Faith Works 8-05-06
Jeff Gill
When Church and Community Meet
Ann Munro Kennedy needs no further praise from the likes of this scribe; her works are written on hearts across this community and far beyond, with indelible ink. She changed lives both with her outward actions and inner decisions. If you did not know her, you might think you are the poorer for it, but most of us who knew her are aware of just how much she quietly and persistently enriched many who never met her, by how much better a place Licking County is to live because of what she’s done.
There’s more that can be said, has been said, will still be told, but the heart of our celebration in the midst of grief was a few Sundays back at a funeral service in her church, First Presbyterian in Granville.
Rev. Karen Chakoian led a wonderful memorial service with gospel music sung, hymns shared by all, and words offered by both pastor and family.
There is an art to the large, public funeral that cannot be taught in seminary, and must be learned, usually in a certain measure of terror, in the process of doing. Some of us have done enough of these that the raw edge of anxiety is a bit less, and the ease is not from it getting easier, but from the experience of how truly healing and helpful such events are for the wider community.
Don’t get me wrong: every funeral service is of major importance to the family and "loved ones" involved, and any pastor or lay leader worth their salt feels a sense of awe and anxiety about presiding over an occasion of such significance even to just half a dozen people. Truly.
But there are certain times when you know that this particular funeral is not just about large numbers present (some families can muster a big crowd even for crosspatch old Uncle Ebenezer), or about so-called big names in town (who can surprise you with how few turn out to mourn their passing). It is when you know you are part of laying to rest a person who lived at the intersection of so many paths through the vital regions of a place, and that many who walk those paths will wend their way into this particular funeral, whatever their faith or lack thereof.
That sort of funeral becomes, for good or ill, a significant moment for that family, that church, and that community (village, city, county, region, profession, all of which were communities represented in Ann’s homegoing). What is said, how presented, the sense and feel of the occasion, will echo in those communities of relationship for a long time to come.
When you try to take such a moment and turn it into your own direction, it can be worse than awkward (I think of the pastor who was part of the Reagan funeral: oy.); when you try to capitalize on such a moment for a cause or purpose, no matter how well intended, it can go very badly for all concerned.
But getting out of the way, letting the life speak of the deceased in the light of eternity, and allowing this to be a worship service even more than a memorial, but because we are remembering together what we know shouldn’t be forgotten . . . that craft can’t be taught, but we can learn together from such an occasion.
Thanks to Rev. Chakoian for providing such a moment with Ann Munro Kennedy’s funeral, and we will remember.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Faith Works 7-29-06
Jeff Gill
To a Faraway Place in Heartfelt Prayer
Damascus is a city I have long hoped to visit, but doubt if I ever will.
Many years ago, from a ridge in the Golan, I looked over the plain where Saul so famously rode, and heard our guide say that the hazy buildings ten miles to our northeast were the southwestern suburbs of Damascus.
That view may have to suit me for some years to come. The results of the last few weeks’ bombardment is further instability and tension in a very nervous, if historic corner of this troubled world.
In Damascus Paul came to his defining faith and was nurtured in an early Christian community near what is still "the street called straight." Straight Street, the central artery of the city, has seen Suleiman the Magnificent and Saladin the Great and Lawrence of Arabia all march its length.
The original "bazaar" is found near the heart of this most ancient of cities, almost as old as Jericho and Ur, and sites of import to Islam and Mohammed’s history are found there, near to Mecca’s significance.
And to the west of Damascus is Mount Hermon, whose snowy heights, far above the source of the Jordan River, cool by sight if not in degrees the parched plains below. Stretching north are more mountains, whose western slopes once produced tall, straight cedars, the cedars of Lebanon which made possible the wide roof of the Jerusalem Temple built by Hiram of Tyre for King Solomon. They would have been cut, and hauled by oxen across the Bekaa Valley to Tyre, sailed south along the Mediterranean coast, and landed at Joppa (near modern Tel-Aviv) to make the long way up into the Judean hills.
Those ships would have passed Haifa, just below the Mount Carmel headland, where high-up caves once harbored Elijah and later monks known as Carmelites. From Tyre to Haifa is about the same distance as from Columbus to Newark, and on to Gratiot to match Joppa.
Christian, Jew, or Moslem, it is painful to see the familiar names and journeys from holy writings punctuated by rockets, missiles, and bombs, by killing and burning and demolition.
Your columnist is broadly speaking pro-Israel, and John Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, broadly speaking, has tended pro-Palestinian. Our respective senses of what problem started when and who is responsible for next steps in that region are usually widely divergent.
His prayer, though, recently offered at a church event and made available on-line, speaks very pastorally to all of us, and in this moment I want to thank him by offering that prayer to you all:
A Prayer for the Middle East at a Time of War
You did not make us, O God, to die in bomb craters or to huddle through the night in basement shelters. You made us to play under olive trees and cedars and to sleep soundly with animal toys and gentle lovers.
Lord, have mercy.
You did not make us, O God, to hold hostages for barter or to rain deadly fury on innocent children and beautiful coast lands. You made us, O God, to welcome strangers and to cherish all creation.
Christ, have mercy.
You did not make us, O God, to oppress in the name of security or to kill in the name of justice. You made us, O God, to find security in justice and to risk life in the name of peace.
Lord, have mercy.
While leaders in Tel Aviv and Damascus, Tehran, Washington, and southern Lebanon pander to ancient fears, claim the mantle of righteous victim, and pursue their little empires in the name of gods of their own devising, the people of Lebanon and northern Israel are made captive to fear, true victims whose only advocate is You.
Save us from self-justifying histories and from moral equations that excuse our folly. Search our hearts for our own complicity. Spare us from pious prayers that neglect the prophet's angry cry. Let us speak a resounding "no" to this warring madness and thus unmake our ways of death, so that we may be made more and more into your image.
Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Jeff Gill
To a Faraway Place in Heartfelt Prayer
Damascus is a city I have long hoped to visit, but doubt if I ever will.
Many years ago, from a ridge in the Golan, I looked over the plain where Saul so famously rode, and heard our guide say that the hazy buildings ten miles to our northeast were the southwestern suburbs of Damascus.
That view may have to suit me for some years to come. The results of the last few weeks’ bombardment is further instability and tension in a very nervous, if historic corner of this troubled world.
In Damascus Paul came to his defining faith and was nurtured in an early Christian community near what is still "the street called straight." Straight Street, the central artery of the city, has seen Suleiman the Magnificent and Saladin the Great and Lawrence of Arabia all march its length.
The original "bazaar" is found near the heart of this most ancient of cities, almost as old as Jericho and Ur, and sites of import to Islam and Mohammed’s history are found there, near to Mecca’s significance.
And to the west of Damascus is Mount Hermon, whose snowy heights, far above the source of the Jordan River, cool by sight if not in degrees the parched plains below. Stretching north are more mountains, whose western slopes once produced tall, straight cedars, the cedars of Lebanon which made possible the wide roof of the Jerusalem Temple built by Hiram of Tyre for King Solomon. They would have been cut, and hauled by oxen across the Bekaa Valley to Tyre, sailed south along the Mediterranean coast, and landed at Joppa (near modern Tel-Aviv) to make the long way up into the Judean hills.
Those ships would have passed Haifa, just below the Mount Carmel headland, where high-up caves once harbored Elijah and later monks known as Carmelites. From Tyre to Haifa is about the same distance as from Columbus to Newark, and on to Gratiot to match Joppa.
Christian, Jew, or Moslem, it is painful to see the familiar names and journeys from holy writings punctuated by rockets, missiles, and bombs, by killing and burning and demolition.
Your columnist is broadly speaking pro-Israel, and John Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, broadly speaking, has tended pro-Palestinian. Our respective senses of what problem started when and who is responsible for next steps in that region are usually widely divergent.
His prayer, though, recently offered at a church event and made available on-line, speaks very pastorally to all of us, and in this moment I want to thank him by offering that prayer to you all:
A Prayer for the Middle East at a Time of War
You did not make us, O God, to die in bomb craters or to huddle through the night in basement shelters. You made us to play under olive trees and cedars and to sleep soundly with animal toys and gentle lovers.
Lord, have mercy.
You did not make us, O God, to hold hostages for barter or to rain deadly fury on innocent children and beautiful coast lands. You made us, O God, to welcome strangers and to cherish all creation.
Christ, have mercy.
You did not make us, O God, to oppress in the name of security or to kill in the name of justice. You made us, O God, to find security in justice and to risk life in the name of peace.
Lord, have mercy.
While leaders in Tel Aviv and Damascus, Tehran, Washington, and southern Lebanon pander to ancient fears, claim the mantle of righteous victim, and pursue their little empires in the name of gods of their own devising, the people of Lebanon and northern Israel are made captive to fear, true victims whose only advocate is You.
Save us from self-justifying histories and from moral equations that excuse our folly. Search our hearts for our own complicity. Spare us from pious prayers that neglect the prophet's angry cry. Let us speak a resounding "no" to this warring madness and thus unmake our ways of death, so that we may be made more and more into your image.
Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Notes From My Knapsack 7-30-06
Jeff Gill
Malletheads, Unite!
If Jimmy Buffet fans are "Parrotheads," then could polo fans be called "malletheads"?
Each Sunday afternoon through September, the sport of kings and the king of sports, as polo players would have you believe, is played in front of the Bryn Du Mansion on Newrk-Granville Road.
Despite the horsey implication of wealth and cost, admission is free, and some fairly average people play the sport. I can’t say normal people, since Bernie Brush is one of them, but many Licking County residents spend more on their hunting dogs than it costs to maintain a horse or two.
Your columnist doesn’t get up on top of animals bigger than he is, but it is fun to watch – did I mention it’s free?
Adding to the fun in a few weeks is a little "value-added" experience that you can spend a bit of money on and help a great local cause. Sunday, August 13 from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm the Licking County Coalition for Housing will set up a "professional" croquet area up by the mansion, and for $50 a person, $75 a couple, Bake-n-Brew is setting up a buffet and wine tasting to go with one of our last summer afternoons. Why croquet?
In part, because croquet is a spin-off of polo for those of us who don’t get up on animals larger than we are. The balls were originally old polo balls, and the mallets broken polo mallets (and they break often enough to keep up the supply).
Add a few horseshoe gates and the other end of the broken stick for a wicket, and you have ur-croquet. The game has evolved, and a croquet professional is part of the afternoon, who will show us how to (I suspect) put backspin on our cross court shots and jump balls to get around a sticky wicket.
The beverage set-up is a cash bar (hey, it is a fundraiser), but admission to the event does not include mandatory white clothing, so dress for the outdoor relaxation of it all before school starts nine or ten days later for most of us. Call LCCH 349-1921 during weekday business hours to reserve tickets, or go online at www.lcchousing.org.
As this catches on, Shani Smith and I imagine theme foursomes playing cutthroat, full-contact croquet; or at least with the costumes competing while the field of play is more peaceful. Whether you want to wear Edwardian whites or Bermuda shorts, just plan to wander by the Bryn Du Mansion on Aug. 13 and help more modest housing stay open and available to those who need it in Licking County.
And the polo alone is still free from the Newark-Granville Road entrance!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him your croquet balls, bouquets, or brickbats at knapsack77@gmail.com (note new email!).
Jeff Gill
Malletheads, Unite!
If Jimmy Buffet fans are "Parrotheads," then could polo fans be called "malletheads"?
Each Sunday afternoon through September, the sport of kings and the king of sports, as polo players would have you believe, is played in front of the Bryn Du Mansion on Newrk-Granville Road.
Despite the horsey implication of wealth and cost, admission is free, and some fairly average people play the sport. I can’t say normal people, since Bernie Brush is one of them, but many Licking County residents spend more on their hunting dogs than it costs to maintain a horse or two.
Your columnist doesn’t get up on top of animals bigger than he is, but it is fun to watch – did I mention it’s free?
Adding to the fun in a few weeks is a little "value-added" experience that you can spend a bit of money on and help a great local cause. Sunday, August 13 from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm the Licking County Coalition for Housing will set up a "professional" croquet area up by the mansion, and for $50 a person, $75 a couple, Bake-n-Brew is setting up a buffet and wine tasting to go with one of our last summer afternoons. Why croquet?
In part, because croquet is a spin-off of polo for those of us who don’t get up on animals larger than we are. The balls were originally old polo balls, and the mallets broken polo mallets (and they break often enough to keep up the supply).
Add a few horseshoe gates and the other end of the broken stick for a wicket, and you have ur-croquet. The game has evolved, and a croquet professional is part of the afternoon, who will show us how to (I suspect) put backspin on our cross court shots and jump balls to get around a sticky wicket.
The beverage set-up is a cash bar (hey, it is a fundraiser), but admission to the event does not include mandatory white clothing, so dress for the outdoor relaxation of it all before school starts nine or ten days later for most of us. Call LCCH 349-1921 during weekday business hours to reserve tickets, or go online at www.lcchousing.org.
As this catches on, Shani Smith and I imagine theme foursomes playing cutthroat, full-contact croquet; or at least with the costumes competing while the field of play is more peaceful. Whether you want to wear Edwardian whites or Bermuda shorts, just plan to wander by the Bryn Du Mansion on Aug. 13 and help more modest housing stay open and available to those who need it in Licking County.
And the polo alone is still free from the Newark-Granville Road entrance!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him your croquet balls, bouquets, or brickbats at knapsack77@gmail.com (note new email!).
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Faith Works 7-22-06
Jeff Gill
A Trip To the South (Not Far!)
After our last two weeks looking at our Licking County religious history, we can’t forget Perry County.
Aside from giving us Dave Lehman, our area’s pioneer church heritage ties directly into some places of worship just over the border.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Church south of Somerset is the first Catholic parish in all of Ohio, with the first mass said by Bishop Fenwick in 1818. The current building is perhaps the oldest structure still in use as a regular service location for the county, dating to 1864. I may well be wrong about that, as Perry County has many buildings and congregations directly preceding and leading to Licking County establishments, but St. Joseph’s deserves and will get her own treatment in this space someday soon.
What we just marked as a bicentennial for a Perry County house of worship is the 1806 founding of Zion Church, along Rt. 13 south of Thornville. I’m sure I’m not the only one to find it ironic that after passing Zion Road exits for what seems half a dozen times between Thornport to the hill where today’s Zion UCC stands, you turn on High Point Road, east where the Backwoods Festival crowds turn west.
Founded as a union church for both German Reformed and Lutheran congregations, the Reformed branch joined under the E&R wing with the Congregational Church 50 years ago to help found the United Church of Christ. Zion Church still honors German roots, Reformed liturgy of the Mercersburg tradition, Lutheran Pietism and Congregational thoughtfulness in her life today, led by Dr. Herb Hicks.
Former Newark area pastors Dick Hurdiss, Dave Mitchell, and Bob Settlage have all preached there in recent years, and your scribe even fills in for Pastor Hicks these days.
The technical date for their 200th anniversary was a few weeks back, but they will celebrate as a congregation in mid-September. Before that happy event, they look forward to the arrival and installation of Perry County’s most recent state historical marker, telling the tale of the oldest church in those parts.
With thanks to David Smith, the congregation historian, here’s the text soon to be seen in gold and brown by High Point Road off Rt. 13:
* * *
ZION REFORMED CHURCH
Zion (Ribel’s) Church was built on this site in 1808. The log structure was located in the Zion Ridge Cemetery, adjacent to the first school in Thorn Township. The congregation of Zion Reformed Church is the oldest in Perry County still in existence. The church was officially organized in 1806 when the German Reformed and Lutheran congregations joined together in building the first church in Perry County. They purchased this land on June 30, 1806, and shared the building, alternating Sundays, until 1911. In 1803, Reverend Johannes Christian Koenig (John King) became the first minister to settle in Perry County and became the founding minister for the German Reformed congregation. In 1805, Reverend Wilhelm Georg Forster (William Foster) was the first Lutheran minister to settle in Perry County and was the founding minister for the Lutherans. The present Zion Reformed Church was built across the street from the original church in 1910.
* * *
Congrats to everyone at Zion Church on their high historic hill, and we’ll stay tuned for the big celebration in September.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; spin your historic narratives to him through disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
A Trip To the South (Not Far!)
After our last two weeks looking at our Licking County religious history, we can’t forget Perry County.
Aside from giving us Dave Lehman, our area’s pioneer church heritage ties directly into some places of worship just over the border.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Church south of Somerset is the first Catholic parish in all of Ohio, with the first mass said by Bishop Fenwick in 1818. The current building is perhaps the oldest structure still in use as a regular service location for the county, dating to 1864. I may well be wrong about that, as Perry County has many buildings and congregations directly preceding and leading to Licking County establishments, but St. Joseph’s deserves and will get her own treatment in this space someday soon.
What we just marked as a bicentennial for a Perry County house of worship is the 1806 founding of Zion Church, along Rt. 13 south of Thornville. I’m sure I’m not the only one to find it ironic that after passing Zion Road exits for what seems half a dozen times between Thornport to the hill where today’s Zion UCC stands, you turn on High Point Road, east where the Backwoods Festival crowds turn west.
Founded as a union church for both German Reformed and Lutheran congregations, the Reformed branch joined under the E&R wing with the Congregational Church 50 years ago to help found the United Church of Christ. Zion Church still honors German roots, Reformed liturgy of the Mercersburg tradition, Lutheran Pietism and Congregational thoughtfulness in her life today, led by Dr. Herb Hicks.
Former Newark area pastors Dick Hurdiss, Dave Mitchell, and Bob Settlage have all preached there in recent years, and your scribe even fills in for Pastor Hicks these days.
The technical date for their 200th anniversary was a few weeks back, but they will celebrate as a congregation in mid-September. Before that happy event, they look forward to the arrival and installation of Perry County’s most recent state historical marker, telling the tale of the oldest church in those parts.
With thanks to David Smith, the congregation historian, here’s the text soon to be seen in gold and brown by High Point Road off Rt. 13:
* * *
ZION REFORMED CHURCH
Zion (Ribel’s) Church was built on this site in 1808. The log structure was located in the Zion Ridge Cemetery, adjacent to the first school in Thorn Township. The congregation of Zion Reformed Church is the oldest in Perry County still in existence. The church was officially organized in 1806 when the German Reformed and Lutheran congregations joined together in building the first church in Perry County. They purchased this land on June 30, 1806, and shared the building, alternating Sundays, until 1911. In 1803, Reverend Johannes Christian Koenig (John King) became the first minister to settle in Perry County and became the founding minister for the German Reformed congregation. In 1805, Reverend Wilhelm Georg Forster (William Foster) was the first Lutheran minister to settle in Perry County and was the founding minister for the Lutherans. The present Zion Reformed Church was built across the street from the original church in 1910.
* * *
Congrats to everyone at Zion Church on their high historic hill, and we’ll stay tuned for the big celebration in September.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; spin your historic narratives to him through disciple@voyager.net.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Notes From My Knapsack 7-23-06
Jeff Gill
With Summer Set On High
Heat waves are no laughing matter, even for the sun worshipers among us who long for Florida or Arizona or the Riviera.
Some years ago a heat wave across the Northern Hemisphere led to hundreds of deaths in Chicago and tens of thousands in France, both pretty civilized places.
Even when the power doesn't go out, for those who dislike air conditioning, can't afford to run it, or just the bewildered and confused can get caught in a vicious cycle of heat, dehydraytion, and dizziness leading to unconsciousness and death.
This is a good time to get to know your neighbors if you haven't already, throw a late evening picnic or block party, and call relatives who are getting on a bit in years.
Lightning is more likely to strike you than the Powerball, and tornados are dramatic but quite infrequent, especially so far this summer. But people die in central Ohio every summer from heat stroke and related issues, often right in their living rooms . . . talk about your preventable causes of death!
Drink, drink, drink, y'all, and no, not that stuff. All year 'round Americans tend to go about in a general state of dehydration, with impairments from memory loss to slower reflexes to unnecessary discomfort. Soda pop, even in the MegaGulpSlurpCanister size, can help keep you on the down side of fluid balance in your body. Water is great, tap water just fine, but keep on drinking it through the day.
Eating a good quantity of fruits and vegetables has a good influence in making your body want fluid rather than feel falsely filled, so diet can affect this internal sense as well. Plus drinking water supresses your appetite naturally, leading to weight loss . . . it's all good.
As you may be able to tell, I just got back from directing a week of church camp, where the other gospel we preached was "drink water!" Counselors and kids alike, with the steady rains we experienced, had to be reminded frequently, and still the visits to the health officer came for headaches and tummy aches and just plain all body icks that tended to vanish with the application of 2000 ml of H2O between the teeth.
I know I got tedious on the subject at camp, and why should i not be tedious for you folks? As Spiderman says, with great heat comes great responsibility. Or something like that -- I feel tired and confused, and need to go get a drink.
I'll be right back!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a summer tip with him at disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
With Summer Set On High
Heat waves are no laughing matter, even for the sun worshipers among us who long for Florida or Arizona or the Riviera.
Some years ago a heat wave across the Northern Hemisphere led to hundreds of deaths in Chicago and tens of thousands in France, both pretty civilized places.
Even when the power doesn't go out, for those who dislike air conditioning, can't afford to run it, or just the bewildered and confused can get caught in a vicious cycle of heat, dehydraytion, and dizziness leading to unconsciousness and death.
This is a good time to get to know your neighbors if you haven't already, throw a late evening picnic or block party, and call relatives who are getting on a bit in years.
Lightning is more likely to strike you than the Powerball, and tornados are dramatic but quite infrequent, especially so far this summer. But people die in central Ohio every summer from heat stroke and related issues, often right in their living rooms . . . talk about your preventable causes of death!
Drink, drink, drink, y'all, and no, not that stuff. All year 'round Americans tend to go about in a general state of dehydration, with impairments from memory loss to slower reflexes to unnecessary discomfort. Soda pop, even in the MegaGulpSlurpCanister size, can help keep you on the down side of fluid balance in your body. Water is great, tap water just fine, but keep on drinking it through the day.
Eating a good quantity of fruits and vegetables has a good influence in making your body want fluid rather than feel falsely filled, so diet can affect this internal sense as well. Plus drinking water supresses your appetite naturally, leading to weight loss . . . it's all good.
As you may be able to tell, I just got back from directing a week of church camp, where the other gospel we preached was "drink water!" Counselors and kids alike, with the steady rains we experienced, had to be reminded frequently, and still the visits to the health officer came for headaches and tummy aches and just plain all body icks that tended to vanish with the application of 2000 ml of H2O between the teeth.
I know I got tedious on the subject at camp, and why should i not be tedious for you folks? As Spiderman says, with great heat comes great responsibility. Or something like that -- I feel tired and confused, and need to go get a drink.
I'll be right back!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a summer tip with him at disciple@voyager.net.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Faith Works 7-8-06 (7-15 is part two, just below - keep scrolling!)
Jeff Gill
A Summer Puzzle
With the warm weather and outdoor activities, there are always folks who like a good crossword, sudoku, or word search in their comfy chair.
In that spirit, Faith Works offers a little quiz for y’all to mull over . . .
1) What is the oldest church building in Licking County?
2) What is the oldest church building still used for worship in these parts?
3) What is the oldest continuously worshiping congregation in the county?
4) Who was the first Christian missionary to this area, and under which denomination?
5) What was the first Christian observance in Licking County?
6) Where, and in what year was the first European child born in the county?
7) And what about the first wedding in the modern legal sense?
8)What is the earliest official cemetery in Licking County?
So, let’s give you some time to think about those questions. Not too many would know these down to the detail, but most would have a vague, general idea. If you’ll bear with me through the end of this week’s and next week’s column on the "Your Faith" page, I hope your general ideas will expand a bit.
Even if you don’t remember the specifics, but hey, it is the summertime. No test at the end, I promise.
OK, so here go the answers, with a few "tricks" I trust you’ll forgive. Errors of fact are the responsibility of the columnist, and are not the views of the management here at the Advocate!
1) What is the oldest church building in Licking County?
The correct answer, as best as I can confirm, is the Snider Muffler Shop on First Street, just south of Main Street in Newark.
Huh?
No, really; drive by sometime, a block before you reach "The Works," and look up past the Monroe Muffler banners. You’ll see a tower, and picked out in black against the cream paint over the aged brick is the year "1834," which is when Trinity Episcopal Church built the structure.
There are a number of other buildings which claim to be rebuilt on foundation stones going back farther, but I’m not aware of an older intact building made for worship . . . other than the Newark Earthworks, but we’ll leave their 2,000 year old purposes for other consideration. The lack of written records means Native faith and practice will get the standard qualifiers against their claims of "first European," et cetera.
2) You could kinda tell by the previous question that there was some kind of trick here. Not long after Trinity built the brick building now within Snider Muffler in 1834, the "Stone Pile" Church of Christ was built out on Brushy Run Road in southeastern Licking County, towards Flint Ridge. 1837 was when the work appears to begin, with worship regularly from 1838 forward. The congregation has ebbed and waned, but was given a new lease on life and a new roof by the Central Church of Christ (now Central Christian on Mt. Vernon Rd.) back 75 years ago, and there has been not only consistent worship but additions and improvements ever since.
Old Stone Church of Christ is still together on Sunday mornings in the 1837 building, and I’d have to say they have the oldest arrangement in the county.
If I am wrong about either 1) or 2), I would be absolutely delighted to hear about it!
3) What is the oldest continuously worshiping congregation in the county? Here’s where this exercise gets really tricky. First Presbyterian Church in Newark has a clear line right back to 1808, and is often called the "oldest," with the qualifier that First Presbyterian Church of Granville has met on their corner since 1805, but started as Congregational, switching under Rev. Jacob Little thirty some years later.
Licking Baptist Church in Union Township can trace their roots to 1803, and Welsh Hills Baptist to 1801 (sort of), but the congregations lapsed, sometimes more than once, over the last two centuries. Should this disqualify their claim the primacy? It certainly makes them non-continuous.
And White Chapel Methodist southeast of Heath on (yep) White Chapel Road could claim heritage to 1802 or 3, but their continuity is in some question as well.
Which brings us to: 4) Who was the first Christian missionary to this area, and under which denomination?
Actually, Chaplain David Jones, a Baptist preacher from Freehold, New Jersey, passed through and made notes just before the American Revolution, in 1773, and I’m having some fun looking for more details of his story.
But Parson Jones, who returned a number of times to visit Welsh Baptists who may well have come here on his recommendation, didn’t come with the intention to preach here. He came through largely by accident, heading back east with a guide who, um, wasn’t. Much of a guide, that is. More on Jones some other day. . .
We do know for a fact that brothers Asa and Levi Shinn, of a western Virginia settlement now called Shinnston WV, came as Methodist circuit riders to the Hog Run valley (aka White Chapel Road in Licking Township) specifically to preach the Gospel and save souls, starting a congregation if they could. By 1803, they were well known to the few earliest European settlers of all faiths in what was not yet Licking County.
5) through 8) comes next week!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; correct him (with verification!) at disciple@voyager.net.
* * *
* * *
Faith Works 7-15-06
Jeff Gill
Finishing the Quiz
Last week, I threw you eight Licking County faith community trivia questions. You only got four answers, so before I provide the last four, here are the questions again:
5) What was the first Christian observance in Licking County?
6) Where, and in what year was the first European child born in the county?
7) And what about the first wedding in the modern legal sense?
8) What is the earliest official cemetery in Licking County?
Of course, there is room for interpretation on most of these questions (is the oldest church just one still used, on the original site, without interruption, etc.), and 5) certainly counts.
Levi and Asa Shinn held worship services in settler cabins around 1800 and 1801, and Chaplain Jones returned to the area and preached for Welsh Baptists as the Granville Company settlers arrived in 1805, but Christopher Gist beats them all on a technicality. He wrote in his journal that his party of explorers celebrated Christmas just north of the Great Buffalo Swamp in 1750, heading for the Scioto valley.
The first service held in a building built for the purpose was a near tie between Presbyterians of Newark and Granville in and after 1805, using log structures built for both worship and school purposes.
6) We think we know the answer to this one, but as birth records were sketchy even when the so-called literate pioneers came in, noting that we disqualify at least 12,000 years of birthin’ babies to Native Americans due to lack of written records.
At the north end of Granville’s Galway Drive, just above the intersection of Cherry Valley Road and Newark-Granville Road, Lily Jones had a baby in 1802; she also died shortly after, and her husband John buried her there on the homestead, moving away with child (whose name is not known) and abandoning the cabin. The Jones property, later the Munson farm, was where the last night’s campsite was established before arriving in newly surveyed Granville 201 years ago. She was moved to their (Old) Colony Burying Ground as one of the first laid to rest there (or re-laid) after 1805.
7) is totally a trick question: the infrequence of resident or itinerant clergy, or even judges riding circuit in early pioneer days meant that the first weddings were often long after the first children, if they bothered at all by that point. It isn’t that folks didn’t want to get married – weddings were about all the celebration anyone got between 1800 and 1820 in these parts – but they had to be practical.
I’ve never read about broom-jumping or other folk customs as was common in the upper Ohio or Monongahela valleys before 1812, but I have trouble believing there wasn’t some Licking County equivalent. Common law marriage was simple expediency in those days.
8) Cemeteries, on the other hand, required a certain amount of community consensus. You couldn’t just plant Auntie Esmerelda anywhere, although that would have happened early enough, usually leading to a crop of marble (or local limestone & sandstone) springing up around her for a family cemetery. Many of these still adorn bends in country roads and nearby hilltops today, but often frustratingly illegible and unrecorded elsewhere.
What we do know is that the early 1803 settlers in Newark began just west of Fourth Street with a cemetery, many of whom were relocated to Sixth Street by 1814, when the first recorded graves were noted there. Some, but by no means all, were moved northeast to Cedar Hill when the city of Newark founded their third cemetery in 1850.
The Old Colony Burying Ground of Granville is usually called the oldest, with records beginning in 1805, but three may have started earlier: the Beard-Green family plot on the scenic drive through now Dawes Arboretum (not the Dawes monument and graves in the north drive, but the southern cemetery with the historic marker) may have interments going back to 1803 or earlier, and likewise the White Chapel Cemetery just north and Licking Baptist Cemetery to the west (off Beaver Run Road) are likely to contain burials from that same year.
On west, and a bit south along Refugee Road is Luray Cemetery, with some very old but illegible inscriptions. Hebron and Fairmount Cemeteries are quite historic in their own ways, but date to after 1830 and the National Road.
Fairmount also contains what archaeologists call an Adena period mound, which is a burial type, dating to as far back as 500 BC, so you might just want to count the mound, not the more "modern" cemetery as the oldest! Native American practices meant that a family or association didn’t spread out, as our cemeteries do today, but with cremation and a new interment layer the usual method, they rose up, looking over the landscape with a perspective built on their ancestors.
Literally.
And I hope this little quiz helped you get some perspective on our faith traditions in Licking County.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send him a tombstone inscription or two through disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
A Summer Puzzle
With the warm weather and outdoor activities, there are always folks who like a good crossword, sudoku, or word search in their comfy chair.
In that spirit, Faith Works offers a little quiz for y’all to mull over . . .
1) What is the oldest church building in Licking County?
2) What is the oldest church building still used for worship in these parts?
3) What is the oldest continuously worshiping congregation in the county?
4) Who was the first Christian missionary to this area, and under which denomination?
5) What was the first Christian observance in Licking County?
6) Where, and in what year was the first European child born in the county?
7) And what about the first wedding in the modern legal sense?
8)What is the earliest official cemetery in Licking County?
So, let’s give you some time to think about those questions. Not too many would know these down to the detail, but most would have a vague, general idea. If you’ll bear with me through the end of this week’s and next week’s column on the "Your Faith" page, I hope your general ideas will expand a bit.
Even if you don’t remember the specifics, but hey, it is the summertime. No test at the end, I promise.
OK, so here go the answers, with a few "tricks" I trust you’ll forgive. Errors of fact are the responsibility of the columnist, and are not the views of the management here at the Advocate!
1) What is the oldest church building in Licking County?
The correct answer, as best as I can confirm, is the Snider Muffler Shop on First Street, just south of Main Street in Newark.
Huh?
No, really; drive by sometime, a block before you reach "The Works," and look up past the Monroe Muffler banners. You’ll see a tower, and picked out in black against the cream paint over the aged brick is the year "1834," which is when Trinity Episcopal Church built the structure.
There are a number of other buildings which claim to be rebuilt on foundation stones going back farther, but I’m not aware of an older intact building made for worship . . . other than the Newark Earthworks, but we’ll leave their 2,000 year old purposes for other consideration. The lack of written records means Native faith and practice will get the standard qualifiers against their claims of "first European," et cetera.
2) You could kinda tell by the previous question that there was some kind of trick here. Not long after Trinity built the brick building now within Snider Muffler in 1834, the "Stone Pile" Church of Christ was built out on Brushy Run Road in southeastern Licking County, towards Flint Ridge. 1837 was when the work appears to begin, with worship regularly from 1838 forward. The congregation has ebbed and waned, but was given a new lease on life and a new roof by the Central Church of Christ (now Central Christian on Mt. Vernon Rd.) back 75 years ago, and there has been not only consistent worship but additions and improvements ever since.
Old Stone Church of Christ is still together on Sunday mornings in the 1837 building, and I’d have to say they have the oldest arrangement in the county.
If I am wrong about either 1) or 2), I would be absolutely delighted to hear about it!
3) What is the oldest continuously worshiping congregation in the county? Here’s where this exercise gets really tricky. First Presbyterian Church in Newark has a clear line right back to 1808, and is often called the "oldest," with the qualifier that First Presbyterian Church of Granville has met on their corner since 1805, but started as Congregational, switching under Rev. Jacob Little thirty some years later.
Licking Baptist Church in Union Township can trace their roots to 1803, and Welsh Hills Baptist to 1801 (sort of), but the congregations lapsed, sometimes more than once, over the last two centuries. Should this disqualify their claim the primacy? It certainly makes them non-continuous.
And White Chapel Methodist southeast of Heath on (yep) White Chapel Road could claim heritage to 1802 or 3, but their continuity is in some question as well.
Which brings us to: 4) Who was the first Christian missionary to this area, and under which denomination?
Actually, Chaplain David Jones, a Baptist preacher from Freehold, New Jersey, passed through and made notes just before the American Revolution, in 1773, and I’m having some fun looking for more details of his story.
But Parson Jones, who returned a number of times to visit Welsh Baptists who may well have come here on his recommendation, didn’t come with the intention to preach here. He came through largely by accident, heading back east with a guide who, um, wasn’t. Much of a guide, that is. More on Jones some other day. . .
We do know for a fact that brothers Asa and Levi Shinn, of a western Virginia settlement now called Shinnston WV, came as Methodist circuit riders to the Hog Run valley (aka White Chapel Road in Licking Township) specifically to preach the Gospel and save souls, starting a congregation if they could. By 1803, they were well known to the few earliest European settlers of all faiths in what was not yet Licking County.
5) through 8) comes next week!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; correct him (with verification!) at disciple@voyager.net.
* * *
* * *
Faith Works 7-15-06
Jeff Gill
Finishing the Quiz
Last week, I threw you eight Licking County faith community trivia questions. You only got four answers, so before I provide the last four, here are the questions again:
5) What was the first Christian observance in Licking County?
6) Where, and in what year was the first European child born in the county?
7) And what about the first wedding in the modern legal sense?
8) What is the earliest official cemetery in Licking County?
Of course, there is room for interpretation on most of these questions (is the oldest church just one still used, on the original site, without interruption, etc.), and 5) certainly counts.
Levi and Asa Shinn held worship services in settler cabins around 1800 and 1801, and Chaplain Jones returned to the area and preached for Welsh Baptists as the Granville Company settlers arrived in 1805, but Christopher Gist beats them all on a technicality. He wrote in his journal that his party of explorers celebrated Christmas just north of the Great Buffalo Swamp in 1750, heading for the Scioto valley.
The first service held in a building built for the purpose was a near tie between Presbyterians of Newark and Granville in and after 1805, using log structures built for both worship and school purposes.
6) We think we know the answer to this one, but as birth records were sketchy even when the so-called literate pioneers came in, noting that we disqualify at least 12,000 years of birthin’ babies to Native Americans due to lack of written records.
At the north end of Granville’s Galway Drive, just above the intersection of Cherry Valley Road and Newark-Granville Road, Lily Jones had a baby in 1802; she also died shortly after, and her husband John buried her there on the homestead, moving away with child (whose name is not known) and abandoning the cabin. The Jones property, later the Munson farm, was where the last night’s campsite was established before arriving in newly surveyed Granville 201 years ago. She was moved to their (Old) Colony Burying Ground as one of the first laid to rest there (or re-laid) after 1805.
7) is totally a trick question: the infrequence of resident or itinerant clergy, or even judges riding circuit in early pioneer days meant that the first weddings were often long after the first children, if they bothered at all by that point. It isn’t that folks didn’t want to get married – weddings were about all the celebration anyone got between 1800 and 1820 in these parts – but they had to be practical.
I’ve never read about broom-jumping or other folk customs as was common in the upper Ohio or Monongahela valleys before 1812, but I have trouble believing there wasn’t some Licking County equivalent. Common law marriage was simple expediency in those days.
8) Cemeteries, on the other hand, required a certain amount of community consensus. You couldn’t just plant Auntie Esmerelda anywhere, although that would have happened early enough, usually leading to a crop of marble (or local limestone & sandstone) springing up around her for a family cemetery. Many of these still adorn bends in country roads and nearby hilltops today, but often frustratingly illegible and unrecorded elsewhere.
What we do know is that the early 1803 settlers in Newark began just west of Fourth Street with a cemetery, many of whom were relocated to Sixth Street by 1814, when the first recorded graves were noted there. Some, but by no means all, were moved northeast to Cedar Hill when the city of Newark founded their third cemetery in 1850.
The Old Colony Burying Ground of Granville is usually called the oldest, with records beginning in 1805, but three may have started earlier: the Beard-Green family plot on the scenic drive through now Dawes Arboretum (not the Dawes monument and graves in the north drive, but the southern cemetery with the historic marker) may have interments going back to 1803 or earlier, and likewise the White Chapel Cemetery just north and Licking Baptist Cemetery to the west (off Beaver Run Road) are likely to contain burials from that same year.
On west, and a bit south along Refugee Road is Luray Cemetery, with some very old but illegible inscriptions. Hebron and Fairmount Cemeteries are quite historic in their own ways, but date to after 1830 and the National Road.
Fairmount also contains what archaeologists call an Adena period mound, which is a burial type, dating to as far back as 500 BC, so you might just want to count the mound, not the more "modern" cemetery as the oldest! Native American practices meant that a family or association didn’t spread out, as our cemeteries do today, but with cremation and a new interment layer the usual method, they rose up, looking over the landscape with a perspective built on their ancestors.
Literally.
And I hope this little quiz helped you get some perspective on our faith traditions in Licking County.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send him a tombstone inscription or two through disciple@voyager.net.
Notes From My Knapsack 7-9-06 (see below for 7-16, a related column)
Jeff Gill
When Our Children Come Home
Along with camps and sports clinics and county fairs, kids are packing up in some households for college. Classes may not begin for weeks, but freshmen days on campus or early orientation or even "fall" sports get going in just the next few weeks.
These can be bittersweet days, all the more as most young people who travel away for higher education tend to stay away, returning for visits but very rarely moving home to work and live.
The Lovely Wife and I lived in West Virginia for six years, and were struck by how much political campaigning was focused on "bring our children home." Lines like "vote for me and we’ll keep our kids and grandkids here," or "my opponent has turned a blind eye to thousands of our young people moving out of state" were standard fare. No one was against this, it was more a question of who could make the better case for how their plans and policies would allow everyone’s descendents to stay near the home place, and not the other guy.
Meanwhile, the more this was the rhetoric, the reality just increased that college grads left the state, in ever larger numbers.
Then we moved back into Ohio, and what do you know: we’ve started hearing candidates slide references into ads like "and I’ll help keep our children working and living in Ohio."
Surely this is a fine idea that no one can argue with, but my fear is that as in West Virginia, and with so many other political footballs, we’ll hear the most ranting and raving about the stuff elected officials can’t do anything about, and little discussion of what they can affect.
Ohio has started competing with West Virginia in the rate of college graduates who move out of state, and by some measures we’re beating them in this category (keep in mind that they’ve already seen huge losses in years past, so we’re just catching up). Central Ohio is doing better than most of the rest of the Buckeye State, but population losses in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, and Dayton, along with rural Ohio, more than overwhelm our local vitality.
How realistic is the "keep our kids here" logic? Scott Russell Sanders, who spoke to freshmen at Denison last fall, spoke eloquently about the easy assumptions we have around the links between mobility and education and professional advancement. He encouraged students to think about finding a place to live and putting down roots there, even if it meant a certain loss of potential prestige, status, advancement, or even (gasp) income.
Sketching the social costs of rootlessness and vagrant culture, tracing them through non-sustainable practices and cultural amnesia, Sanders made (and makes) a strong case for why your life is better with roots. Meanwhile, American society does, in fact, presuppose that a person or a couple will move many times, across multiple states, until they reach some level of economic stability where they will then buy a vacation home in yet another locale.
For myself, I feel wistful about the place I still think of as home, and faintly envious of high school classmates who still live and work where we were students together. They take their kids to the camps we attended, picnic in the parks I explored as a kid, and go to church where we grew up.
And there’s a different sense of the same jealousy for those around me now who are marching in the same parade with their kids that they marched in as children, or are running events they watched their parents manage years ago.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send your thoughts about community to disciple@voyager.net.
* * *
Notes From My Knapsack 7-16-06
Jeff Gill
Send the Candidates To School
Last week I talked about two categories of people I know, those back in my hometown (in another state) who take their kids to the same camps we attended, picnic in the parks I explored as a kid, and go to church where we all grew up; I do envy them bit.
And there’s a different sense of the same jealousy for those around me now who are marching in the same parade with their kids that they marched in as children, or are running events they watched their parents manage years ago.
But there are actually very few people for me to feel that way about. I know maybe a half-dozen people who left either spot for college and ended back home to raise their families. Two back in my hometown are actually able to be there in large part because they don’t have any kids, and are free to do what they want, which for them happens to be back in northwest Indiana.
Licking County is a great place to raise a family, but the professional options for supporting a household can be limited.
Wait, you say, aren’t there lots of interesting, challenging, and even well paid jobs in central Ohio? Exactly: in Franklin, Delaware, and other surrounding counties. Beyond hourly wage jobs, many local residents are pursuing opportunities down the road (roads like the new 16/161). This means a family that stays in Licking, but whose wage-earners are spending ten and more hours per week in their car, time they don’t spend as youth group leaders or tutors or board members in Licking County.
Last I heard, out-of-county workplace directed giving to our United Way was pushing past 25%. That’s good news of a sort, but an indication of problems to come, as the landscape of volunteerism and local involvement shifts seismically.
Many local civic leaders are asking "what can be done to increase the number and type of jobs here in Licking County?" This isn’t an anti-bedroom community issue, so much as a very real concern about balance and wholeness in how to be a sustainable bedroom community.
And our children are still likely to advance themselves by moving away, for schooling and for after. Easy answers aren’t going to be real solutions from anyone running for office, but everyone can share the goal of creating a state where more people want to live, and can.
Development is getting to be dirty word in Licking County. We still have to make decisions on things like whether to support our growing schools with property or income taxes, zoning and stormwater management, the question isn’t yes or no, but good or bad.
Maybe even "good or bad" is a less useful distinction than productive and sustainable versus short term and short sighted. Education out of state is getting more attractive, and picking up your bachelor’s degree out of state greatly magnifies the likelihood you’ll not return.
Even recipients of Ohio higher ed degrees are moving away, but that’s not a reason to cut state post-secondary budgets. We need the economic energy of research and technology that comes from colleges and universities, because that’s where new jobs are born. We also want to lure capital for investment in Ohio businesses, and those dollars tend to follow campuses and the educated work force found around them.
6,000 plus students (a bit over 2,000 each) are pursuing post-high education in Licking County, at OSU-N, COTC, and Denison. Around 12,000 kids are in high school right now ‘round here, watching to see where their future is heading. I hope the campaigning going into this fall has some clear proposals for what candidates intend for our most vital economic infrastructure.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send your community news bulletins to disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
When Our Children Come Home
Along with camps and sports clinics and county fairs, kids are packing up in some households for college. Classes may not begin for weeks, but freshmen days on campus or early orientation or even "fall" sports get going in just the next few weeks.
These can be bittersweet days, all the more as most young people who travel away for higher education tend to stay away, returning for visits but very rarely moving home to work and live.
The Lovely Wife and I lived in West Virginia for six years, and were struck by how much political campaigning was focused on "bring our children home." Lines like "vote for me and we’ll keep our kids and grandkids here," or "my opponent has turned a blind eye to thousands of our young people moving out of state" were standard fare. No one was against this, it was more a question of who could make the better case for how their plans and policies would allow everyone’s descendents to stay near the home place, and not the other guy.
Meanwhile, the more this was the rhetoric, the reality just increased that college grads left the state, in ever larger numbers.
Then we moved back into Ohio, and what do you know: we’ve started hearing candidates slide references into ads like "and I’ll help keep our children working and living in Ohio."
Surely this is a fine idea that no one can argue with, but my fear is that as in West Virginia, and with so many other political footballs, we’ll hear the most ranting and raving about the stuff elected officials can’t do anything about, and little discussion of what they can affect.
Ohio has started competing with West Virginia in the rate of college graduates who move out of state, and by some measures we’re beating them in this category (keep in mind that they’ve already seen huge losses in years past, so we’re just catching up). Central Ohio is doing better than most of the rest of the Buckeye State, but population losses in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, and Dayton, along with rural Ohio, more than overwhelm our local vitality.
How realistic is the "keep our kids here" logic? Scott Russell Sanders, who spoke to freshmen at Denison last fall, spoke eloquently about the easy assumptions we have around the links between mobility and education and professional advancement. He encouraged students to think about finding a place to live and putting down roots there, even if it meant a certain loss of potential prestige, status, advancement, or even (gasp) income.
Sketching the social costs of rootlessness and vagrant culture, tracing them through non-sustainable practices and cultural amnesia, Sanders made (and makes) a strong case for why your life is better with roots. Meanwhile, American society does, in fact, presuppose that a person or a couple will move many times, across multiple states, until they reach some level of economic stability where they will then buy a vacation home in yet another locale.
For myself, I feel wistful about the place I still think of as home, and faintly envious of high school classmates who still live and work where we were students together. They take their kids to the camps we attended, picnic in the parks I explored as a kid, and go to church where we grew up.
And there’s a different sense of the same jealousy for those around me now who are marching in the same parade with their kids that they marched in as children, or are running events they watched their parents manage years ago.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send your thoughts about community to disciple@voyager.net.
* * *
Notes From My Knapsack 7-16-06
Jeff Gill
Send the Candidates To School
Last week I talked about two categories of people I know, those back in my hometown (in another state) who take their kids to the same camps we attended, picnic in the parks I explored as a kid, and go to church where we all grew up; I do envy them bit.
And there’s a different sense of the same jealousy for those around me now who are marching in the same parade with their kids that they marched in as children, or are running events they watched their parents manage years ago.
But there are actually very few people for me to feel that way about. I know maybe a half-dozen people who left either spot for college and ended back home to raise their families. Two back in my hometown are actually able to be there in large part because they don’t have any kids, and are free to do what they want, which for them happens to be back in northwest Indiana.
Licking County is a great place to raise a family, but the professional options for supporting a household can be limited.
Wait, you say, aren’t there lots of interesting, challenging, and even well paid jobs in central Ohio? Exactly: in Franklin, Delaware, and other surrounding counties. Beyond hourly wage jobs, many local residents are pursuing opportunities down the road (roads like the new 16/161). This means a family that stays in Licking, but whose wage-earners are spending ten and more hours per week in their car, time they don’t spend as youth group leaders or tutors or board members in Licking County.
Last I heard, out-of-county workplace directed giving to our United Way was pushing past 25%. That’s good news of a sort, but an indication of problems to come, as the landscape of volunteerism and local involvement shifts seismically.
Many local civic leaders are asking "what can be done to increase the number and type of jobs here in Licking County?" This isn’t an anti-bedroom community issue, so much as a very real concern about balance and wholeness in how to be a sustainable bedroom community.
And our children are still likely to advance themselves by moving away, for schooling and for after. Easy answers aren’t going to be real solutions from anyone running for office, but everyone can share the goal of creating a state where more people want to live, and can.
Development is getting to be dirty word in Licking County. We still have to make decisions on things like whether to support our growing schools with property or income taxes, zoning and stormwater management, the question isn’t yes or no, but good or bad.
Maybe even "good or bad" is a less useful distinction than productive and sustainable versus short term and short sighted. Education out of state is getting more attractive, and picking up your bachelor’s degree out of state greatly magnifies the likelihood you’ll not return.
Even recipients of Ohio higher ed degrees are moving away, but that’s not a reason to cut state post-secondary budgets. We need the economic energy of research and technology that comes from colleges and universities, because that’s where new jobs are born. We also want to lure capital for investment in Ohio businesses, and those dollars tend to follow campuses and the educated work force found around them.
6,000 plus students (a bit over 2,000 each) are pursuing post-high education in Licking County, at OSU-N, COTC, and Denison. Around 12,000 kids are in high school right now ‘round here, watching to see where their future is heading. I hope the campaigning going into this fall has some clear proposals for what candidates intend for our most vital economic infrastructure.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send your community news bulletins to disciple@voyager.net.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Faith Works 7-1-06
Jeff Gill
Freedom To Be . . . What?
Over this next year two fiftieth anniversaries are catching my attention, and may have a link of sorts. Let’s see what you think.
1956 and 1957 saw the formal merger of the Congregationalist and "E&R" or "Evangelical and Reformed" Churches, to start what we now know as the United Church of Christ, or UCC. In and right around Licking County we have many congregations with artifacts of this era embedded in their names: Highwater Congregational, Trinity Evangelical, and so on. But all have the "cross, crown, and orb" of the UCC logo surrounded by Jesus’ prayer in John 17 "that they may all be one." From Pilgrim roots to Mercersburg Reformed liturgy, many different distinctive strands were woven together in 1957.
This was the high tide in some ways of the modern ecumenical movement, or at least the Protestant version of it, with an emphasis on organizational and institutional merger. The 50’s and 60’s saw not only the UCC but the EUB and many Methodist bodies join in the United Methodist Church. And the groundwork was laid for what is now the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, joining a number of liturgical and ethnic Lutheran bodies as one ecclesial group.
1956 also saw the beginning of something that no one at the time probably thought of as being in competition with this unifying impulse. The National Interstate System began, a dream in young Lieutenant Eisenhower’s head as he bounced across the continent after World War I in a military convoy that was lucky to get all its trucks from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
As President Eisenhower, he signed legislation putting federal dollars and influence into building a network of state spanning, limited access highways. Recall uneasily, if you will, that these ribbons of asphalt and concrete were not built originally to sell maple nut logs or meals o’ happiness with small crunchy toys to insert in your car’s upholstery, but to move military equipment swiftly back and forth across the country.
What they ended up doing was not shift armored columns from the west to east coast, but speed the shift of populations from city centers and "first rings" of urban growth to . . . uh, well, here. Exurban, let alone suburban communities as we know them now, are the creation of high speed cloverleafed transportation corridors.
Modern suburban life is a social experiment that we are living through right now, with potential implications on a par with the invention of agriculture or the rise of the nation-state.
No, I’m not kidding.
At no point in human history have we tried to live quite this way, with a growing majority of the population living in this kind of dispersed community structure. The outcomes of what we’re doing are almost utterly unpredictable, except that it isn’t sustainable as things currently stand beyond another fifty years (a whole ‘nother column).
What it has clearly done is affirm and cement the individualist tendencies of American culture into all kinds of social spheres . . . and church life is one of them.
Shopping, consumer choice, and driving around to find what you want: these are part and parcel of modern life. Don’t find exactly what you want right next door? Get in the car/van/humm-vee and drive thirty miles ‘til you find it.
Does this effect church life? Ask any pastor who calls on new visitors. If they’ve been at this a while, they can trace for you the shift in how those conversations have gone over the last 20 or 30 years.
This force works directly against the centralizing, institutionally centered ecumenist perspective that folks in many churches thought was the future as they celebrated yet another merger . . . while they drove home on US Rt. 66 past the ribbon cutting for I-40. Any connection? Well, I’m betting you see it now yourself, all the more if you saw the movie "Cars" recently. No church in "Cars," which is itself a whole ‘nother column . . .
And Happy Birthday today to my dad, who taught me to think in this odd connection oriented sort of way!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; observe your own trendspotting to him at disciple@voyager.net.
* * *
* * *
Notes From My Knapsack 7-2-06
Jeff Gill
Freedom Far And Near
Even if you know nothing of 30,000 feet above the ground or 30 miles away, a cumulonimbus anvil-top thunderhead in a rose-tinted dusky glow says to you, "I’m as far away as you’ll ever see something."
Throw in a red tailed hawk circling in the middle distance, receding into an infinitesimal dot just barely perceivable, and such a view has more visceral impact than even a galaxy through a telescope.
Spiral star whirls and globular clusters are distant and amazing, but with a little help from binoculars and a big assist from the knowledge of what astronomers deduce from radio telescopes and infrared observatories. But a towering thunderhead speaks directly to your mind and heart of size and distance and power.
It helps a great deal if said cloud formation is heading away from you, at least for calm appreciation. When the roiling top is swelling both in height and width, looming in the northwest and heading southeast, you start to shift your reflections to a mental inventory of patio furniture and which windows are open.
But when you have an iced tea at hand, the lawn is mowed, and said storm is passing well to the south, ideal for porch viewing, a meditative mood is in order.
Most of us will watch a passing, but powerful phenomena over the next few days: cue the "ooohhh . . . . . aahhhhhh" of standard fireworks crowd response. We can all hope we see more of pyrotechnics from chemicals and electronic launchers than the standard summer aerial display of "(flash) . . . K-Boom." Granville’s Wildwood Park fireworks on Sunday night, Monday’s Columbus’ "Red, White, and Boom," or the OSU-N concert and fireworks, and Tuesday all over the place, will all have officials watch the sky nervously, and ironically.
Ironically, because the fear is less of no fireworks than of being upstaged by Mother Nature’s own, less colorful but more reliably earthshaking light show.
My own preference for an "ideal" Fourth of July weekend is less about getting a good view of the nighttime show, though the Little Guy wants that and will likely get it (and ask to be carried as we walk the long trudge back to the car about 10:30 pm). It is the chance to marvel at the meaning of freedom and liberty that was not just fought for around about 1776, but was dreamed of and envisioned and planned and occasionally plotted and not infrequently schemed for.
The Founders negotiated, discussed, wrote, wrote some more, published, debated, occasionally legislated, and yes, they did have to fight sometimes. They also had to run at the right moment (see Jefferson, Thomas) along with knowing when to stand their ground (see Forge, Valley).
What gave them the vision to see the kind of freedom that led to this amazing society we live in today? Some of it came from a view like I have from my own front porch on a summer afternoon, shading into evening with the vast expanse of the heavens textured by clouds. They reach for infinity, but finally find a limit even in the sky, jet streams slicing a flat anvil top which presses energy down into the lightning and rain below.
Something within that sense of vastness and limit, purpose and process is where the Adams’ and Washington and even old pragmatic Hamilton could look and see a hope and a promise that they translated into documents and traditions we still celebrate today.
I hope they had some good cool tea, if not iced, while they were dreaming all this up.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send him your story to disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Freedom To Be . . . What?
Over this next year two fiftieth anniversaries are catching my attention, and may have a link of sorts. Let’s see what you think.
1956 and 1957 saw the formal merger of the Congregationalist and "E&R" or "Evangelical and Reformed" Churches, to start what we now know as the United Church of Christ, or UCC. In and right around Licking County we have many congregations with artifacts of this era embedded in their names: Highwater Congregational, Trinity Evangelical, and so on. But all have the "cross, crown, and orb" of the UCC logo surrounded by Jesus’ prayer in John 17 "that they may all be one." From Pilgrim roots to Mercersburg Reformed liturgy, many different distinctive strands were woven together in 1957.
This was the high tide in some ways of the modern ecumenical movement, or at least the Protestant version of it, with an emphasis on organizational and institutional merger. The 50’s and 60’s saw not only the UCC but the EUB and many Methodist bodies join in the United Methodist Church. And the groundwork was laid for what is now the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, joining a number of liturgical and ethnic Lutheran bodies as one ecclesial group.
1956 also saw the beginning of something that no one at the time probably thought of as being in competition with this unifying impulse. The National Interstate System began, a dream in young Lieutenant Eisenhower’s head as he bounced across the continent after World War I in a military convoy that was lucky to get all its trucks from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
As President Eisenhower, he signed legislation putting federal dollars and influence into building a network of state spanning, limited access highways. Recall uneasily, if you will, that these ribbons of asphalt and concrete were not built originally to sell maple nut logs or meals o’ happiness with small crunchy toys to insert in your car’s upholstery, but to move military equipment swiftly back and forth across the country.
What they ended up doing was not shift armored columns from the west to east coast, but speed the shift of populations from city centers and "first rings" of urban growth to . . . uh, well, here. Exurban, let alone suburban communities as we know them now, are the creation of high speed cloverleafed transportation corridors.
Modern suburban life is a social experiment that we are living through right now, with potential implications on a par with the invention of agriculture or the rise of the nation-state.
No, I’m not kidding.
At no point in human history have we tried to live quite this way, with a growing majority of the population living in this kind of dispersed community structure. The outcomes of what we’re doing are almost utterly unpredictable, except that it isn’t sustainable as things currently stand beyond another fifty years (a whole ‘nother column).
What it has clearly done is affirm and cement the individualist tendencies of American culture into all kinds of social spheres . . . and church life is one of them.
Shopping, consumer choice, and driving around to find what you want: these are part and parcel of modern life. Don’t find exactly what you want right next door? Get in the car/van/humm-vee and drive thirty miles ‘til you find it.
Does this effect church life? Ask any pastor who calls on new visitors. If they’ve been at this a while, they can trace for you the shift in how those conversations have gone over the last 20 or 30 years.
This force works directly against the centralizing, institutionally centered ecumenist perspective that folks in many churches thought was the future as they celebrated yet another merger . . . while they drove home on US Rt. 66 past the ribbon cutting for I-40. Any connection? Well, I’m betting you see it now yourself, all the more if you saw the movie "Cars" recently. No church in "Cars," which is itself a whole ‘nother column . . .
And Happy Birthday today to my dad, who taught me to think in this odd connection oriented sort of way!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; observe your own trendspotting to him at disciple@voyager.net.
* * *
* * *
Notes From My Knapsack 7-2-06
Jeff Gill
Freedom Far And Near
Even if you know nothing of 30,000 feet above the ground or 30 miles away, a cumulonimbus anvil-top thunderhead in a rose-tinted dusky glow says to you, "I’m as far away as you’ll ever see something."
Throw in a red tailed hawk circling in the middle distance, receding into an infinitesimal dot just barely perceivable, and such a view has more visceral impact than even a galaxy through a telescope.
Spiral star whirls and globular clusters are distant and amazing, but with a little help from binoculars and a big assist from the knowledge of what astronomers deduce from radio telescopes and infrared observatories. But a towering thunderhead speaks directly to your mind and heart of size and distance and power.
It helps a great deal if said cloud formation is heading away from you, at least for calm appreciation. When the roiling top is swelling both in height and width, looming in the northwest and heading southeast, you start to shift your reflections to a mental inventory of patio furniture and which windows are open.
But when you have an iced tea at hand, the lawn is mowed, and said storm is passing well to the south, ideal for porch viewing, a meditative mood is in order.
Most of us will watch a passing, but powerful phenomena over the next few days: cue the "ooohhh . . . . . aahhhhhh" of standard fireworks crowd response. We can all hope we see more of pyrotechnics from chemicals and electronic launchers than the standard summer aerial display of "(flash) . . . K-Boom." Granville’s Wildwood Park fireworks on Sunday night, Monday’s Columbus’ "Red, White, and Boom," or the OSU-N concert and fireworks, and Tuesday all over the place, will all have officials watch the sky nervously, and ironically.
Ironically, because the fear is less of no fireworks than of being upstaged by Mother Nature’s own, less colorful but more reliably earthshaking light show.
My own preference for an "ideal" Fourth of July weekend is less about getting a good view of the nighttime show, though the Little Guy wants that and will likely get it (and ask to be carried as we walk the long trudge back to the car about 10:30 pm). It is the chance to marvel at the meaning of freedom and liberty that was not just fought for around about 1776, but was dreamed of and envisioned and planned and occasionally plotted and not infrequently schemed for.
The Founders negotiated, discussed, wrote, wrote some more, published, debated, occasionally legislated, and yes, they did have to fight sometimes. They also had to run at the right moment (see Jefferson, Thomas) along with knowing when to stand their ground (see Forge, Valley).
What gave them the vision to see the kind of freedom that led to this amazing society we live in today? Some of it came from a view like I have from my own front porch on a summer afternoon, shading into evening with the vast expanse of the heavens textured by clouds. They reach for infinity, but finally find a limit even in the sky, jet streams slicing a flat anvil top which presses energy down into the lightning and rain below.
Something within that sense of vastness and limit, purpose and process is where the Adams’ and Washington and even old pragmatic Hamilton could look and see a hope and a promise that they translated into documents and traditions we still celebrate today.
I hope they had some good cool tea, if not iced, while they were dreaming all this up.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send him your story to disciple@voyager.net.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Notes From My Knapsack 6-25-06
Jeff Gill
Day Camp Takes All Year
Cub Scout Day Camp for Licking District Cub Scouts has ended, and the older Boy Scout troops are now going week by week out to Camp Falling Rock, out Rocky Fork way a couple miles past Hickman on Rt. 79.
Before we forget, and the carved bars of soap, birdhouses, and stamped leather crafts are put to work or put away around the house, it is time for a huge "Thank You!"
Our district Cub Day Camp is so popular, in fact, that the thanks have to come from Franklin, Fairfield, Perry, and Muskingum Counties. From June 13 to June 17, a total of 321 young boys from six to ten years old, 46 siblings who had parents that were among the 242 adults assisting with the twenty stations and four days (five for the older, or Webelos Scouts) of "Scouter Space" adventures, the theme for 2006 Cub Day Camp.
Ric and Angela Eader of Pataskala returned as directors, and were honored at the closing program by Jeff Schiavone, Licking District executive for the Simon Kenton Council, our wider Scouting structure in central Ohio. Over 600 crowded into the Waterfalls Amphitheater at Camp Falling Rock and gave a standing ovation to the leaders who made this amazing week possible.
For doing a program area, usually repeated twenty times in four days for groups of twelve to twenty-two, the Eaders note that they can’t be everywhere, so they needed these folks: A.J. Hildreth, Debbie Neighbarger, Brad Barborak, Amy Ybarra, Ruth Herbert, John Cash, Aaron Kirkingburg, Dave Addis, Jim Coley, Rick Ives, Randall Farley, Martie Slate, Jeff Chapman, Anne Arnold, Lisa Crum, Joe Bush, Harold Mason, health officer Russell Sparks and his wife Rebecca, and Lori Harvey, plus eight boys from Troop 141, and the staff of CFR who ran the pool.
That’s just to run the program.
Then you needed at least twenty adults who were committed to being there all four program days as day camp den leaders, plus dozens more "den walkers" who were parents who came a day or two as they could, and climbed Cardiac Hill as they could, or couldn’t.
We’re trying to get the name changed to the more optomistic "Cardio Hill," since your cardiovascular health is certainly helped by two or three trips up that slope each day!
For the den leaders who knew how to find the Foxfire Trail (hi Stephanie! Thanks Al!) and all the rest, the week really couldn’t happen without you.
Many youth serving programs have been having a rough time, with the press of so many competing options and the lure of the dancing blue fire in our air conditioned caves. I know many of you rejoice with me that close to 400 kids got dirty, got out in the sun (yes, SPF 40 was slathered in abundance), and got away from electronic almost everything, at least until they got home hungry, tired, and maybe a bit more thankful for their homes in the evenings.
And if we did our part right, they were ready for bed, too, for which I know their parents were thankful. Enjoy these longest days of the year this week, and get out and find a blister on a trail somewhere.
If you’re not sure what to do or where you’re going in the out-of-doors, ask your local Cub Scout. They have a pretty good idea of what’s going on out under the trees and stars.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s also a proud Cub Scout leader (like you couldn’t tell), so send him your tales of the trail at disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Day Camp Takes All Year
Cub Scout Day Camp for Licking District Cub Scouts has ended, and the older Boy Scout troops are now going week by week out to Camp Falling Rock, out Rocky Fork way a couple miles past Hickman on Rt. 79.
Before we forget, and the carved bars of soap, birdhouses, and stamped leather crafts are put to work or put away around the house, it is time for a huge "Thank You!"
Our district Cub Day Camp is so popular, in fact, that the thanks have to come from Franklin, Fairfield, Perry, and Muskingum Counties. From June 13 to June 17, a total of 321 young boys from six to ten years old, 46 siblings who had parents that were among the 242 adults assisting with the twenty stations and four days (five for the older, or Webelos Scouts) of "Scouter Space" adventures, the theme for 2006 Cub Day Camp.
Ric and Angela Eader of Pataskala returned as directors, and were honored at the closing program by Jeff Schiavone, Licking District executive for the Simon Kenton Council, our wider Scouting structure in central Ohio. Over 600 crowded into the Waterfalls Amphitheater at Camp Falling Rock and gave a standing ovation to the leaders who made this amazing week possible.
For doing a program area, usually repeated twenty times in four days for groups of twelve to twenty-two, the Eaders note that they can’t be everywhere, so they needed these folks: A.J. Hildreth, Debbie Neighbarger, Brad Barborak, Amy Ybarra, Ruth Herbert, John Cash, Aaron Kirkingburg, Dave Addis, Jim Coley, Rick Ives, Randall Farley, Martie Slate, Jeff Chapman, Anne Arnold, Lisa Crum, Joe Bush, Harold Mason, health officer Russell Sparks and his wife Rebecca, and Lori Harvey, plus eight boys from Troop 141, and the staff of CFR who ran the pool.
That’s just to run the program.
Then you needed at least twenty adults who were committed to being there all four program days as day camp den leaders, plus dozens more "den walkers" who were parents who came a day or two as they could, and climbed Cardiac Hill as they could, or couldn’t.
We’re trying to get the name changed to the more optomistic "Cardio Hill," since your cardiovascular health is certainly helped by two or three trips up that slope each day!
For the den leaders who knew how to find the Foxfire Trail (hi Stephanie! Thanks Al!) and all the rest, the week really couldn’t happen without you.
Many youth serving programs have been having a rough time, with the press of so many competing options and the lure of the dancing blue fire in our air conditioned caves. I know many of you rejoice with me that close to 400 kids got dirty, got out in the sun (yes, SPF 40 was slathered in abundance), and got away from electronic almost everything, at least until they got home hungry, tired, and maybe a bit more thankful for their homes in the evenings.
And if we did our part right, they were ready for bed, too, for which I know their parents were thankful. Enjoy these longest days of the year this week, and get out and find a blister on a trail somewhere.
If you’re not sure what to do or where you’re going in the out-of-doors, ask your local Cub Scout. They have a pretty good idea of what’s going on out under the trees and stars.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s also a proud Cub Scout leader (like you couldn’t tell), so send him your tales of the trail at disciple@voyager.net.
Faith Works 6-24-06
Jeff Gill
Joseph Smith a Prophet for Some
(a problem for others!)
162 years ago this week, Joseph Smith, Jr. was martyred for his faith in Carthage, Illinois.
Yes, this is the man who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as "Mormons" and which we’ll call the LDS church.
Members prefer "Latter Day Saints" as a label, and have tried to focus popular attention to the prominence of Jesus Christ in their long-official full name. They use the King James Version of the Bible common to Christian denominations of all sorts, and a tour of one of their many temples around the world will feature Jesus’ story, albeit through the lens of the "Book of Mormon," an 1830 text which many believe Smith wrote himself but which the LDS Church holds as inspired scripture, including Jesus appearing in this hemisphere as part of his resurrected ministry.
So is the LDS Church a Christian denomination? A few of you noted I side-stepped the question in our brisk review of Christendom a few weeks back.
I had intended to write something about the LDSers and the Prophet Joseph closer to June 27, when he died in 1844, but there was a nod to the influence Smith’s movement had on the American frontier. . . and read on to see a key local connection with their own 175th anniversary this year.
The nod was in my discussion of the "Restoration Movement," usually associated with Barton Stone, Cane Ridge revivals in 1801, and Alexander Campbell. Less well known is that Joseph Smith is known among LDS and related groups (like the RLDS, now called the "Community of Christ"), as a "restorationist leader" with an original agenda of restoring the ancient order of things.
In fact, the parallels (or borrowings, hard to trace) are so strong that many of the early Stone-Campbell restorationist pastors jumped denominational boundaries a second time, saying Campbell in particular did not go far enough. They accepted the "Book of Mormon" as a tool for recovering the simplicity of the early Christian church, especially in northeast Ohio. There the Western Reserve district became a powerful center for Smith’s movement to build from, where the first Mormon temple was built and still stands (operated by the RLDS group) in Kirtland outside Cleveland.
Financial setbacks, including a fair amount of imprudence and illegality around founding a bank for common life in the Kirtland community, spurred a migration first to Missouri, where they faced harsh and violent persecution, and then to the Mississippi banks of Nauvoo, Illinois, where after a peaceful respite their Christian neighbors saw them with first alarm, and then anger. Threatened by both overwhelming growth and odd practices like polygamy, the civil authorities were manipulated and finally trumped by a lynch mob, which stormed the small courthouse and jail in Carthage where Joseph Smith, Jr. met his end at the age of 39.
Smith died for his beliefs. That much is clear. But was he a Christian? He would have said yes, but his additions and even corrections to Christian teachings have left many others saying no. Groups as diverse as the Catholic and Methodist churches require rebaptism of LDS members who convert, saying that the peculiarities of Mormon teachings clearly leave their baptism outside of any definition of Christian orthodoxy, such as the nature of God having once been a physical, human person, and that human persons will become gods themselves in the "celestial kingdom."
Beyond argument is that 12 million claim LDS Church membership, and their local churches, or "stakes" help to support the center stake of the tent of Zion in Salt Lake City, Utah today. Their vision of lay leadership through locally ordained overseers, or bishops is one approximation of what the Restorationist Movement intended in 1830.
And here in Licking County we all owe this much to that movement: Baptists, who lost a number of Western Reserve congregations to first the Reformed Baptists of Campbell (later Disciples of Christ) and to the early Latter Day Saints, decided in 1830 they needed to train their clergy and lay leaders better.
So in 1831 they founded a college to do just that, the Granville Theological and Literary Institution. As Denison University today, they celebrate their 175th anniversary in Granville this fall!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a tale at disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Joseph Smith a Prophet for Some
(a problem for others!)
162 years ago this week, Joseph Smith, Jr. was martyred for his faith in Carthage, Illinois.
Yes, this is the man who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as "Mormons" and which we’ll call the LDS church.
Members prefer "Latter Day Saints" as a label, and have tried to focus popular attention to the prominence of Jesus Christ in their long-official full name. They use the King James Version of the Bible common to Christian denominations of all sorts, and a tour of one of their many temples around the world will feature Jesus’ story, albeit through the lens of the "Book of Mormon," an 1830 text which many believe Smith wrote himself but which the LDS Church holds as inspired scripture, including Jesus appearing in this hemisphere as part of his resurrected ministry.
So is the LDS Church a Christian denomination? A few of you noted I side-stepped the question in our brisk review of Christendom a few weeks back.
I had intended to write something about the LDSers and the Prophet Joseph closer to June 27, when he died in 1844, but there was a nod to the influence Smith’s movement had on the American frontier. . . and read on to see a key local connection with their own 175th anniversary this year.
The nod was in my discussion of the "Restoration Movement," usually associated with Barton Stone, Cane Ridge revivals in 1801, and Alexander Campbell. Less well known is that Joseph Smith is known among LDS and related groups (like the RLDS, now called the "Community of Christ"), as a "restorationist leader" with an original agenda of restoring the ancient order of things.
In fact, the parallels (or borrowings, hard to trace) are so strong that many of the early Stone-Campbell restorationist pastors jumped denominational boundaries a second time, saying Campbell in particular did not go far enough. They accepted the "Book of Mormon" as a tool for recovering the simplicity of the early Christian church, especially in northeast Ohio. There the Western Reserve district became a powerful center for Smith’s movement to build from, where the first Mormon temple was built and still stands (operated by the RLDS group) in Kirtland outside Cleveland.
Financial setbacks, including a fair amount of imprudence and illegality around founding a bank for common life in the Kirtland community, spurred a migration first to Missouri, where they faced harsh and violent persecution, and then to the Mississippi banks of Nauvoo, Illinois, where after a peaceful respite their Christian neighbors saw them with first alarm, and then anger. Threatened by both overwhelming growth and odd practices like polygamy, the civil authorities were manipulated and finally trumped by a lynch mob, which stormed the small courthouse and jail in Carthage where Joseph Smith, Jr. met his end at the age of 39.
Smith died for his beliefs. That much is clear. But was he a Christian? He would have said yes, but his additions and even corrections to Christian teachings have left many others saying no. Groups as diverse as the Catholic and Methodist churches require rebaptism of LDS members who convert, saying that the peculiarities of Mormon teachings clearly leave their baptism outside of any definition of Christian orthodoxy, such as the nature of God having once been a physical, human person, and that human persons will become gods themselves in the "celestial kingdom."
Beyond argument is that 12 million claim LDS Church membership, and their local churches, or "stakes" help to support the center stake of the tent of Zion in Salt Lake City, Utah today. Their vision of lay leadership through locally ordained overseers, or bishops is one approximation of what the Restorationist Movement intended in 1830.
And here in Licking County we all owe this much to that movement: Baptists, who lost a number of Western Reserve congregations to first the Reformed Baptists of Campbell (later Disciples of Christ) and to the early Latter Day Saints, decided in 1830 they needed to train their clergy and lay leaders better.
So in 1831 they founded a college to do just that, the Granville Theological and Literary Institution. As Denison University today, they celebrate their 175th anniversary in Granville this fall!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a tale at disciple@voyager.net.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Faith Works 6-17-06
Jeff Gill
So Many Resolutions, So Little Time
Church bodies of all sorts, but especially Christian denominations, tend to have their conventions or assemblies or synods or whathaveyous in the summer.
Giving delegates a chance to wrap a family vacation around the affair is no doubt part of the plan, as well as less business or trade association traffic in the convention centers needed to pull off such an event. The size of the gathering has little to do with the size of the communion in question: The Episcopal Church numbers around two million members, but has around 10,000 people passing this weekend through the Columbus Convention Center, while 60 million Catholics await the reports out of a few dozen bishops at their conference.
Southern Baptists just elected a new chief executive officer with fewer delegates, or "messengers" than the Presbyterians use with six times the adherents.
One common feature from all of these gatherings I notice is a fundamental disconnect between national or general bodies and the average member in the pews. Sometimes that disagreement percolates up, as with the choice of an unexpected low key pastor at the Southern Baptist Convention, expressing a hesitation over the former front-running mega-church style pastor.
More often it is outright disagreement, such as is found among many Catholics in their personal and lifestyle choices versus the clear teachings of the US Bishops’ Conference (let alone the Vatican), or Presbyterians’ rejecting an "Israel dis-investment" resolution, or UCC churches withdrawing, including a number here in Ohio, over last summer’s resolutions on marriage equality for gay and lesbian persons (the synod was for it, many lay people are agin’ it).
Everyone from the local West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church, which just finished their annual "do," to the gathering of the UCC’s Ohio Conference, is looking at reductions in how much money local congregations are sending to work beyond their immediate areas, which forces cuts and major changes in how those state and national bodies staff and program their work.
Some blame this trend on increased personnel costs (which for full-time, especially clergy employees, has gone up drastically in recent years), building maintenance left undone by many churches through the last quarter-century, and fixed costs like insurance and heating. Others argue that a new form of selfishness pervades local churches, but much of that opinion comes from staff in wider ministries who are facing directly the outcome of those increased costs.
Or to put it another way, I just don’t think congregations are more selfish today than forty years ago. People are giving more, across the board, to their faith communities, it just isn’t being reflected in more income for nationally oriented programs.
There is an element of that holdback of funds that goes back to that disconnect, the one between local members and national leaders. It isn’t, if you’re assuming what I’ll say next, a liberal/conservative thing, since conservative groups are seeing much the same trends, just masked by more members.
People are not sure exactly what is being done, and why, in their name by many of these distant offices and programs and ministries. Offerings like "Week of Compassion," "One Great Hour of Sharing," or "(Blank) Relief Society of (Your Church)" get staggering amounts of money when a particular situation, with specific promises about where the resources go, are set before them.
But too many of the lobbying, opinion shaping, workshop after workshop presenting efforts, with a perceived lack of responsiveness or accountability to the local level, just don’t reach people on the basis of denominational loyalty anymore. Maybe they never should have . . .but they shore don’t work much now, brother.
Districts and regions and boards and commissions are closing down, replaced by smaller, leaner organizations, with the promise of greater transparency and stronger relatedness to the local church. The World War II generation, profoundly motivated by loyalty, is giving way to a generation that may well be less generous, but is also more skeptical.
Stewardship efforts will need to keep all this in mind as the work of the church is transformed by these trends. Local treasurers have known it for some time; maybe they could, um, ask them about it, no?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he was only church treasurer once, and prays nightly this cup will never pass his way again! Tell him your story at disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
So Many Resolutions, So Little Time
Church bodies of all sorts, but especially Christian denominations, tend to have their conventions or assemblies or synods or whathaveyous in the summer.
Giving delegates a chance to wrap a family vacation around the affair is no doubt part of the plan, as well as less business or trade association traffic in the convention centers needed to pull off such an event. The size of the gathering has little to do with the size of the communion in question: The Episcopal Church numbers around two million members, but has around 10,000 people passing this weekend through the Columbus Convention Center, while 60 million Catholics await the reports out of a few dozen bishops at their conference.
Southern Baptists just elected a new chief executive officer with fewer delegates, or "messengers" than the Presbyterians use with six times the adherents.
One common feature from all of these gatherings I notice is a fundamental disconnect between national or general bodies and the average member in the pews. Sometimes that disagreement percolates up, as with the choice of an unexpected low key pastor at the Southern Baptist Convention, expressing a hesitation over the former front-running mega-church style pastor.
More often it is outright disagreement, such as is found among many Catholics in their personal and lifestyle choices versus the clear teachings of the US Bishops’ Conference (let alone the Vatican), or Presbyterians’ rejecting an "Israel dis-investment" resolution, or UCC churches withdrawing, including a number here in Ohio, over last summer’s resolutions on marriage equality for gay and lesbian persons (the synod was for it, many lay people are agin’ it).
Everyone from the local West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church, which just finished their annual "do," to the gathering of the UCC’s Ohio Conference, is looking at reductions in how much money local congregations are sending to work beyond their immediate areas, which forces cuts and major changes in how those state and national bodies staff and program their work.
Some blame this trend on increased personnel costs (which for full-time, especially clergy employees, has gone up drastically in recent years), building maintenance left undone by many churches through the last quarter-century, and fixed costs like insurance and heating. Others argue that a new form of selfishness pervades local churches, but much of that opinion comes from staff in wider ministries who are facing directly the outcome of those increased costs.
Or to put it another way, I just don’t think congregations are more selfish today than forty years ago. People are giving more, across the board, to their faith communities, it just isn’t being reflected in more income for nationally oriented programs.
There is an element of that holdback of funds that goes back to that disconnect, the one between local members and national leaders. It isn’t, if you’re assuming what I’ll say next, a liberal/conservative thing, since conservative groups are seeing much the same trends, just masked by more members.
People are not sure exactly what is being done, and why, in their name by many of these distant offices and programs and ministries. Offerings like "Week of Compassion," "One Great Hour of Sharing," or "(Blank) Relief Society of (Your Church)" get staggering amounts of money when a particular situation, with specific promises about where the resources go, are set before them.
But too many of the lobbying, opinion shaping, workshop after workshop presenting efforts, with a perceived lack of responsiveness or accountability to the local level, just don’t reach people on the basis of denominational loyalty anymore. Maybe they never should have . . .but they shore don’t work much now, brother.
Districts and regions and boards and commissions are closing down, replaced by smaller, leaner organizations, with the promise of greater transparency and stronger relatedness to the local church. The World War II generation, profoundly motivated by loyalty, is giving way to a generation that may well be less generous, but is also more skeptical.
Stewardship efforts will need to keep all this in mind as the work of the church is transformed by these trends. Local treasurers have known it for some time; maybe they could, um, ask them about it, no?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he was only church treasurer once, and prays nightly this cup will never pass his way again! Tell him your story at disciple@voyager.net.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Notes From My Knapsack 6-18-06
Jeff Gill
Crossing the Border
Ken Salazar speaks fluent Spanish. He lives and works in Colorado, but his family is from the south. Not Mexico, though. . .
New Mexico, actually, where his ancestors were among the founders of Santa Fe four centuries ago. His lineage does go back to south of the Rio Grande, but before there was a Mexico, so he jokes before audiences about whether or not he can really claim the label "Mexican-American" many put on him. Salazar goes on to point out that his family never crossed the border, but the border crossed them.
As a United States Senator, he has this conversation often. The first Hispanic elected outside New Mexico to such office, the Democrat is asked to help Anglo audiences in Colorado and around the US understand some of the challenges and intricacies of the immigration issue.
No one, from Salazar on down, doubts that ten million plus illegal immigrants over the last decade from Mexico represents a unique problem that has to be addressed. What can be lost in the political furor over the southern border is that tens of millions of Spanish speaking Americans are already here, are US citizens from before the Gadsden Purchase, and that the Hispanic/Latino element of this country’s ethnic mix is vital and longstanding.
We may not get Ken Salazar to speak in Licking County anytime soon, but a new novel can help you get some perspective on how Latino is not new piece in the national fabric, but one of our oldest stripes of color in the flag.
"The Night Journal," by Elizabeth Crook, is a fictional story about made up people, but set in actual places you can visit, like Pecos Pueblo southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Las Vegas. Nope, not that one, but a quieter and much, much older one on the eastern edge of the Rockies, where the Sangre de Cristo range starts to rise to the north.
Crook has clearly done her research on New Mexican, Mexican, Mormon, and general American history, weaving them together with a tale of settlers and railroads and a briefly glimpsed appearance by Paul Harvey. Nope, not that one, but the fellow who a century and more ago, opened up the southwest to the first tourism boom. If you’ve traveled in the Grand Canyon area, you may have run into the name still used for hotel and restaurant management.
This book is a richly detailed story about people set nearly today (in the 1980’s) and also a hundred years back, with windows through those characters another generation before and more. If you have read A. S. Byatt’s "Possession," this is constructed similarly, with letters and diary entries believably created to tell earlier stories, with ghostly scenes written by a narrative perspective quietly omniscient but selectively revealing.
Generally, I keep my book reviewing to stuff that’s out in paperback for ease of access, but with the immigration debate flaring around us, and our local libraries mostly carrying Crook’s newest book, this was a recommendation I didn’t want to delay in making. Find a copy however you wish, or remember it until the cheaper version comes out, but I can heartily endorse putting "The Night Journal" on the top of your reading pile.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your immigrant ancestors through disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Crossing the Border
Ken Salazar speaks fluent Spanish. He lives and works in Colorado, but his family is from the south. Not Mexico, though. . .
New Mexico, actually, where his ancestors were among the founders of Santa Fe four centuries ago. His lineage does go back to south of the Rio Grande, but before there was a Mexico, so he jokes before audiences about whether or not he can really claim the label "Mexican-American" many put on him. Salazar goes on to point out that his family never crossed the border, but the border crossed them.
As a United States Senator, he has this conversation often. The first Hispanic elected outside New Mexico to such office, the Democrat is asked to help Anglo audiences in Colorado and around the US understand some of the challenges and intricacies of the immigration issue.
No one, from Salazar on down, doubts that ten million plus illegal immigrants over the last decade from Mexico represents a unique problem that has to be addressed. What can be lost in the political furor over the southern border is that tens of millions of Spanish speaking Americans are already here, are US citizens from before the Gadsden Purchase, and that the Hispanic/Latino element of this country’s ethnic mix is vital and longstanding.
We may not get Ken Salazar to speak in Licking County anytime soon, but a new novel can help you get some perspective on how Latino is not new piece in the national fabric, but one of our oldest stripes of color in the flag.
"The Night Journal," by Elizabeth Crook, is a fictional story about made up people, but set in actual places you can visit, like Pecos Pueblo southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Las Vegas. Nope, not that one, but a quieter and much, much older one on the eastern edge of the Rockies, where the Sangre de Cristo range starts to rise to the north.
Crook has clearly done her research on New Mexican, Mexican, Mormon, and general American history, weaving them together with a tale of settlers and railroads and a briefly glimpsed appearance by Paul Harvey. Nope, not that one, but the fellow who a century and more ago, opened up the southwest to the first tourism boom. If you’ve traveled in the Grand Canyon area, you may have run into the name still used for hotel and restaurant management.
This book is a richly detailed story about people set nearly today (in the 1980’s) and also a hundred years back, with windows through those characters another generation before and more. If you have read A. S. Byatt’s "Possession," this is constructed similarly, with letters and diary entries believably created to tell earlier stories, with ghostly scenes written by a narrative perspective quietly omniscient but selectively revealing.
Generally, I keep my book reviewing to stuff that’s out in paperback for ease of access, but with the immigration debate flaring around us, and our local libraries mostly carrying Crook’s newest book, this was a recommendation I didn’t want to delay in making. Find a copy however you wish, or remember it until the cheaper version comes out, but I can heartily endorse putting "The Night Journal" on the top of your reading pile.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your immigrant ancestors through disciple@voyager.net.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Faith Works 6-10-06
Jeff Gill
When Does It Matter To You?
Whew! Doing seven short pieces summing up 2000 years of Christian denominational history certainly leaves out more than it includes.
I meant to mention Jenny Geddes and Smith Wigglesworth and Walter Scott and Aimee Semple McPherson, but you just can’t get everything in with a 750 word limit, even times seven. The Hicksites and Joseph Smith and Bishop Purcell will all find their way into columns soon, and I appreciate that I’ve gotten so few notes and e-mails complaining about who got left out, and am delighted that so many adult study groups were able to use this as a guide.
Smacking back into the here and now, our prayers and interest turn just to the west these next few days, and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States. This is an every three years’ gathering for our American branch of the Anglican Communion, and the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio is the host body, which includes Licking County and our friends at Trinity Episcopal in Newark and St. Luke’s Episcopal in Granville.
So, you might say, what? I ain’t Episcopal, so have a good gathering y’all, and don’t speed through Alexandria if you’re visiting the giant basket building over here.
Which is part of why I wanted to spend the time tracing the linkages and common history between the Christian bodies that make up our prevailing cultural heritage today. The Church of England is the step just back from many, if not most of our modern denominations in the US, and their influence still rolls forward for many of us still.
Actually, in their own way, the Episcopal Church rebelled from the Church of England as much as the Methodist Church did, just in slightly different directions. The Anglican Communion includes the Episcopal Church, and both groups are looking at new possibilities for mutual recognition of ministries with their Methodist cousins.
Baptists of many sorts, Quakers, and certainly Congregationalists (now UCCers) are direct descendants from the Pilgrims, Separatists, and Puritans who walked out of the state church of England.
Many of us left the Anglican Communion years ago, but the closeness of the liturgical history (how we organize worship) meant we took the order of worship and many of the pieces of governance structure with us. The most obvious example is something called "The Book of Common Prayer," the standard of worship for Episcopal/Anglicans which goes back to Thomas Cranmer, Queen Elizabeth, George Herbert, and Samuel Seabury. Many Protestant clergy of all sorts have a copy of this book, because for most Americans, their idea of a "traditional" wedding or funeral or church dedication is, whether they know it or not, "The Book of Common Prayer."
Even conservative groups who are sure they don’t have any need or place for structured prayer or ritual are still tied, if only through the Anglican Communion’s greatest gift to the English speaking world, the 1611 King James "Authorized Version" of the Bible (authorized by the English crown, head of the church for Anglicans).
So I would maintain that there are good reasons for all sorts of us, even not Episcopal, to take note and show interest in what will be happening in Columbus next week. For aspects of their tradition that are totally different from our own, even looking at how they do things can give us a basis for reflecting on why we do what we do.
One question that came up for the ECUSA three years back, in Minneapolis, is how their polity, or "church structure," requires that area leaders, or bishops of each diocese, be affirmed by the general church body. For most Protestants, local democracy reigns supreme, and no one in South Dakota has a voice in who leads the regional body in Ohio. What does it mean for your polity when they do? How does it effect us when they don’t?
And at any rate, many of us will have friends and neighbors and colleagues who will be working as hosts, which is reason enough to keep track of what they’re tied up in: rectors and members of local Episcopal parishes will be doing the hard work of welcoming up to 10,000 guests.
A good friend of Licking County, the Rev. Vicki Zust, was once rector at Trinity and now serves on the bishop’s staff, which means major work for her during General Convention. If she works as hard for GC 2006 as she did for the Licking County Coalition for Housing and other area projects when she served here, they’re gonna have a great assembly!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him to disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
When Does It Matter To You?
Whew! Doing seven short pieces summing up 2000 years of Christian denominational history certainly leaves out more than it includes.
I meant to mention Jenny Geddes and Smith Wigglesworth and Walter Scott and Aimee Semple McPherson, but you just can’t get everything in with a 750 word limit, even times seven. The Hicksites and Joseph Smith and Bishop Purcell will all find their way into columns soon, and I appreciate that I’ve gotten so few notes and e-mails complaining about who got left out, and am delighted that so many adult study groups were able to use this as a guide.
Smacking back into the here and now, our prayers and interest turn just to the west these next few days, and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States. This is an every three years’ gathering for our American branch of the Anglican Communion, and the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio is the host body, which includes Licking County and our friends at Trinity Episcopal in Newark and St. Luke’s Episcopal in Granville.
So, you might say, what? I ain’t Episcopal, so have a good gathering y’all, and don’t speed through Alexandria if you’re visiting the giant basket building over here.
Which is part of why I wanted to spend the time tracing the linkages and common history between the Christian bodies that make up our prevailing cultural heritage today. The Church of England is the step just back from many, if not most of our modern denominations in the US, and their influence still rolls forward for many of us still.
Actually, in their own way, the Episcopal Church rebelled from the Church of England as much as the Methodist Church did, just in slightly different directions. The Anglican Communion includes the Episcopal Church, and both groups are looking at new possibilities for mutual recognition of ministries with their Methodist cousins.
Baptists of many sorts, Quakers, and certainly Congregationalists (now UCCers) are direct descendants from the Pilgrims, Separatists, and Puritans who walked out of the state church of England.
Many of us left the Anglican Communion years ago, but the closeness of the liturgical history (how we organize worship) meant we took the order of worship and many of the pieces of governance structure with us. The most obvious example is something called "The Book of Common Prayer," the standard of worship for Episcopal/Anglicans which goes back to Thomas Cranmer, Queen Elizabeth, George Herbert, and Samuel Seabury. Many Protestant clergy of all sorts have a copy of this book, because for most Americans, their idea of a "traditional" wedding or funeral or church dedication is, whether they know it or not, "The Book of Common Prayer."
Even conservative groups who are sure they don’t have any need or place for structured prayer or ritual are still tied, if only through the Anglican Communion’s greatest gift to the English speaking world, the 1611 King James "Authorized Version" of the Bible (authorized by the English crown, head of the church for Anglicans).
So I would maintain that there are good reasons for all sorts of us, even not Episcopal, to take note and show interest in what will be happening in Columbus next week. For aspects of their tradition that are totally different from our own, even looking at how they do things can give us a basis for reflecting on why we do what we do.
One question that came up for the ECUSA three years back, in Minneapolis, is how their polity, or "church structure," requires that area leaders, or bishops of each diocese, be affirmed by the general church body. For most Protestants, local democracy reigns supreme, and no one in South Dakota has a voice in who leads the regional body in Ohio. What does it mean for your polity when they do? How does it effect us when they don’t?
And at any rate, many of us will have friends and neighbors and colleagues who will be working as hosts, which is reason enough to keep track of what they’re tied up in: rectors and members of local Episcopal parishes will be doing the hard work of welcoming up to 10,000 guests.
A good friend of Licking County, the Rev. Vicki Zust, was once rector at Trinity and now serves on the bishop’s staff, which means major work for her during General Convention. If she works as hard for GC 2006 as she did for the Licking County Coalition for Housing and other area projects when she served here, they’re gonna have a great assembly!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him to disciple@voyager.net.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Notes From My Knapsack 6-11-06
Jeff Gill
‘Round the World In Your Yard
June has left behind most wild flowers, with some blossoms showing up on a few trees. The real display is now in yards and house margins where industrious homeowners have planted annuals around beds of fairly standard perennials.
Petunias, begonias, marigolds, irises, plus rose bushes starting to bud and flower, are now on display around hostas, ferns, ivy, and the stray boxwood.
Rhododendron plants are common around Licking County, with various colors and forms giving some variety (along with the related azalea) to the woody branches sprawling around house corners and up hillsides.
A discussion about the relative "nativeness" of rhododendron took your scrivener down some googlicious pathways. My scraps of Greek told me that the name, at least, comes from a "tree (dendros) of Rhodes (a Greek isle)" which is clearly not in Ohio.
It turns out that many ornamental and familiar plants we see in common yards, let alone highly maintained gardens, have histories as tangled as my family tree, covering about as much ground.
Rhododendron, for instance, is native to this area not far away, but many of the hybrids and "cultivars" we see are descended from Himalayan stock, from 7000 feet in altitude and more. Obviously, this builds some challenges into the genome of this plant.
Likewise roses are found all around the northern hemisphere, going back in the fossil record more than 30 million years, but mostly pink until 1600 or so, when the Age of Exploration also became the Age of Garden Obsession. Yellow roses found in Afghanistan and southeast Asia sparked creative gardening and grafting, leading to the rainbow of colors found today, but also a congenital weakness to diseases like blackspot.
The Greek word "rainbow" is, in fact, "iris," and many yards have seen a beautiful stand of irises in a literal rainbow of color shoot up, but while irises and their cousins the day lily are found all over, many grown today are Japanese and Siberian in origin.
Most of us, even with black thumbs, know that Holland is famous for tulips, but how many know that the Dutch got them from the souks of Istanbul? Current research shows that the tulips secretively traded to the West from the Ottoman Empire actually came from Lebanon, on Mount Hermon’s slopes, and the heights of eastern Turkey and Kazakhstan.
Marigolds are deer repellent, and hence popular ‘round here, and are native to the New World. They were recorded by Cortez as sacred flowers of the Aztecs, crossing the Atlantic twice to get thousands of miles north of their origin to our gardens. They went from New Spain back to the Old World, where marigolds were bred in Spanish monastery gardens, and then back to America after the Revolution.
Petunias come from Brazil, begonias from Puerto Rico, and hostas grew first on the prairies of China and Korea.
Geraniums stem from South Africa, and impatiens, SE Asia, India, except of course New Guinea impatiens, which come from . . .
Peony, the official state flower of Indiana, comes originally from China, and to no one’s surprise the regal chrysanthemum traces a royal lineage to imperial China and Japan.
And Granville’s beloved daffodils are actually "narcissus," with a Greek heritage but our yellow flowered favorites seen first in southwestern Europe.
To see an everyday flowerbed to the roots, you need an up-to-date passport!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he knows more paleoethnobotany than he does gardening, but tell him a flower power tale at disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
‘Round the World In Your Yard
June has left behind most wild flowers, with some blossoms showing up on a few trees. The real display is now in yards and house margins where industrious homeowners have planted annuals around beds of fairly standard perennials.
Petunias, begonias, marigolds, irises, plus rose bushes starting to bud and flower, are now on display around hostas, ferns, ivy, and the stray boxwood.
Rhododendron plants are common around Licking County, with various colors and forms giving some variety (along with the related azalea) to the woody branches sprawling around house corners and up hillsides.
A discussion about the relative "nativeness" of rhododendron took your scrivener down some googlicious pathways. My scraps of Greek told me that the name, at least, comes from a "tree (dendros) of Rhodes (a Greek isle)" which is clearly not in Ohio.
It turns out that many ornamental and familiar plants we see in common yards, let alone highly maintained gardens, have histories as tangled as my family tree, covering about as much ground.
Rhododendron, for instance, is native to this area not far away, but many of the hybrids and "cultivars" we see are descended from Himalayan stock, from 7000 feet in altitude and more. Obviously, this builds some challenges into the genome of this plant.
Likewise roses are found all around the northern hemisphere, going back in the fossil record more than 30 million years, but mostly pink until 1600 or so, when the Age of Exploration also became the Age of Garden Obsession. Yellow roses found in Afghanistan and southeast Asia sparked creative gardening and grafting, leading to the rainbow of colors found today, but also a congenital weakness to diseases like blackspot.
The Greek word "rainbow" is, in fact, "iris," and many yards have seen a beautiful stand of irises in a literal rainbow of color shoot up, but while irises and their cousins the day lily are found all over, many grown today are Japanese and Siberian in origin.
Most of us, even with black thumbs, know that Holland is famous for tulips, but how many know that the Dutch got them from the souks of Istanbul? Current research shows that the tulips secretively traded to the West from the Ottoman Empire actually came from Lebanon, on Mount Hermon’s slopes, and the heights of eastern Turkey and Kazakhstan.
Marigolds are deer repellent, and hence popular ‘round here, and are native to the New World. They were recorded by Cortez as sacred flowers of the Aztecs, crossing the Atlantic twice to get thousands of miles north of their origin to our gardens. They went from New Spain back to the Old World, where marigolds were bred in Spanish monastery gardens, and then back to America after the Revolution.
Petunias come from Brazil, begonias from Puerto Rico, and hostas grew first on the prairies of China and Korea.
Geraniums stem from South Africa, and impatiens, SE Asia, India, except of course New Guinea impatiens, which come from . . .
Peony, the official state flower of Indiana, comes originally from China, and to no one’s surprise the regal chrysanthemum traces a royal lineage to imperial China and Japan.
And Granville’s beloved daffodils are actually "narcissus," with a Greek heritage but our yellow flowered favorites seen first in southwestern Europe.
To see an everyday flowerbed to the roots, you need an up-to-date passport!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he knows more paleoethnobotany than he does gardening, but tell him a flower power tale at disciple@voyager.net.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Faith Works 6-4-06
Jeff Gill
An End, And a Beginning
Pentecost is a Christian feast of the church calendar, marking fifty days (pente-, pentagon, got it?) after the events of Easter, paralleling a similar observance in Judaism following Passover.
The original Pentecost is described in the New Testament book of Acts, with the second chapter, where a sermon by Peter follows a gathering of the early church where the presence of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the trinitarian Godhead, was shown by a gift for languages and tongues of fire.
Leap forward to 1906, a century ago last April, where a revival in Los Angeles on Azusa Street was led by an African-American pastor named William Joseph Seymour. He had been to Houston, Texas recently, at a Bible school where Charles Fox Parham was teaching.
Parham had a Bible academy in Topeka, Kansas, where on New Year’s Day 1901 a student named Agnes Oznam "spoke in tongues," or experienced glossolalia, a verbal outpouring of sounds and syllables with no audible meaning.
Three days later, Parham and other students experienced the same phenomenon, and they concluded that speaking in tongues was biblical evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. This decision led to what we now know as Pentecostalism. Seymour’s preaching intersected with the San Francisco Earthquake of that month, drawing ever growing crowds and attention of the media, whose wire services were already looking to the West Coast at the destruction just north and its aftermath.
Nevermind that Parham made Seymour listen behind a door in a room separate from the white pastors in Houston: at Azusa Street, black and white worshiped together. This, as much as glossolalia, caught the public imagination.
Soon the Church of God in Christ sprang into vital, continent-spanning being; just as soon, racial reconciliation met racial divisions, and the Assemblies of God was born. Pentecostals have the mixed heritage of being more racially inclusive in worship and church life than most other denominational groups, but with their own vexed history of dividing and subdividing over racial and ethnic groupings.
A pre-existing "Holiness" movement helped push this new brand of faith and practice into the spotlight, with roots in German Pietism, Reformed revivalism, and Methodist separatism. Oberlin College here in Ohio, with Asa Mahan and Charles Grandison Finney, was one of the centers of Holiness revival, seeking a "higher life" in their traditional faith. With this movement starting in the US and England through the 1830’s, and influenced by later authors like William Boardman and Hannah Whitall Smith, institutions like the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, and William Booth’s Salvation Army were launched. A more personal and immediately transformative view of conversion and faith marked the "Higher Life" or Holiness movements, which gave birth to modern denominations like the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, the Church of the Nazarene, as well as the Salvation Army (a church before it is a social service, as many forget!); the Presbyterian A. B. Simpson led a mission-centered revival that created the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and many groups using the label "Church of God" spring from this period as well. Dwight Moody, the great revivalist of the late 1800’s, gave great force to this movement, laying the foundations for what was to come. (And you’ve likely seen he and his wife: the picture of the elderly, bearded fellow praying over a loaf of bread in the classic print is Moody, and if you have the companion print of an older woman saying grace over a bowl of soup, that’s the Missus.)
But it took the Azusa Street revival to spark the Church of God in Christ (with roots a decade earlier in a Holiness outgrowth), Assemblies of God, International Church of the Four-Square Gospel, and myriad other Pentecostal groups; mainline denominations also saw the rise of "charismatic" fellowships, or groups who worshiped with their wider fellowship but practiced the gift of tongues in private or through smaller gatherings. More recently new groups like Vineyard Fellowships, of which Licking County now has four, are not necessarily Pentecostal in outlook, expecting most members to experience the baptism of the Spirit through speaking in tongues, but charismatic in their inclusiveness of the experience.
This Holiness-Pentecostal movement has been the great gift of distinctively American Christianity to the world, with Pentecostals claiming 500 million adherents worldwide, from a few dozen in Los Angeles just a century ago. With African and Korean charismatics sending missionaries to the US, what will 2106 look like?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him at disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
An End, And a Beginning
Pentecost is a Christian feast of the church calendar, marking fifty days (pente-, pentagon, got it?) after the events of Easter, paralleling a similar observance in Judaism following Passover.
The original Pentecost is described in the New Testament book of Acts, with the second chapter, where a sermon by Peter follows a gathering of the early church where the presence of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the trinitarian Godhead, was shown by a gift for languages and tongues of fire.
Leap forward to 1906, a century ago last April, where a revival in Los Angeles on Azusa Street was led by an African-American pastor named William Joseph Seymour. He had been to Houston, Texas recently, at a Bible school where Charles Fox Parham was teaching.
Parham had a Bible academy in Topeka, Kansas, where on New Year’s Day 1901 a student named Agnes Oznam "spoke in tongues," or experienced glossolalia, a verbal outpouring of sounds and syllables with no audible meaning.
Three days later, Parham and other students experienced the same phenomenon, and they concluded that speaking in tongues was biblical evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. This decision led to what we now know as Pentecostalism. Seymour’s preaching intersected with the San Francisco Earthquake of that month, drawing ever growing crowds and attention of the media, whose wire services were already looking to the West Coast at the destruction just north and its aftermath.
Nevermind that Parham made Seymour listen behind a door in a room separate from the white pastors in Houston: at Azusa Street, black and white worshiped together. This, as much as glossolalia, caught the public imagination.
Soon the Church of God in Christ sprang into vital, continent-spanning being; just as soon, racial reconciliation met racial divisions, and the Assemblies of God was born. Pentecostals have the mixed heritage of being more racially inclusive in worship and church life than most other denominational groups, but with their own vexed history of dividing and subdividing over racial and ethnic groupings.
A pre-existing "Holiness" movement helped push this new brand of faith and practice into the spotlight, with roots in German Pietism, Reformed revivalism, and Methodist separatism. Oberlin College here in Ohio, with Asa Mahan and Charles Grandison Finney, was one of the centers of Holiness revival, seeking a "higher life" in their traditional faith. With this movement starting in the US and England through the 1830’s, and influenced by later authors like William Boardman and Hannah Whitall Smith, institutions like the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, and William Booth’s Salvation Army were launched. A more personal and immediately transformative view of conversion and faith marked the "Higher Life" or Holiness movements, which gave birth to modern denominations like the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, the Church of the Nazarene, as well as the Salvation Army (a church before it is a social service, as many forget!); the Presbyterian A. B. Simpson led a mission-centered revival that created the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and many groups using the label "Church of God" spring from this period as well. Dwight Moody, the great revivalist of the late 1800’s, gave great force to this movement, laying the foundations for what was to come. (And you’ve likely seen he and his wife: the picture of the elderly, bearded fellow praying over a loaf of bread in the classic print is Moody, and if you have the companion print of an older woman saying grace over a bowl of soup, that’s the Missus.)
But it took the Azusa Street revival to spark the Church of God in Christ (with roots a decade earlier in a Holiness outgrowth), Assemblies of God, International Church of the Four-Square Gospel, and myriad other Pentecostal groups; mainline denominations also saw the rise of "charismatic" fellowships, or groups who worshiped with their wider fellowship but practiced the gift of tongues in private or through smaller gatherings. More recently new groups like Vineyard Fellowships, of which Licking County now has four, are not necessarily Pentecostal in outlook, expecting most members to experience the baptism of the Spirit through speaking in tongues, but charismatic in their inclusiveness of the experience.
This Holiness-Pentecostal movement has been the great gift of distinctively American Christianity to the world, with Pentecostals claiming 500 million adherents worldwide, from a few dozen in Los Angeles just a century ago. With African and Korean charismatics sending missionaries to the US, what will 2106 look like?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him at disciple@voyager.net.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Notes From My Knapsack 6-4-06
Jeff Gill
Markers of the Season
Spring’s end is clearly shown not by the Summer Solstice (coming up in three weeks) or white shoes coming out of the back closet darkness. With the fading and fall of dogwood tree blossoms and trillium flowers on the forest floor, that’s when I stick a fork in springtime.
Now we see stacks of catalpa flowers erupt up all over those trees, a beautiful sight in full bloom. Harder to see are the spectacular canopy blossoms on tulip poplars, a hundred feet or more above us but slowly dropping yellow and orange and pink petals onto the may apples and ferns down at our feet.
And many roadsides across central Ohio are gently fuzzed with small blossoms on locust trees lining woody margins . . . of the cottonwood tree, we will not speak (I’ll just sneeze, again).
Your scribe had the honor to spend part of Memorial Day with combat engineers and medium maintenance soldiers who had seen Guadalcanal and Pelieu in the Pacific, corpsmen and WACs who had crossed Europe under Eisenhower’s command, and a B-17 ball turret gunner who had flown over the thick of it. They, and their wives and families who kept the home front strong, defeated the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan by 1945.
These stories are not in history books as vividly as they are in homes and retirement communities and nursing homes right here in Licking County. First sergeants and captains and warrant officers abound in the stands at their grandkids’ ball fields, and there are quartermaster’s mates steering carts down the grocery aisle who once navigated oceans at the helm of aircraft carriers or in the conning tower of submarines.
But just as I’m hinting to all you readers that it would be worth your while to listen to the stories these folk have to tell, I have a message for those veterans and fellow citizens. Make sure to tell your stories, too.
Some will say, sadly, that they’ve tried and found even among their own family little interest. That may be, but I offer two points in response.
First, my own experience is as a preacher and a storyteller, not to mention a lot of camp programming with young people. I can tell you many, many stories of when I thought I was wasting my time and theirs, because no one seemed to really be paying attention – and sometimes hours later, maybe days, occasionally even years, I’ll hear that story told back to me, word perfect. Just because they haven’t sat with expressions of rapt attention and obvious appreciation doesn’t mean they aren’t hearing it!
And second, if indeed you don’t have an immediate audience, then would you please write it down? Talk into a tape recorder, type on your computer if you have one or drop by the library and let them show you how to make a file.
One of the gentlemen I spoke to last Monday had participated with the Library of Congress Oral History project, but also noted a few stories that hadn’t made it onto the tape; I strongly encouraged him to put those on paper, too. If we don’t tell these stories, who will hear them, and how will they be passed along?
Motts’ Military Museum is just down the road from Licking County, and even closer on the internet (www.mottsmilitarymuseum.org). They are the official home of the Ohio Military Hall of Fame (www.ohioheroes.org), while the seventh class of inductees was honored early last month on the steps of our state capital.
With about twenty new members honored each year, that means about 150 of your fellow Ohioans are part of this select group, whose stories can be read on line, and were heard out loud as part of the ceremony of induction. Ted Keller of the Millersport area may be just barely in Licking County, but he is clearly a hero, and has the paperwork to prove it.
Like many such stories, Ted may say that he was lucky enough to have someone tell his story that ended in a medal citation, and there likely are many who earned no less but ended their wars unseen. To which I say, all the more reason to tell your story and search out others’, and I suggest to anyone a little time at the Ohio Military Hall of Fame website within Motts’, reading the citations we have.
Between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, you could get a better sense of what we celebrate when the fireworks light up the sky, and who some of the upturned faces around you might be.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story through disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Markers of the Season
Spring’s end is clearly shown not by the Summer Solstice (coming up in three weeks) or white shoes coming out of the back closet darkness. With the fading and fall of dogwood tree blossoms and trillium flowers on the forest floor, that’s when I stick a fork in springtime.
Now we see stacks of catalpa flowers erupt up all over those trees, a beautiful sight in full bloom. Harder to see are the spectacular canopy blossoms on tulip poplars, a hundred feet or more above us but slowly dropping yellow and orange and pink petals onto the may apples and ferns down at our feet.
And many roadsides across central Ohio are gently fuzzed with small blossoms on locust trees lining woody margins . . . of the cottonwood tree, we will not speak (I’ll just sneeze, again).
Your scribe had the honor to spend part of Memorial Day with combat engineers and medium maintenance soldiers who had seen Guadalcanal and Pelieu in the Pacific, corpsmen and WACs who had crossed Europe under Eisenhower’s command, and a B-17 ball turret gunner who had flown over the thick of it. They, and their wives and families who kept the home front strong, defeated the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan by 1945.
These stories are not in history books as vividly as they are in homes and retirement communities and nursing homes right here in Licking County. First sergeants and captains and warrant officers abound in the stands at their grandkids’ ball fields, and there are quartermaster’s mates steering carts down the grocery aisle who once navigated oceans at the helm of aircraft carriers or in the conning tower of submarines.
But just as I’m hinting to all you readers that it would be worth your while to listen to the stories these folk have to tell, I have a message for those veterans and fellow citizens. Make sure to tell your stories, too.
Some will say, sadly, that they’ve tried and found even among their own family little interest. That may be, but I offer two points in response.
First, my own experience is as a preacher and a storyteller, not to mention a lot of camp programming with young people. I can tell you many, many stories of when I thought I was wasting my time and theirs, because no one seemed to really be paying attention – and sometimes hours later, maybe days, occasionally even years, I’ll hear that story told back to me, word perfect. Just because they haven’t sat with expressions of rapt attention and obvious appreciation doesn’t mean they aren’t hearing it!
And second, if indeed you don’t have an immediate audience, then would you please write it down? Talk into a tape recorder, type on your computer if you have one or drop by the library and let them show you how to make a file.
One of the gentlemen I spoke to last Monday had participated with the Library of Congress Oral History project, but also noted a few stories that hadn’t made it onto the tape; I strongly encouraged him to put those on paper, too. If we don’t tell these stories, who will hear them, and how will they be passed along?
Motts’ Military Museum is just down the road from Licking County, and even closer on the internet (www.mottsmilitarymuseum.org). They are the official home of the Ohio Military Hall of Fame (www.ohioheroes.org), while the seventh class of inductees was honored early last month on the steps of our state capital.
With about twenty new members honored each year, that means about 150 of your fellow Ohioans are part of this select group, whose stories can be read on line, and were heard out loud as part of the ceremony of induction. Ted Keller of the Millersport area may be just barely in Licking County, but he is clearly a hero, and has the paperwork to prove it.
Like many such stories, Ted may say that he was lucky enough to have someone tell his story that ended in a medal citation, and there likely are many who earned no less but ended their wars unseen. To which I say, all the more reason to tell your story and search out others’, and I suggest to anyone a little time at the Ohio Military Hall of Fame website within Motts’, reading the citations we have.
Between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, you could get a better sense of what we celebrate when the fireworks light up the sky, and who some of the upturned faces around you might be.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story through disciple@voyager.net.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Faith Works 5-27-06
Jeff Gill
Religion Meets Democracy
With one more installment to come in our journey through the history of Christian church groups from an American viewpoint, we just put our feet on US soil last week.
As European dissent, reformers, and revivals fueled the trends, independence, individualism, and democracy quickly shaped the structures and leadership styles in the last 200 years of religious development.
Even Judaism saw the rise of a "Reform" movement in this country, rooted in the frontier as Cincinnati was when first called "The Queen City of the West," and where a Jewish presence is still strong. Orthodox Christian bodies sprang up around Cleveland and the Mahoning Valley when Eastern European ethnic groups came to mine and work the mills, carrying their homeland traditions with them. But they have seen tugs at their hierarchical system from congregations expecting more say in spending and personnel decisions than would be true even today in their countries of origin.
In fact, for most of the first century of the American experiment, faith and ethnicity were still closely tied. If your name was Sirovic, you were Serbian Orthodox, or if Podgorsky, then Catholic, albeit a member of a Polish Catholic parish (probably St. Stanislaus), while the O’Malleys walked to St. Patrick’s, the Irish Catholic parish. Muellers and Schmidts went to the Lutheran church, Bontragers and Millers were likely Mennonite if not Amish, and all the easy to spell names went to Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Congregational congregations. Episcopalians were usually easy to spell, but had middle names and bank accounts, or at least weren’t buying their seed on credit at the general store.
The Civil War transformed this landscape as much as it did so many other features on the American scene. First, many of those aforementioned groups split North and South, despite their official leadership’s efforts to hold each communion together. With the exception of the Episcopal Church, they all had major splits just before, or in the case of the Restoration Movement (Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ groups today), just after the 1861-5 conflict. Some were over abolitionist pro- or con- sentiments, and others were over membership for people of African or Native American descent, creating new ethnic churches.
Membership, the "laity" of the church, no longer deferred to ordained or clerical leadership, but spoke out and even organized themselves, multiplying or fracturing (depending on your point of view) the structures, echoing into today with – for instance – American Baptists, Southern Baptists, General Baptists, National Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Primitive Baptists, not to mention "Two-seed in the Spirit Predestinationist Conservative" Baptists.
Evangelism in the early Colonies, under the first "Great Awakening," and even the second so-called with the Cane Ridge, KY revivals of 1801, had been largely aimed at reviving one’s own. In the wake of the vast mixing of the Army of the Potomac, Army of Northern Virginia, and the rest of the Civil War, evangelism began to reach across ethnic, if not class boundaries; sometimes proselytism but often just a new sense of what was acceptable. Feeneys became Baptist (of whatever sort), Yoders converted to Catholicism, and Joneses went from Welsh Methodist to Presbyterian to Episcopal as the economy grew and mobility increased in the late 1800’s.
Ironically, along with the increased segmentation of American religion through this period came an interest in what became the ecumenical movement of the 1900’s, especially in the cities, where the "Social Gospel" movement focused on local mission and co-operative efforts. Global missionary efforts around 1900 were woefully sectarian, but with different groups reading in the newspapers and magazines of the day about each others’ work around the world, awareness took on a new character, moving beyond worldly competition. "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" was the greeting of reporter and explorer Henry Stanley to the long-feared missing David Livingston, found ministering in the heart of Africa; the account sold thousands of papers and later books to an avid readership of all denominations, inspiring a young Albert Schweitzer to do the same.
Global Christianity, at the dawn of the 20th century, cast a missionary net and built a network of relationships that literally did span the world. New forms of communication, ease of travel, and then two world wars, saw that network spark a transformation which reverberated both ways, with resonances that ripple across today’s truly transformed religious landscape.
We’ll trace those and where they may be heading next week, on Pentecost Eve!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him through disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Religion Meets Democracy
With one more installment to come in our journey through the history of Christian church groups from an American viewpoint, we just put our feet on US soil last week.
As European dissent, reformers, and revivals fueled the trends, independence, individualism, and democracy quickly shaped the structures and leadership styles in the last 200 years of religious development.
Even Judaism saw the rise of a "Reform" movement in this country, rooted in the frontier as Cincinnati was when first called "The Queen City of the West," and where a Jewish presence is still strong. Orthodox Christian bodies sprang up around Cleveland and the Mahoning Valley when Eastern European ethnic groups came to mine and work the mills, carrying their homeland traditions with them. But they have seen tugs at their hierarchical system from congregations expecting more say in spending and personnel decisions than would be true even today in their countries of origin.
In fact, for most of the first century of the American experiment, faith and ethnicity were still closely tied. If your name was Sirovic, you were Serbian Orthodox, or if Podgorsky, then Catholic, albeit a member of a Polish Catholic parish (probably St. Stanislaus), while the O’Malleys walked to St. Patrick’s, the Irish Catholic parish. Muellers and Schmidts went to the Lutheran church, Bontragers and Millers were likely Mennonite if not Amish, and all the easy to spell names went to Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Congregational congregations. Episcopalians were usually easy to spell, but had middle names and bank accounts, or at least weren’t buying their seed on credit at the general store.
The Civil War transformed this landscape as much as it did so many other features on the American scene. First, many of those aforementioned groups split North and South, despite their official leadership’s efforts to hold each communion together. With the exception of the Episcopal Church, they all had major splits just before, or in the case of the Restoration Movement (Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ groups today), just after the 1861-5 conflict. Some were over abolitionist pro- or con- sentiments, and others were over membership for people of African or Native American descent, creating new ethnic churches.
Membership, the "laity" of the church, no longer deferred to ordained or clerical leadership, but spoke out and even organized themselves, multiplying or fracturing (depending on your point of view) the structures, echoing into today with – for instance – American Baptists, Southern Baptists, General Baptists, National Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Primitive Baptists, not to mention "Two-seed in the Spirit Predestinationist Conservative" Baptists.
Evangelism in the early Colonies, under the first "Great Awakening," and even the second so-called with the Cane Ridge, KY revivals of 1801, had been largely aimed at reviving one’s own. In the wake of the vast mixing of the Army of the Potomac, Army of Northern Virginia, and the rest of the Civil War, evangelism began to reach across ethnic, if not class boundaries; sometimes proselytism but often just a new sense of what was acceptable. Feeneys became Baptist (of whatever sort), Yoders converted to Catholicism, and Joneses went from Welsh Methodist to Presbyterian to Episcopal as the economy grew and mobility increased in the late 1800’s.
Ironically, along with the increased segmentation of American religion through this period came an interest in what became the ecumenical movement of the 1900’s, especially in the cities, where the "Social Gospel" movement focused on local mission and co-operative efforts. Global missionary efforts around 1900 were woefully sectarian, but with different groups reading in the newspapers and magazines of the day about each others’ work around the world, awareness took on a new character, moving beyond worldly competition. "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" was the greeting of reporter and explorer Henry Stanley to the long-feared missing David Livingston, found ministering in the heart of Africa; the account sold thousands of papers and later books to an avid readership of all denominations, inspiring a young Albert Schweitzer to do the same.
Global Christianity, at the dawn of the 20th century, cast a missionary net and built a network of relationships that literally did span the world. New forms of communication, ease of travel, and then two world wars, saw that network spark a transformation which reverberated both ways, with resonances that ripple across today’s truly transformed religious landscape.
We’ll trace those and where they may be heading next week, on Pentecost Eve!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him through disciple@voyager.net.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Notes From My Knapsack 5-28-06
Jeff Gill
Decorating Your Days and Simplifying Your Travels
Decoration Day, the one time name for May 30, was the original idea of "Memorializing" the honored dead. Whether it began with Julia Pierpont, wife of the governor of occupied Virginia, leading a group of Union women after war’s end to decorate soldiers’ graves both North and South, or any of the other claimed inspirations for the GAR commander General Logan’s order, flowers and wreaths and speeches have been part of late May since 1868.
Now a Monday holiday, Memorial Day falls on May 29 this year. Many communities around Licking County will offer simple parades and quiet ceremonies to honor the dead of all wars on Monday, and I trust you will find your way to mark the solemnity of the occasion.
Other cultural traditions have grown onto the weekend, with the Indy 500 on the last Sunday, and summer "officially" starting with the profusion of grills and picnics and sales that usher in what we trust and pray will be warmer weather.
School has a couple more weeks to go, but higher ed is off and those returned students scrambling for summer jobs if they didn’t do that arrangement last Christmas, and the public school program is more focused on inventories of lab glassware and turning in your textbooks.
For grownups, the office scramble is for figuring out who gets which week for vacation. News flash: you won’t get your first choice. Trust me.
The big idea this summer is "microvacation." This is the one tank trip to the nth degree; you find a nearby attraction you’ve always meant to see or visit in depth, and go do it, returning home in time for dinner in your own lawn chair.
Your Knapsack will offer a few of those in coming weeks, but may I suggest a micro-microvacation idea: books! A good read is not just for wintry cabin fever or beach broiling, but can be a back porch break that takes you to another era, a different land, to a new place in your head that you feel in your bones.
With Memorial Day in mind, I would belatedly commend to one and all "Hannah Coulter" by Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and farmer and writer on agriculture and sustainability who has done the nearly impossible. He has published nothing that wouldn’t reward a close reading, in essays, collections of poems ("The Country of Marriage" his best, I feel), magazine articles, and novels.
Berry returned to a family farm in Kentucky, working as a professor of English while working the land at the same time. His novels all take place in a piece of Kentucky that is, and isn’t quite where Berry lives and farms and writes, and "Hannah Coulter" is the latest of that series. It is a short and powerful story of growing to maturity through and past World War II into the modern world.
You will not travel far reading "Hannah Coulter," but you will go deep into the human heart, perhaps even your own.
"The Genizah at the House of Shepher," by Tamar Yellin is a very distant work from Kentucky; Jerusalem, the lands of exile for Judaism in Eastern Europe and central Asia, and Yorkshire in England are all vividly sketched. You don’t need any knowledge of Hebrew to read this novel, but you will know much about Hebrew culture and the Jewish diaspora when you’re done.
There is love and romance, too, but not that kind. The love of words, and writing, and of one’s culture, even when you’re in rebellion against it, is the amour propre of this work.
Men and women marry, but not always to good ends. And faith is occasionally misplaced . . . all like real life at home, but looking a bit different far away.
If those recent novels aren’t enough for you, Penguin Classics has put out, in a fat paperback, a "restored" version of "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas. Most of us who might have read this in the past, as it turns out, got a pasteurized, bowdlerized, heavily edited version of this vast and complex tale, which is on a very short list of books that is actually improved by being twice as long.
Yes, it reads like a book written when Queen Victoria was still eating with her own teeth, but the fine folk at Penguin have given you just enough notes to clear up chronological confusions as they arrive. Once you allow for the unique tones and rhythms of the late 19th century, this is a remarkable travelogue through post-Napoleonic Europe, in Marseilles, Rome, Sardinia, Paris, and of course the Chateau d’If.
At the very least, this is a book that will hold down a corner of your beach towel; at best, you will be transported yourself.
Check your library or bookshop, and take a trip. Gas prices won’t even enter into the equation.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; pass him your favorite titles to disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Decorating Your Days and Simplifying Your Travels
Decoration Day, the one time name for May 30, was the original idea of "Memorializing" the honored dead. Whether it began with Julia Pierpont, wife of the governor of occupied Virginia, leading a group of Union women after war’s end to decorate soldiers’ graves both North and South, or any of the other claimed inspirations for the GAR commander General Logan’s order, flowers and wreaths and speeches have been part of late May since 1868.
Now a Monday holiday, Memorial Day falls on May 29 this year. Many communities around Licking County will offer simple parades and quiet ceremonies to honor the dead of all wars on Monday, and I trust you will find your way to mark the solemnity of the occasion.
Other cultural traditions have grown onto the weekend, with the Indy 500 on the last Sunday, and summer "officially" starting with the profusion of grills and picnics and sales that usher in what we trust and pray will be warmer weather.
School has a couple more weeks to go, but higher ed is off and those returned students scrambling for summer jobs if they didn’t do that arrangement last Christmas, and the public school program is more focused on inventories of lab glassware and turning in your textbooks.
For grownups, the office scramble is for figuring out who gets which week for vacation. News flash: you won’t get your first choice. Trust me.
The big idea this summer is "microvacation." This is the one tank trip to the nth degree; you find a nearby attraction you’ve always meant to see or visit in depth, and go do it, returning home in time for dinner in your own lawn chair.
Your Knapsack will offer a few of those in coming weeks, but may I suggest a micro-microvacation idea: books! A good read is not just for wintry cabin fever or beach broiling, but can be a back porch break that takes you to another era, a different land, to a new place in your head that you feel in your bones.
With Memorial Day in mind, I would belatedly commend to one and all "Hannah Coulter" by Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and farmer and writer on agriculture and sustainability who has done the nearly impossible. He has published nothing that wouldn’t reward a close reading, in essays, collections of poems ("The Country of Marriage" his best, I feel), magazine articles, and novels.
Berry returned to a family farm in Kentucky, working as a professor of English while working the land at the same time. His novels all take place in a piece of Kentucky that is, and isn’t quite where Berry lives and farms and writes, and "Hannah Coulter" is the latest of that series. It is a short and powerful story of growing to maturity through and past World War II into the modern world.
You will not travel far reading "Hannah Coulter," but you will go deep into the human heart, perhaps even your own.
"The Genizah at the House of Shepher," by Tamar Yellin is a very distant work from Kentucky; Jerusalem, the lands of exile for Judaism in Eastern Europe and central Asia, and Yorkshire in England are all vividly sketched. You don’t need any knowledge of Hebrew to read this novel, but you will know much about Hebrew culture and the Jewish diaspora when you’re done.
There is love and romance, too, but not that kind. The love of words, and writing, and of one’s culture, even when you’re in rebellion against it, is the amour propre of this work.
Men and women marry, but not always to good ends. And faith is occasionally misplaced . . . all like real life at home, but looking a bit different far away.
If those recent novels aren’t enough for you, Penguin Classics has put out, in a fat paperback, a "restored" version of "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas. Most of us who might have read this in the past, as it turns out, got a pasteurized, bowdlerized, heavily edited version of this vast and complex tale, which is on a very short list of books that is actually improved by being twice as long.
Yes, it reads like a book written when Queen Victoria was still eating with her own teeth, but the fine folk at Penguin have given you just enough notes to clear up chronological confusions as they arrive. Once you allow for the unique tones and rhythms of the late 19th century, this is a remarkable travelogue through post-Napoleonic Europe, in Marseilles, Rome, Sardinia, Paris, and of course the Chateau d’If.
At the very least, this is a book that will hold down a corner of your beach towel; at best, you will be transported yourself.
Check your library or bookshop, and take a trip. Gas prices won’t even enter into the equation.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; pass him your favorite titles to disciple@voyager.net.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Faith Works 5-20-06
Jeff Gill
Frontier Faith Is Different
With week five of our seven part history of Christendom, we finally cross the pond to the American Colonies. Just about every one has a history of establishment by religious dissidents, Protestants of some sort. The chief exception would be Maryland, whose Calvert and Carroll founders were English Catholics.
But they were protestants of a sort, or Recusants: the Anglican Reformation, leading to the Church of England, swung Protestant under Henry, Catholic under his daughter Mary, back to a "via media" under Elizabeth I, and her heir from Scotland, James, firmed up the Protestantism of the state church by authorizing an English translation of the Holy Bible in 1611, the King James Version.
Catholics were left out in the cold, as citizens (barely) and as participants in civil society (forbidden from Oxford and Cambridge or in government work). Recused from real involvement in their culture, some went underground (Guy Fawkes the most famous, or infamous of the type), and others emigrated.
A Civil War in England, led by those wanting a "purer" Reformed English Church under Oliver Cromwell, rocked colonial governments in places like Virginia and Georgia and the Carolinas, where the Church of England was established as the state church.
In Massachusetts Bay, where Puritan Congregationalists were in control from the start, they didn’t want outright rebellion – that was a hundred years ahead yet. It made them nervous enough, though, that when Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson started speaking about an even more radically congregational faith, with adult baptism conferring democratic rights of freedom in the church, they were exiled to Providence Plantations and Rhode Island in the southern wilds of New England. Connecticut just got marginal Congregationalists, not the Baptists.
New Amesterdam and Hudson Valley already had early Dutch Calvinists (think Rip Van Winkle), with Scandinavian Lutherans settling Delaware and those "peculiar people," the Quakers under William Penn, starting Pennsylvania. Anglicans were strongly present, but not dominant, in early New York (as it became) and New Jersey, the latter getting a healthy share of Scots-Irish Presbyterians in their early days, starting a college and seminary at Princeton early on.
So each colony or area had their own traditional, or ethnic Protestant tradition carried over from Europe’s conflicts, with even the Catholicism of Maryland emigrating out of a minority situation. This held for some time in the coastal cities – Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Williamsburg, Charleston – but inland very quickly became a whole new story.
John Wesley lived and died an Anglican priest, traveling to the Colonies in his early career (disastrously). He struggled with what felt dry and unfeeling out of the tradition that gave him birth, and returning to London he fell in with a group of . . . Moravians! (they pop up all over…) A prayer meeting in Aldersgate Street where his "heart was strangely warmed" led to a Method of personal renewal and social revival that became Methodism.
Francis Asbury, an early adopter of the Method of classes and class leaders and open air preaching (without a license, no less), came to America at a critical time. Church of England priests were few and far between, without bishops to ordain more this side of the Atlantic. Frontier settlements saw clergy for sermons and communion, let alone weddings and funerals, at long intervals. Asbury saddled his horse and rode, in the days before and after the Revolution, from Maine to Georgia.
With even Anglicans pulling back from the home country leadership to rely on their own bishops, and an Episcopal system, the frontier areas were ripe for more lay led church life, and revivalistic preaching from travelling clergy who were willing to move about. The Methodist Church blazed across the mountains and all along the Alleghenies and Appalachians, where it still thrives today and is Licking County’s dominant faith tradition.
The Church of Scotland, known as Presbyterian over here, had many of the same problems as their English brethren, and the Campbells, father and son, came into the western Pennsylvania district just after the Constitution and nation were set. They led a "Restoration Movement" out of that tradition, influenced by Calvinism but in revolt against many of the structures created by those churches.
With weekly communion, adult baptism, and congregational government, the Churches of Christ, independent Christian Churches, and Disciples of Christ are the Campbellite heirs of the Restoration Movement in three modern traditions, divided like Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians today by the American Civil War and modernism.
Those divisions and a reaction towards ecumenism we’ll consider next week!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has two more weeks to go ‘til Pentecost, and we’ll trace a path from Cane Ridge, Kentucky to Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Feedback to disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
Frontier Faith Is Different
With week five of our seven part history of Christendom, we finally cross the pond to the American Colonies. Just about every one has a history of establishment by religious dissidents, Protestants of some sort. The chief exception would be Maryland, whose Calvert and Carroll founders were English Catholics.
But they were protestants of a sort, or Recusants: the Anglican Reformation, leading to the Church of England, swung Protestant under Henry, Catholic under his daughter Mary, back to a "via media" under Elizabeth I, and her heir from Scotland, James, firmed up the Protestantism of the state church by authorizing an English translation of the Holy Bible in 1611, the King James Version.
Catholics were left out in the cold, as citizens (barely) and as participants in civil society (forbidden from Oxford and Cambridge or in government work). Recused from real involvement in their culture, some went underground (Guy Fawkes the most famous, or infamous of the type), and others emigrated.
A Civil War in England, led by those wanting a "purer" Reformed English Church under Oliver Cromwell, rocked colonial governments in places like Virginia and Georgia and the Carolinas, where the Church of England was established as the state church.
In Massachusetts Bay, where Puritan Congregationalists were in control from the start, they didn’t want outright rebellion – that was a hundred years ahead yet. It made them nervous enough, though, that when Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson started speaking about an even more radically congregational faith, with adult baptism conferring democratic rights of freedom in the church, they were exiled to Providence Plantations and Rhode Island in the southern wilds of New England. Connecticut just got marginal Congregationalists, not the Baptists.
New Amesterdam and Hudson Valley already had early Dutch Calvinists (think Rip Van Winkle), with Scandinavian Lutherans settling Delaware and those "peculiar people," the Quakers under William Penn, starting Pennsylvania. Anglicans were strongly present, but not dominant, in early New York (as it became) and New Jersey, the latter getting a healthy share of Scots-Irish Presbyterians in their early days, starting a college and seminary at Princeton early on.
So each colony or area had their own traditional, or ethnic Protestant tradition carried over from Europe’s conflicts, with even the Catholicism of Maryland emigrating out of a minority situation. This held for some time in the coastal cities – Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Williamsburg, Charleston – but inland very quickly became a whole new story.
John Wesley lived and died an Anglican priest, traveling to the Colonies in his early career (disastrously). He struggled with what felt dry and unfeeling out of the tradition that gave him birth, and returning to London he fell in with a group of . . . Moravians! (they pop up all over…) A prayer meeting in Aldersgate Street where his "heart was strangely warmed" led to a Method of personal renewal and social revival that became Methodism.
Francis Asbury, an early adopter of the Method of classes and class leaders and open air preaching (without a license, no less), came to America at a critical time. Church of England priests were few and far between, without bishops to ordain more this side of the Atlantic. Frontier settlements saw clergy for sermons and communion, let alone weddings and funerals, at long intervals. Asbury saddled his horse and rode, in the days before and after the Revolution, from Maine to Georgia.
With even Anglicans pulling back from the home country leadership to rely on their own bishops, and an Episcopal system, the frontier areas were ripe for more lay led church life, and revivalistic preaching from travelling clergy who were willing to move about. The Methodist Church blazed across the mountains and all along the Alleghenies and Appalachians, where it still thrives today and is Licking County’s dominant faith tradition.
The Church of Scotland, known as Presbyterian over here, had many of the same problems as their English brethren, and the Campbells, father and son, came into the western Pennsylvania district just after the Constitution and nation were set. They led a "Restoration Movement" out of that tradition, influenced by Calvinism but in revolt against many of the structures created by those churches.
With weekly communion, adult baptism, and congregational government, the Churches of Christ, independent Christian Churches, and Disciples of Christ are the Campbellite heirs of the Restoration Movement in three modern traditions, divided like Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians today by the American Civil War and modernism.
Those divisions and a reaction towards ecumenism we’ll consider next week!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has two more weeks to go ‘til Pentecost, and we’ll trace a path from Cane Ridge, Kentucky to Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Feedback to disciple@voyager.net.
Notes From My Knapsack 5-21-06
Jeff Gill
It’s All Right Here
Licking County makes a strong claim for center of the known universe this weekend, not that many of us didn’t already know that.
National Trail Raceway, west of Hebron on Rt. 40, hosts the single biggest gathering we hold through the year, the Pontiac Springnationals. If you’re not familiar with this event, it is drag racing with two cars and drivers surrounded by tens of thousands of fans trying, and failing, to scream louder than the roar of the nitro fueled engines.
Over 100,000 people come to the area over this weekend, so if you’re wondering about why there are no hotel rooms available, there you go. And some of the your fellow drivers may be oddly quick off the green light at intersections, so stay alert.
Smaller, but one of the largest gatherings of clowns anywhere – no, not Congress in session – ClownTown is at OSU-Newark mostly, and downtown Newark Saturday afternoon, where their traditional ClownTown parade at 4 pm intersects with the wrap-up of the United Methodist churches "Festival of Sharing," on the Courthouse Square all day. Not all Methodist clergy are clowns, but Bob Beyer is, and Jacksontown knows it!
Jacktown and many other Methodist congregations from around the county will have a series of events that promote support of the food pantry networks they share in, with fun and food for you, too.
When dozens or even hundreds of clowns mix with hundreds of Methodists, anything could happen, but we know the kids will have a great time.
Get them cleared away, and Sunday afternoon sees the Newark square filled with hundreds of barbershoppers and their fans, with their annual concert at the Midland Theater. Gospel meets close harmonies (a natural match, when you think about it) and singers from all over central Ohio.
All too much activity? Don’t flee east, where Coshocton and Roscoe Village host their annual Dulcimer Festival all weekend; the Lovely Wife played in this once, and we always wish we could get back there. Hundreds always do, no excuses, and the finest lap, mountain, and hammered dulcimer players from up and down the Appalachians gather. You can buy one there, too.
Nope? If you run west, you’ll run into the "Susan Komen Race For the Cure" in downtown Columbus, a breast cancer fundraiser which attracts thousands of runners and their families.
This is a big, big weekend wherever you turn; watch the traffic, don’t jump off the curb when the lights change, and join in the activity somewhere. It’s all right here, nearby!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your events and activities through disciple@voyager.net.
Jeff Gill
It’s All Right Here
Licking County makes a strong claim for center of the known universe this weekend, not that many of us didn’t already know that.
National Trail Raceway, west of Hebron on Rt. 40, hosts the single biggest gathering we hold through the year, the Pontiac Springnationals. If you’re not familiar with this event, it is drag racing with two cars and drivers surrounded by tens of thousands of fans trying, and failing, to scream louder than the roar of the nitro fueled engines.
Over 100,000 people come to the area over this weekend, so if you’re wondering about why there are no hotel rooms available, there you go. And some of the your fellow drivers may be oddly quick off the green light at intersections, so stay alert.
Smaller, but one of the largest gatherings of clowns anywhere – no, not Congress in session – ClownTown is at OSU-Newark mostly, and downtown Newark Saturday afternoon, where their traditional ClownTown parade at 4 pm intersects with the wrap-up of the United Methodist churches "Festival of Sharing," on the Courthouse Square all day. Not all Methodist clergy are clowns, but Bob Beyer is, and Jacksontown knows it!
Jacktown and many other Methodist congregations from around the county will have a series of events that promote support of the food pantry networks they share in, with fun and food for you, too.
When dozens or even hundreds of clowns mix with hundreds of Methodists, anything could happen, but we know the kids will have a great time.
Get them cleared away, and Sunday afternoon sees the Newark square filled with hundreds of barbershoppers and their fans, with their annual concert at the Midland Theater. Gospel meets close harmonies (a natural match, when you think about it) and singers from all over central Ohio.
All too much activity? Don’t flee east, where Coshocton and Roscoe Village host their annual Dulcimer Festival all weekend; the Lovely Wife played in this once, and we always wish we could get back there. Hundreds always do, no excuses, and the finest lap, mountain, and hammered dulcimer players from up and down the Appalachians gather. You can buy one there, too.
Nope? If you run west, you’ll run into the "Susan Komen Race For the Cure" in downtown Columbus, a breast cancer fundraiser which attracts thousands of runners and their families.
This is a big, big weekend wherever you turn; watch the traffic, don’t jump off the curb when the lights change, and join in the activity somewhere. It’s all right here, nearby!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your events and activities through disciple@voyager.net.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
