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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Faith Works 5-13-06
Jeff Gill

Reforming the Reformers

Our season from Easter to Pentecost series on the branches of Christendom continues with reforms of the Reformation.
Last week we saw Martin Luther in 1517 start the ball rolling, so to speak, although Czechs would proudly note that an early reformation movement was in their province of Moravia, under Jan Hus, over 50 years earlier. And they’d be right: the Moravian Church ushered in the Protestant Reformation, and their descendants would be some of the first Protestant Christians to reach the Ohio country in the 1700’s, giving us Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhutten and Lichtenau, so we daren’t forget them!
The Swiss Reformation under John Calvin was quickly exported to places like Scotland by way of French Hugenots, so even today the Church of Scotland is what today Americans know as Presbyterian, a church led by elders in session consulting and discerning together, the word for elder in Biblical Greek being roughly "presbyter" transliterated to English. John Knox and other Scots reformers brought Calvinism into the Anglosphere, but not without some resistance.
At first, the king of England called Henry the Eighth was indignant at "the monk Luther" challenging God’s authority through the church, which he rightly saw as challenging royal prerogatives. Writings he "helped" pen led to his receiving from the Roman pontiff the title "Defender of the Faith." Ironically, British monarchs still hold this title.
The irony is because the same Henry, heir-less from his first wife, led a reformation of the English, or Anglican Church, which led them away from Roman primacy and towards a "Church of England," with the monarch as, well, "Defender of the Faith." The Archbishop of Canterbury became another "primus inter pares," or first among equals in a form of church leadership for what is still known as the Anglican Communion, the third largest world branch of Christendom after Catholic and Orthodox Christian bodies.
Is the ruler of England the head of the church? Elizabeth the Second today, like her esteemed ancestor of the late 1500’s Elizabeth I, child of Henry, is exactly that for most Anglicans, but her son Charles, hapless Prince of Wales, may find a way to step aside from such a role given his complex marital history.
What is as true now, as then, is that the English Reformation was both less and more than many other Protestant revolutions, so their American branch, the Episcopal Church (from "episcope," or overseer aka bishop in New Testament Greek) has a liturgy quite similar to a Catholic mass. The major difference is in the authority structure, or hierarchy, tracing to the archbishops and primates of the still vital Anglican Christian stream.
Back in Europe, the idea of authority was thrown entirely aside by some reforming groups, especially in Bavaria and southern Germany into Switzerland, who thought Luther was far too restrained in his reform of the church.
Under leaders like Jacob Amman, becoming the Amish, or Menno Simons, with Mennonites, groups who saw authority as primarily in the local or congregational unit of the church, and who removed baptism from the infant to the adult stage of spiritual growth, were called "Anabaptist." They strongly weighed against ("ana") baptism as a rite of the church, and made it a decision of the mature adult to be, most often, immersed ("baptizo") in water, and many if not most were sent across the waters of the Atlantic for their troubles. Anabaptist groups are to this day both mostly found in the New World, and often associated with the clothing and habits of the time period that gave them birth, the 1600’s.
And even the Lutheran Christian movement of Germany, once made the official state church, provoked a reaction of what became known as "Pietism," a group seeking the original passion and purpose of Martin Luther’s first reformation. Some of these Pietist groups, Brethren and Dunkards German Evangelicals and the like, included a renewed Moravian Church, staying largely loyal to their Lutheran roots, helped to spin off movements and energy for groups that we know today in America in many forms . . . which we’ll talk about next week.
Suffice it to say that the Anglicans had protesters against their structures of authority, some who were more "pure" and some who wanted adult baptism or more congregational government (at least in the colonies) and some who were quaking in their silent prayer assemblies; these Puritans and Baptists and Congregationalists and Quakers all left the episcopal way of being Christian for organizing principles that still are with us in Licking County today.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story through disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-14-06
Jeff Gill

Begin With a Single Step

Sidewalks, bike paths, trails, even the wider shoulders of some roads; strollers and bicycles and walkers of all sorts are out and around in this glorious spring weather.
True, we could use a little more rain, but just as in Camelot, Licking County has been receiving her liquid precipitation between midnight and 5 am for the most part.
Cool nights, also known as "good sleepin’ weather," with sunny days make for idyllic mornings and evenings, perfect for taking a nice walk.
Most health and weight loss advice boils down to this: get a move on! Better nutrition, smaller portion sizes, colorful platefuls of veggies are all important. But somewhat counterintuitively, a bit more exercise makes your body "ask" for more of that stuff, and plenty of fitness leaves your internal cues all pointing to the good stuff. If your muscles and bones are doing real work, they want real food and they know how to tell your foolish brain what the score is.
Kids present slightly different challenges, because they can want crud with their consumer-soaked brains and the veggie-dairy-healthy stuff with their bodies, and eat both with room for more. Limiting (or for some, banning) snack food is a task in its own, but children still respond best to their own physical cues with fitness driving better nutrition.
Where to run around, though? Running around in the car, of course, doesn’t count – let’s not even think about the drive-up windows you go by, or don’t. Our busy schedules of team practices, games, and rehearsals or lessons may actually have less real exercise in them than a long afternoon of running amok . . . if you have somewhere to do it.
A recent book proposed "Nature Deficit Disorder" as a form of illness afflicting American kids, and while I loathe the tendency to make a disorder of every little quirk of life, you can’t really dispute that roaming free in the wilderness ain’t what it used to be.
What did it used to be, anyhow? Is it another one of those golden glowing "good ol’ days" that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny?
My folks opened the 60’s by building a house on the edge of a town/small city, where farm fields could be seen from some upstairs windows and nearby woodlots from most. When we got kicked out of the house, joining other refugees from indoors into the banishment of "go play outside," that’s where we headed. A mowed field behind a church and next to corn was the ball diamond, and a ravine down the block held years of tree forts and scrap board clubhouses.
I suspect that there are some issues with increased fear (if not reality) of liability and lawsuits, with the accompanying fences and signage. The trend to screaming coverage of every pond drowning from Alabama to Wyoming on the local evening news helps generate a climate of fear and anxiety that may press parents to keep kids closer to home, let alone the "stranger danger" epidemic.
But I wonder how much has to do with family size. I was oldest of four, and my mom probably wondered where I was some afternoons, but after yelling my name out the back door, she was chasing another flapping diaper, and just couldn’t obsess about it. (Ground me for getting my sneakers muddy when I got home, she could do that, and ask "where did you get so dirty?" but I’m not sure she heard the answer.)
There was a six pack o’ kids around the corner, and three blocks down a twelve; some families were two and three, but four wasn’t unusual and five wouldn’t draw stares.
My dad was youngest of six, his dad was sixth of nine; great-grandfather was one of two, but that had more to do with his father’s service in the Civil War and then death not long after – he was youngest male of nine, we think, but the records are unclear. Coulda been more, but children who died young don’t always show up on paper.
The Little Guy is one of one, and is quite common in that state; his parents started late and got slowed down by a great deal of moving about. We didn’t really plan to have an only child, though his mother and my mother are exactly that themselves. We try not to be overprotective, but . . .
When you have one kid, you watch them more, if only because they’re the only show in town. You just can’t supervise four kids the same way. Whether or not you think kids should ever be out of your eyeshot or hearing unsupervised is a different debate, but average family size probably has a lot to do with why they rarely get there anymore.
The upside: since even adults should get out for a ramble regularly, just all go together. Stick to paths or climb a fence or two, as long as you’re keeping on the move.
And then have a healthy family dinner!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your favorite family hikes through disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-7-06
Jeff Gill

Headin’ Outside

Next weekend, on Saturday May 13, the Licking County Coalition for Housing will join their friends and supporters in a Golf Outing.
As a non-golfer, I still don’t understand entirely what that means, but apparently golf is even more fun when you are a) helping a worthy charity, b) whacking away with friends to mock your swing (or cheer you on, occasionally), and c) doing it with dozens of others in front of you and behind you to cheer and deride your time spent in those little sandy pits around the green.
If this sounds fun and exciting to you, or if you want to sponsor a portion of the day – I’m told people actually like putting advertising up next to some of the more popular bunkers, where a few spend more time than on the tee – call LCCH at 344-1970, and they’ll set you up.
The Links at Echo Springs is hosting the affair, and they promise green grass and tawny sands; apparently the weather is up to (full disclosure) the members of the bord.
Up and over across the county at Flint Ridge State Memorial, where the museum will open weekends at the end of the month, school field trips from all over the state are arriving, bright yellow buses carrying squadrons of lunch-clutching kids.
These days, most of our visitors are 4th grade students, in line with the all-powerful state proficiency standards, which put Ohio history in that year. A few adventurous 5th grade teachers still bring groups, and we get the stray older youth contingent, but the bulk of our group tour traffic this time of year is either 4th graders or senior citizens rambling the continent.
Jim Kingery, site manager for the Ohio Historical Society, has no word on when the Great Circle unit of Newark Earthworks State Memorial will have a museum facility again, but the old "Fairgrounds Circle" on Rt. 79 between Newark and Heath is open for picnics and some limited tours by arrangement (344-1919).
Those of us who volunteer with the sites to support the school tours get to meet kids and teachers from not only Licking County school districts, but Franklin, Perry, Fairfield, Muskingum, and Athens Counties, along with an annual visit from a school up in the Cleveland area on their way to the Statehouse and the Ohio Historical Center.
Over the last couple years we’ve met contingents from Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New York. And those are just the ones who have made specific arrangements for a formal tour!
Often, while I’m waiting for a school bus to show up at Great Circle or Flint Ridge, a car will appear with a couple or family traveling from point A to point B who thought they’d stop along the way. We offer them what we can, and just in recent months I’ve given impromptu tours to visitors from Texas, Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, Oklamhoma, Louisiana, and Missouri. All to folks who drove out of their way to see our world famous 2000 year old earthworks.
Flint Ridge is a bit more off the beaten path, but still near the interstate, and well marked off of both I-70 and Rt. 40. Coming soon is the "World’s Longest Yard Sale" effort along the old National Road, from Cumberland, Maryland to . . . well, it’s going through Licking County, and may not end in Illinois but it will go at least that far, or so I hear from Doug Smith.
Along with being our newest county commissioner, Doug has been a student and teacher of the National Road and its lore. Efforts to promote this scenic and historic byway often involve him, and he and Charla Devine of Devine Farms have been active in promoting this Memorial Day weekend event. More to come . . .
Any route you may drive out to Flint Ridge takes you up and up, and winds around for good measure, but get a driver and switch with them when you get to the ridge and let them watch out the windows on the way back. Redbuds and dogwood are blossoming out all over; trillium on shady hillsides and fire pinks standing above swaths of spring beauties along the ridgetops.
Even though the daffodils and crocuses are fading, a new crop of native wildflowers and flowering trees is coming into season. A few more weeks, and yellow or tulip poplars will blossom up in the canopy a hundred feet above; watch at your feet for their falling petals.
Forsythia is dropping her yellow for a more staid green; we not only had next to no winter, we didn’t even have a snow after the forsythia bloomed.
But frost-free is another week away, so hold onto those tomato plants on top of the refrigerator! Even in a warm year like this, a quick freeze in mid-May is perfectly possible . . . as long as it isn’t the morning of the LCCH Golf Outing!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he doesn’t golf, but he’d be happy to mention your good cause’s golf event if you tell him through disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 5-6-06
Jeff Gill

Was Luther a Lutheran?

On the Eve of All Saints’ Day, 1517, Martin Luther uploaded his blog to the internet.
Er, he got a full page ad in the Wittenberg, Germany area Gannett newspaper.
No? Well, maybe he sent a direct mail flier with his detailed list of concerns to a targeted group of opinion shapers in the local zip code?
Of course none of that is correct; many of you know that the soon-to-be former Augustinian monk and priest and professor nailed his 95 theses, or points of dispute with Roman Catholic theology and practice, to the door of Wittenberg Church, next door to the Castle.
Nailing your thoughts to a church door sounds dramatic and picturesque, but for Martin Luther’s time and place, with Gutenberg’s printing press still an innovation and communication the province of the wealthy and influential, the best way to let average Joe, or Johannes, to get in on the debate was to post your theses on the public square. There they’d be next to the list of the banns, or who proposed to marry in the next few weeks, the property transfers, and memorial notices.
Sounds like the first few pages of the Advocate, doesn’t it? And that’s the point: many read the paper daily to see who’s getting hitched (or un-), who bought what parcel of land, and if their name is in the obituaries. As some of us say, if we aren’t listed in the "Death Notices," then we can have breakfast and move on.
So Martin Luther wanted to be on the editorial board, and write an Op-Ed, and even wanted feedback. "Hier stehe ich," as he was later to say, "Here I stand," "Ich kann nicht anders," – "I can do no other."
A movie was recently in theaters which starred Joseph Fiennes, who played the title role in "Shakespeare In Love." Titled simply "Luther," the viewing is worth it if only for the sight of Alberto Molina, actor with Diego Rivera and Doctor Octopus to his credit, playing Johannes Tetzel, a Dominican monk who is often and maybe even fairly blamed for precipitating Luther’s break with Rome.
Including the dramatic if ahistorical line "every coin in coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs" (it was used, but not by Tetzel), you see the hard-sell fund raising techniques used by those working to build a new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. You’ve heard of church splits over building fund campaigns? Well, this was the mother of all campaigns, and it began the mother of all Christian divisions, the Protestant Reformation.
Luther did have much to protest about abuses in the organized church of his day, but his original desire was to reform, not revolt. Likewise, the Catholic Church needed reformation, and soon embarked on a renewal campaign called the
Counter-Reformation, with many bishops and cardinals agreeing at the Council of Trent that their church must change.
But by then it was too late for those changes to be negotiated between the factions, for reasons both theological and political. The involvement of the infamously named "Holy Roman Empire" (as Gibbon noted, neither holy, nor Roman, and not even an empire) precipitated open warfare, and Luther’s conviction that priests should marry and the people should not only read scripture in their own language but – oh, the horror! – sing in worship, created a communion that was no longer in communion with the Bishop of Rome.
Were they Lutheran, though? Well, that’s what we call them, though it would no doubt sadden Martin. The German Church, with bishops of their own people and a separate but cooperative relationship with the civil authority, was reformed by Luther in a way that was different than his neighbor to the south, in Geneva, Switzerland, organized church and state. The rise of John Calvin and his Reformed Church helped cement the idea of "Lutherans" and "Calvinists" within the Reformation, each protesting in their own way.
Thirty years of warfare resulted in a stability Luther was never to see in his lifetime, with Catholicism resurgent in the south, especially around Munich.
The form of state Protestantism known as Lutheran spread north to the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, and much of the Baltic region. Many Lutheran churches in this country have a strong ethnic component from one of those countries.
There are also some well known faith communities in this country springing from groups that protested the protesters, when the Lutheran Reformation became the official state church. We’ll look at those next week, in part four of this series.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him at disciple@voyager.net.

Faith Works 4-29-06
Jeff Gill

Beneath Vatican Hill

The Roman Catholic Church traces her roots beneath the massive bulk of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where fill that Emperor Constantine brought in to level a side of Vatican Hill covers an ancient cemetery.
Below the "modern" structure, the second on that constructed platform, tombs from before the time of Christ and just after now can be toured, with the conclusion of the visit to the excavations, or "scavi," come to the area just under the high altar, beneath the center of the vast dome designed by Michaelangelo.
It is what archaeologists and classical scholars believe is the burial place of Simon Peter, foremost of the apostles and leader of the Christian movement carried back to the heart of the Roman empire. Just to the south is the former Circus, or racetrack, where Peter was executed by upside-down crucifixion; the pylon marking one end of the course was an obelisk brought as spoil of war, the same obelisk now in the center of the piazza before the largest church in Christendom – perhaps Peter’s last sight on earth, now witness to the election and speeches and funerals of Peter’s successors, called bishops of Rome, or "il papa," or just pope.
This second week of our series on Christendom for Dummies (hey, it takes one to know one!) moves from the ancient traditions of Eastern, Orthodox Christianity back to the west, and the Catholic Christian wing of the faith.
Pope John Paul II said not long ago of the eastern and western branches of traditional Christianity that the church "breathes with two lungs," implying that while each can get along to some degree without the other, such a situation is not the best, and could be harmful. The years since World War II, and especially in the pontificate of John Paul II, have seen a renewal of relations between the Orthodox and Catholic "lungs" not dreamed of since 1204, when Crusaders in Constantinople plundered holy shrines to make up for not getting to Jerusalem, and leaders of Christianity both east and west anathematized, or cursed each other.
Tensions began much earlier, and came to a head with church councils around 1052, when understandings of the relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could not be reconciled (the "filoque" clause). But the stresses were as much geopolitical as theological, beginning with the sack of Rome in 410, and cracked beyond all repair, it seemed, with the sack of Constantinople in 1453.
The word catholic, small-c, means universal, and the Roman Catholic Church continues to struggle with catholicity both as promise and problem. The papal affirmation "no salvation outside the church" is meant more as assured promise than veiled threat, but is heard by many as a claim of absolute authority with limited justification.
One of the common, but unusual titles used by the leader of Catholic Christianity is "Supreme Pontiff." You hear it just down the road in the name of the Pontifical College Josephinum, signifying the role of the Roman Pontiff in that school over the local bishop of Columbus, along with the "P" in the former PIME seminary school between Heath and Hebron, once a papal property, now the retreat center for the Diocese of Columbus.
This is a title that goes back into the ancient heritage of Rome, given by the city-state to Julius Caesar as "pontifex maximus," or literally "supreme bridge builder." This title, signifying the responsibility for maintaining relationships between believers and various faith groups, was held by the Caesars and was given to the Papacy when the Roman Empire fell.
As modern Supreme Pontiff, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has a responsibility he takes quite seriously, to share the Christian message and build bridges to believers around the world.
Modern Catholics hold a loyalty to their bishops as the organizing embodiments of their faith community, and a primary loyalty to the teaching pre-eminence of the bishop of Rome, where Peter was martyred and where his successors still worship and preside as the "daddy" in Italian vernacular, or "il papa."
The pre-eminence of the papacy is an obstacle to some in hoping for Christian union, and the embodiment of unity for many others. This tension reaches a head when the old St. Peter’s is being torn down and a new one planned, just after the year 1500, and a good Catholic monk named Martin Luther gets some strange ideas in Pope Benedict’s homeland of Germany.
The story continues next week!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him through disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-30-06
Jeff Gill

Thornwood Drive, connecting Union Township’s northern reaches and the Newark/Granville corridor since before the Civil War, is still a crucial link for Licking County.
Many of you shared your interest with me last week in where and how the "Dugway" changed traffic patterns; along with the Deep Cut on the west edge of Millersport, these two projects are probably only second to the National Road and the Ohio & Erie Canal in shaping the first hundred years of our region.
Just as the expansion of Rt. 79 wiped away a few remaining traces of the canal bed and basins in recent years, the new Thornwood connector and Cherry Valley interchange will obscure some still visible chunks of history, wherever the new path goes.
Thornwood begins in the south where it does today, starting at Beaver Run Road (named for early settler David Bever, so don’t look for bucktooth rodents nearby). Arrowing north past the Sts. Peter and Paul Retreat Center of the Diocese of Columbus (former PIME), this is clearly a surveyed route, not a former Indian footpath.
But just at the foot of the hill to West Main (which does have that prehistoric angularity), where Hope Timber sits above, there is a small "jog" in Thornwood, a noticeable shift but small enough that it will certainly vanish in the coming widening.
The reason for this jog is simple: in horsepower days, Thornwood ended here, turning right and looping around the steep slope to join Main near Vensil-Orr-Chute’s new funeral home.
The Showman farm, once a true Licking County agricultural showplace, still sits in part on the ridge beyond the bike path stop on Cherry Valley Road. A traveler from the rich grain markets of Hebron heading for Granville, or an underground railroad conductor seeking a rest on the way to Mount Vernon, Mansfield, and ultimately Canada, has to get around that ridge.
From the meander east around the southern side of the Showman ridge, you would cross Main, called the Columbus Road this far away from Newark proper back then. You’d go north along Showman St. (still called that), and at Central City (now mainly the Market Basket) follow Cherry Valley Road around the northern half of the Showman farm to . . . the Showman Bridge! At this crossing of Raccoon Creek an aqueduct for the Granville Feeder of the Ohio & Erie Canal lay alongside the bridge, and if you come towards the Cherry Valley/Reddington Road intersection from the west, you can clearly see the age of the bridge that we still use from the piers and streamlined footers in the creekbed.
River Road, Reddington, and Thornwood all dissolve into a tangle today which will vanish under whatever new interchange is built at the end of Thornwood to route us into Rt. 16. Just as wagons couldn’t, and didn’t, go straight up the hill north to join Main Street, neither did the 1800’s River Road do anything but push on to join Cherry Valley Road. Somewhere after 1900 power equipment and the horseless carriage that Mr. Ford up in Detroit made popular created the link from the foot of Showman Ridge, pushing Thornwood from the jog, up to cross Main and James Road, then up and over to drop down onto River Road.
Now larger trucks and increased expansion of both Newark and Heath mean this set of intersections will change again. The traces of the original paths and roads will only be seen in the books and diaries about former days and olden times, with the stray street sign or neighborhood name reminding us of another way.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your stories with him at disciple@voyager.net.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-23-06
Jeff Gill

Dugway Opens the Road

Discussion of an interchange for Rt. 16 and Cherry Valley Road takes us very close to the roots of Licking County transportation history.
Before the National Road and the Ohio & Erie Canal criss-crossed this area in the 1830’s, the network of roads and paths were less linear and had to fit both the terrain and the limitations of both human and animal power.
The angle of West Main Street through Newark, offset to north-south or east-west lines of the surveyed city, traces back to the first maps we have, and likely follows an early American Indian path from the meeting of the Licking River forks to the Scioto River drainage west.
Weaving into what’s now James Road, Canyon and River Roads, possibly linking with Morse Road, the Native American footways were trodden down by European shoes, widened for mule and ox teams, and slowly straightened (a bit) for wagon and stagecoach.
The same is probably true for what we now call Rt. 13, up from Somerset, the early regional center, where many of Newark’s "first citizens" came from, weaving north along the first terraces above the marshy river bottoms to Mount Vernon and on to Mansfield.
Between Newark and the northwest, to Granville, the main road also follows a unique angle which may also hint at pre-settler trails.
Less well remembered, or traceable on the map, is that the highlands now called "Morgan Manor" stretched to a drop-off to Raccoon Creek, creating a major obstacle for the first travelers who weren’t on foot to get from the area of Granville St. in Newark to where Newark-Granville Road heads into the latter named village – and almost where the new interchange is proposed.
The first settlers, and for many years, had to make a double crossing of the creek, jouncing down and laboring back out of the riverbed, a path which had to be laboriously rebuilt after each spring and every major rain.
What now unnamed citizens took on was a "graded way," or "dugway" through the saddle of the ridge just north of Raccoon Creek, cutting a deeper path that lessened the grade for oxen to make the slope up and over into the eastern edge of the Granville area.
Done, necessarily, with shovels and stoop labor alone, this was Licking County’s first major public works project. It was memorable enough that the district west of Newark proper north of the creek was, and is still to some, known as "Dugway."
In fact, if you travel west on Rt. 16 and peel off to the right onto Granville Road, just as you leave the expressway a small part of the old Dugway is still visible to your left, fenced off but clearly evident if you know what you’re looking at. The age of the trees growing down on the sides of the trench show the antiquity of this site.
ODOT will probably use this area for staging and construction purposes when the Cherry Valley interchange is built, but I hope someday the area can be not only preserved but memorialized in some way. The Dugway is a clear witness to the elemental labors that were needed to make transportation and community expand and connect in early Licking County, just as the area’s growth requires a more technologically elegant, but not dissimilar solution, along Rt. 16 today.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; write him at disciple@voyager.net.