Faith Works 3-22-14

Faith Works 3-22-14

Jeff Gill

 

What churches need to know about not going to church

___

 

Last week, I talked about how church attendance often looks to those of us who have always gotten up and gone. We're "churched" people, as the phrase goes, and the churched often don't understand, or have never thought about, how church looks to the un-churched, or the de-churched.

 

Why do people NOT go to church? One obvious reason is that they don't believe in what churchgoers do, but that was a big part of last week's column: that's a small fraction of those not showing up anywhere on a weekend. So we can nod to the intentionally unchurched, and look more closely at reasons most folks might, but don't go.

 

First, they're tired. You really can't just sniff and frown at that one. Yes, grandma was dying of tuberculosis and still struggled up the steps in 1927 the day before she died (and probably gave TB to someone else), but judgmental stuff aside, they really are tired.

 

I see it, as a preacher, even among those who are in worship: it can be hard for folks to stay awake. I won't say I'm the best preacher in town, but I would hazard that I'm far from the most boring. Plus I have a disturbing tendency to walk away from the pulpit and up the aisle from time to time. IT DOESN'T MATTER. People, not the elderly, not the young, but everyday working folk struggle to stay awake while sitting for an hour.

 

Our culture has created new norms of work schedules and viewing habits that mean we are all tending to go around sleep deprived, averaging 6.5 hours of sleep where we are made to need 8 or more. This is a handicap when you hit what is often the one morning of the week that people have any say over whether or not they get up before 7:00 am. Lots of folks are very honest when they say they tried to sleep to 8:30, and suddenly realized it was 11 am.

 

Does this mean evening worship on Saturday or Sunday would help? Could be.

 

Another obstacle: work schedules do munch right across the week without regard to any one day. It's just not the case that anyone, not sports teams, schools, or most significantly, employers, will work around a Sunday morning for you. Some do, and sincerely: God bless them! But as a church body, we're forced to make shifts (some of which I mentioned last week) in our assumptions. Good, solid, community minded people just aren't going to be present 50 or more Sundays a year anymore. Again, multiple options become more important.

 

And last week's column garnered a comment that was very important, I thought (and thank you, Renate!): people are often sitting at home trying to understand the Bible, and worried about two things. First, will those in church judge them on the basis of appearances. I can answer that – yes, they will. To some degree, we all do this. Congregations should do a better job at this than they do, but there are very few places anymore that will be outright hostile if you don't dress up, etc. If you think "I may have people look at me funny" and that's a reason not to go, the fact of the matter is that entering any group or space or room, like visiting a neighborhood bar you've never been in before, is going to get you some looks. So that's why the only real solution to this one is for people to do more personal invitations, and to not only invite them, but to go to church WITH them. If you have a regular right by your side, the whole look/glance/question thing goes away. Boom!

 

The other worry, though, is more aimed at pastors and leaders: I am still learning the basics, some fear, and if I go to church, they all have the same translation (not the one I happened to have), they already know and sling the lingo, and are "ahead of me." Where can I go to not be an idiot for my questions?

 

Honestly, we're all beginners. Some of us have learned to fake it better. And there's a certain amount of in-group games going on with how we talk about the Bible, and beliefs, and our churches. I believe that our default assumption on EVERY Sunday morning should be "how does what I'm saying (announcements, greetings, sermon) sound to someone who's never been here?" We can fix that.

 

Next week, let's talk about why it matters to go to church at all.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him why you don't go to church at knapsack77@gmail.com

Faith Works 3-15-14

Faith Works 3-15-14

Jeff Gill

 

Don't go to church? Can't do it.

___

 

You don't have to tell me why not to go to church.

 

I won't say I've heard it all, because there's always a new spin on the old story, but in outline, the basics are well known to me.

 

First off, a full admission: I go to church each Sunday in large part because I don't know how to do anything else.

 

Someone may point out: dude, that's your job. Well, yes, in those periods of my life when I've been the settled pastor of a congregation, it was one of those nearly unstated bedrock assumptions that you would show up on Sunday mornings. And preach, and stuff. You know.

 

Yes, that's true, but I've had a few stretches in my adult, married life when I wasn't on staff, didn't have a church "job," and I still went. Honestly? Each time I figured I'd give myself some slack, take the time to taste life as the majority of my fellow citizens, my friends and neighbors do, and stay home on Sunday morning. At least past 8:00 am.

 

In those times, I thought about checking out this thing called "Sunday brunch" (I'd heard bacon was involved), and maybe the whole read-the-whole-paper-plus-crossword-puzzle routine. At least a few times, it can't hurt, right?

 

I meant to, but it didn't happen. My wife and I are church-going folk, it's in the bone and the heart, and we even go to church when we're on vacation. Those have almost always been amazing experiences of worship and learning and growth for us, by the way. There is one occasion when I can remember us just not getting up out of the tent or motel room and hauling off to somewhere on Sunday, and it was a question of distance and uncertainty about the time of the service, and honestly? We regretted it. Not out of guilt, but an opportunity missed.

 

So I'm pretty hard on people who don't go, right? Well, that's a funny thing. In fact, many, maybe even most people I know outside of my own congregation are not what you'd call every Sunday or even twelve times a year folks. The stats bear it out: on any given weekend, about 80% of Licking County isn't going to worship services anywhere. The number within that 80% who mean to go, know where they will go when they can, and go often enough to call it a church relationship, that can be debated.

 

In the congregation where I serve, we average 165 or so a Sunday across the year, while our official membership is around 250, and our regular family members (if you will) whom we see often but haven't, for a variety of reasons, joined the church, is probably another 50.

 

What happens is the modern world of a) odd work schedules that don't allow for much planning ahead, including second shifts, four twelve-hours then four off, and on-demand hours, and b) a new degree of mobility by family and self, including a more active and mobile senior cohort, that means when people aren't working on Sunday morning (or until 4 am on Sunday morning), they may be driving across the state or into neighboring states to visit with folks who a generation ago would have been across town, or at least in the county.

 

So if we have 150 in church last Sunday between two services, we almost certainly have 300 who would like to be with us, intend to pray and sing and study scriptures with us, but 150 of them don't on that particular weekend. If we have forty people with perfect attendance last year, I'd be amazed (and it wouldn't include me!). So you know, as a pastor, that you're preaching to a changing set of faces in the pews, and some of your best leaders and workers don't hear you every week.

 

Dealing with this reality is why many of us preachers are doing sermon series', and presenting themes across weeks and months and a year. To tie together the fellowship, you can't just assume weekly continuity; it takes more tools than that. Social media is a glue that reaches across absence, and so are small groups that meet through the week.

 

I still think regular Sunday attendance is important; it is a spiritual discipline (that's another column). I need church, and the church fellowship needs each of us, ideally, all of us. But that "all" has to be seen in a different context than "any given Sunday."

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your perfect attendance pin at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 3-13-14

Notes from my knapsack 3-13-14

 

Memories and remembering

___

  

Watching the Granville High School band and choir at the OMEA competitions last weekend, it occurred to me that instrumental and singing music is one of the few areas where straight-up memory is still important.

 

We use so many tools to keep our thoughts and schedules in order, our phones and tablets and virtual desktops; in learning, whether at school or later on in the workplace, we are called on to master theory and framework and process, but to remember stuff? I've got an app for that.

 

And more and more often, "rote memorization" is almost referred to in the same tones as "corporal punishment." It's not a technique, it's a torture. No value is assumed or imputed to the practice.

 

Neuroscience is probably going to prove me wrong some day, or it may be sooner than I think that there will be vivid, full color imagery of a brain scan to tell me I'm right: I think there's a place for memorization, in school and in personal discipline. Just as you can't only do push-ups and call it good exercise, the mental framework and problem solving approach feels to me like doing nothing but sit-ups, and neglecting a system and an element of the whole that needs stretching and pushing.

 

Obviously, the band and choir and theatre kids can and must do it. You don't go out on stage with a script in hand; bands don't want to take the field with a lyre and music clip if they can help it, and they know they'll sound better if they don't need it; skilled choral and solo singers don't hold a big folder up in front of their faces when it's time to project and blend. (Oh, and the GHS music dept. did us all proud and are mostly all going on to state competition!)

 

You may say, and would agree, the some folks don't memorize easily, and for others it's a gift. I do not have good memory for detail as much as for sequence and relationship, so my quotes from poetry, drama, or even scripture tend to shift pronouns and even adjectives from time to time, even though they sound convincingly accurate when declaimed. I wish I had a photographic memory, but I don't.

 

Yet most of us have perfectly serviceable memories, and the problem is just that we don't use them, much. In fact: do you know the words to the Star Spangled Banner? The Gilligan's Island theme song? The narration to the commercial that ends "don't have your dad get punched over a can of soup"? The five different passwords you regularly use? (Right, you have to double check, but how many do you have in your head right now? Six? Seven? Yeah.)

 

There's a remarkable amount of stuff in our memory, and when you work with your memory, you can be surprised by how capacious, and how flexible that skill can become. You memorize a poem a week, a psalm or text that has meaning to you from sacred literature, a song whose lyrics are important to someone you love . . . and you find that, like any muscle in your body, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him what you know "by heart" at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-8-14

Faith Works 3-8-14

Jeff Gill

 

As Lent begins

___

 

Regular readers know that "Faith Works" as a feature on the "Your Faith" page here is aimed at a wide audience, that large percentage of Americans (not to mention Ohioans and Licking Countians) who believe in God (93%), who believe God hears and responds in some way to our prayers (82%), but who don't necessarily regularly attend a church fellowship (in our area, around 20% do, leaving some 60-70% of you who are still working on how you want to live out your beliefs).

 

But I've never made any secret out of the fact that your faithful scrivener is not only a believing and practicing Christian (and gonna keep practicing until I get it right), but a preacher and parson. I was raised and baptized and trained for ministry in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and serve a congregation of that tradition, Newark Central Christian.

 

Each year, when the preparatory and penitential season of Lent comes up, I ask my wider readership's forebearance and understanding as I get just a bit more explicitly, well, Christian. Because that's who I am, and how I best understand God's working in the world. If you read for the more ecumenical, more interfaith content, please forgive me for a few weeks, and please come back after April 20^th (or come to church during Holy Week and see what it is we're talking about).

 

So, with that brief "Apologia Pro Vita Sua", to commence:

 

We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. 

 

   ~ Romans 6:6-11, (ESV)

 

There are ashes, and there is glory. We just marked the Transfiguration in the church calendar, but we also head into a long slog up the road to Jerusalem, where (as Jesus himself reminds us grimly) the people of God tend to stone, strip, and even slaughter the prophets sent them by God.

 

Lent begins with a mark of grey ashy charred remnant palm fronds, traced onto mostly clean foreheads, and making a very unpretty cross. We know in advance we will sing praises and make beautiful ourselves and our worship come Easter day (April 20, mark your calendars now!), but the journey begins in ashes.

 

Paul reminds us, in the passage from his letter to the Roman church above, that to get to the life in Christ, eternal and abundant, which he promised us, we have to pass through death. And not just the dying in the body we are all somewhat familiar with, but our LIVES have to die to sin. Our choices, our paths, need to make a wrenching and often initially disturbing shift to get on the way that leads to life.

 

It sounds painful, and often is. The glory, and the beauty, all come when we find ourselves wanting the life in and of Christ's promise to be our own lives so much so that we start finding we're not even tempted by the things of this world. That's the last step of the dying Paul's talking about, when you move beyond even wanting that which does not satisfy, and you hunger only for what refreshes and feeds us forever.

 

We start by acknowledging that this world is, in itself and no more than itself, nothing more than ashes. Ashes that can be arranged in lovely and alluring ways, but from the finest meal in the grandest restaurant, to the Eiffel Tower itself, it's all made of carbon and dust. That which points us in any earthly thing to something grander, something greater: that's the breath of God, the life eternal, the dance everlasting, and to join in requires that we start to let go of our stuff and dust and ashes and simply join the parade. Let's go!

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

Newark Central 3-6-14

Notes From My Knapsack – As Lent Begins

We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. 

   ~ Romans 6:6-11, (ESV)

 

There are ashes, and there is glory. We just marked the Transfiguration in the church calendar, but we also head into a long slog up the road to Jerusalem, where (as Jesus himself reminds us grimly) the people of God tend to stone, strip, and even slaughter the prophets sent them by God.

 

Lent begins with a mark of grey ashy charred remnant palm fronds, traced onto mostly clean foreheads, and making a very unpretty cross. We know in advance we will sing praises and make beautiful ourselves and our worship come Easter day (April 20, mark your calendars now!), but the journey begins in ashes.

 

Paul reminds us, in the passage from his letter to the Roman church above, that to get to the life in Christ, eternal and abundant, which he promised us, we have to pass through death. And not just the dying in the body we are all somewhat familiar with, but our LIVES have to die to sin. Our choices, our paths, need to make a wrenching and often initially disturbing shift to get on the way that leads to life.

 

It sounds painful, and often is. The glory, and the beauty, all come when we find ourselves wanting the life in and of Christ's promise to be our own lives so much so that we start finding we're not even tempted by the things of this world. That's the last step of the dying Paul's talking about, when you move beyond even wanting that which does not satisfy, and you hunger only for what refreshes and feeds us forever.

 

We start by acknowledging that this world is, in itself and no more than itself, nothing more than ashes. Ashes that can be arranged in lovely and alluring ways, but from the finest meal in the grandest restaurant, to the Eiffel Tower itself, it's all made of carbon and dust. That which points us in any earthly thing to something grander, something greater: that's the breath of God, the life eternal, the dance everlasting, and to join in requires that we start to let go of our stuff and dust and ashes and simply join the parade. Let's go!

In grace & peace, Pastor Jeff

Faith Works 3-1-14

Faith Works 3-1-14

Jeff Gill

 

A House Not Made With Hands

___

 

Truly, I can't complain that God didn't let me know what was coming.

 

Aside from all the hints and indications that were available demographically and statistically that anyone could have opened their eyes and seen back in the 1980s about where denominational and congregational life was heading, God gave me a clear moment of prophetic insight.

 

Like most of us, most of the time, I chose to not quite see it.

 

My ordination, which was 25 years ago this coming summer, was under a giant National Guard tent, in an empty lot next to a condemned church building.

 

Yeah, it is kinda obvious when you look back, isn't it? Prophecy works that way sometimes.

 

We had more people in Scout uniforms than ecclesiastical robes on the folding chairs and benches (it was Aug. 12), and the sound system was borrowed and brought from out of town. My family set up the communion service and baked the bread we used, the music was a capella and to an acoustic guitar (inside that condemned 1888 lovely old structure was an amazing 1893 pipe organ, which was cautiously extracted and went to a church in the Nashville TN area, the proceeds of which helped to build the new church building some years later).

 

The denominational official who came up to play their necessary and important role representing the larger church and the covenants between candidate and credentialing body, my region of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), never quite reconciled himself to the setting. He'd been warned in advance how we were doing it, but when he got there, he kept pointing at the church across Chicago Street and asking "did anyone ask if we could hold Jeff's ordination in their building?"

 

No, we didn't, and they were and are lovely people, who would have said yes in a heartbeat. But this lot was the property of the congregation doing the ordination (whoops, sorry, since 1968 the congregation hosts the ordination, but the region is the body which grants ordination), we had this beloved building I'd grown up in, visible all along the rolled up east side of the big tent which my Scout troop had erected, and did I mention my work in Scouts and at summer camp was where my call to ministry arose? Anyhow, no, we didn't ask. He mopped his brow and looked nervously around and asked where he would sit: there was a folding chair set aside for him.

 

In the congregation gathered that afternoon were people from UCC & Methodist & Lutheran congregations; many of the UCC folk were there from an urban congregation that had taken in the congregation I served in seminary after our church building burned down, until we could rebuild; they had made the hard decision to close and join with another UCC congregation, selling their building – but had pushed the date back another month so they could "officially" be one of my three sponsoring congregations.

 

If traditionalists are starting to worry that this was all an off-kilter sort of affair, let me reassure you: after the service of ordination, there was a large sheet cake with my name and our Disciples chalice in frosting, mints and nuts, and coffee (and punch which went fast, because it was hot). The proprieties must be observed, as Michaeleen O'Flynn would say.

 

What I did not observe was that Almighty God was giving me a very clear picture of what I was getting into that day. We are, indeed, a pilgrim people, from the Wilderness to the Diaspora; Paul reminds us in II Corinthians 5 that "we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens".

 

1888 German Romanesque brick structures that were unskillfully retrofitted in the 1950s, not so eternal.

 

My home church worshiped in a middle school, built a gathering space that they next worshiped in until they could build a "proper" sanctuary, and now it has been home for them long enough that many members have never known any other space to gather in… but they still do an early outdoor service every summer. Just to keep their edge.

 

And my other ordination sponsor, the congregation I was with as we rebuilt from the fire, has now reached a point where they are preparing to sell that building to a group that will "re-start" in the neighborhood, and that body, born in 1909, will "sink into union with the Body of Christ" after June 1.

 

Because, as God's been telling me for years, it's not about the building.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; being a sinful creature, he loves the church building he preaches in on Sundays. Tell him about your building for worship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 2-27-14

Notes from my Knapsack 2-27-14

Jeff Gill

 

Nature, not always maternal

___

 

The problem is, nature wants to kill you.

 

That may be a bit overstated. Nature, as a whole (let alone that whole ambiguous formulation of "Mother Nature"), does not care one whit whether you live or die.

 

But it does seem from time to time that there's a bias to Nature in that, all things being equal, it's better at killing you than keeping you going.

 

We tend to live most of our modern lives at one remove, or two or three, from Nature. The weather forecaster jokes about looking out their non-existent window, but even their depictions of Nature in the raw are mediated through radar and video, instruments and weather spotters. You get numbers and maps and arrows, and a sense – at one remove – of what the outdoors is like.

 

Our youth insist on their Constitutional right to wear no more than a hoodie into sub-zero weather, pointing out, not without reason, that they're going ten feet to a car, maybe thirty feet from that car to the school or elsewhere, and they don't need to bundle up like Admiral Peary heading for the pole.

 

Robert Falcon Scott they're a little less clear about. I guess it's all in the history you know, and understand.

 

Raccoon Creek has leapt its banks and flooded her valley, enjoying an abundance of water and carving new paths of drainage. The roiling surface hints at threat, but few of us go near to sense the strange new power this "creek" holds in spate.

 

Not long ago, with ice atop it, these friendly neighborly scenic waters killed a friend, a professor, a local resident. It was the result of a bravely intended act, but it turned awry in an instant, and death was the result.

 

More recently, another death in another scenic, nearby, often passed spot. There are questions and investigations still going on, but for me, there's a question: did he know? How clearly did he understand: this weather can kill you. Subzero temperatures are hungry for your warmth, and the valleys hold the chill which, without even a few thin layers (which, in layers, can make all the difference in the world, heat trapped in the air spaces between), so terribly quickly is drained from your body.

 

There is a suspicion I have, unfounded, unwarranted, that there was among all the other factors at play that night, a dreadful lack of understanding that Nature is perfectly capable of committing murder without a second thought. It's not personal, it's no more intentional than a cliff edge is threatening . . . but you are wise to see it as such.

 

I love to invite youth and families to enjoy the outdoors, and to value wilderness, and to love Nature as our home and our true hearth, which takes tending and care just like a cooking fire. These feelings are still in my heart.

 

But perhaps my question is whether or not our detachment from Nature makes an even greater hazard for the unwary, that our sense of separateness is what can hasten our demise under the wrong circumstances. It's through an understanding of the depths of what Nature truly is (and isn't) that we can find our place and our security, and even beauty, while standing not too close to a sheer cliff, and watching the sun set on an ice cold night.

 

The stars inspire, but they look on with a distant, thoughtless twinkle. It takes our time and attention to arrange them into constellations, and human stories shared to learn how to find direction from them.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County. Tell him about your relationship to Nature at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 2-22-14

Faith Works 2-22-14

Jeff Gill

 

Not quite about George Washington

___

 

Today is Feb. 22, which is George Washington's birthday.

 

It would be a good day to talk about the "faith of our fathers" and the Father of our Country, but I got so much feedback last week in talking about church buildings it only makes sense for me to finish some thoughts, and some provocations, about that subject, and see if in 750 words I can get back to our first president or not.

 

As I hoped would be clearer, nothing I spoke of last week should be taken to say that buildings are a bad idea, although we should keep an open mind when reading some of today's discussion afoot on the internet and in some church circles saying that maybe, at least in some situations, they are.

 

We do, it must be admitted, have a tendency to do a touch of idolatry when it comes to the structures in which we worship, and the Bible is pretty clear on where it comes down on idolatry. On buildings, not so much. God resides in a tent for big chunks of the Old Testament, and Jesus does much of his ministry on earth in rented rooms, as does Paul (the lecture hall of Tyrannus, third floor teaching rooms with wide windowsills, in his own apartment in Rome, etc.). Very little in the Christian scriptures or Hebrew writings that back up the need for assembled believers to own a big hunk of masonry and framing.

 

Nothing really to say it's bad, either.

 

The point is that a church building is a ministry tool. When the mimeograph first came out, it was a piece of technology that, combined with the address-o-graph, changed how we reach out to our community; that ministry tool gets set aside when copy machines and e-mail change the landscape of communications. This can also happen with structures, spaces, sanctuaries.

 

And we see churches moving into a variety of building types, too. Converted catering halls, repurposed schools, modified house layouts.

 

One of the fastest growing phenomena in congregational life in the US is the multisite church. A main "campus" or physical plant may also have a number of satellite locations, but all consider themselves a single "church" in governance and leadership and identity.

 

According to a National Congregations Survey by Duke University, there are over 8,000 multisite churches in this country, with 5 million (!) people worshiping in one expression or another of this approach. 9% of Protestants consider themselves part of a multisite church, even though they are just 3% of the total number of Protestant congregations. Locally, Newark Church of the Nazarene is working with a multisite model. There's a more traditional church building on Williams St., and other structures housing expressions of the Newark Naz ministry a few blocks north, and over in the East End.

 

In some multisite/satellite church models, everyone worships at the same time, with a live feed of the core service broadcast into the outlying churches, or the streaming feed can be used for later (or even next day) worship at the satellite location.

 

Others have shared elements of ministry across the location, but each location has its own preaching from the pastor and worship team of that campus, but following an outline and themes from the "mother church." However you handle the sermon, multisites are one way technology takes an old model – the circuit rider – and gives it a flexible new twist.

 

This is a fairly unusual model for being a church in terms of Christian history and tradition, but it makes sense that multisites have really gotten going in America. When this country called together the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the big question was how we could get from loose confederation of states to a truly federal model, where the nation as a whole had certain rights and responsibilities, but the states would still individually have roles and rights for themselves.

 

Our government is an ongoing experiment in balancing of the whole and the parts between states and the federal government, and the first leader of it, George Washington (told ya I'd get back to him!), found the balancing act challenging.

 

For multisites to work, you seem to need a pastor with both presence and administrative skills. The second generation of leaders in them will be interesting to watch, as the Bill Hybels and Rick Warrens and Andy Stanleys transition out of leadership, and new figures step into those roles.

 

Because pastors are no more permanent than church buildings!

 

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

Knapsack - Newark Christian 2-20-14

Notes from my Knapsack 2-20-14

 

There's a saying that's often attributed in various forms to an original comment by the pastor and former chaplain to the U.S. Senate, Richard Halverson (1916-1995):

 

"In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America where it became an enterprise."

 

At heart, we are neither a business nor an enterprise, not a culture or form of entertainment, our faith is not best summed up in laws and a legal institution, nor is Christianity really a philosophy.

 

It often is said that our faith is a "world view" and that's closer, but I think it still misses the mark. We have received from the Lord what we would give to others, as Paul said (I Cor. 11:23), that we invite people to come and dine, to be formed anew in Christ's image, and then to go out themselves bearing this good news of invitation and welcome into the Kingdom of God.

 

Or to go back to Halverson's line, we are called to be "a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ." Thinking the right thoughts and obeying the right laws and living within a social norm are not as important as living in fellowship with one another, forbearing, forgiving, and lifting up those who have taken the name of Christian.

 

We do live in a world which has been shaped by Greek thinking and Roman law and European culture… and American entertainment. Those influences tug at us in a bewildering variety of ways. As your pastor, I get asked all the time to sign us up for this cause or that, to buy into a program or a package from a denominational source or a parachurch organization, and there are debates from TV and online that filter into questions asked in the narthex and parking lot.

 

Frankly, I smile and fend off 99% of all that, and often end up wishing I'd gotten closer to 100%. Everyone out there, from curriculum salespeople to pressure group spokespersons, wants us to take up their cause, their agenda, and either be in or be out, join or be excluded, get in the club or find ourselves on the outside.

 

But I believe our calling is first and foremost to be a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. How we show forth that centeredness, to use a slightly awkward phrase, is going to look different in different communities, but it starts in our own community, in this county, among our own fellowship. How can we focus together on Christ, and also reach out (as he commands!) to the world?

 

And the key to resolving that dilemma is to remember that Jesus is not a caged prisoner of the church, but a living presence in this world for which he lived, in which he died, and to which he brings redeeming power. We form our circle, as a congregation, facing outward, looking for signs of where Christ is already at work…and we jump in alongside whomever else it is that Jesus has gathered.

 

In this way, the fellowship, our fellowship, grows.

 

In grace & peace, Pastor Jeff

Faith Works 2-15-14

Faith Works 2-15-14

Jeff Gill

 

The end of buildings

___

 

There's a common theme in recent writing, especially online writing among those involved in what's called "the emergent church."

 

The emergent church is an expression of a contemporary form of Christianity with classical elements contained within: chant, candles, contemplation. It tends to be young in audience and leadership, and is usually a sort of new church plant that doesn't show any interest in ending up like older churches, in any way.

 

Call them cool, and they won't argue, but will insist that it isn't their goal.

 

The common theme I'm seeing emergent folks playing off of is: who needs a building?

 

If you don't understand how you can be a church without a building, then you're making some of the emergent folks' point for them. "The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a resting place, the church is the people." So sang Avery and Marsh in 1972, and the ideal of envisioning the church of Christ as the Body, not a building, has struggled mightily to be born since then.

 

Today, a "church plant" begins in rented rooms, in school auditoriums normally empty on a Sunday, or nested within an established church on a Sunday afternoon. And they may or may not aspire to having a building or property committee someday.

 

More and more developing church models don't assume the ownership of property or the building of a physical plant as a goal. Those of us who have such ministry tools in our care can understand why. When I go into a church building, I probably notice faster than you would where the plaster cracks are (and how deep, and which direction they run), where the roof leak stains are, the quality of the windows, etc. etc.

 

A building is a ministry tool, and should be used, maintained, and even set aside with that understanding in mind. But there's something in us that can make of the church building an idol, and we… well, we don't worship it, but it starts looking dangerously close to doing so.

 

All of us in buildings as a part of our ministry understand the attraction of doing without one: but I also have seen how the extra work it takes to be "building-free" can drain valuable ministry energy that could go to mission and outreach, but is "spent" in set-up and tear-down, or even in moving from point-to-point.

 

Buildings have a logic all their own. We should appreciate them, and care for them, but when they dictate the shape of our ministry it's a fair question: should we stop using this tool, and find a new one? And maybe even a tool that doesn't look like what we're used to having in our hand.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he loves the Newark Central building, but knows it is something less than the Kingdom itself! Tell him about your building issues at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Knapsack 2-13-14

Notes from my Knapsack 2-13-14

Jeff Gill

 

Where to put it all

___

 

One thing you have to deal with in a winter such as this one: where to put it all.

 

The snow not only falls, but does not melt. This is what's been so different for me about Ohio winters, or at least Licking County winters, growing up just off the tip of Lake Michigan in a snow belt. For years (and years) the snow would fall, even some substantial snows, and it would almost always melt entirely before the next one.

 

I've not checked out the figures, but it seemed not that there were fewer snow events (although each is less in total than you see off the Great Lakes onto your driveway, up north), but that the snow never piled up. In my northwest Indiana childhood, snow covered the ground by Christmas, and the mounds on either side of the driveway apron mounted higher and higher, until the mailbox nearly vanished.

 

We also had a driveway that, when my dad built an addition onto the house after two more kids, ran directly into the garage leaving most of the part to be shoveled cut into the earth. From the street to the house the snow had to be shoveled ever farther up, some three feet or more at the garage door: and with each new snowfall, that throw got higher.

 

So you got strategic about when to pitch your shovel load, where to throw it, and when you were actually better off to walk each carefully balanced pile a few steps back to a lower part of the drive. Wind came into this equation, and also the knowledge that it was one kind of weary to walk back and forth in each poke at the piles, and another sort of tired you felt when a flung load tumbled right back down onto the newly shoveled pavement.

 

That all comes back this winter, and aching back aside, it's kind of a fun memory now, and practical experience to deploy.

 

You also realize that you grew up from your learner's permit getting taught by parents and experience how to drive on ice and slick ridged side streets with intersections polished by start-up futility . . . and that many of your fellow local drivers today do not have that benefit. Nor do they know in their bones the many uses of kitty litter in the trunk or a few decent hunks of corrugated cardboard. And an old sleeping bag with a flashlight and backup gloves.

 

We're all learning or relearning these realities. Snow comes, and we deal. There's how the larger institutions deal, school systems and grocery stores and churches and sporting events. Frankly, I'm pretty impressed with how everyone has dealt with the circumstances of this winter. For Granville Schools, they've tried to protect our far flung student body (Cambria Mill, Deeds Rd., Park Trails: it's not just about the village, campers), with young drivers at GHS and parents commuting 30-45 minutes away all factors in the equation, using what I would call the right closings & two-hour delays applied in a timely (if tediously frequent!) manner.

 

And just as I was going to hit send on this column, the word came out about a missing Denison student, and then the search (God bless everyone who tried, especially those who found his body), and the tragic aftermath.

 

Winter is serious business, and we are reminded that the only way, really, to deal with it is to deal with it together.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him your winter tales at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-8-14

Faith Works 2-8-14

Jeff Gill

 

You could write your obituary

___

 

Today is the official birthdate of the Boy Scouts of America.

 

Feb. 8 is the date of the Congressional charter granted to bring Baden-Powell's youth program over from its English birthplace two years earlier into the United States.

 

Scouting had started a number of places before 1910, hearing about this approach to outdoor education and youth leadership development by various means, and there were earlier attempts to do something similar that ultimately were folded into the BSA, including Ohio's own Dan Beard and his "Sons of Daniel Boone."

 

Here in Licking County, we got going pretty quickly, not in 1910 (as far as we can tell) but soon after. By the 1920s, there were a number of Scout troops, with Rev. Franklin at Trinity Episcopal Church leading the way.

 

By 1937, Scouting had grown nationwide to the point where we were ready to hold a National Scout Jamboree, a sort of made-up word to describe a giant encampment of Scouts such as England and Europe had already seen. There were plans to hold one for the 25^th anniversary of American Scouting, but a polio epidemic delayed the planned 1935 event in Washington DC for two years.

 

A young man in Licking County wanted to go, but we were still deep in the Great Depression through 1937. His father sadly explained that the $75 it would take for registration and train tickets weren't in the family budget. Henry was raising a calf for the market, planning to make $150 from the transaction; he and his father decided that it was up to him, but it would be okay if Henry sold the calf now, which would only bring $75, but that was what it took to go to the Jamboree.

 

That's what he did, camping out on the National Mall in the shadow of the Washington Monument with tens of thousands of other Scouts in late June and early July, and he came home even more committed to Scouting, his country, and his church.

 

I know this story because Dr. Henry Hook told it to me as we planned his funeral, which by a series of "coincidences" has to be today, February 8, the birthday of the BSA.

 

That part, he did not plan. All the rest, he did. You may well have read his obituary in the newspaper: he wrote it. At 89 you have the advantage of seeing clearly what's coming, and as a doctor specializing in pulmonary care, when you learn you have lung cancer you know perhaps too much.

 

But Henry asked to meet with me, as a fellow Scouter, not his pastor (which I wasn't at the time), to help plan his funeral fifteen years ago. We've met specifically for that purpose twice more since then: friends died, other matters shifted a bit, and modifications in the plan were called for. The outline has not changed dramatically, but he kept on making adjustments because when he died, he didn't want to leave others guessing or worried about doing the right thing. He'd laid it out years before.

 

Just a few weeks ago, I also had the honor of conducting Lucille Hoskinson's memorial service, and as hard as it all had to be for her son Don, we both knew one thing: she'd written her obituary, and left us more than enough information to do her "last honors" the way she wanted it.

 

My point to all of us, the survivors as funeral notices say, or in Lincoln's words, "we the living", is that such preparation is a gift. It is, in a very real sense, a blessing. To your family, to your friends, indeed even to the funeral home staff.

 

Those last folks talk about pre-need and pre-arrangement, and I'm not here to sell services, my own or anyone else's. But you need put no money down, expend no assets other than a bit of your time on this earth, to take out pen and paper, or to type on your screen and print out and seal away in a location known to a number of people, what you want done on the occasion of your passing.

 

If you have a church home (and if you don't, you can find one pretty easily, we're around!), your pastor or priest or rabbi will be pleased and honored to receive a copy of that. Whether an obituary written with certain strategic blanks, or a service outline, or just a list of scriptures and hymns, we will put it in the file.

 

And pray with you that we don't take it out for decades!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he is honored to do the last honors for his friend Henry today in Scout uniform. Tell him what you want at your funeral at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-1-14

Faith Works 2-1-14

Jeff Gill

 

Seminary education, and structural decline

___

 

Seminary in general among Protestant clergy, and my Masters of Divinity alma mater in particular, has historically been a place designed around a residential experience for learning, reflection, and worship together. For those getting an "MDiv" with plans for ordination to parish ministry, it has usually done all that in tandem with field placement as a sort of leavening agent, though increasingly field placement has been the necessary financial keystone of the process. Seminary students needed the job, and indirectly, the seminary needed those congregational dollars to flow through those students back to the balance sheet of the institution.

 

As field placement became more important alongside of student loans, the seminaries could shape less and less of the time and experience of students -- the priority was finding where a student placement could be made, and the student looking at what they were doing to themselves in terms of indebtedness, and anticipating how that would push them in certain directions on graduation. Even in the late 1980s for me, the number of students who were in the position of being able to stay in a ministry job because of the quality of the learning experience, and not need to find a better paying position during their three or four years in seminary, and then could go upon graduation where they felt called, not just to where they had an option in front of them that would cover their loan payments (and I was fortunate enough to have all that be true for me): that number was very low.

 

Since then, the continued decline of student church positions has followed declines in worship attendance generally, and a relative decline in the ability to cover comparable pay & benefits. There are fewer such positions, and pay has necessarily overwhelmed the issue of placement. Some regions have maintained a regular, every semester (or more!) process of formation with seminary students - but most have had annual (at best) meetings, with most "formation" focused on the suite of final ordination requirements, which themselves tend to be academic in nature (papers, sermons), accenting what's already going on in classes, not taking up unaddressed areas of student life.

 

So where we are is, in retrospect, no surprise, even though there's a great deal of shock and dismay that's been rattling through the "order of ministry" these last few years in most denominational bodies. The seminaries have been collapsing, closing, merging, or announcing "sustainability plans" which sound suspiciously like a retrenching and retooling to a radically new model of post-secondary theological education. They may be pursuing creative options to maintain student counts somewhat better than its peers, but that still means that the number of M.Div. students enrolled and going through to graduation & ordination for service in the local church is shrinking there as well.

 

And why shouldn't it? The number of full time, benefits bearing positions is drastically lower today than it was in 1989 when I was ordained. That's true for what in ministry would be called "entry level" positions, both as a solo pastor, or as an assistant or "associate pastor." Most of the so-called full time associates are non-benefited, barely into five-digit pay positions. There are very few such positions I think are fairly paid as a "full time" post, even if the title is maintained.

 

If there's no jobs to go to, why would you encourage people to incur crushing debt to qualify themselves for them? If there are 3 openings for every 10 M.Div.s looking, then for 7, "none" is the answer, job-wise. Full time jobs in ministry are being taken away by large scale changes in the cultural setting of today's church, and only a flexible, adaptive response (including biovocationality as an option, even for M.Div. ordained pastors) is going to sustain congregations.

 

Which means whatever seminaries, including my alma mater, are going to be in ten years, they will be different. Radically different. A brief mourning period will be allowed, and then the caravan has to keep moving. We are a pilgrim people, and there's no one earthly institution (or art collection, or degree program) that's necessary. Stuff has to be left by the road before the rough patches. Even the heirloom manger scene becomes excess baggage on some uphill pulls -- so set it aside, pick up the little baby Jesus from the box and put him in your pocket, and walk on.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your view of changes in professional education at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.