Faith Works 5-22-21

Faith Works 5-22-21

Jeff Gill

Missions and ministries continue, and thrive

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As most churches are finding their path back to more regular in-person operations, the focus in recent months has reasonably been on worship.

Who can be together, how can they be seated, what should we do within our worship spaces — all of these matters complicated by building layout and auditorium furniture, doorways and hall ceilings, et cetera et cetera. I keep saying "there's no one right way for every church." My prayers have been, and will continue to be, with the church leaders, lay and ordained, who are making the hard choices and communicating complicated responses to frustrated community members.

What gets overlooked in much of this confusion and concern are the outreach ministries so many faith communities operate. Food pantries are a very common expression of ministry outreach for typical churches. One or two days a week, a door is opened, hours are kept, and people not members of the congregation can come to get assistance and support. There are dozens of these around this county, and they tend to work in coordination with the Food Pantry Network of Licking County, which has been helping their member pantries figure out how to follow health orders while still serving the community at large.

More tricky are the means by which other kinds of outreach can function. There have been a few clothes closet type ministries, where people (some have been targeted to groups, like women going back to work for interview clothes, or school clothes for children) come and they need to come inside, and try on items, and the issues of contact and contagion have been hard to manage. Since we've learned that contact transmission is less an issue with coronavirus than originally feared, those hygiene challenges are less of a barrier, but limits on how many can come inside and be together in a tight space are still slowing things up.

And I know many of you have had occasion to visit the Medical Loan Closet at Central Christian Church, which began almost two decades ago in a closet, moved to a room, then a hallway and half a basement, now outside into a converted garage behind the church building. They had the problem many outreach ministries have on weekdays, which is a large number of senior citizens as volunteers, and early on worries about COVID closed them down. Once the vaccine began coming available, they've opened up on Wednesdays again with a little more caution on how many people come in at a time.

Down on US 40, serving the entire Buckeye Lake twi-county region, Hebron New Life Church opened a Baby Pantry over ten years ago. They're open Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings, offering infant specific items like diapers, formula, and clothing to families who need their help. The church looked around and saw some food pantries and other ministries meeting certain needs quite well, and decided that they were called to a "gap" which was the needs of families with small children. The Hebron Baby Pantry is now, like the Medical Loan Closet in Newark, outgrowing the room it's filled inside the church building.

They are ready to expand, with the end of most of the health orders and limits, hoping to build on their property a standalone building for the Baby Pantry operations and expand their community center capacity. Pastor Brian Harkness told me "we just want to be able to expand our ability to serve the community in ways we weren't able to before," with hopes to reach out to older school-age youth.

In 2019, they served over 3,000 children; executive director Beth Walters let me know in that year they shared around 20,000 packages of diapers, 500 toothbrushes, and some 18,500 children's outfits of clothing. Obviously, numbers were down a bit through 2020, but 2021 has picked up right at the pace they were at before and even increasing a bit. Their current space, though, is at capacity, and I can tell you I have to move sideways through some of the shelving they have up.

[NOTE: keep or edit this para depending on space limits] They ask that adults with children in their care present a "Valid State ID or Driver's License," something that indicates "Proof of Residency" like a utility bill or rental lease, and a WIC folder or medical card. And since it's usually best to come without the child in question, they ask for at least one form of ID per child, whether a "Crib Card," or a copy of Birth Certificate or Social Security Card, and their WIC folder or medical card.]

If you would like to help them build some space, they're interested in support from anyone; their contact info is on their website along with a PayPal button. Along with helping them move forward in 2021 with this project, I hope every faith community is using the "COVID reboot" to think about the gaps and needs and vision they have in their area, and consider: what unexpected blessing might you be able to share where you are?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows that when you need diapers, you really need diapers. Tell him about your unique outreach ministry at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-27-21

Notes from my Knapsack 5-27-21

Jeff Gill

Personal protective equipment, and memorials

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Just inside the doors of Doane Academy, the main administrative building up on the hill at Denison, are two plaques, one on either side.

As they're inside, they're easy to miss. On your way out, you're looking through the windows and onto the academic quad where commencement was held this year. On your way in, you don't see them unless you look back over your shoulder.

Actually, looking back can be a useful thing if you don't make too regular a habit of so doing. You can see things you might miss, and learn stuff about not just the past, but of how we got where we are, which is where we're getting to the future from.

To one side, appropriate for Memorial Day, is an inscription honoring William Jordan Currin, Class of 1913, who was the first Denison alumni to die in World War I. Adding to the poignancy, he died at Cambrai on November 11, 1917 . . . the date which would precisely one year later become Armistice Day, the end of the war. Later Americans would convert Nov. 11 into Veterans Day, but on Memorial Day we honor those who not only served but also died in service, and so let us salute Mr. Currin: "He lived the life of a Christian gentleman and died a brave man" in the words of his memorial.

On the other side, a reminder of how a hundred years ago the college honored in general two groups of students who served far beyond national boundaries: not only those who served in the armed forces, but also a regular "platoon" or more of missionaries set out after graduation to the global mission field, sent from Granville every May out into the world.

The opposite marker says "In Memory of John Cherney, D.U. '05 - Died from fever contracted in famine relief work, Kuling, China - May 11, 1912."

Kuling is more often presented as "Guling" today; then and now a resort town near Lushan in Jiangxi Province. It was built as a place for rest and restoration for English speaking missionaries in the 1890s, and later would be an unofficial headquarters in turn both for the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, and later the Chinese Communist Party of Mao Zedong.

Of John Cherney I can find little; directories of missionaries in "China, Japan, and Corea" for 1910 & 1911 show him as an ordained Baptist minister with a wife, unnamed, in southwestern China. But 1910 & 1911 also marked in northwest China the outbreak of the "Manchurian plague," a respiratory disease that seems to have jumped from marmots to humans, with a truly awful mortality rate, and at a time when transmission methods were still unclear to medical science. It was in Manchuria and neighboring areas that Chinese doctors first recommended "personal protective equipment" like masks and gowns for medical staff to prevent transmission; a French doctor came to help, rejected the usefulness of PPE, and quickly caught it and died. So 1911 is a landmark with current relevance.

Cherney's fever could have been malaria or any other parasitic or bacterial infection, likely not a viral transmission. But his memorial, telling us he was "Cheerful, brave, unselfish; a noble type of college man" who died of disease in China, reminds us that global questions of epidemiology have been with us for more than a century, and we still wrestle with how to prevent illness and slow spread, through means often both simple and social.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking a great deal about globalism lately, from Xinjiang and Wuhan to Granville and Newark. Tell him how big or small your world is at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.