Faith Works 5-23-09
Jeff Gill

Who You Calling a Hypocrite?
___

I am a hypocrite.

There, got that out of the way. Now, what is a hypocrite?

Generally speaking, a hypocrite is someone who says one thing, or stands for one thing, but then does something quite different, usually in opposition to what they claim to represent.

A police officer who breaks laws would be a hypocrite; a firefighter who is an arsonist would certainly be hypocritical; a “family values” politician who is found to be cheating on their spouse would be lucky if hypocrite is the most people call them.

(No, I have nothing to say about “Jon and Kate + 8” and please don’t make me.)

So those would be dramatic and clear-cut examples of hypocritical people. Now what about my admission up top there, in the lead paragraph?

Well, there’s another way of using hypocrite which has some common currency behind it, and that it the more rhetorical, more argumentative way to label someone a hypocrite. That would be saying that if you don’t always and emphatically live up to the best values of a strong, public stance that you take, you are in fair danger of getting tagged as a hypocrite.

If said “family values” pol is so committed to their cause that they travel constantly, hardly know their eight kids’ names (ahem) one from another, and neglect basic parental duties like birthdays and anniversaries, can you call them a hypocrite? Sure. A different sort, perhaps, but hypocritical in degree if not to an extreme.

This past week my wife and I celebrated our 24th year of marriage, and if I said I was not always the best husband I could have been, I doubt that the Lovely Wife would disagree. If I take a strong stand in defense of marriage in public settings – say, in a weekly newspaper column – is that a wee bit hypocritical? Sure. It doesn’t take being a John Edwards to make you less than the husband and father God wants you to be.

When I want to make a comment about the recent news that we’re now up to 4 out of 10 births in the US being “out of wedlock,” I think a decent respect for the opinions of mankind makes me think carefully about what stones I might throw.

And then still say “Folks, does this worry anyone else? ‘Cause it sure does me!” Because being a little less than the angels means I am a sinner who has fallen short of the glory of God, but a sinner who still should say what’s on their heart.

All of which makes me watch and listen in bemusement to the long line of people waiting to take a gleeful pitch of the hypocrite hardball at Miss California USA in the dunk tank of public opinion. Apparently, she’s a hypocrite because she’s said something out of her understanding of where her Christian walk has taken her, but she has a) taken pictures in her foundation garments, b) gotten artificial enhancements of the blessings God already gave her, and c) walked down a runway in a sash.

News flash, folks: yes, some Christians are adamantly against beauty pageants and such, but there are probably more progressive/liberal Christians against them as exploitation of women than there are Christians who think women should wear burkhas. Joke all you want, but I think breast augmentation surgery is doing just fine in Oklahoma and Texas, so where did you get the idea that conservative Christians were against them as a matter of faith?

(I think they represent poor stewardship. See, theology to go, that’s me.)

There is a real insincerity at work when you hear commentary that tries to tell Christians to go back into a ghetto enclave that exists only in the commentator’s mind (and perhaps in their hopes). Ms. CA may be somewhat inarticulate, she may not be politically correct, and she may not be the best preacher I’ll hear this month, but hypocritical is an odd point to make.

Where it comes from, in my hearing, is the use of “hypocrite” as a bludgeon to end debate, to close discussion, to tell people what they can and can’t disagree about. My solution is to simply say as quickly as possible “I know I’m not perfect, but let’s talk about the merits of what I’m proposing, and not whether I’m the best advocate for it.”

Because, you see, I know I’m a hypocrite, but I’m working on it!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he thinks the big debate about marriage is in that 4 of 10 babies born outside of it. Tell him what you think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 5-16-09
Jeff Gill

Decoding Certain Movies, One Error At a Time
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Growing up in northwest Indiana, my interest in morning radio was limited to days when the snow had fallen by the foot the night before.

Obligatory snarky comment: a few miles off of Lake Michigan, as my friends in Ashtabula County, Ohio can tell you along Lake Erie, you get lots of snow, and your highway departments are fully equipped and your school staff is used to opening up on time even when eighteen inches fell the night before, unless it was blowing. So we all hoped for wind much more than we counted on snow to get us a day off.

In my youthful neck of the woods, the best station for getting the fastest school closure announcement also had a gentleman of the region who subscribed to everything the John Birch Society mailed out. This meant that along with waiting for the joyous news of “no school” (or the grim silence that meant the bus was coming at 7:00 am sharp), I learned a great deal about the Bavarian Illuminati.
.
Or at least what the John Birch folks thought about the Illuminati.

Yes, I know, not believing they exist is one of the ways they work their evils plans, no need to send me that e-mail. But I and my fellows all knew that the Bavarian Illuminati were founded, eerily (cue music) in 1776, by one Adam Weishaupt.

You can web search more if you want.

So when Dan Brown tries to say that Galileo the scientist and Bernini the artist were members, subverting the Catholic Church with their materialistic machinations, I thought way back when I read his book (koff) “Angels & Donuts,” or something like that, “hey, there’s something wrong about the dating here.”

Sure enough, Galileo died in 1642, and Bernini in 1680. So something was wrong here . . .

“Ankles & Demons” was written (koff) by Dan Brown before his opus manglous, “The DaVinci Code” sold sixty bazillion copies and got Dr. Langdon made into Tom Hanks. Since that movie got made first, they’ve gone back and retrofitted “Angles & Deacons” into a sequel, Hollywood’s favorite sport, second only to mangling history.

I’ve already written about the DaVinci Head Cold’s various congestions of fact, and I’m driven to pull out “Angels & Detours” just to alert y’all to what they’re very likely to inflict on you while you’re innocently trying to eat your popcorn in air conditioned peace.

Copernicus was killed by the evil, nasty papacy, Brown tells us, when he died in bed of a stroke at 70 (they recently found his bones buried with honor in a cathedral where he had served as a priest – cool story; they weren’t sure it was his skull, but did DNA analysis on the bone and hair from among the pages of a book he was known to have owned, and got a match!).

He tries to say that Winston Churchill was a staunch Catholic; he might have been a staunch alcoholic, and committed cigar smoker, but when he went to church it was the Church of England, the Anglican Communion.

And the idea that a pope (the one he names was dead by the time the event described, by the way) banished the famous “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” because it was too sensual flies in the face of the well-known fact that a Cardinal (not from St. Louis) commissioned Bernini to make it for his mortuary chapel, which is exactly where it still is on display today.

My point is simply that Brown isn’t making errors based in ignorance or poor research: he’s changing facts to make his point. Does he have a point? That’s a different argument, but if you change facts to make it, I think one should be suspicious from the start. I’m not saying “boycott the movie,” but I am saying that you should know you’re being sold a manipulative bill of goods if you go.

Don’t even get me started on what he does with anti-matter and physics . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is not a physicist, but he knows anti-matter isn’t what Brown says it is. Tell him a true story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” @Twitter.com.

Staycation 2009 Licking County

Summer of 2009 -- the season of Staycations, a family trip that
doesn't involve plane tickets, passports, or time changes.

May: You run the family budget numbers, and determine that the plans
for this summer will not involve major travel.

Memorial Day weekend: You check www.newarkadvocate.com and find out
when the ceremony at the local cemetery is held on Monday; Sunday,
you watch the Indianapolis 500 on TV and then cook out, with the
family talking about where you went last year (they're still coming
to terms with it). Monday morning you get up and go down to where
the Legion fellows are lining up with the high school band and the
Scouts and all, and walk down to what turns out to be a very moving
ceremony, with stories about people from right down the block from
you that you'd never heard. You and the kids walk along the
tombstones and grave markers, and they ask about their great-
grandfather.

The next weekend is Strawberries on the Square, and the county
courthouse makes a solid centerpiece for this big event you've always
heard of but never been to. Everyone finds the evening fun, and the
strawberry shortcake is delicious; the Kiwanis server tells you the
shortcake is from Riley's and the ice cream is from Utica and Velvet
Ice Cream, which gives you an idea . . .

June: On a weeknight, you drive out to Utica to Ye Olde Mill, which
you'd been meaning to do for years. Spouse notes that neither of you
had tasted Moose Tracks for too long, and you should come back again
before the summer's over.

A later weekend takes you past Brownsville and up to Flint Ridge
State Memorial, which the Licking Valley Heritage Society is now
operating. You realize that this flint stuff is not only the "state
mineral," but it's beautiful, and you find out that people 2,000
years ago traded across thousands of miles to get it -- which makes
sense. A hike around the flint pits makes you feel like you earned
the ice cream from last week.

When you go on vacation, you like to stop sometimes at a completely
off-the-wall little hole-in-the-wall place; so you do that on the way
home through Newark (or were we still in Heath?), and get some
delicious fried chicken and roasted garlic mashed potatoes.

July: You hadn't been to Granville since the Candlelight Walking
Tour last December (or was it the December before that?); the Old
Fashioned Fourth of July is a ridiculously affordable trip into a
Rockwell painting of a carnival on Main Street in a New England
village -- both of you wonder if you've ever thought to drive through
the Welsh Hills in autumn instead of going to New England and being
disappointed by a badly run B&B, when you can underbake your own
muffins and not water down the OJ. As the sun sets, you pick up a
flyer about the free Sunday evening concerts on the College Green.

Someone mentions at work that Licking County has enough golf courses
that you could play a different one every week all summer; you and
some others decide it isn't too late in the summer to try to hit 'em
all. But that evening, while the light still lingers, you load the
kids' bikes into the back of the van and run down to Toboso -- think
of that, a Licking County town named after a place in "Don Quixote"
-- where you go for a ride along the Black Hand Gorge trail. Looking
up at Council Rock, it's like the Grand Canyon, on a slightly smaller
scale but without three dozen Germans all complaining about the food
right next to you.

August: The kids ask you to take their friends to the trip they'd
heard about to the "floating island," Cranberry Bog. Sure enough,
you call the Greater Buckeye Lake Historical Society and they have
regular boat trips and guided tours of one of the very few floating
islands in the world, left adrift in the 1830s by the rise of the
lake for the Ohio & Erie Canal, with plants dating back to the
glaciers 12,000 years ago. Mmmm, glaciers. You stop in Hebron at
Hayman's Dairy Bar for ice cream.

Then you finally make it to the new museum, just open a year, at the
Newark Earthworks State Memorial, air conditioned but so interesting
that you actually want to go back out in the heat, and walk around
this largest circular earthwork in the entire Western Hemisphere.
They give you a flyer that reminds you there's a huge event back at
Flint Ridge on Labor Day weekend, and you realize -- that's coming up
soon, and the summer's almost over. The 151st Hartford Fair up in
Croton, and when the week is over out there, school begins just a
week or so later.

And you haven't even made it out to Pataskala yet.

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Notes From My Knapsack 5-14-09 Granville Sentinel

Jeff Gill

 

Design In Living, In the Village, In Your Life

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Painting the old gas station black (ok, charcoal) did not strike me as a good idea at first, and then I though "oh, it'll be a base coat."

 

What I simply could not have imagined was that this color, even before spring has cast a green and gold shading across the dark exterior, would bring out a new appreciation in me for the lines and angles of this very simple building.

 

Add some brushed aluminum, or at least what looks like brushed aluminum, and a few well placed lights, and you have a whole new experience as you curve into the village around Mount Parnassus after crossing Clear Run.

 

Yes, there are some who still don't like it – "why did they paint it that way?" – and as my childhood Scoutmaster said and still says, "Some people would complain if you hung them with a new rope."

 

Monique Keegan is about to launch Enjoy Co. and you can see a bit more of her work in design at www.enjoyco.net, but it's the very idea of design that intrigues me, maybe because it's a bit beyond my usual skill set. The ability to move a vase and bring in an old trunk and lean it in a corner, after rearranging the furniture and adding a coat of paint to one wall, seems a bit like magic to me. Only a bit, because it works, and those who can make it work do it over and over again, without any goats being sacrificed or pixie dust sprinkled.

 

Steven Jobs of Apple likes to point out that design isn't about how something looks, but how it works. How a living space works is something we're usually most aware of when it doesn't, but the tricks and techniques of making a place to work and cook and eat and relax is definitely more than aesthetics. Although I suspect design professionals have to convince people quite often that what they think they want in a room is what they are used to seeing, and not what will make it "work."

 

The design of a life has the same sorts of complication to it, as we know what we're used to seeing or expect to see play out. We've just gone through a generation that had to deal with "life design" assumptions changing, about women staying home and men staying with one business, or even one company, for their whole lives.

 

Some of us are watching our Boomer friends start to redesign retirement, which doesn't look much like shuffleboard anymore, unless it's full court, full contact shuffleboard with titanium pushers and special stretchy fabric outfits.

 

In a couple of weeks, on Pentecost Sunday, which is May 31 this year, I get the pleasure of preaching at Centenary UMC so Pastor Steve can focus on his daughter Laura graduating from GHS, laden with well-earned honors. Her life, I'm sure mother Emily would agree, carries a very different set of design criteria into planning a future than did the generation her parents and I share.

 

What I'm also looking forward to that weekend, though, is sneaking ahead a bit in the timetable for Centenary's bicentennial, since the church was founded in 1810. I plan to preach, in part, about a fellow who wanted to change his life one way, and found it changing in a completely different direction; I'm going to address how the biggest battle of the American Revolution, at least in terms of casualties, may have found its ultimate closure right on the northeast corner of Broadway and Main.

 

Designing a life doesn't always turn out the way you plan – that may be a good thought all around in this season of graduations, up the hill and around the village.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow "Knapsack" at Twitter.com.

Faith Works 5-9-09
Jeff Gill

Engage Thrusters, Helm; Chaplain To the Bridge

Yes, I am a Trekkie.

It’s said that hard-core fans of Star Trek prefer “Trekker,” but i’ve never heard anyone use that term for themselves, and I have trouble believing I’m not hard-core enough.

When “Star Trek” was a TV show (now, with so many later elements of the franchise, that is known as TOS for “The Original Series”), I saw it first in black and white. It was made in color, of course, but I may have seen one of the four or five I saw as a kid on a color set.

Then it went into syndicated reruns, but the basement TV was black and white, so I had a pretty shaky sense of who wore what color – for instance, I was slow on picking up the fact that a red shirt, unless your name was Scotty, meant you were plot filling dead meat, waiting for Bones McCoy, ship’s doctor, to look up and (never) say “He’s dead, Jim.”

I knew where my crew berth was, on Deck 8, aft portside, sector 24 on the TOS USS Enterprise NCC-1701, on Deck 13 (they aren’t superstitious in the 23rd century, or the 24th) on TNG’s NCC-1701D. It looked out from the underside of the saucer section towards the prow of the port nacelle, with an external bulkhead that sloped inwards towards the deck.

Is that Trekkie enough for you?

What I didn’t see a place for in the Star Trek universe was my faith. This was, obviously, no accident; the crew was certainly multicultural enough, with Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov, and more than multiracial with Spock on TOS and Worf on TNG. So presenting any kind of religious perspective would have been challenging, but should have made sense.

Anyone who has ever known a chaplain in any branch of the military would understand the challenge, and have stories about how you work past and around and through them.

But Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek universe, saw from the traumas of World War II and in the optimism of the 60’s where it all began, a future where science would give everyone a rational, reasonable, evidence-based, faith-free world.

He couldn’t resist giving Spock a coldly rational kind of spirituality that hinted at . . . something, but for the rest of the crew . . .

It didn’t matter to me, since I always inferred for myself a chaplain and a chapel just around one of those endlessly curving corridors, just out of sight. After my call to ministry came and I went to seminary, one of my papers was written essentially as a story, only vaguely disguised as the Trek universe, with the protagonist a chaplain on board a ship that wasn’t quite the Enterprise. (Actually, it was a Miranda class starship called the USS Bozeman, but that’s another story.)

The professor found the basic elements of what the paper was supposed to contain, graded that, and then added a note “but what happens next?” That’s what makes the Trekkie experience what it is, I guess – it doesn’t end when we leave the theater or turn off the TV.

Our family went Thursday night to see the new, “rebooted” Star Trek movie, and I’ve blogged about it as a movie at the newarkadvocate.com website. There’s still no chaplain, unless you count Bones, who strikes me as a doctor whose grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister just outside of Atlanta and has issues, but still questions that take him back to that childhood congregation, where . . .*

See? We just can’t let it alone. Where else do you see faith at work and at play just under the surface, and how does your own faith weave into those imaginary pictures?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he holds the rank of Lt. Commander in Starfleet on a Cultural Contact Mitigation team (in his imagination). Tell him your story, true or imaginary, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” at Twitter.com.

*DeForest Kelley's father was, in fact, a Baptist preacher.

[After ". . .turn off the TV." and before "Our family went . . ." were supposed to be these paragraphs, deleted by my hasty cut-n-pasting, in my rush to get an after-deadline column turned in after watching the Trek premiere Thursday night:

Science fiction doesn't always ditch the clergy or religious context of life in the future. Orson Scott Card, a committed and active Mormon, always shows the life of faith in his novels; not always the Latter Day Saints, either. The best example (from my point of view, anyhow) may be in "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where an obvious homage to the Trek universe can be seen in the descriptions of the bridge of the INSS MacArthur.

The CoDominium Navy in this future history has chaplains, and in the "first contact" at the center of this book, an Anglican clergyman and linguist is sent along on the voyage, shown performing both roles in the narrative; another ship in the novel, crewed largely by ethnic Russians, is the INSS Lenin, which has an icon corner on their bridge with a nearby samovar of tea bubbling away.

Many science fiction authors, if not Gene Roddenberry, see a lively and vital role for a robust faith when they look into the future through their unique lenses.] [Return above to "Our family went . . ."]

Faith Works 5-2-09
Jeff Gill

You’re Going To Die, Get Used To It
____

Nearly 100 people died of the influenza today.

And about that number the day before.

Oh, and last week? Same number. Or a month ago today, or this day last year.

Right, I’m not talking about the swine flu. Which sounds nasty, and I hope me and mine don’t get it.

What is clearly dangerous is influenza in general, which – news flash – affects the respiratory system in ways that doctors are still trying to fully understand. It’s a virus (which means antibiotics don’t do a lick of good) and we don’t know as much as we’d like, but we can identify new strains, new types of flu virus, through laboratory means.

In the labs, they talk about H1N1, but it takes a news story to come up “swine flu” or “bird flu,” neatly confusing people about whether you get it from eating those items (nope) or if you catch it from them (perhaps way back at the start, but not now).

There’s also no little confusion about the nature of the threat, hence my distinctly uncheery note to church-going folk of “you’re going to die, get used to it.”

Of course we don’t want to be casual about transmitting disease, and sick people and people with compromised immune systems – two often completely different categories! – should not be piled up next to each other. (And a hospital is where you do just that…)

What folks who are responsible for gathering and managing worship need to keep in mind is that there’s essentially nothing to learn here that we shouldn’t know and practice in general. Using “swine flu” as a way to focus attention isn’t all bad, but let’s not go pitching bathwater out upstairs windows without checking the contents, shall we?

First off, people who are coughing and sneezing shouldn’t go into public gatherings if at all possible. Masks? C’mon. Just stay home and keep using fresh tissues. We don’t need mass mask wearing (try that at the airport, ha ha), we need some common sense. And hand washing. Lots of hand washing.

Perfect attendance? Schools gently set most such recognitions aside for exactly this reason – good attendance plus (whatever) is worth rewarding, but awards or recognition for just showing up no matter what may not actually accomplish what you think. If it gets people who know they have a metabolism full of viruses to still go to church thinking “hey, I have a tissue in my pocket,” then you really aren’t promoting healthy anything, let alone healthy theology.

Inside the worship space and restrooms, keep tissues around. If you have relevant and meaningful worship going on, you’ll need ‘em for all kinds of reasons. Don’t be cheap or chintzy with ‘em, either: get ones that are better than sandpaper, and keep them stocked. I could go into detail here, but it may be your Saturday breakfast with the Granville Kiwanis or Jacksontown United Methodist folks I’m ruining, so I’ll just say – use a new one, and dispose of the old. Now.

Should we ditch “the passing of the peace”? Many introverts quickly say “Yes!” if not “Hallelujah!” For some, that can be the most excruciating five minutes of their week, not to mention the service; for extroverts, the grim smile and perfunctory handshake from others is a mystery to be solved by a big, long hug.

There’s a case to be made for siding with the introverts when public health situations are afoot, and any flu season, let alone swine flu, makes a case for inviting people to turn, smile (from a distance), and say “Peace be with you,” letting “and also with you” replace the warm, two-armed embrace, let alone big kiss on the cheek.

Before 1890, many Protestant denominations had a common cup for their communion practice – many congregations in Licking County, Presbyterian, Disciples, Baptist, UCC, Methodist, and so on, still have a pewter or maybe even silver pitcher and chalice . . . in their historical cabinet.

The advent of little cups for communion (shot glasses, say the disrespectful) was in the 1890s and a growing understanding of tuberculosis. A fascinating book, “The Gospel of Germs,” by Nancy Tomes (Harvard University Press), explains how the religion of hygiene collided, and ultimately ran over the theology behind a common cup.

Never mind that there is little or no data to show that you can get much of any disease from a common cup (especially if you use actual wine, a whole ‘nother debate).

The swine flu flap may just be a handy time for churches to tell the sick it’s OK to stay home, to stock up and keep clean the restrooms, and maybe lay in a few bottles of hand santizer next to the tissue boxes. Just in case.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’d like folks to keep in mind almost 3,000 people died today of malaria, but not where you see it on TV. Let him know what you worry about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-25-09
Jeff Gill

Updating Your Glossary With a Word or Two

A few weeks ago I was updating my Facebook status with a Twitter feed from my cell phone texting function, which I reviewed later on Firefox from my MacBook.

Trust me when I say that the year I started seminary that sentence would have been so much gibberish.

Anyhow, my tweet had to do with my bemusement at spending a Saturday night finding a few pictures on Google Image search to use in the PowerPoint that would augment my sermon; other than Saturday and sermon, that sentence also would have competed in the “say what?” sweepstakes in 1985.

Add in the fact that said images and messages would be captured on digital video to ultimately be uploaded to YouTube for a congregation website that most of the church members subscribed to for e-mail notice of updates, and . . .

Let me say in my own defense that I had an e-mail account in 1978, which is not something many people can claim. Each account was awarded the munificent quantity of memory of, if memory serves, 500 Kilobytes. Keep in mind that we landed on the moon, 40 years ago in July of 1969, with a combined Apollo command module and lunar lander computer capacity of about 150 Kb of memory.

(And today your car probably has about 1 MB of memory running the emission control system and various elements of the automotive systems, which is impressive until you remember that your computer nowadays probably has 2 GB of RAM, so it’s 2,000 times more than your car, which is almost a thousand times more than the Lunar Module.)

All of which is to say: I started seminary in 1985, and if I had started seminary in 1960, most of what I learned about preaching and administration and leadership would have aged pretty well by 1985.

But here we are in 2009, and much of my 1985 knowledge base, about the basic tools of ministry, is scrap metal, by which I don’t mean the kind of scrap metal they run TV commercials about, telling people to not get electrocuted stealing that scrap metal.

The most useful content from that year of 1985 is what I learned of Bible content, and my seminary was busy trying to de-emphasize required coursework like that, plus most of the Bible content I know didn’t come from seminary coursework, other than Hebrew classes (which I will always be glad I took, regardless of relevance to the modern world). My Greek was and is fragmentary, but even that wasn’t required for graduation.

So, anyhow, I was doing a series of dialogue sermons with a pastor who wanted to open up some of the tough questions of Christian faith, and in one Sunday, where we were wondering what people already thought, we decided to try something a little out there even for 2009.

We started the message portion of the service with a “yes or no” question, and projected a slide with the two options, each with either his cell number or mine, asking the congregation to text a blank message to one number for “yes” or the other number for “no,” and over 70 text messages came to our two phones over the next five minutes, giving we two preachers a bit of data to work with as we worked to share our understanding of Biblical teaching into the modern world.

What is most striking to me about these tools for ministry is how simple and easy they are to use. Cell phones, digital video uploads, e-mails: they all are incredibly cheap, commonly available, and quite easy to use. Figuring out how to use a Biblical concordance or Greek lexicon is really much harder than making sense of these modern ministry tools.

It’s simply a question of being able to step out of the standard forms and approaches that were the norm from the 1950s to the 1990s, and trying on the virtual reality goggles of the post 2000 world. It’s a bit disorienting at first, but the twisted landscape makes quite a bit of sense once you figure out the new frame of reference.

And if you’re curious about how timeless truths communicate in new forms, you can search YouTube for melbrian1991 and click around, whatever that means!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story or link him to your video tale with an email to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” at Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-23-09
Jeff Gill

A Few Books To Read, and To Re-Read
____

Roxana Saberi is a freelance reporter whose work has been on NPR along with other national venues.

Her profile may have gotten a small boost from being Miss North Dakota over a decade ago, and her ethnic background with Iranian parents led her to try to cover the story of women’s lives in Iran from the inside.

If you’ve heard her story, it’s likely because she’s been arrested by the Iranian government on suspicion of espionage; which friends, family, and most recent employers all agree is balderdash. Sharing accounts of how women have to live in the Islamic Republic of Iran may be as worrisome to authorities there as the possibility of spies checking out their atomic program, since neither issue gains them much favor around the world.

What caught my attention about Ms. Saberi’s story is a recent development, when her parents traveled to Iran and finally got the chance to visit her in prison. They asked her what they could bring her, and she asked for books.

Specifically, she requested Plutarch’s “Lives,” a biography of Gandhi, and a French dictionary, since many Iranians speak that language (odd quirks of colonial history pop up across the Middle East – lots of older Iraqis speak German, especially if they worked on the railroads).

Still no word (as of this writing) about whether she will be allowed these books in her cell, but it set me to thinking “what books would I ask for if I had a long undefined stretch ahead of me?”

For myriad reasons, I’d ask for a Bible, ideally with the Apocrypha (extra books, y’know), but it isn’t clear whether that would be allowed in any case, just as they are entirely and shamefully illegal in Saudi Arabia.

Beyond that Book full of books, what else would I request? If I could only have, say, five other books, what would I pick? “Tristram Shandy” would top my list, and then . . . this gets hard! They would have to hold up under re-reading, not just be long, although length would have to be a criterion.

Herodotus’ “The Histories,” Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” “PrairyErth” by William Least Heat-Moon, where he does for Chase County, Kansas what I hope to do for Licking County someday, and then I think “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau.

When Shannon Lucid was up on the Russian “Mir” Space Station in 1996, and the internet was new, there was an interactive feature on a NASA website that allowed you to click through a series of pictures showing life during her then-record-setting nearly 200 days in space.

In one shot, within a mesh bag near her berth, I could make out the distinctive cover design of the Penguin Classics edition of “Walden” and I thought “Brilliant! The perfect book to take on such a trip.” When the Mir was “de-orbited” in 2001, I wondered, as we saw the footage of the burning hulk slash into the South Pacific on TV, did anyone bring that copy of Walden back home?

Having said all that, I wonder if poetry might not be a better choice for re-reading: a volume of Shakespeare’s plays (his birthday today!) and a collection each from Frost, Maxine Kumin, Jaroslav Seifert, and Billy Collins. What five books would you pick, in a prison or for a season in space? It’s an interesting thought experiment.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a list of books at knapsack77@gmail.com or on Twitter at “Knapsack.”

Faith Works 4-18-09
Jeff Gill

A Profession May Be a Vocation, Or Even a Hobby
____

Profession is a word with religious roots. You profess your belief, and a professor is one who helps you understand and explain what it is you believe.

Professions have come to be known as vocations – another religiously rooted term, from Latin “vocare,” or “to call,” meaning your calling in life – which have a set of certain standards and are self-policing in their practices.

Medicine, legal work, teaching, journalism, and of course ministry have all been referred to as professions in the now technical sense of the term, as well as career military service.

Since World War II, professionalization has been coming up as an expectation for all kinds of job fields, from secretarial work (I mean, administrative professionals) to service employees (ahem, service professions). As with many such terms, when you expand it so far as to cover everyone, after a while the butter is so thin on the toast you can’t hardly tell that it’s there anymore.

And at the other end, many of the classical “professions” have been experiencing a certain nibbling away of their exclusive rights and assumptions. With professional standards comes expectations of professional pay and benefits and certain perks, like sabbaticals and paid continuing education. Which costs money, even as other elements of economic models are . . .

So one example is the growth of “nurse practitioners” serving in the role once exclusive to doctors. Granted, nursing is a profession and has been since Florence Nightingale, but to be the first and sometimes only medical person to see and treat a patient – that’s a major change in what most of us think of as the job of a medical professional. But that’s what we’re seeing.

Legal services are popping up on the internet (with myriad ads on TV) and lots of legal filings don’t require a lawyer anymore, but just a quick chat with a paralegal. Public schools are losing budgets and market share to charter and private schools, where the teachers do not necessarily come out of the standard “professional development” model to reach their position, no matter how professional their behavior or supervision.

Blogging and other internet forms of media are never going to entirely replace the need for skilled, experienced journalists to seek out stories and get behind the spin, but “citizen journalism” is all over the place now, and not likely to go away; the series “24” is highlighting the growth of paramilitary organizations that may or may not have a professional ethic of national service at their heart.

And then there’s the ministry. The profession that is at the root of the very word itself is de-professionalizing in some ways, even as church structures are emphasizing the “profession” of clergy more every year, with mandatory licensing and training and contract guidelines.

A professional clergymember is assumed to have a bachelor’s degree and a seminary-based master’s degree, and some are quite rigorous (mine was 90 credit hours, and included a thesis with oral defense at the end), and are under strict accreditation review themselves by the Association of Theological Schools.

Meanwhile, more and more congregations are finding that unless you have over 120-plus in worship a Sunday as your baseline membership, it is basically impossible to have a budget that pays for the salary and benefits that would support a full time, seminary trained pastor (with often the student loan debt that comes with all that academic background).

So what you start to see, more and more, are bivocational (preacher with a day job), tentmaker (ditto, see Paul in Acts), licensed ministers, many of whom have no seminary per se behind them, and not that likely ahead of them (see entry: day job). Does this phenomenon change the profession of ministry? Of course it does. Is it a “problem”? It depends on who you’re talking to.

This is a major change in the church world many of us grew up in, and it’s happening faster than many realize. It began with assistant and associate positions going from “fully ordained” and seminary trained to licensed or commissioned status, and now more and more congregations are served exclusively by lay or licensed clergy.

Church by church, the numbers are creeping up past a third in many denominations. Larger churches are still only looking at fully professionalized pastors, but the size of congregations considering this step is steadily getting larger.

What do you think about this shift? E-mail or Twitter me your comments, or add them to the column at newarkadvocate.com. This is a conversation that is going on right now all around us, and isn’t likely to stop anytime soon!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s ordained but works on training and equipping licensed ministers for a number of Protestant denominations. Tell him your reflections on this at knapsack77@gmail.com or on Twitter at “Knapsack.”

Are seminaries relevant?

http://www.rev.org/article.asp?ID=3230

The answer is yes, and no . . . or maybe no, but yes.

[Note: i have the honor of preaching the Maundy Thursday service at Centenary Church in Granville tomorrow, 7:30 pm with, of course, communion!]

Maundy Thursday 9 April 2009 CUMC

Opening Call to Worship
(adapted from Psalm 116)

Leader: We love the Lord, because our voice and our pleas are heard.
People: Because our prayers have a listener, we will call on the Lord as long as we live.

L: In distress and anguish, we felt death and darkness overwhelm us;
P: Then we called out: “O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!”

L: Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.
P: The Lord preserves the simple; when we were brought low, God saved us.

L: What shall we render to the Lord, with all the blessings we have received?
P: We will lift up the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord!

L: Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
P: O Lord, we are your servants; you have loosed our bonds.

Unison: We will offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving, and call on the name of the Lord.
We will pay our vows to the Lord in the presence of all God’s people, in the courts of the house of the Lord,
in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord! Amen.

* * *

Unison prayer of confession and redemption

Lord of every banquet and buffet, God of creation and cafeterias, we call on you this evening. You tend to the fields and the harvest, the grinding and the cooking, and your hand rests gently on all who clean up after. Almighty God, we barely understand how bread rises, or how sunlight fills the grapes with sweet life. Our hands are far from the effort of reaping and kneading; our feet do not stomp in the vineyard, or tread out a path around the olive press. Here, O Lord, we would break bread we have not baked, pour out fruit from vines we did not pick. Help us, God, to take from this holy meal a greater awareness of how we depend on one another, and how such true community can only be born in love and forgiveness. And lift our hearts, Father of farmers and loving Lord of all who cook, to celebrate the Son who called Martha from the kitchen, who surprised Mary in the garden, and who offered, even to Judas, the choice to come to his table, and eat of his freely offered salvation. For it is in Christ’s name that we pray, Amen.

Faith Works 4-11-09
Jeff Gill

Traveling on a Saturday, Heading Towards Sunday

Just on down the road, a dust devil swirled into mad, manic life, and skittering across the dusty pathway, spun out into nothing among the rocks beyond.

He stepped cautiously forward, walking steadily but with hesitations, almost as one with a lame ankle or a sore toe. It was a fact that going up to Jerusalem necessarily meant going down as you left, whether to the east and down the rocky defiles leading to Jericho, or the longer and less steep decline to the west, on towards the Roman’s Mare Nostrum, the Great Sea, the Mother of Storms.

There had been great storms yesterday, and a shaking of the earth, but the western sky had not foreshadowed with “a cloud the size of a man’s hand” on the horizon. It came up suddenly, full of lightning and wind, but who had really been watching the skies off to one side?

Shaking his head, he banished the vision of Friday’s events from his mind, and went back to watching the ground closely, for loose rocks that could make his already shaky legs twist right out from beneath him. One sandal was already mended with cordage, where the leather had torn as he ran up the side of the olive tree covered slope, stepping on a rock in the late Thursday darkness. He’d been able to find the lost sandal and keep running, hopping, ludicrous in his fear mixed with anxiety over having to purchase a new sandal.

Even with Roman soldiers at his back, imagined in pursuit, poverty squeezed his thoughts into their mold. It was a puzzle still that they had not followed anyone, but the teacher, their leader, was apparently all they wanted.

A scrap of cord in a gardener’s shed near the top of the mount let him find his footing and his dignity of a sort. Back to their Passover throng’s campsite among the olive oil presses, the “gethsemane” workshop busy during the fall harvest, but where springtime visitors to the Holy City were welcome as out of season guests.

Among the rattled, confused followers of the Galilean rabbi whom he had recently joined, all that he could make out was that an arrest had happened, spurred by the betrayal of one of the core followers, the students, the “discipuli” who came to Jerusalem from the north.

Some said the soldiers had taken their captive to the main fortress overlooking the Temple Mount, the Antonia, others said it was to the Chief Priest’s palatial home at the other end of the city walls. Most went back to a troubled sleep.

By noon the next day there was no question where the focus of attention had turned, to the Romans’ preferred killing ground just west of the city’s exit to the west, the main road of commerce and travel, where most of the visitors for this sacred week would leave and have to choose to turn away, or to glance up, cringe, and keep moving.

He had stayed far away, but his wife joined a group of women who stood near the condemned man’s mother – odd how it was hard to think of him as a teacher, having been refuted and rejected and tormented to such a shameful death. He was the condemned man, innocent though he might be, but if Rome said he was guilty, then who . . .

Stumbling forward, starting at any sudden movement in the brush or stony slopes on either side, he kept his unsteady route to Ein Kerem. His wife had family there, and when they met near the city gate, after the dead body had been removed from the cross and carried to a nearby tomb, she told him they would meet at Ein Kerem tomorrow, and then Sunday walk on down to Emmaus, and from there back to Joppa. The women would grieve together, while the men scattered.

Cleopas thought about the hope for God’s active working in the world that he had felt so strongly just days before, and how hopeless he felt now, fearful again of bad luck, dust devils in his path, the weight of Roman rule hard across his shoulders.

He was glad the two of them were walking, not paying to rent a mule, but just taking one step at a time, quietly letting the miles wear the sadness down. There was an inn at Emmaus where he had known comfort before, and hoped to enjoy again; there they might find a measure of peace.

That was his prayer, as he walked away from Jerusalem on a Saturday afternoon.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow on Twitter at “Knapsack.”

Notes From My Knapsack 4-9-09
Jeff Gill

Who Do You Say Is Lord?
___

“Dominus Caesar est.”

Three words, and a pinch of incense on a sacrificial altar.

“Caesar is Lord.”

Statements like that, and statues and inscriptions on public buildings proclaiming the “King of Kings” and “Prince of Peace” all were common almost 2000 years ago. They referred, of course, to the ruler of Rome, whether Julius Caesar who made his family name a title, his adopted son Octavian, soon known as Augustus Caesar, the first Emperor, or the Roman rulers who followed – Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

Julius was born in the month that was known as Quintilis, but after his death, famously on the Ides of March, became known as July, named for the man who was believed to have become a god upon his death. Octavian saw with all of Rome a daytime comet in the sky, and declared his father “Divus Iulius,” or the “God Julius” – which conveniently made the August one “divi filius,” “God’s son.”

The month he died, Sextilis, became August as part of the proclamation that the “Son of God” was now a member of the Roman pantheon himself. Worship of at least the “divine spirit” of the ruling emperor began with Augustus, but it was Caligula who began to insist that he be considered a god while alive, and in person.

So all around the Roman Empire, it became a part of simple transactions and legal business, already taking place in the basilicas, or law courts, of the imperial authority, that participants would step to the altar on the elevated platform before all witnesses, and say “Caesar is Lord,” dropping a pinch on incense into the perpetual vestal flame.

John Dominic Crossan is a controversial Biblical scholar, but one I hope Denison or some other local effort could bring to town. He is a charming and brilliant fellow, who is not at all afraid of controversy while trying to provoke careful and consistent thought about the claims of the New Testament, particularly about Jesus of Nazareth.

One of the debts I feel that I owe this scholar is a greater awareness of the very personal, yet extremely social tension in the earliest days of the Roman Empire, and for the birth of the Christian Church.

To say “Caesar is Lord” is to make a much broader statement than those three words appear to say. “Caesar is Lord” is to say that the methods and approach of Julius and Augustus and even crazy old Caligula were divinely ordered, the expression of an ultimate nature about how human creatures were to relate to each other.

“Caesar is Lord” is saying that the crushing grip of military conquest is the best way to reach a “Pax Romanum,” a peace that is easily understood as the absence of war, under the authority of emperors and consuls and prefects and procurators. You know, procurators, like that sharp-edged tool of empire, Pontius Pilate.

Or you could say something else, a different statement that not only cut you off from the protection of empire, but left you open to the punishment, the ‘poena,’ the penalties of the amphitheater and Colosseum. You could claim a peace that passes all understanding, but one that grows far beyond even the reach of a Caesar.

You could say instead “Dominus Iesus est,” but God help you if you did.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow on Twitter at “Knapsack.”

Faith Works 4-4-09
Jeff Gill

Taking a Walk Around the Block, or a Bit Farther
____

‘Tis the season . . . for processions.

Coming into Holy Week for Christian observance of the last earthly week of Jesus’ life, we’ve got a number of special occasions on the worship calendar, what some churches call “liturgy.”

Liturgy translates, roughly, as “the work of the people,” meaning the call and response of certain set prayers and actions needs the active involvement of the people in the pews. Liturgy is not – contrary to many misconceptions – just the script for the ordained clergy, but the work all of God’s people do together.

In the sanctuary, the worship space, with a robed and vested minister leading from behind the pulpit, it can be easy to confuse liturgy at any season, let alone through Easter season, with the work of what’s going on up front.

Which is where religious processions come in, where they have for millennia been a crucial part of acknowledging what “leitourgia” is really about.

Palm Sunday in many traditions has the congregation process into the building with their palms, echoing the impromptu parade into Jerusalem behind Jesus on the prophetic white donkey, the crowds acclaiming him as the coming king, stripping the palm trees for branches to lay down on the road so the dust would not obscure the view.

Mostly this has turned into the kids marching briskly up and down the aisles with their eco-palms waving (sustainably) and singing suitable acclamation to King Jesus. Many Catholic churches still have at least the officiants march in from outside, or at least from the narthex (entry room from door to worship space).

In fact, through Lent these last few weeks, many Catholic churches have a weekly Stations of the Cross procession within the sanctuary, either on Fridays or after a parish retreat or dinner on another evening. Large numbers of worshipers skip the sitting and work their way around the walls of the worship space, praying at panels recalling crucial events from the original Good Friday.

Francis of Assisi began this custom when the original Stations of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, became inaccessible to Christian pilgrims after the Moslem takeover of the Holy Land. That journey, following the steps of Jesus himself from his trial to crucifixion and burial, became a set of 13 stations (or in some places today, 14, adding the Resurrection) around the inside of the church.

There are locations on the grounds of churches, or at the Sts. Peter and Paul Retreat Center (former PIME Seminary), where outdoor Stations of the Cross are walked.

In some locations, a Good Friday “Cross Walk” is an ecumenical way to recall those steps of Jesus, bringing more traditionally ordered churches together with less formal approaches to worship in an outdoor procession, usually trying to end atop a hill, echoing Jesus’ carrying of his cross up Calvary, or “Golgotha,” Aramaic for “Place of the Skull.”

Some towns hold theirs on the grounds of a church, and many do so in a cemetery, especially if there’s a hill for the closing portions recalling the crucifixion itself.

In Granville, the Good Friday Crosswalk starts at 11:00 am at the parking lot of St. Edward’s Catholic Church, and winds through town and up the hill to the front of Denison University’s Swasey Chapel.

For some of the observant in New Mexico and the Philippines, there is a fellowship called “Los Penitentes,” whose penitential observance takes “the work of the people” to a whole new level, with members of these fraternities actually re-enacting the scourging, crossbearing, and crucifixion itself, using the actual equipment in modified form as an act of devotion.

Yes, that means sometimes people actually not only bleed, but are nailed up onto a cross. They’re brought down pretty quickly, and those who choose to endure this tangible symbolism are considered particularly devout, but the official church does not approve of or participate in these re-creations.

Some of you might prefer being nailed to a cross to staying up until dawn, which in Eastern Orthodox Churches is a central element of the Easter Vigil. Some Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican/Episcopal churches have an Easter Vigil from Saturday night into Easter Sunday morning, where a flame is supposed to enter the building from without, and in some areas a midnight bonfire is part of the tradition (along with various strategies for staying warm).

But few keep a procession outside of the church as central as Orthodox churches do, with one element of the service requiring the officiants and entire congregation to not only walk out the church door, but to walk around the building three times before re-entering to celebrate the lighting of the Holy Fire.

Among Protestant Christians, the last vestige of these customs is in the sunrise service, where a pre-dawn awakening for the worship leaders often leads them and the worshipers to an outdoor service as the sun rises, as Lakewood area churches hold on Easter morning at Dawes Arboretum.

Then there’s the procession traditions behind Rogation Days and Ember Days. What are those? I’ll save that for after Easter, but they involve . . . more processions! A walk, a parade outside by young and old, clergy and laity together, is not an exception to “liturgy,” but maybe the very best embodiment of it!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a religious procession from your tradition at knapsack77@gmail.com, or on Twitter at Knapsack.

[from my Facebook Notes]

What Must Change

Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 8:25am http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=59873428180&1&index=2

My title is a question, and a multi-directional one at that, and it's also a statement, but one i can't quite feel certain how i want to aim.

Since i started working with Gay Reese on the Bethany Project, and did some research that led to sitting down and reading the 1963 Blakemore "Panel of Scholars" report, all three volumes, i've been haunted by a bit of a ghost, one that many be appearing out of the corner of my eye more than is actually appearing in actuality. I still don't know.

For those lucky enough to have not picked up the task, self-appointed or class-assigned, to read these three thick, heavy tomes, this was meant to be the scholarly, academic, thoughtful, procedural basis for Restructure of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a process that picked up speed with the "Panel of Scholars'" publication and culminated in the Design proposed in 1967 and formally adopted in 1969, making official the denominational structures and self-understanding of the "Brotherhood" into regions and general offices and . . .

Well, there are a number of references in the "Panel of Scholars" (henceforth POS) to the fundamental element of "Congregation" in the life and activity of the denomination. The mentions become more and more rueful as you read through the various reports, as if the fact that "the congregation is the basic element that makes up the CC(DoC)" is an unfortunate but unavoidable historic reality that has to be dealt with, but surely there could have been a better way.

I should also note that i see Loren Lair's "The Christian Church and Its Future" (1971) as a kind of coda and summary to the POS, written by someone who, like Willard Wickizer, was not formally a member of the POS but strongly shaped the process that called them together and also influenced the final papers. In Lair's book, the stream that i trace through the POS come together in an ocean of certainty that our problem as a church is congregationalism, and the answers are to be found in leadership, guiding if not directing the placement of clergy, teaching elders about more effective management of congregational affairs, and proclaiming social justice on behalf of the church as a whole.

Item by item, the POS/Lair agenda makes a certain kind of administrative and efficiency-based common sense, but in sum, the proclamation is "what's wrong with the church is 'congregations' and what will fix/help/renew the church is academically-trained leadership." Elders as an expression of local leadership are caustically described (in courteous '50's type terms, but harshly), and largely given up on, not even discussed as possible targets for training and equipping themselves. The Renewal/Restructure plan is -- create new structures that make congregational elders largely irrelevant, then these uneducated bossy folk won't get in the way of ministerial leadership showing the way to the Kingdom.

And you know what? That mindset took, with a vengeance. Elders, a local source of spiritual leadership, tend to see themselves as peripheral to congregational life in most DoC congregations; there have been some initiatives to train elders as spiritual leaders that can themselves model and teach spiritual growth to their fellow members, with a "preaching and teaching elder" as the pastor sitting among them as a set-apart ordained or licensed person, but as a part of a spiritual leadership team, yet none of these attempts (Peter Morgan, Gary Straub) have really caught fire or seized the vision of key leaders regionally or generally.

The model that informs much of our common life is that the basic unit of the CC(DoC) really is and/or should be the individual believer, and the wider church itself best expressed by the region in some forms, the general offices in others. And i perceive, i believe, i fear that the entity that is called a "Congregation," that particular manifestation of church life, is still seen among us, particularly among clergy, as the Problem, not in any way a Solution. If we could get the message from the General or Regional offices more effectively to individual believers, everything would be different, everything could change -- but Congregation, and congregational life is what's in the way.

Nothing makes me go back to these dark imaginings as much as going to a clergy gathering. Yesterday, i saw quite a few smart, friendly, cheerful, even some spiritually robust fellow clergy, ordained and licensed (ok, only 3 licensed, but that's another discussion, and sadly another rant, related to this one, but not right now). And to be candid, i don't know what to extrapolate, exactly, from 40 pastors out of 191 churches claimed by the region. That 191 probably is more like 140 if you discount for leadership and communcations purposes the congregations that haven't given to DMF since 1986 (or earlier).

But even of the not quite 40 present (plus another 10 regional and general staffers for a high presence of 50 yesterday), you had three or four retired, not currently serving pastors, myself not serving a pulpit on an ongoing basis, taking us to 35 congregations, and 7 or 8 who are "intentional interims" (bless 'em all). Take out the 3 licensed pastors, and we had maybe 25 ordained, pulpit serving leaders present; whether out of 140 as i estimate or 191 as we officially state, that's a pretty thin robed & stoled line of "well-trained, well ordered preachers" to build the hopes of the institution upon.

And the heart of my darkness is that through the course of the day, i spoke to five pastors who simply despise their congregations. They might say that's not true if you asked them cold, first thing this morning, but any dispassionate hearer of their conversation would assert that this isn't venting or stress relief or a bad day, but that these folk truly can't stand the people they are called to serve, the congregation that called them, pays them whatever it is that they receive in compensation, and is their preaching audience each Sunday. The congregation won't listen, won't follow, and won't heed the pastor, and they (the congregation, mind you) are the problem. They won't buy a projector, they won't upgrade the office computer, they won't pay you proper mileage, they won't send people to General Assembly, they won't come to adult Bible study, they won't support this or that regional/general cause.

They are the problem. The congregation, that is.

I don't know what we can do to renew and transform congregational life until we change this essential, default mode of clergy and wider church life -- that congregations and congregational leadership is the problem that must be fixed, that they are the heart and source of what's wrong with the church, and that where their interests and intended activity leads is almost unfailingly misguided, and certainly misled. I'm not sure that the general or regional expressions of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have much capacity to try, not as mere concession or abdication of leadership, but with hope and eager listening, to hear what 'congregation' is saying to the church.

It surely is not the case that i idealize elders or congregational life, potlucks and rummage sales and committee meetings (though it's good to remember they didn't start doing endless committee meetings until we pounded that model into them from 1947 to 1987, when suddenly we started saying "Bad, bad congregations, stop doing so much committee stuff!). I've been frustrated and indeed wounded by local petty tyrants in life-tenure congregational slots myself. But that doesn't mean that congregational expressions of Church are always that way, any more than the regions should be ignored because they ran a poor capital campaign once or put on a dumb program at some regional assembly.

Is 5 out of 25 an unfair sample, or the tip of an iceberg? My worries run to the latter, and based on what i'm now confounded to realize is 28 years of mucking about in the vineyard of area, regional, and denominational life, most often working alongside fellow well-trained, well educated clergy. I fear that the contempt and fundamental disdain i keep bumping into among pastors for congregations is the one thing that is going to have to change before anything else even can. I will continue to pray for individual clergy and the conversion of their hearts, but it's the institutional bias about the problematic-ness of congregations that worries me.

"Has anything good ever come out of a congregation?" That's a phrase that has some resonance for me, one whose irony may not be as obvious as i might like!

[from NewsMuse -- http://disciplesworld.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/social-monday-is-it-resistance-or-is-it-just-missing-the-forest-for-all-those-darn-trees-in-the-way/#comments]

Whoa.

I’ve been to a hatful of meetings, with both clergy, church folk, and social service professionals over the last month, where everyone else at the meeting willing to speak up about “social media” all said, as if they’d gotten the same script in the mail (that’d be “snail mail”), that “All this stuff like the Twitter, or Facebooker, or these (insert anguished tones and negative adjective) blogs are really contributing to the breakdown of community and culture. They get in the way of, and replace, real/true (your choice) human community.”

Further discussion reveals the obvious, which is that they don’t use these online tools, and only know what they’ve heard at the gym, the coffee shop, or in the NYTBR about social media. They often go on to say, in my unfair and tendentious paraphrase, “I learned how to use e-mail, for pity’s sake, and i’m trying to update the church/agency website at least four times a year, so i’m not techno-phobic or anything, but this new stuff is just too confusing.”

At a congregational board meeting where a fairly healthy, vital, mission-minded group of leaders were talking about newer, younger families and how to connect them, ideas were broached like a euchre night (in the words of the theologian Dave Barry, “I am not making this up”), or more potlucks.

Another council member (yes, the youth minister) and i, at a pause in the worried conversation, pointed out to the group that there were 51 members of a Facebook group of younger, newer families, specifically identified as “Fans of [Church Name Here]” where they were already planning activities and studies for Lent amongst themselves, so we should jump in gently and help that approach along.

Someone asked, fair enough, “What’s Facebook?” The youth minister and i tried to explain, to which a senior staff member who will remain nameless said “Oh, like that Twitter thing - what a strange sounding name! And what do they call messages on that?”

“Tweets,” i said, smiling grimly, as the expected laughter rolled around the table, and then the discussion went back to when a potluck might be held where young families would be invited to come share recipes with each other (see entry, Dave Barry).

The youth pastor quietly slid his laptop over in front of me at our end of the table — the Facebook group had just silently clicked up to 52 members. The potluck was scheduled for the weekend after Easter, “so there will be time to get it in the newsletter.”

[blog post from NewarkAdvocate.com]

Manufacturing in Ohio

Duck!

I'm about to fling unsupported mullings about with abandon, so don't say you haven't been warned.

There's been an odd little subtext both here in the blog post lineup at NewarkAdvocate.com and in general discussions around Ohio, saying -- and i paraphrase, perhaps unfairly -- that the era of manufacturing in Ohio is largely over, and that we should get over it, and look to more high tech, third frontier, biotech kind of economic engines.

Everyone seems to agree, and i know of no good reason to argue, that service industries are largely maxed out, as far as jobs and opportunties. You can't really count on generating many long term, family supporting jobs out of service industry work (a waitress can get some raises and up her income a bit, but there's a pretty hard ceiling unless she saves enough tips to buy her own small restaurant and go entrepreneurial).

The travel and tourism industry wisely points out that their field is at least one kind of job that can't be outsourced -- you can't send those jobs overseas. True enough, and local direct services whether food service, health care, or custom retail tend to stay put, although you might be surprised by how much unseen backroom work can be sent to Bangalore (like the Orange County Register newspaper sending copy editor work to India, no joke).

But i'm curious about manufacturing, the basic task of taking raw materials and doing some of the core steps of turning those farmed and mined and mixed substances into finished or near-finished product. For the period after the Civil War until the 1950s, Ohio was a dominant player in manufacturing, building stoves in Newark and aluminum spars in Heath and engine covers in Hebron, et cetera around the state. Dayton made cash registers and adding machines and airplanes, Youngstown made steel to order, and Toledo made scales (thank you, John Denver).

I'll grant you that the sources of steel making are shifting away from Minnesota taconite, Pennsylvania oil, and West Virginia coal and coke, with us as the hot intersection of all that raw material. We're still at a key distribution node, logistically speaking, in relation to the entire Eastern Seaboard as Las Vegas is for the West Coast, and that gets us pear packing and glass panel shaping and rolling assembly line making in Hebron. We're still not that far from the roots of innovation with Games Slayter at Owens-Toledo for fiberglas, and John Weaver's Fyrepel Products and Tectum Panels, or Ev Reese and the beginnings of the national bank card system.

So what i'm wondering about is whether or not we're still dreaming big. Dave Longaberger was onto something, but i fear many feel like they got their civic fingers burnt because the goose didn't lay enough golden eggs. This is a good area to put stuff together that takes some willingness to be cleverly flexible and change over assembly lines in response to market conditions, now in the internet era even more than before Dave died in 1999. Here on the edge of Appalachia, we still have a fairly smart workforce that also prefers some physical labor mixed in with their cogitation, and isn't afraid of getting a bit dirty while calculating machining tolerances; we have access to an urban quality of life for knowledge workers, but also a rural quality that is attractive to those who aren't looking for the 11 pm sushi bar kind of neighborhood to live in, let alone to raise their kids.

And we still have much in the way of natural gas and even some nearby oil, coal still coming out of the hills to our south and east, and the locational leverage to pull materials together and assemble stuff like heavy industrial equipment and motorized gear, whether hybrid or infernal combustion. We won't be making from scratch much in the way of low cost, disposable consumer product, but we might up our game in packaging and distributing that stuff after it gets this far around the world from Asia, and there's stuff like transmissions and tower framing and table shakers and trackhoes that we oughta still be able to put together and stand behind right here.

There's nothing wrong with biotech and nanotech and alt-tech, but are we chasing the last craze? Is it time to be a bit contrarian, and go back to the future, and chase Kettering and Patterson and Wright and Rockefeller Sr. and Firestone, and maybe even Henry Ford? What would third generation heavy industry look like, and wouldn't it fit really well into Ohio 2010?

Faith Works 3-28-09
Jeff Gill

Kings and Other Rulers On the Air, In the Bible

If you know your Old Testament, then you know that I & II Samuel and I & II Kings are in many ways one great work of history, starting with Eli and Samuel – ok, actually starting with Hannah and Elkanah – and ending with Zedekiah carried off, blinded and in chains, to Babylon and exile.

It is a vast and sweeping narrative, broken up to fit onto Hebrew scrolls, four even using the largest and longest that could be handled. The four books can be understood as -- I Samuel being about Saul becoming Israel’s first king, and David’s ascent from shepherd boy to de facto crown prince; II Samuel starting with David’s crowning as second king and detailing his remarkable successes and horrible failures.

I Kings opens with David’s son Solomon reaching the throne (over more than a few brother’s bodies) and building a great temple for worship of God in David’s newly established capital city, Jerusalem, but with Solomon’s decline into apostasy, shifting focus to a prophet named Elijah. In II Kings we begin with the literal root of “passing the mantle” from Elijah to Elisha, as the Israelite kingdom is first fractured into two, then destroyed from without and within, first the northern kingdom of Israel and finally Zedekiah’s southern remnant of Judah around Jerusalem . . . while a remnant remains behind on the land, near the now ruined temple.

Doesn’t that make you wonder why no one’s made a movie out of such a tale? In fact, NBC has gone and done just that, and I must confess to only having realized this last week, so I missed the first two-hour entry entirely but caught up on Hulu.com.

It’s a mini-series simply called “Kings,” and they’ve taken the plot, not “ripped from the headlines,” but pretty directly from I Samuel. As you can tell, if they get renewed from the first 13 episodes, there’s plenty of material for them to follow right on into II Samuel and beyond.

Except they are “ripping” or maybe “riffing on the headlines.” Ian McShane, he of the foul-mouthed character Al Swearingen on HBO’s “Deadwood,” is King Silas Benjamin, who rules over a sort-of modern day city with a light sci-fi spin called “Shiloh” (check your Bible dictionary, nice . . .), where he now rules as an absolute monarch over a land called “Gilboa” (ditto) which is at war against a neighboring country called “Gath” which is Canada in a really, really bad mood, and a huge, you might say giant tank called . . . wait for it . . . a “Goliath.”

Does a young soldier named David Shepherd kill the Goliath with a humble, homemade bazooka and become a national hero? Yep.

Which takes us to the mix of modern day family and political intrigue woven right into the Biblical plot, which is front and center in the most thought-provoking ways.

You think the whole “king’s daughter” being shoved at a hero to let the aging ruler pick up some gloss on his image by marrying the fellow into the family is some Mafia movie schtick? Nope, Michal is right there in Scripture, with her almost understandable mix of admiration and disgust with this nouveau poseur that she loves but was virtually forced to love. How to reconcile this tension? Princess Michelle is a vivid depiction of a somewhat shadowy figure near the core of a major Biblical story, and you’ll find yourself grabbing your Bible if you watch to see “is that actually in there, or did they add it for the modern plot?”

Over and over you’ll find as I did last week – it’s in there. I’d missed it, skipping along across the plot points I already thought I knew.

Or the role Saul, (sorry) I mean, King Silas plays in keeping the war going to keep him in power, wanting to be a hero to his people, but not enough to let his grip on power be threatened, either.

This mini-series may start Sunday nights at 8:00 pm, but it isn’t for the kids. It’s a TV movie with all that implies, and I’m not sure I really love it or even entirely like it yet, but to see Scripture brought to life in this way has certainly made me want to watch a few more episodes.

What do you think? I’ll keep you posted and would love to add some other viewpoints to my own. And feel free to e-mail me any sunrise services or special Easter programs your church has coming up in the next few weeks.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack7@gmail.com.

For Sunday, Mar. 22, and if you've read the previously posted column, this will make even more sense.