Faith Works 10-31-15

Faith Works 10-31-15

Jeff Gill

 

The Eve of All Saints

___

 

"For all the saints, who from their labors rest…"

 

It's a beloved hymn, and one that's often sung at this time of year to commemorate the church calendar feast of All Saints, or "All Hallows" in old English usage, making the day before All Hallows' Eve, or good ol' Hallowe'en.

 

Make of it what you will, but most of it has been made over from churchly purposes, and the remnant is, well, tomorrow for some of us.

 

All Saints' Day is a time to remember all those who "have died in the Lord," that "great cloud of witnesses" who are the faithful departed. Many churches will include an "in memoriam" of some sort in worship tomorrow morning.

 

But as Paul says in Romans 1:7, "To all those being in Rome beloved of God, called saints: Grace to you and peace…" The saints of God are not just the deceased, but those who are wholly God's, and kept holy in faith, and between "holy" and "saints" is pretty much the same word, "hagios" in Greek.

 

Yes, there might just be saints reading this! Whether it's a saint who's writing it…

 

We might be abashed to claim that title of "holy" for ourselves (although Paul would point out that, through grace and mercy, there's nothing to claim, but it's a gift that's being given to us), but I think we all know people in our faith communities who are saintly indeed, holy in intention and action, whose role in our lives and often in whose years there is a quality we can only call "hagios," saint or holy either way.

 

At our church, we've been spending Wednesday nights working this fall through James, and the call for the faithful to tend to "the widow and the orphan" is made clear to us. Those who are on the margins of society are where God is calling us to be present and active, of that there's no confusion. Not all widows or widowers are saints, but among our seniors, there is a faithfulness in patience and sorrow and even suffering that is humbling, that brings to mind that which is holy.

 

There are two Sundays each month that our congregation has taken on the responsibility of bringing a simple ecumenical worship service to two different nursing homes. The first Sunday of the month is always one, and the third another. Often, I go and lead and share an edited version of my Sunday message; edited simply because about twenty to twenty-five minutes is about all that works well in those settings.

 

But not infrequently I have another church event or conflict, and a number of other leaders in the church can step up, leading a few old familiar hymns, offering a prayer with the Lord's Prayer as its anchor, and a message is shared. We would not want to let them down or leave the eight to twelve at each place who are expectantly waiting for our arrival those Sunday afternoons to face an empty doorway, and no opportunity to share in a gathered time of worship.

 

It startled me to learn, though, that at both of the local nursing homes we come to, we are the only Sunday worship that comes in. They wait a month until we return, because that's all that they have showing up.

 

So in honor of all the saints of the Lord, past and present, I'd like to put a challenge before the other church bodies of our area. There are at least 220 congregations in Licking County. There are about ten nursing home facilities in Newark & Heath, maybe two dozen in the county as a whole. It strikes me that if every congregation would find an open Sunday afternoon near them, and commit to once a month regularly, this should be a blessing that James and Paul and even Jesus would honor. Some forty churches in Newark and Heath would cover the Sundays, including fifth Sundays since there are already a few like Spring Hills Baptist and Bible Baptist Churches that are already, like Newark Central Christian, doing more than one Sunday a month anyhow. If you're not sure you can do this (and you can, you know), take a fifth Sunday for a facility, and that's just three or four times a year.

 

For all the saints, they should not be sitting waiting for weeks to worship. Let God's people go forth in song and prayer! If you don't have a homily at hand, just read a few psalms.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him what stories have helped you understand wholeness in your life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 10-24-15

Faith Works 10-24-15

Jeff Gill

 

A calling in context, and in change

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Full-time Christian ministry, whether you call it ordained or commissioned or licensed, whether it's with a seminary graduate-level degree or two years of a Bible college, or a set of responsibilities called and claimed out of the membership for a set period . . . it's a hard thing to pin down.

 

Most Christian communities have a person who serves in a central leadership role for worship, which may or may not be as central having to do with secular matters for the  congregation. In my own tradition, ministers don't own the building, sign the checks, or have any financial authority at all; in other Protestant traditions, the pastor is "sent" from a central authority to take the preaching and teaching office for a church and can't be "sent back" just by the congregation's choice.

 

In general, though, folks expect when they visit a church that there is a preacher who is also a leader of some sort, in casting a vision and coordinating services if nothing else. Titles can range from "Brother" or "Reverend" to "Father" or "Mother," "Bishop" or "Evangelist," and I once served a congregation where at least half a dozen of the men, all of World War II vintage, called me "Padre."

 

In many churches October is a time for "minister appreciation" in a week or month, and I have to admit to being a bit, well, agnostic about the whole thing. And I wouldn't bring all this up except for the fact that it seems like every October my social media fills with memes and posts and comments that all tie back to some stats and stories about how the overwhelming majority of ministers are, in a word, overwhelmed.

 

Images with captions saying things like "1,500 pastors leave the ministry every month" (or 1,700, says church consultant and ministry expert Ed Stetzer, wondering where the updated figure came from since he can't find a source for the initial stat), heartfelt pleas to affirm clergy "because 50% of pastors' marriages end in divorce" (also a stat without a source), and lists of negative impressions from "studies" of what ministers feel about themselves and their church.

 

At the risk of ruining a perfectly good pity party, it just ain't so. Ministry in whatever form, to take a public role, paid or unpaid or poorly paid, to represent your faith and its teachings out to the world and in pastoral care for your congregation, is hard work. No doubt about that whatsoever. And it's harder work than nailing together pallets, I can assure you.

 

But there are some standard complaints about ministry work that need some context. Yes, we work 55-60 hours a week on average: so do most entrepreneurs and senior managers. Yes, we make less than doctors or lawyers or school administrators (or most teachers), but we make about what most social workers earn, MSW and MDiv alike. Preschool staff and secretaries and children services caseworkers make less than us on a full time average, but I think we can agree it doesn't state the relative value of a person's work to look at their pay… and even doctors wish they made more.

 

We don't get days off much, true; I usually get about half of a Tuesday for my weekend. But my wife, who has a demanding professional job during the week and into many weekends, also has had an unpaid ministry leadership position for over a decade where she goes in and works on Saturdays and Sundays to make sure worship is powerful and effective in the area she's responsible for. When is the day off for a leader who works five-plus days a week and comes in to serve at church?

 

It used to be, not all that long ago, clergy were expected, in the words of an elderly mentor in my younger days, "to dress like bankers, keep doctors' hours, and be paid like ditchdiggers." You had to wear hand-me-down suits from better-off parishioners, borrow money for half a gallon of gas into your Model A to get to the hospital once a week, and got a basket of potatoes and turnips some Sundays.

 

As a member of the clergy, my appreciation is that those days are past. I appreciate and love my work, and as Ed Stetzer has noted, among Protestant pastors, 93% of us say we feel privileged to be a pastor.

 

If you'd really like to appreciate your minister, ask them to tell you about their vision for your congregation. And offer to take on some part of that vision for your own!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him your vision for your own ministry through your church at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 10-17-15

Faith Works 10-17-15

Jeff Gill

 

A safe place to go

___

 

"Arsenic and Old Lace" is opening at Licking County Players this weekend. It's a funny, frenetic play about a family, one that has some, um, mental health issues in it.

 

It's one of my favorite plays, which tells you my tastes aren't quite Shakespearean; another of my most beloved stage productions is "Harvey" and not just because I so enjoyed watching my brother Brian play Elwood P. Dowd at our high school a few (hah!) years ago.

 

"Harvey" and "Arsenic" come from either end of the World War II era, and they have certain qualities that identify them as being of that time and place in American life, not least of which is that, while life is fairly modern in some ways, communications are still a bit rudimentary. Transportation is motorized, but with some qualifications. And then there's that question of mental health in both shows.

 

Central to the plots of each (no spoilers here!) is the reality of having someone "put away" in an asylum or institution of some sort. If the right relatives come together and file the right paperwork, you can have someone carried off by those legendary "nice young men in their clean white coats."

 

And if you have an ear to cultural trends in dramatic dialogue, you might just pick up on the fact that between 1939 and 1944 the United States was not feeling terribly good about the whole process. Maybe even there's a theatrical sense here that it was simply too easy, and too few professional checks and balances were involved, and that good if eccentric people could be taken advantage of by sharp operators or greedy relations.

 

As a pastor, I've heard enough true stories from family members of those days to believe that it was, in fact, a process that was open to abuse and misuse, sometimes with good intentions but not occasionally because some younger folk got tired of waiting for Great Aunt Hattie to kick off and inherit her house.

 

So things changed. Commitment, and especially involuntary commitment, became much more challenging. The standard became one of "threat of harm to self or others," and that threat had to be fairly imminent.

 

Now I can also say, as any pastor or church leader can probably tell you, it's not unusual these days to be asked to join in an awkward family conversation about "taking the car keys," or even "it's time to leave this house and move somewhere you can be safe." Sometimes those conversations are expected, more than younger family realized, and they go well; other times, you start to see signs of what adult children and grandchildren have been seeing, and the concern grows even as the resistance to any change hardens. But you can't force the situation, and everyone leaves the meeting a little more worried.

 

But I wouldn't go back. The idea that any two or three nieces and nephews being able to put a senior citizen into confinement and getting to dispose of their property was never a good situation, and while I've had my own moments of "wishing" I could just force a circumstance, those days of institutions for people who believe they have tall invisible sentient rabbits talking to them are long gone.

 

We have a renewal coming up in a couple of weeks for the county Mental Health and Recovery levy on Election Day. I have no concerns about Licking County affirming the work that's being done right now, in emergency services and available care. The agencies that serve the mental health needs of our area work hard, do well, and help people reach recovery and stability every day.

 

Beyond that, I do wonder about what it will take to extend services, to make mental & behavioral health a more fully integrated part of our overall health system. There are conversations going on right now in our United Way task forces and community boards and various constituency groups to look at how we align and combine services, so that physical health and healing can be seen as a whole, with not only mental health but spiritual health and community health all playing their part in also seeing our bodies and our lives and our families find healing and wholeness.

 

A broken leg calls for certain interventions, and ongoing care, and some awareness even after the cast is off; an emotional or cognitive ailment needs much the same, and they can show up together (think of after a car accident, for instance), with interventions & care & awareness bringing healing to the whole self. An institution is still not going to be the answer for many, for most.

 

It's about a healthy community, and that will take all of us.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him what stories have helped you understand wholeness in your life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 10-10-15

Faith Works 10-10-15

Jeff Gill

 

Vocations & decisions

___

 

 

So, how did you end up becoming a minister?

 

That question has been asked of me before, and it came up in an interesting context last week, intriguingly enough outside of a church context entirely.

 

It was someone who knows me in a different guise, wearing one of the other hats I wear around our community. They knew I could have "been" a number of other things, vocationally speaking, and wanted to know why I chose the ministry.

 

In fact, ministry chose me. Which is another way of saying "I was called."

 

To back up a bit, I was originally, starting college, looking in different directions. The Marine Corps had helped me refine that, with some clarity around how good of a platoon leader I would have been.

 

Staff Sergeant Camire was firmly of the opinion that I'd be a terrible one, and he was a pretty sharp NCO. "You don't know how to react, Gill, you stop and think. That will get a lot of good Marines killed." Excellent point, sergeant instructor.

 

I looked at a wide variety of career options, many of which I probably would have been perfectly adequate in doing. And most of which I've ended up dabbling in, as an amateur, a community volunteer or representative for, an occasional contributor with… Social work and criminal justice and psychology and hospital care and urban planning and journalism and community organizing. I went to trainings for that last in 1985 & 1987, at the same time a guy named Barry from Chicago was going to Campaign for Human Development programs, but if we were ever in the same church basement I don't recall (darn it!).

 

How did I end up going to seminary and becoming a minister of the Gospel? Because doors kept opening in that direction, and closing in others. Looking back, it seems clear and unambiguous and downright linear. At the time, trying to look ahead, it was confusing and uncertain and groping, step by step.

 

Both perspectives are true.

 

Up to, and into seminary in Indianapolis, those other options kept tugging at me, but they never had a real pull on me. As I grew into an identity as a preacher, a parson, a padre, those steps always had some momentum behind them, a motive force that grew – even as the church I was serving had the building burn down before two years had passed, even when my own denominational staff were tugging me in some odd directions. To be the minister for a parish, pastor to a congregation, just kept making more sense.

 

 

I can talk about my sense of God speaking to me, and that's another column, I suspect -- but for the "call to ministry," it was more what Parker Palmer refers to as "way will open." You often don't see it clearly until you look back at it, but it's clear enough step by step moving forward. The "way will open," and you simply move into the light.

 

Archaeology is still an important part of my life. I get to be out tomorrow with some of my best friends, leading tours at Octagon State Memorial for the last "open house" there at Parkview and 33^rd St. of that amazing 2,000 year old earthen architecture, Sunday afternoon from Noon to 4 pm (or after, if you get there soon enough). I don't have summer openings to dig much, but I keep my trowel sharp.

 

And I'm in hospitals often as a pastoral care provider, working with mental health as you see in my commentary here and elsewhere for our Mental Health and Recovery Board for Knox & Licking County, and I chair the Granville Board of Zoning and Building Appeals, which is narrow-gauge urban policy and city planning, but it's about all I need to try to comprehend.

 

All that, and I get to write. Like this column. What I realize, in retrospect, is that God said to me "Choose ministry, and I'll give you a little of everything else." I could have been other things in this life, but in any one other choice, that's probably all I would have done. In ministry, as the Apostle Paul says to the Corinthians, I get to "become all things to all people."

 

And that's more than enough!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County. Tell him what your vocation is and how you found it at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 10-3-15

Faith Works 10-3-15

Jeff Gill

 

Money, Millions, and Munificence

___

 

I was momentarily disheartened by learning in the news this week that the presidential candidates, all together, raised a total of about $100,000,000 in the last quarter (that's One Hundred Million for those who don't like numbers).

 

Then, idly, I checked out how much American colleges & universities raise per quarter, which works out to about $8,000,000,000 (that's Eight Billion dollars; see www.cae.org for more info). That's less than best estimates I find for church giving in aggregate, which seems to come out to an annual total of about $120,000,000,000 (One Hundred-and-Twenty Billion) or $30,000,000,000 per quarter (Thirty Billion).

 

By way of comparison, the SNAP/Food Stamp program cost US taxpayers $74,000,000,000 (Seventy-four B) last year, numbers declining so far this year, so let's say $18,000,000,000 per quarter (Eighteen B).

 

Yes, I can think of plenty I'd rather see done with a hundred million bucks than buy mailers and TV ads. And this doesn't include giving to Super PAC's, 527 political groups and 501(c)4 organizations, which looks to run around $500,000,000 (Five Hundred Million) per year, so $125,000,000 (One Hundred-and-Twenty-five Million) a quarter at least, with indications that's up right now, call it more like $150M.

 

Since we're making comparisons here (or I am, anyhow), let's also look at tax revenue, all told, federal and state and local combined. Right now, that's running at $6,000,000,000,000 (that would be Six Trillion dollars), or $1,500,000,000,000 per quarter (One-and-a-half Trillion). Hat tips, www.taxpolicycenter.org, www.usgovernmentrevenue.com, and www.governing.com. (Reasonable people may disagree by a billion here or a billion there.)

 

Gross domestic product, according to the Wall Street Journal, is slowing somewhat, growing at 2.6% as last year ended, about 2.4% growth for 2014. Call it (hold on to something solid) $17,419,000,000,000 (Seventeen and almost a half Trillion). That's all the economic activity in general, from online transactions to buying a burger at a drive up window to pumping gas and swiping a card at the pump. Sticking with my quarter-perspective from the Federal Elections Commission reports, that means over $4,300,000,000,000 per quarter (Four Trillion and Three Hundred Billion). 34% goes into taxes, by the way. Interesting.

 

Okay, so giving to presidential campaigns isn't so bad. It's probably less than we spend in any given three month period on antiperspirants, and no, I won't look that one up for you, good luck on your own! It helps, it always helps to get perspective.

 

And economically, it's hard to maintain perspective on figures when they move into the millions, the billions, the trillions. You hear political debate that focuses on growth and cuts and cuts in the rate of growth and deferred giving or debt loads and it all gets overwhelming.

 

Even in church life, a fairly modestly sized congregation like the one I serve has a budget of a quarter-million dollars. Wow, he said to himself. That's quite a bit of money.

 

Yet when you figure out what it takes to operate 8,000 square feet of facility and compensate one full time staffer (hi!) and nine more varying levels of part-time staffers, it's amazing how little you have left after fixed costs to fiddle around with. The numbers seem big at first, but start spending it and they get small in a hurry.

 

Likewise with any number of proposals and needs where you can be daunted by the upfront numbers or costs. It's like the old line "how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."

 

Many faith communities are doing their fall stewardship education right now, and households are looking at their giving. You have to start with your income (you know what that is, right? It's amazing how many don't, so figure it out), then be honest about what you give for what you believe in, and do the math. What's the percent? Divide the giving by the getting, multiply by 100. You can probably do it on your phone.

 

For most Americans, even churchgoing ones, you'll probably come up with something around 2%. I'm not going to preach on tithing here, but I will say this: look at that percent you're giving now? And figure out what the next step up is. One bite at a time. Sooner or later, you start giving at a level that helps you remember it's all a gift anyhow, you're just getting the chance to point it somewhere for a while.

 

Where are you pointing?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about how you give at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.