections making his work hard, and the usual accusations about his opposition's competence, that the process is crooked. He feels that he's been trying to do the right thing against a tilted playing field, against enemies who don't play fair.

President Trump openly expressed his doubt he could get into heaven because he clearly is skeptical he's been able to do enough to justify himself. Good enough, so far, except none of us is.

I have good news for President Trump, and anyone else wondering about rewards and outcomes, in this life and the next. God understands all of that about what we're up against, and why we often don't overcome our own limitations. The good news is that we don't have to achieve acceptance in God's sight, or earn our reward to be in God's presence. It's called grace, offered freely, and if we accept that freely given gift, the hard work is done. But it was never our work in the first place. Christians point to Jesus, and say "he paid it all." However you understand that, the point is that the ultimate story is not up to us. God has anticipated and provided for our weakness, even our failures, and sent someone to open the door for us that we can't get through on our own.

That's the hard thing about grace. God's grace isn't fair, and is not in any immediate sense, at least, balanced. Grace isn't fair Biblically. Look at Matthew 20, the parable of the workers in the vineyard. People still argue about whether it's "fair" for the workers hired at the end of the day to get the same reward as those who've been up in the trees working all day.

Likewise, we all have the same eternity ahead of us. Those who responded to God's grace eons ago; people who have been faithful all their lives, or who have a deathbed conversion. Fair isn't the point.

Similarly, rich or poor, in elective office or out, we all have the same 24 hours in each day. With wealth, you can make use of it differently, I'll grant you, with charter jets and limousines to save time, be productive during your time, but in essence, you still have the same 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours in any given day. We are utterly equal in that. The sun moves west, it sets, and nothing you or I can do will haul it backwards in its course.

Likewise, looking on into the fullness of God's divine providence, we have each of us the same eternity. The only way it's open in any way, objectively or subjectively, is at God's gracious initiative: and that opportunity is as available to you as it is to Donald Trump.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he trusts in Jesus to get him through all sorts of doors. Tell him where your hope is found at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 10-10-2025

Faith Works 10-10-2025
Jeff Gill

"Why go to church" - a question with many answers
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There are churches that are growing, and those that are closing, but if you've been reading this column a while, you know the net number of people attending worship services any given week is declining.

Worship style debates are such old hat I hate to even get close to the subject. I will freely admit: I am impatient with those who prefer traditional and liturgical orders of worship who enjoy taking the cheapest of cheap shots at contemporary worship, but I can get just as frustrated with supporters of contemporary Christian music and worship built around it who resist any criticism of it.

Suffice it to say: traditional worship can be rote, tedious, and borderline depressing, and contemporary worship has the capacity to be just as mechanical or vacant with admittedly newer words and chords. Both can be true. Holy Spirit infused worship I have experienced in ancient forms, and at gatherings around a central drum set and with excellent audio (and even a fog machine). God shows up in mysterious ways, at a variety of venues.

So let's just leave it to your preference as to music or responsive readings, and move to the question "why go to church?" Because obviously many people are answering that one in the negative.

We're used to the framing of this proposition being that of divine command. It still gets used, but much less often: the idea that God demands you be part of communal, corporate worship each week, and not doing so is itself sin, a violation of church law and eternal commandments. Few churches make weekly attendance a requirement in a spiritual or a practical sense. I am just old enough to recall a time when in many Protestant bodies, a person holding a church office (elder, deacon, trustee) who missed a few Sundays in a row would be removed from their position; in earlier generations, poor church attendance would be cause for removing a person from membership rolls in many traditions. Those days are, a few exceptions aside, well in the past. Today, people miss Sundays with great frequency, and with no sense on their part or others that they might lose standing of any sort, officially or individually.

Short of restoring a preaching tradition that tells people God will frown on their patchy attendance, what's to be said, let alone done? A minister could soundly castigate people for missing Sundays over anything short of a coma or out of town funeral, but in today's church environment, you could only expect people to ask us "why?"

We could look at some scriptural roots of why this expectation could be seen as a necessity; certain traditions can page through canon law to explain the internal justification for it. I'd just like to offer to a willing ear a few practical reasons for going to church, and keeping up with your attendance.

The most obvious is the parallel between the physical and spiritual. The body is a temple, and maintenance of your spiritual sinews is not as different from your digestive needs or keeping your body's muscles in tone. Working out, or eating healthy, "occasionally" or when you "feel like it" is a recipe for failure . . . and everyone knows it. Why would the workings of your spirit, the health of your soul, be any different? They are not. You need to work out your heart in stretching your compassion, building up your soul's endurance, strengthen your spirit for the long haul.

In reply to this approach, I often hear versions of "I do such things regularly, but on my own." Yeah, well. The reality is few personal disciplines done on one's own are maintained over the long haul. You need mentors and sponsors and saints and role models. You need a faith community to stay spiritually healthy all your life long.

In other words, you need to go to church.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he goes to church on vacation, too. Tell him how you keep fit spiritually speaking at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 10-9-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 10-9-2025
Jeff Gill

Haunted by both pasts and futures
___


October's lengthening nights are creeping back into our evenings.

Time change isn't until November, so we will keep sunsets on the other side of 6:30 pm, but as soon as we enter next month that will "fall back" to before 5:30 pm, and pass 5:00 pm by month's end.

We also tend to be more reflective this time of year. Winter and Christmas offer the happy distractions of celebration; right now we look forward to Hallowe'en with a mix of anticipation and dread. You know, ghosts and ghouls and all those giant skeletons they're selling at home repair stores.

Being haunted is right in line with the seasonal circumstances. It's a time we think of those who have gone, who've passed on, who have died, recently or long ago. I'm a cemetery visitor in part as a historian, because there are stories in stone you can pick up on that the internet might not help you find. Put them together, and you get insights into stories long buried, past tragedies, lasting sorrows.

You can also be haunted, in a very similar way, by the future. That's right, haunted by the future. There's quite a bit of it going around now, in fact. When we usually speak of hauntings, it's the half-seen, half-imagined outline of who or what once was, and how they are gone, but still exerting a pull on our hearts and minds. A ghost, in general terms.

We are haunted right now by half-seen, half-imagined shades of what we fear is yet to come. We can't know for sure, but there's a distinct image, even if daylight shines right through it, of what we anxiously anticipate.

Ghosts from our past dangle from leaf-stripped tree branches, howling with winds growing chill and sharp. Our future oriented ghosts sway around the angular extensions from a nest of cranes, seen north of the highway into Columbus; they wail with suggestions of farmland lost and old homes leveled for rows and rows of newer boxy houses.

These hauntings influence our hearts and minds like ghosts of the past, but they're even trickier because they have even less anchor in facts and markers and reality than typical ghosts. They're the ghoulish worries of what might be, projected out before the changes that are already with us, like elongated shadows in earlier evenings.

Practically speaking, change was coming to the Granville area well before anyone thought about computer chips being made here. We saw AEP and Bob Evans and Abercrombie & Fitch and the "Beauty Campus" all march towards Beech Road and cross it, heading for Mink Street.

We're haunted by the prospect of long, windowless buildings tromping across the landscape right up to the edge of Wildwood Park, and by visions of subdivisions without number spreading north and south of Rt. 16, reaching around the village in an unavoidable embrace. Ghosts of a future we fear.

We fear ghosts in part because we will die, ourselves, and others we love will too. So there's a dread and sorrow we pull in from the past into our present lives. Likewise, Granville is changing, will change… has changed, and will continue to change. Not changing is like not dying. It's not one of the options available.

So we need find ways to tease our fears, mock some of our more extreme worries, trick-or-treat door-to-door our way through a different approach to what's happening. Don't let ghosts of the future overshadow your today.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got his ghosts. Tell him what haunts you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 10-3-2025

Faith Works 10-3-2025
Jeff Gill

Communion is a meal which feeds the hungry
___


On the first Sunday of October, many Christian churches of a wide range of traditions will mark World Communion Sunday.

In the United States, World Communion Sunday marks 85 years going back to Oct. 6, 1940. The observance has Presbyterian roots, in a "Worldwide Communion Sunday" celebration within their fellowship going back to 1936. Presbyterian congregations may celebrate communion twice a year, quarterly, or in a few cases monthly; the goal was to have a certain day on which all Presbyterians across the United States knew fellow believers were also having communion.

Jesse Bader is a remarkable figure in American religious history who deserves to be better known than he is; a minister of my own religious tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which has communion in every weekly worship service, he was in 1939 working to promote evangelism through the Federal Council of Churches, a forerunner body of the National Council of Churches. Bader believed that evangelism and ecumenism were not in conflict, but could be complementary.

Bader recommended the Federal and also the World Council of Churches encourage the observance of a World Communion Sunday on the first Sunday of October, not to try and get churches to hold joint services, but simply to be mindful of how Christians were marking what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper down the street, around the corner, and around the world. While the World Council of Churches did not officially endorse the plan, the celebration of World Communion Sunday quickly spread well beyond the United States.

To the end of his life, when Bader died at 77 in 1963, he continued to promote the simple act of churches making sure to hold communion in their worship service on October's first Sunday, and to be aware that so many others were doing the same. Celebrating communion together is still a challenge for many Christian bodies, given internal rules around who can preside, and who can receive, but there is still a unity in the common practice which is essential, and that Bader believed supported evangelism in the widest possible sense.

Today it can be a date on the church calendar which is simply "how we've always done it," but the roots of the practice I believe are inspiring, and worth our extra attention and awareness. Traditions like my own Disciples of Christ, or in Methodism generally, believe communion is a "converting ordinance" and rightly open to all; other more liturgical traditions hold to a more closed table, restricting the reception of communion to members, while usually noting that they pray for the unity of all believers in God's good time.

So there are still quite a few churches where I can't walk right in and take communion on the first day I visit, but I respect their discipline and rigor within their own contexts. I think these differences make World Communion Sunday all the more meaningful, as each of our worship gatherings can imagine and hope for a wider unity, even as we hold to our own traditions within our four walls. That wider unity knows no walls, and points beyond our time to what is yet to come.

This, we do in remembrance of the one who calls us to break bread together, to pour out the cup, and in these simple, everyday acts of eating and drinking, to be in communion with each other, with Jesus, with God whose invitation is to all of us, to the table of fellowship, and of peace.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to communion on Sunday. Tell him how you commune with God at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 9-26-2025

Jeff Gill

How to consider the role of judgment
___



My mentor in seminary, Michael Kinnamon, liked to tell students the best dialogue takes place when we engage our opponents at their best, not at their worst.

For good or ill, I've since taken Michael's teaching to heart. Most people one disagrees with will say foolish and stupid things, and you can zoom in on those and make your retorts and responses all about their worst phrasing or framing. When you think about it, you can see where that's likely to end up.

The real art in constructive debate is to find the strongest, best case being made for the subject or viewpoint you're challenging, and go after that on level ground.

Obviously this can have political implications, but that's not where I want to go. Recently, Christianity Today had an extended essay about a theological perspective, what's generally called "penal substitutionary atonement" or PSA for short. Some say this isn't a perspective, it's simply the truth, Biblically speaking, about who God is and how redemption in Jesus Christ works.

However, not all Christians look at the saving role of Christ in the same way. All of Eastern Orthodoxy, for instance.

So the essayist approached the question in what I realized was an unusual way. He tried to assemble the best arguments both for and against, and compare them to each other. The strongest objections were raised from various angles, but without making assumptions about the mistakes or misunderstandings of the opposing side.

Reading this made me realize that so many discussions of PSA I've read over the years, both in published outlets and in recent years, online, have started with a boatload of assumptions, and pressed those about the bad faith or ignorance of those standing against the view proposed more than actually explaining why their understanding should prevail.

The heart of penal substitutionary atonement is a cluster of questions, or perhaps one big question, about the nature of God. And this essay reminded me that, at their best, proponents of PSA wish to give God the glory, to acknowledge the weight of God's power and presence over and against the place for our human choices. An evangelical, confessional perspective can run up against an unintentional elevation of our significance in the whole eternal drama of redemption. We can end up making our "yes" to God's intentions the key element in what Christians call salvation, and turn God into almost just an audience member of one, but with our acceptance and ourselves the central cast member on stage.

And one outcome of this sort of mischaracterization of God's role can be making the evangelistic decision the summit and conclusion and end of the drama of redemption, and eternity just a very long ovation in response to that act, an act on our part. PSA at its best puts God and eternity into proper perspective, and gives us a chance to see our choices as not the entire process, to understand our acceptance of God's free gift of love as part of a longer, ongoing journey in which God alone is in control.

At its worst? PSA can turn God into a particularly harsh judge on a very high bench, detached and even indifferent to the human condition and why we make the choices we do. Mind you, I said "at its worst." If you wish to debate PSA, just arguing against the legislative, punitive aspect of it might cause you to miss where there's something being said we need to hear.

We live in a time when judgment is freely offered all over the place. Thinking about how judgment is part of life in the largest sense of the meaning of our lives has a place, in any tradition. And to pivot just a bit, for any and all Jewish readers, blessings on your Yom Kippur which engages with much the same questions this week.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's done his share of judging in his life, and accepts that he could be judged for that. Tell him how you regard judgment in time & eternity at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.




https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/09/penal-substitutionary-atonement-debate-theology/

Notes from my Knapsack 9-25-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 9-25-2025
Jeff Gill

What a Long Strange Trip It's Been
___


My wife and I just took a long trip, for us, to the Pacific Northwest. It was a part of the country neither of us had ever been to, and had a number of personal connections that made it a much anticipated and memorable venture.

It was also too much. We jammed so much into the nine days we had, with a travel day on either end for eleven in total, that halfway through we had a serious conversation about what we could cut to give us a bit of a respite. Serious it was, but our decision was to press on, and we did.

I figured out how to navigate Puget Sound's ferry system, which we rode three times with our rental car, and that saved us some time, but the driving was still something else. For anyone considering that area, let me caution you that many of the popular locations (or ferries!) can fill up by 9 am, but it is common to have dense fog until 10 am, so driving in limited visibility is something you just have to get used to.

As I posted our pictures on social media, I heard from a number of friends variations on a perfectly fair question: are you out of your mind? We covered a ridiculous amount of ground both in vehicle and on foot. One could ask, why?

We have been thinking about that, in terms of planning future travel. The reality is we were both raised by fathers who never took all the vacation they technically had, and were uneasy about being away from work; our mothers were homemakers and thus never had time off. We can feel like we've come a ways from our upbringing, but still be constrained by it.

The truth is, with my wife recently retired and my work status complicated, but heading that way, we both never took all of our vacation time, either. On my spouse's official retirement she had a certain amount of unused vacation she could receive in compensation, but she still left double-digit days' worth of time on the table. In forty years, I took two full weeks covering three Sundays off precisely once, and it was a) arranged as a term of employment, b) with a year's warning to one and all that I'd be gone, and c) it was for a backpacking trip to Philmont Scout Ranch which some might not consider vacation in the first place (something about spending ten nights on the trail with fourteen youth and five other adults, but it was glorious). On the other hand, I often had to cope with congregational leaders who thought time I spent directing church camps or going to regional events was "personal time" and counted against vacation days. It was a factor we pushed back against, but it was always there.

Otherwise, we took lots of four and six day vacations when we thought we could afford to get away together. Data indicate we were fairly typical Americans in that respect. And we got habituated to packing as much experience we could into as few days as possible.

In retrospect, we both wish we'd taken more time off. It would have helped us, and I honestly believe it would have made us better employees, but the reality is our history and culture and institutions tend to push against taking vacations, and even at that our experience is mostly before the issue of online tools creating the "infinite workday" we're talking about now.

Meanwhile, we are working on how to change our own assumptions around work, even in retirement. It's definitely a work in progress, even in our sixties.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has some places he'd like to go he's never been. Tell him where you'd like to visit at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 9-19-2025
Jeff Gill

Standing in the surf as the tide rises
___


Earlier this summer, Charlie Kirk said on X: "When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it's important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It's going to be ok."

I remember being surprised by this. His reputation was more for provocation and challenge and defiance, but this recommendation was itself pretty solidly grounded. I clicked "like" and scrolled on. I'd like to say I made a mental note to check him out more thoroughly, but it was June 17th and if I did I never got around to it.

My wife and I were on vacation when the news came, tragic and shocking. We were about to make my first visit to the Pacific Ocean, and Charlie Kirk's death was on my mind as I stood in the waves, feeling the sand itself move under my feet as the tide was surging in. You can stand and watch breaking waves, one after the other, roaring in your ears and spraying your legs, for some time. It's a contemplative place, timeless and yet indicative of inexorable time passing, one wave after another. Plus the reality that with each stronger wave you could really tell the ground beneath you was not stable. And it was cold.

Walking back to the rental car, I worked to get the sand off my sandals before getting in, never a task done to completion. The grit and kelp was woven into the straps of my sandals, and stayed with me all the way back to our hotel. The news I'd heard, and the details of the assassination, were stuck in my thoughts as well. In part, I was sorry I had heard about it; self-pityingly, I wished I'd stuck to old pop music and anodyne entertainment, and not let my notifications pull me into the strong currents of daily news. Looking at iconic Haystack Rock, I was still mindful of a new widow and small children sure to ask when Daddy was coming home.

From Minnesota legislators shot at their own front doors to an Atlanta police officer killed trying to stop a shooter spraying a government building, all the way back to our summer vacation last year coming to a halt for a day with the attempt on President Trump's life, there's no way to look around and think this is too much, it's building and growing in ways we can't seem to control, and the world is feeling unstable under our feet. The knowledge that just as inexorably, the tide will go out just as it has come in, is not much of a comfort right now. Are we at a high tide, or is it still to come?

Which is where a number of people, all over the political . . . spectrum? Arc? Sphere? Two dimensions don't seem to do it these days. But all sorts of us recalled and pulled back up that June aside by Charlie Kirk himself, as a surge of political furor was washing up around our ankles, and no doubt his, since he was one to wade out deep into troubled waters. And we recall what he said:

"When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it's important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It's going to be ok."

I really can't improve on that. I promise to try, in coming weeks, but for now, I'd like to give Charlie Kirk the last word. "It's going to be ok."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has a variety of political opinions, most of which he doesn't preach about. Tell him how you stay in touch with real life at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 9-11-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 9-11-2025
Jeff Gill

Monuments larger than buildings
___


Over the summer months, I've thought many times as I would drive and walk past the Buxton Inn about what can be said of Orville and Audrey Orr.

They got in about a decade of retirement after 42 years of inn-keeping here on East Broadway. We lost them both, and their daughter Melanie, in just a few weeks' time over late May and the beginning of June. Today the Buxton awaits new ownership and many of us hope a new opening day, after over two centuries of operation. Orville and Audrey "only" took responsibility for the last four decades and change, but for most of us in Granville today, they are the only hosts their we ever knew.

I had the privilege of sharing a small piece of that experience with them, mostly Orville, during their last decade at the Buxton Inn. The convention and visitor's bureau had recruited me to serve as a "step on" guide for buses that were coming, a great many of them from Canada, to do local tours. The most common was to meet the tour bus at the Cherry Valley Hotel, and before the highway closed off Cherry Valley Road, we'd roll north, up to Newark-Granville Road, into the village past Bryn Du and the Granville Inn, turning up Pearl St. to the "back entrance" of Denison University, up and around Swasey Chapel and Beth Eden, down "The Drag" (oh it would be so much easier today!), to the Four Corners noting the historic stump, and back to park at the Buxton Inn where the busload would disembark for lunch.

Orville took over there, and depending on timing would walk them through, sometimes into the cellar and back up the narrow steps, and the deal was that I did the history, Orville did the ghosts. He loved the ghost stories, but he delighted in my assertions, thinly sourced, that Johnny Appleseed slept in the cellar when it was a livestock barn open to the rear courtyard in the years just after 1812. We agreed it couldn't be proven, but it was entirely likely.

Sometimes, the bus tours would be delayed, and we'd sit at the bar in the back or in the greenhouse and tell stories. Orville and Audrey had met at Bible college, he'd been a minister and she a music minister early in their marriage, then both teachers and he a principal. We'd talk about faith and education and ghosts and things past and things yet to come. He was always smiling, and I suspect his guests remembered him that way as well.

Perhaps their daughter Amy or some other family member has tried to do the math on how many guests they served over the years. Tens, even hundreds of thousands in sum, most of which saw either Audrey or Orville or both during their stay, let alone those who just came for a meal but wandered into the lobby and ended up talking to one or both.

The Orrs were the face of Granville to those thousands, carrying that image back to their homes, in Canada, across the United States, and not a few far beyond this continent. They represented us, and made us look good. I wonder now how many come to Granville because of a second- or third-hand sense of the hospitality we offer here, which is rooted in a visit someone made years ago to our place set apart.

Blessings on their memory, on Orville and Audrey and Melanie Orr, and the memories they made for so many of Granville as we hope to be at our very, very best.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he and Orville traded preacher stories, you can be sure. Tell him your memories of the Orrs at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 9-5-2025 & 9-12-2025

Faith Works 9-5-2025
Jeff Gill

Prayer and evangelism
___


One of the areas of pastoral care I think I'm worst at is teaching people how to pray.

Part of the problem may be that people are hoping for a simpler method than I am able to offer. They'd like a "30 days couch to 5K" kind of step by step program, and honestly I don't think there is such a thing.

People are different, and I really don't believe prayer is exactly the same for one person than another. Some of us pray better in motion than at rest, and I don't see anything in scripture to say that's a problem. Walking prayer has a long tradition in spirituality, and it's very different from having a chair and a cup of tea and quiet time with God in front of a window: which is a spiritual discipline I know has great value for some lovely people.

Prayer books, like the Anglican "Book of Common Prayer" going back to 1549 in England, have an honored place in many spiritual traditions. I do most frequently, I think, direct people to the Psalms in their Bibles; it's both hymnbook and prayer book, with a range of models for addressing God with one's heart and mind. Others strongly call for extemporaneous prayer as the most sincere, best form of personal prayer. I think those can be heartfelt, but I also know how "impromptu" prayers can turn into a familiar cycle of phrases and statements as unvarying as the pages of any old book.

One book I do often recommend, but not always (because people are different!), is a very slim volume called "Beginning to Pray." It was written in the 1970s in England by a Russian Orthodox archbishop, whose name is usually found in title and author listings as Anthony Bloom.

There's no method outlined, really, in "Beginning to Pray." Bloom tells stories about his journey to faith and spiritual practice, and the lessons come indirectly, inductively. His story is one of adventures only obliquely referenced as well, but he was a doctor before his ordination, serving in the French Resistance during World War II. He is familiar with tragedy and questions about God's purpose, even existence, which you'll also find I might add in the Psalms. But as a pastor and priest and bishop and finally a metropolitan in his tradition (something like a Catholic cardinal) he is still "Beginning to Pray."

I tried years ago to write a pamphlet for local church use modeled on this little book, an even shorter treatment I titled "Praying on Asphalt." But so much of prayer is like riding a bicycle; it's the kind of thing you learn by doing. You fall down a bit, there's no helping it, even with training wheels. And the real question becomes whether or not you get back up and try again after skinning a knee or scraping an elbow.

You don't need a teacher or coach or an archbishop to tell you that if your praying is just asking for stuff, you may not be approaching the whole matter in the right way. On the other hand, your relationship with a parent may not be all it can be if you just come to them when you need help, but that doesn't mean they don't still love you. They're just waiting for the relationship to develop and mature. That's pretty much what the Bible says God is thinking as we muddle along, calling only occasionally and perfunctorily when we need something.

All of which makes me think of evangelism, but we'll save that for another week.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still beginning to pray, too. Tell him what resources helped you learn to pray at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

===

[and for next week...]

===

Faith Works 9-12-2025
Jeff Gill

Twenty years of unbinding the gospel
___


We're coming up on twenty years since "Unbinding the Gospel" was published in 2006.

As is the case with research and analysis, which is at the heart of Martha Grace Reese's book, the data which is underneath "Unbinding the Gospel" is even older now, collected between 1999 and 2003. Martha Grace, or "Gay" as she's known to her friends, sat down and wrestled her data into the book on evangelism among mainline Christian churches over the next two years, calling and visiting in person when she could churches where the "e-word" was visibly, demonstrably being put into practice.

So as a friend and associate of Gay Reese, I know it was in 2005 she was putting the finishing touches on her study, a slim volume still very much in print. Evangelism is still interesting to many people, but intimidating. This book says it doesn't have to be.

Times have changed since 2005. We've had some overseas turmoil, domestic politics in an uproar, a global pandemic since then. But I think the fundamental insights of Gay's book still hold.

"Unbinding the Gospel" is not a cookbook with a simple set of steps for every church to follow. It's more a description of how some outstanding restaurants's finished products looked and tasted, with a look into the back of the house as to how the dishes were prepared and served.

One of the reactions — even strong reactions — we got as Gay Reese organized a group of us to help field test and roll out the process loosely described in the book, from church leaders in multiple denominations, was incredulity that there wasn't more of a step-by-step process outlined. The book, and some supporting volumes that came out in the next few years after 2006, offers a series of exercises out of which each congregation would develop its own unique approach to sharing the good news, the Gospel, with others in their area.

As I said last week about books on prayer, that's not a subject that really supports an approach like "30 days from couch to 5K" but that's what people are used to looking for. Give me a methodical model which will work for me like it does for almost anyone else. Judicatory heads, regional ministers, district superintendents, synod bishops, executive presbyters: they wanted a clear consistent model with predictable outcomes.

What Gay's research showed us, drawn mostly from a few hundred congregations out of some 30,000 in the initial data set, those who had shown the fruit, the outcomes of evangelism in their settings, was three characteristics they had in common. It wasn't just that they were new church plants, or of a single generational or ethnic cohort, or any of the other usual assumptions about evangelistically effective churches.

Three elements the evangelism-centered congregations had in common: a lively sense of the presence of God, a deep knowledge within the church of each other's faith stories, and prayer was a profound and persistent element of all they did. That's it. Those three things. Presence, personal faith stories, and prayer. And note: that's not about telling strangers your faith story. It was the context of how sharing faith stories within the fellowship was the apparent engine, the driver of how invitation and inclusion became norms for the evangelistically effective churches.

You can practice these things; I'm not sure you can teach them, exactly. This is why Anthony Bloom's thin volume, and Gay Reese's little book, both come to mind together for me. Like riding a bike, or sailing a boat, you really have to be willing to just jump on, jump in, and do it. Teaching just tells you in advance which rope to pull on, and that you'll inevitably end up overboard a few times.

But once you get moving, you'll be glad you did.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad he read both of these books. Tell him what's inspired you recently at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 at Threads or Bluesky.


Sociological study used for the book:

http://unbindingthegospel.com/documents/Wenger%20Reese%20Survey%20Report.pdf

Faith Works 8-29-2025

Faith Works 8-29-2025
Jeff Gill

Do you have a calling?
___


With Labor Day weekend, it's common for preachers to talk about vocation, which from the Latin is literally "calling," or how God speaks to us about what it is we are to do.

Some of us are still working on that one.

I'll be honest: I worry about how to talk to younger people about callings and vocations and God's best counsel for how to live your life. Believe it or not, my own vocation is not to be a contrarian, but often I feel like one. Or at least I wonder how what I want to say is being heard when there's loud voices speaking up for a different view, one I know anyone I'm speaking to or corresponding with is going to hear.

Writing is certainly one vocation that's spoken to me, but I've had many people ask me how to make a living at it, and my most common opening response is "you likely will not."

Quickly I would add: can you find outlets for your writing? Yes. Can you get paid for writing? Yes, for certain kinds in certain circumstances (and we will NOT be talking about how AI writes workaday prose at the drop of a return key, not today, but let that rest as a place marker for later).

Can writing be your calling? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Oh, so you can make a living at writing? This is where it gets sticky.

Karen Swallow Prior is a writer I've respected for years; she would probably like to note she's made her living as a professor. Keep that in mind, for sure. She has just come out with a book titled "You Have a Calling" which is short, small, pocketable, and a good gift to anyone of I would say any age wrestling with God and the question "what should I do when I grow up?" Full disclosure: I bought my own copy of the book, have given it away twice even before I got around to writing this review-ish column.

Karen points out that much of our contemporary love of saying things like "do what you love, the money will follow" or "follow your passion" has the awkward side effect of dismissing the experiences of centuries of faithful Christians — she writes, as do I, from that perspective — who none of them had the chance to look for work that was personally rewarding. They had to weed the rutabagas, churn the butter, and chase goats around the farmstead.

I feel a similar concern with the wider tone taken towards people looking at the workplace who hear advice to "do what you love." That's just not always possible, and it can feel denigrating to people who really don't have any choice. Maybe the clerk at checkout loves their view from the register and interacting with people all day, but many of them are paying the bills as best they can.

What you CAN do, though, is work hard to make space for doing, well, what you love. It may not be all that you do, it is very likely not to pay all the household bills, but you can almost certainly find a place in your life to do what you love even if in part, as a volunteer, as an amateur.

We live in an era of increasing professionalization of full time jobs, which I think exists even more awkwardly with "follow your passion." But you can ask yourself to be honest about your calling, where you feel most strongly led, and how you are making a life, which is the calling to which we all are led.

"You Have a Calling" opens this question up well in about 130 pages; if you try the book and have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear from you.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still growing up, too. Tell him what you wanted to be when you grew up, and how that's changed, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 8-28-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 8-28-2025
Jeff Gill

Summer's end, and new beginnings
___


Summer is over.

Many cultures, including indigenous ones to North America, consider the crossquarter -- midway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox -- to be the marker for the seasons. It was August 7th this year. Harvest time is already beginning, and will continue through the end of October.

Summer, to me, is a necklace with a string of occasional beads: there's the end of school & commencements, Memorial Day, Newark's Strawberry Festival, Cub Scout Day Camp, Granville's Fourth of July Street Fair, usually a quick vacation wedged in, either way trips to the Ohio State Fair and in the last five years the Indiana State Fair, all closing with the Hartford Fair.

With the last day of the fair, and the harness races which have been part of the state and county fairs since the mid-1800s, summer concludes. Some school districts have already started; high school band camps and athletic workouts ratcheted up to full practice weeks with Aug. 1, and the high school and college football seasons start before this month ends.

Summer is over, and a few moments of reflection around where we didn't go, what didn't get done, what needs to happen next spring before summer comes again. Many memories to sift, some muddled with similar summer events that occur and reoccur, like those harness races, all different, all the same.

There is a marvelous old engraving of the Great Circle Earthwork, on the boundary of Newark and Heath, which was from 1853 to 1933 the Licking County Agricultural Society's fairgrounds. The LCAS going bankrupt with the Great Depression is part of how that property stopped being a fairground, and turned into a park, now operated by the Ohio History Connection.

But for some eighty years it was a fairground and also within that period, an amusement park. In all seasons, there was also a racetrack within the ancient enclosure, mostly for harness racing, which you see in the Nineteenth Century engraving.

Then you go out to the Hartford Independent Fair and see horses and one-rider contraptions that could be riding right out of that old picture. In the midst of great change, there are things that have not. We still have a fair, we just share it with Knox and part of Delaware Counties; the horses have their lineages that race fans follow avidly, with today's trotters carrying the tradition on around the track. It's something I've never bet on, but I wouldn't miss it. Plus, I like to go to the last day of the Hartford Fair, because it brings the summer, for me, to a close.

We see there people we haven't run into for a year, unique to that setting; I also encounter there people I mostly know from other locations, but fairs and activities bring us together for that moment of "oh, right, you — hello!" We eat foods we may not consume again for another eleven months or so, but we'll pursue sweet corn as long as we can into August.

Summer's end, and fall's beginning. This, to me, is the true new year season, the time in August & September when the world truly seems to re-set. January? Eh. Champagne if you must. But as the last bugle "call to post" plays, I'm ready for a fresh start, as the crops come in, and the leaves turn.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready for autumn, if not the autumnal equinox. Tell him how you prepare for September at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 8-22-2025

Faith Works 8-22-2025
Jeff Gill

A journey with few familiar landmarks
___


My sister and I spent some good time with our mother this past week. I was in and out a couple of times during the day, tending to some of the practical matters of having a family member in a memory care facility.

We are past the point where I worry about her seeing me walk past and recognizing me. Unless I walk directly up to her and announce who I am, she's not going to see me.

Mom is one of the more verbal, and social individuals among the forty or so residents of the place where she now lives. Verbal as in she talks, but even when you own a copy of the guidebook, what she says doesn't track well. There are broken signposts of familiar stories which still stick up from her monologues, but we're past the point where you can gently nudge or fill in a story to get her back onto solid ground.

When we come in and address her, she will still recognize us with a clear prompt as to who we are, up to a point. She will launch into a story whose fragments are related to one of us, and if we point that out, she laughs and says "no, no, not you, one of the original boys." Free gift: if you need a band name, "The Original Boys" is available.

She used to like it when one of us would get out a phone to take a picture; now, she just can't make sense of what we're doing, so it's catch as catch can if we get her looking. And the incomprehension continues to spread in weird & sometimes awful ways… but she is consistently, almost always, unreservedly happy. Griefs & grudges that used to consume her are gone. This is a blessing.

I'm not making the best of a bad situation here, I'm quite serious. To see my mother as happy as she's been over the last few months has been a surprise I did not expect, as much as I've been familiar as a minister over the years with convalescent homes and memory units and Alzheimer's as it erodes away memory and personality.

Memory loss means she generally doesn't know who I am, but she's if anything even happier to see me. There are things she used to talk about to our frustration, burdens and sorrows which I would have loved to have taken from her, but she had a long-standing tendency to pick back up whenever she could one of those jagged rocks, and would pitch it into whatever conversation we were having.

They're gone. She's not bothered by them anymore. They've been left behind. There's still a shadow of those past events that shows up at times, because they're such a part of her life that as long as there's still anything left of her, we'll hear a mention of them, but they don't dominate the conversation.

She's happy to tell you her stories, and her pleasure in doing so is more obvious for the shadows that are gone. The fact that her stories don't make much sense anymore? That's a trade I'm surprised to be happy to make. What have we wanted for her, after all, except that she could be happy: and now she is. It doesn't quite look like what we might have imagined, but that's where she's still a unique individual, even if without some of the memories we assumed had to be there for her to be her.

There are blessings on this journey, you just have to make sure to look closely for them. They can be hard to miss, but they're there. And those blessings make me wonder what I need to be forgetting, of my own free will. It might be a good thing to remember, this forgetting.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's aware that forgetting might be a better way to remember some things. Tell him what you've forgotten at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky. 

Faith Works 8-15-2025

Faith Works 8-15-2025
Jeff Gill

How to see beyond your horizon
___


What do we see when we look at the horizon from a comfortable place?

It's a distant spot that we may visit, but it can remain just barely in sight for quite a while if we aren't moving. Especially if we have no reason to move.

That point looks a little different if we're already in motion. It might be the perspective focus up ahead where the sides of the road and the telephone poles alongside all come together and meet where earth and sky converge. We watch it, because we'll be there soon.

Off to the sides, we might look around, especially if we're coming up to an intersection; our driver's ed teacher is in our heads reminding us to check the mirrors to look back, and see who's coming up behind.

But if we're on a pleasant porch, with a wide view around, and heat shimmering up the hills, the horizon is something that's just part of the surroundings.

One of the things Rev. Dr. Lee H. Butler Jr. made me think about at a conference I recently attended was how getting too comfortable in a particular spot can be a form of narcissism.

There could be discomfort or sorrow or tragedy over the horizon, or even around the corner from us, but if we can't see it, there's a human tendency (dare we call it sin?) to assume if we're fine, so is everyone else. And that if we're satisfied in a particular place, then that's where we're supposed to be.

For churches, the comfort and security of our faith perspective is something that can be very appealing. Folks come to worship to draw on those reserves of settledness, to borrow a cup of confidence, to find a solid rock on which to stand. That's true for individuals and families looking to a future that's coming at them fast, hoping a faith community perspective can help them know they're in the right place, or moving in the right direction.

Theological narcissism is a warning Dr. Butler offered to us as church leaders. He was talking about our assumptions about ourselves as being on the right path when a quick look around would tell us we might be on the wrong path. His cautions reminded me of my own religious tradition's Preston Taylor, an African American preacher and leader in the late 1800s & early 1900s who said in 1917 "…if the white brother can include in his religious theory and practice the colored people as real brothers, he will have avoided the heresy of all heresies."

You might say you can think of worse heresies, and that would be an interesting discussion for us to have. But increasingly I see his point, focused through the warnings of "theological narcissism" Dr. Butler shared: when we see other people as lesser in God's sight, or of lesser value among humanity, based on any external or incidental quality you can think of, skin color included, you've bent the needle on the compass of your theology to where it won't get you anywhere accurately.

Much of the church in America today has been sitting in a comfortable place, not really noticing where we're going, and we've been in a moving vehicle, not on a pleasant veranda. Suddenly, we look up and the neighborhood looks different, the people are unfamiliar, and we're not sure where we go from here.

The next step is to get off the wagon and look honestly at ourselves and where we are. And realize, for most of us, we're right where God wants us to be. Now what? Maybe the direction we need to go is to be more fully where we are, as life is, to the people we can reach right here.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's on a journey himself. Tell him where you're going at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 8-14-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 8-14-2025
Jeff Gill

Shifting silt and scenes sliding astray
___


If you haven't heard of the Sultana, it's not because Doug Stout, and Dan Fleming, and Chris Evans, and a number of us local historians haven't tried to let you know about it.

On April 27, 1865, after the Civil War was generally over, and as the nation's attention was focused on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and his funeral procession heading for Springfield, Illinois had only made it to Cleveland, Ohio — on that date, a side-wheel steamboat on the Mississippi River, built for a maximum 376 passengers, was carrying at least 2,100 soldiers, most of them recently released from Confederate captivity. 

Seven miles north of Memphis its steam boilers exploded, ultimately killing over 1,800 passengers, by either searing steam in the initial blast, or by way of the still frigid springtime waters of the mighty river, to this day the worst maritime disaster in the United States.

The Titanic sinking in 1912, some 47 years later, killed about 1,500. The steamboat Sultana's sinking killed 20% more people, but it was a footnote at the end of the Civil War's carnage. With something at or over 620,000 deaths North and South, about 2% of the nation's population, another 1,800 dead in the wake of Lincoln's death just didn't get too many headlines.

The released prisoners who filled the Sultana's decks were mostly Midwesterners, a majority of them from Ohio. They had been held in Cahaba prison outside of Selma, Alabama, and the even more notorious Andersonville prison camp near Atlanta, Georgia. These Union prisoners had been brought to a transfer camp outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi for release to their homes. The federal government was offering $2.75 per enlisted man and $8 per officer to steamboats who would take them north, so steamboats were interested in loading up as many released prisoners as possible.

We're sure of William Albert Norris in Granville's Maple Grove Cemetery, and of Daniel Lugenbeal in Perryton Cemetery, as Licking County survivors of the Sultana disaster. How many Licking Countians died in the waters of the Mississippi on the dark night of April 27, 1865?

Mansfield, Ohio has a Sultana marker saluting some 73 residents of that city who died on the Sultana, and Richland County claims 101 citizens who did not make it home due to the disaster. Licking County is not so clear, but even if behind the Mansfield area, it probably wasn't too far off.

Marion, Arkansas has a new Sultana Disaster Museum. East of that town, you can meander down gravel roads to the levee today, alongside of the Mississippi. Even now, the site of where the burnt wreckage of the Sultana came to rest is in a backwater, a bayou, an oxbow of the Mississippi River far to the east. The channel of the Mississippi River in 1865 is today a side stream, a western addition to the larger main channel. The site of the explosion of the over-loaded boilers was miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, and the last resting place of the wreckage is now on the Arkansas side of the river, located in 1982 near the complex historic location of Mound City, Arkansas.

Not all history can be solidly located. But it is interesting to look to curving streams and bent bottomlands, and think about the impact in history of those deaths, and that ending atop the Civil War's ending, as we continue to seek that elusive thing called closure.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad he went to the Sultana wreck site, even if he couldn't really see it. Tell him about obscure successes you've known at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 8-8-2025

Faith Works 8-8-2025
Jeff Gill

When the Bible Belt comes unbuckled
___


"Is this a no-sin zone?"

That was the question Rev. Dr. Lee H. Butler Jr. asked at a conference I just attended in Memphis, in the shadow of the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid, next to the American Nile.

Dr. Butler is a seminary president, recently dean, with wide ranging ecumenical credentials as well as his academic work in history, psychology, and pastoral theology. With all of that background, he was asking us on a hot July day alongside the Mississippi River to consider the images of ancient empires, such as Egypt, and the social context we are called to preach to and minister in today.

"We are in the heart of the Bible Belt here, almost at the very buckle of its embrace," Dr. Butler said. Especially in the early years of Memphis and the Mississippi valley, across the legendary Delta bottomlands extending south from here towards New Orleans, Christianity was pre-eminent. Christian teaching was dominant, the (Protestant) Bible at the center of the culture, ministers and congregations the heart of civil affairs, and well past the Civil War into the modern era it has been Christian teachings which stood to the fore of the schoolhouse, the courthouse, even in the storehouse and into the jail house.

Yet it is also an area where infidelity and illegitimate birth, abortion and poverty, robbery and murder along with illiteracy and illness are present at record levels. What's wrong here, asked Dr. Butler? If the Christian church is allowed to be a dominant influence, as it has been in so many ways over the last two centuries, shouldn't this be a no-sin zone? "Is this a no-sin zone?" he asked, piercingly?

So what went wrong? Dr. Butler suggested there was a flaw in our theology. It could be, he allowed, that Christianity if practiced might not reduce sin, but he did not believe that was true. Faith in God and trust in Christ should reduce, if not completely eliminate sin. If the church was largely in control of a culture, and sin abounded, there is a flaw, even a heresy at work. He called his primary suspect "theological narcissism."

Theological narcissism, Dr. Butler said, is an assumption that one's own self is closer to God than someone different than one's self. And I trust I do no violence to his thesis to fill in from a theologian of a century ago but just two hundred miles to the east, in Nashville.

In my religious tradition's history, there are few figures more amazing in range and scope of their work and thought than Preston Taylor (1849-1931). As a leader among African American churches in the Restoration Movement, he served in the Civil War, had success in constructing railroads, and founded a funeral home and cemetery in Nashville, having served as an elder and preacher in his church from age 20. He formed the National Christian Missionary Convention for African American Disciples of Christ churches and preachers in 1917.

In his inaugural address to the convention, which he served as President for fourteen years, he proclaimed to the wider church "…if the white brother can include in his religious theory and practice the colored people as real brothers, he will have avoided the heresy of all heresies."

The heresy of all heresies. I thought of Rev. Taylor in 1917 Nashville as I listened to Dr. Butler in 2025 Memphis, and about the theological narcissism he warned us about. It was this blindness, this lack of fellow feeling, this absence of basic justice, this heresy of all heresies, which explained why the Bible Belt failed to become a no-sin zone.

Our faith can change human hearts and transform the world, but our cultural barriers and exclusions can block how that faith flows and moves people. By the banks of the mighty Mississippi, I found myself thinking about how we divert the flow of grace, and let sin flourish.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in avoiding heresy and promoting justice. Tell him what flows through your gardens at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 8-1-2025

Faith Works 8-1-2025
Jeff Gill

Theological narcissism and other human errors in the church
___


Last month I made a pilgrimage to Memphis, where I encountered a variety of experiences, from yes, Graceland on the southern edge of the city (saw it, didn't take the tour), and the Lorraine Motel just south of downtown, whose story requires a space all its own, but it was a moving experience in its own right.

But I was there for a church gathering of my religious tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). They aren't every year, I ain't getting any younger, and I had an assortment of reasons for wanting to attend, even if in part. I got there late, but made the most of the time I had.

You need to be open to the Holy Spirit in events like this, because with thousands present and hundreds of opportunities in any given day, there's the official schedule and there's what you do with it.

However, I went to a keynote almost against my better judgment, and was glad I did so. Sometimes those formal, official opportunities to learn are so over-prepared, so forced and managed, they become much less than they could be. When Dr. Lee H. Butler, Jr. spoke, it was all I could have hoped for; in some ways, that half hour or so might have been sufficient reason for all my time and expense involved in getting to Memphis, to hear that sermon-slash-lecture.

Dr. Butler is now President of Iliff School of Theology; that's a United Methodist theological school, where he is an American Baptist ordained clergyperson. My previous awareness of him was as Vice-President and Academic Dean for Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma; we overlapped one year as I began teaching for them in their online certificate program, but he left for Iliff in 2023 before I could visit the campus in person (which I still haven't done!).

Plus before Phillips, he taught at Chicago Theological Seminary, which is a seminary affiliated with the United Church of Christ (UCC), a tradition with which my own faith story is deeply entwined. Dr. Butler is a very ecumenical Christian teacher, with special emphasis on the traditions I'm closest to.

He opened with an observation that at least in part had occurred to most of us. I drove up to the convention center dimly aware of, but still startled to see in person, a giant oddly illuminated pyramid across the street. It is apparently two-thirds the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza, a nod to the Egyptian roots of the name Memphis, and now hosts a Bass Pro Shop megastore inside.

Dr. Butler turned to the deeper roots of why a Memphis was here in Tennessee, and the Mississippi River flowing past, known more often in earlier days as "the American Nile." And he began to unpack in detail the history of the American Nile, the image of empire in monumental form, the story of the Deep South which opens downstream in the Delta region, and of course about slavery, and the imperfect end of the era of slavery into the reality of a century of lynchings and terror and injustice, still hanging in the humid air of the river valley, weighed down by the heat of the sun and depth of the nighttime.

All of which he turned, slowly, steadily, into a calm, dispassionate analysis of theological narcissism, and how we struggle in every generation to turn our eyes toward God, even as we have a tendency to make everything about ourselves, our needs, our wants. And he broke it down into some very basic, simple problems.

I hope you can return next week and allow me to share them with you.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been ecumenical more often than not himself. Tell him how you've learned about your faith while on the road at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-31-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 7-31-2025
Jeff Gill

August is a month filled with promise, and heat
___


For anyone who played football in years past, there's something about the beginning of August which evokes a very particular memory.

Two-a-days.

Generally, you couldn't start two-a-days until August 1, which just added to their exquisite torture. They usually ran for two weeks, then eased back into one practice a day after school started (but the single one would last longer, a different sort of challenge). It was also the case that the heat and humidity of two-a-days tested everyone to the maximum, helping the coaches whittle down the roster simply by having some prospective players not come back on Monday of week two.

For those of us who did return, there was the battle for a starting role, or a position (or both). But that first week of two-a-days was a physical and also psychological, even spiritual challenge.

Why am I here? Is this really what I want to do? Is the short-term pain worth the long-term gain? These are questions that can rattle around inside your helmet while you run the drills, do the wind sprints, hit the blocking sled, start the full contact practices. Maybe I'm done here . . . maybe if I put my all into this next set of over-unders, the coach will notice me . . . maybe the coach hates me. Lots of questions.

Some get answered by the end of the two weeks, some never do, except inside your own head. Since you have to live there, you need to sort your own answers out. Maybe you should have been starting tackle; perhaps you could have been a running back and not a cornerback. Only one person will be starting quarterback, which gets lots of sideline conversation and debate in the stands, but there are forty or more dramatic narratives playing out inside each player. What am I doing this for, and how can I find my place on this team? And when can we stop running . . .

You may compare boot camp to two-a-days, but you are much younger when you start playing offense and defense on the gridiron, so those memories may last even longer, go deeper, at least as deep as basic training in the armed services will mark you.

My four years of football were just on this side of the divide my father never quite understood; in his day, not drinking water was a sign of strength, and if the coach whistled everyone to the fountains, it was a mark of toughness, or so they thought, for you to stand to one side and decline a spot in line. He took some convincing at the new normal, which was coaches lining us up regularly to drink up, and standing over us to make sure everyone did. The idea that it was unwise and unhealthy to drink less water on brutally hot days never quite set well with my dad.

We've learned a few things. Added a few more bars to his one bar helmet; now the concussion prevention technology makes helmets safer than the ones I wore. Football gets debated as a social presence and a youth activity; I just know when the calendar turns to August 1, I think "time for two-a-days, better go run a few laps to get ready."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he was a truly untalented football player. Tell him your memories of summer practices at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.