Notes from my Knapsack 10-9-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 10-9-2025
Jeff Gill

Haunted by both pasts and futures
___


October's lengthening nights are creeping back into our evenings.

Time change isn't until November, so we will keep sunsets on the other side of 6:30 pm, but as soon as we enter next month that will "fall back" to before 5:30 pm, and pass 5:00 pm by month's end.

We also tend to be more reflective this time of year. Winter and Christmas offer the happy distractions of celebration; right now we look forward to Hallowe'en with a mix of anticipation and dread. You know, ghosts and ghouls and all those giant skeletons they're selling at home repair stores.

Being haunted is right in line with the seasonal circumstances. It's a time we think of those who have gone, who've passed on, who have died, recently or long ago. I'm a cemetery visitor in part as a historian, because there are stories in stone you can pick up on that the internet might not help you find. Put them together, and you get insights into stories long buried, past tragedies, lasting sorrows.

You can also be haunted, in a very similar way, by the future. That's right, haunted by the future. There's quite a bit of it going around now, in fact. When we usually speak of hauntings, it's the half-seen, half-imagined outline of who or what once was, and how they are gone, but still exerting a pull on our hearts and minds. A ghost, in general terms.

We are haunted right now by half-seen, half-imagined shades of what we fear is yet to come. We can't know for sure, but there's a distinct image, even if daylight shines right through it, of what we anxiously anticipate.

Ghosts from our past dangle from leaf-stripped tree branches, howling with winds growing chill and sharp. Our future oriented ghosts sway around the angular extensions from a nest of cranes, seen north of the highway into Columbus; they wail with suggestions of farmland lost and old homes leveled for rows and rows of newer boxy houses.

These hauntings influence our hearts and minds like ghosts of the past, but they're even trickier because they have even less anchor in facts and markers and reality than typical ghosts. They're the ghoulish worries of what might be, projected out before the changes that are already with us, like elongated shadows in earlier evenings.

Practically speaking, change was coming to the Granville area well before anyone thought about computer chips being made here. We saw AEP and Bob Evans and Abercrombie & Fitch and the "Beauty Campus" all march towards Beech Road and cross it, heading for Mink Street.

We're haunted by the prospect of long, windowless buildings tromping across the landscape right up to the edge of Wildwood Park, and by visions of subdivisions without number spreading north and south of Rt. 16, reaching around the village in an unavoidable embrace. Ghosts of a future we fear.

We fear ghosts in part because we will die, ourselves, and others we love will too. So there's a dread and sorrow we pull in from the past into our present lives. Likewise, Granville is changing, will change… has changed, and will continue to change. Not changing is like not dying. It's not one of the options available.

So we need find ways to tease our fears, mock some of our more extreme worries, trick-or-treat door-to-door our way through a different approach to what's happening. Don't let ghosts of the future overshadow your today.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got his ghosts. Tell him what haunts you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 10-3-2025

Faith Works 10-3-2025
Jeff Gill

Communion is a meal which feeds the hungry
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On the first Sunday of October, many Christian churches of a wide range of traditions will mark World Communion Sunday.

In the United States, World Communion Sunday marks 85 years going back to Oct. 6, 1940. The observance has Presbyterian roots, in a "Worldwide Communion Sunday" celebration within their fellowship going back to 1936. Presbyterian congregations may celebrate communion twice a year, quarterly, or in a few cases monthly; the goal was to have a certain day on which all Presbyterians across the United States knew fellow believers were also having communion.

Jesse Bader is a remarkable figure in American religious history who deserves to be better known than he is; a minister of my own religious tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which has communion in every weekly worship service, he was in 1939 working to promote evangelism through the Federal Council of Churches, a forerunner body of the National Council of Churches. Bader believed that evangelism and ecumenism were not in conflict, but could be complementary.

Bader recommended the Federal and also the World Council of Churches encourage the observance of a World Communion Sunday on the first Sunday of October, not to try and get churches to hold joint services, but simply to be mindful of how Christians were marking what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper down the street, around the corner, and around the world. While the World Council of Churches did not officially endorse the plan, the celebration of World Communion Sunday quickly spread well beyond the United States.

To the end of his life, when Bader died at 77 in 1963, he continued to promote the simple act of churches making sure to hold communion in their worship service on October's first Sunday, and to be aware that so many others were doing the same. Celebrating communion together is still a challenge for many Christian bodies, given internal rules around who can preside, and who can receive, but there is still a unity in the common practice which is essential, and that Bader believed supported evangelism in the widest possible sense.

Today it can be a date on the church calendar which is simply "how we've always done it," but the roots of the practice I believe are inspiring, and worth our extra attention and awareness. Traditions like my own Disciples of Christ, or in Methodism generally, believe communion is a "converting ordinance" and rightly open to all; other more liturgical traditions hold to a more closed table, restricting the reception of communion to members, while usually noting that they pray for the unity of all believers in God's good time.

So there are still quite a few churches where I can't walk right in and take communion on the first day I visit, but I respect their discipline and rigor within their own contexts. I think these differences make World Communion Sunday all the more meaningful, as each of our worship gatherings can imagine and hope for a wider unity, even as we hold to our own traditions within our four walls. That wider unity knows no walls, and points beyond our time to what is yet to come.

This, we do in remembrance of the one who calls us to break bread together, to pour out the cup, and in these simple, everyday acts of eating and drinking, to be in communion with each other, with Jesus, with God whose invitation is to all of us, to the table of fellowship, and of peace.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to communion on Sunday. Tell him how you commune with God at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 9-26-2025

Jeff Gill

How to consider the role of judgment
___



My mentor in seminary, Michael Kinnamon, liked to tell students the best dialogue takes place when we engage our opponents at their best, not at their worst.

For good or ill, I've since taken Michael's teaching to heart. Most people one disagrees with will say foolish and stupid things, and you can zoom in on those and make your retorts and responses all about their worst phrasing or framing. When you think about it, you can see where that's likely to end up.

The real art in constructive debate is to find the strongest, best case being made for the subject or viewpoint you're challenging, and go after that on level ground.

Obviously this can have political implications, but that's not where I want to go. Recently, Christianity Today had an extended essay about a theological perspective, what's generally called "penal substitutionary atonement" or PSA for short. Some say this isn't a perspective, it's simply the truth, Biblically speaking, about who God is and how redemption in Jesus Christ works.

However, not all Christians look at the saving role of Christ in the same way. All of Eastern Orthodoxy, for instance.

So the essayist approached the question in what I realized was an unusual way. He tried to assemble the best arguments both for and against, and compare them to each other. The strongest objections were raised from various angles, but without making assumptions about the mistakes or misunderstandings of the opposing side.

Reading this made me realize that so many discussions of PSA I've read over the years, both in published outlets and in recent years, online, have started with a boatload of assumptions, and pressed those about the bad faith or ignorance of those standing against the view proposed more than actually explaining why their understanding should prevail.

The heart of penal substitutionary atonement is a cluster of questions, or perhaps one big question, about the nature of God. And this essay reminded me that, at their best, proponents of PSA wish to give God the glory, to acknowledge the weight of God's power and presence over and against the place for our human choices. An evangelical, confessional perspective can run up against an unintentional elevation of our significance in the whole eternal drama of redemption. We can end up making our "yes" to God's intentions the key element in what Christians call salvation, and turn God into almost just an audience member of one, but with our acceptance and ourselves the central cast member on stage.

And one outcome of this sort of mischaracterization of God's role can be making the evangelistic decision the summit and conclusion and end of the drama of redemption, and eternity just a very long ovation in response to that act, an act on our part. PSA at its best puts God and eternity into proper perspective, and gives us a chance to see our choices as not the entire process, to understand our acceptance of God's free gift of love as part of a longer, ongoing journey in which God alone is in control.

At its worst? PSA can turn God into a particularly harsh judge on a very high bench, detached and even indifferent to the human condition and why we make the choices we do. Mind you, I said "at its worst." If you wish to debate PSA, just arguing against the legislative, punitive aspect of it might cause you to miss where there's something being said we need to hear.

We live in a time when judgment is freely offered all over the place. Thinking about how judgment is part of life in the largest sense of the meaning of our lives has a place, in any tradition. And to pivot just a bit, for any and all Jewish readers, blessings on your Yom Kippur which engages with much the same questions this week.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's done his share of judging in his life, and accepts that he could be judged for that. Tell him how you regard judgment in time & eternity at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.




https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/09/penal-substitutionary-atonement-debate-theology/

Notes from my Knapsack 9-25-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 9-25-2025
Jeff Gill

What a Long Strange Trip It's Been
___


My wife and I just took a long trip, for us, to the Pacific Northwest. It was a part of the country neither of us had ever been to, and had a number of personal connections that made it a much anticipated and memorable venture.

It was also too much. We jammed so much into the nine days we had, with a travel day on either end for eleven in total, that halfway through we had a serious conversation about what we could cut to give us a bit of a respite. Serious it was, but our decision was to press on, and we did.

I figured out how to navigate Puget Sound's ferry system, which we rode three times with our rental car, and that saved us some time, but the driving was still something else. For anyone considering that area, let me caution you that many of the popular locations (or ferries!) can fill up by 9 am, but it is common to have dense fog until 10 am, so driving in limited visibility is something you just have to get used to.

As I posted our pictures on social media, I heard from a number of friends variations on a perfectly fair question: are you out of your mind? We covered a ridiculous amount of ground both in vehicle and on foot. One could ask, why?

We have been thinking about that, in terms of planning future travel. The reality is we were both raised by fathers who never took all the vacation they technically had, and were uneasy about being away from work; our mothers were homemakers and thus never had time off. We can feel like we've come a ways from our upbringing, but still be constrained by it.

The truth is, with my wife recently retired and my work status complicated, but heading that way, we both never took all of our vacation time, either. On my spouse's official retirement she had a certain amount of unused vacation she could receive in compensation, but she still left double-digit days' worth of time on the table. In forty years, I took two full weeks covering three Sundays off precisely once, and it was a) arranged as a term of employment, b) with a year's warning to one and all that I'd be gone, and c) it was for a backpacking trip to Philmont Scout Ranch which some might not consider vacation in the first place (something about spending ten nights on the trail with fourteen youth and five other adults, but it was glorious). On the other hand, I often had to cope with congregational leaders who thought time I spent directing church camps or going to regional events was "personal time" and counted against vacation days. It was a factor we pushed back against, but it was always there.

Otherwise, we took lots of four and six day vacations when we thought we could afford to get away together. Data indicate we were fairly typical Americans in that respect. And we got habituated to packing as much experience we could into as few days as possible.

In retrospect, we both wish we'd taken more time off. It would have helped us, and I honestly believe it would have made us better employees, but the reality is our history and culture and institutions tend to push against taking vacations, and even at that our experience is mostly before the issue of online tools creating the "infinite workday" we're talking about now.

Meanwhile, we are working on how to change our own assumptions around work, even in retirement. It's definitely a work in progress, even in our sixties.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has some places he'd like to go he's never been. Tell him where you'd like to visit at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 9-19-2025
Jeff Gill

Standing in the surf as the tide rises
___


Earlier this summer, Charlie Kirk said on X: "When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it's important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It's going to be ok."

I remember being surprised by this. His reputation was more for provocation and challenge and defiance, but this recommendation was itself pretty solidly grounded. I clicked "like" and scrolled on. I'd like to say I made a mental note to check him out more thoroughly, but it was June 17th and if I did I never got around to it.

My wife and I were on vacation when the news came, tragic and shocking. We were about to make my first visit to the Pacific Ocean, and Charlie Kirk's death was on my mind as I stood in the waves, feeling the sand itself move under my feet as the tide was surging in. You can stand and watch breaking waves, one after the other, roaring in your ears and spraying your legs, for some time. It's a contemplative place, timeless and yet indicative of inexorable time passing, one wave after another. Plus the reality that with each stronger wave you could really tell the ground beneath you was not stable. And it was cold.

Walking back to the rental car, I worked to get the sand off my sandals before getting in, never a task done to completion. The grit and kelp was woven into the straps of my sandals, and stayed with me all the way back to our hotel. The news I'd heard, and the details of the assassination, were stuck in my thoughts as well. In part, I was sorry I had heard about it; self-pityingly, I wished I'd stuck to old pop music and anodyne entertainment, and not let my notifications pull me into the strong currents of daily news. Looking at iconic Haystack Rock, I was still mindful of a new widow and small children sure to ask when Daddy was coming home.

From Minnesota legislators shot at their own front doors to an Atlanta police officer killed trying to stop a shooter spraying a government building, all the way back to our summer vacation last year coming to a halt for a day with the attempt on President Trump's life, there's no way to look around and think this is too much, it's building and growing in ways we can't seem to control, and the world is feeling unstable under our feet. The knowledge that just as inexorably, the tide will go out just as it has come in, is not much of a comfort right now. Are we at a high tide, or is it still to come?

Which is where a number of people, all over the political . . . spectrum? Arc? Sphere? Two dimensions don't seem to do it these days. But all sorts of us recalled and pulled back up that June aside by Charlie Kirk himself, as a surge of political furor was washing up around our ankles, and no doubt his, since he was one to wade out deep into troubled waters. And we recall what he said:

"When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it's important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It's going to be ok."

I really can't improve on that. I promise to try, in coming weeks, but for now, I'd like to give Charlie Kirk the last word. "It's going to be ok."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has a variety of political opinions, most of which he doesn't preach about. Tell him how you stay in touch with real life at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 9-11-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 9-11-2025
Jeff Gill

Monuments larger than buildings
___


Over the summer months, I've thought many times as I would drive and walk past the Buxton Inn about what can be said of Orville and Audrey Orr.

They got in about a decade of retirement after 42 years of inn-keeping here on East Broadway. We lost them both, and their daughter Melanie, in just a few weeks' time over late May and the beginning of June. Today the Buxton awaits new ownership and many of us hope a new opening day, after over two centuries of operation. Orville and Audrey "only" took responsibility for the last four decades and change, but for most of us in Granville today, they are the only hosts their we ever knew.

I had the privilege of sharing a small piece of that experience with them, mostly Orville, during their last decade at the Buxton Inn. The convention and visitor's bureau had recruited me to serve as a "step on" guide for buses that were coming, a great many of them from Canada, to do local tours. The most common was to meet the tour bus at the Cherry Valley Hotel, and before the highway closed off Cherry Valley Road, we'd roll north, up to Newark-Granville Road, into the village past Bryn Du and the Granville Inn, turning up Pearl St. to the "back entrance" of Denison University, up and around Swasey Chapel and Beth Eden, down "The Drag" (oh it would be so much easier today!), to the Four Corners noting the historic stump, and back to park at the Buxton Inn where the busload would disembark for lunch.

Orville took over there, and depending on timing would walk them through, sometimes into the cellar and back up the narrow steps, and the deal was that I did the history, Orville did the ghosts. He loved the ghost stories, but he delighted in my assertions, thinly sourced, that Johnny Appleseed slept in the cellar when it was a livestock barn open to the rear courtyard in the years just after 1812. We agreed it couldn't be proven, but it was entirely likely.

Sometimes, the bus tours would be delayed, and we'd sit at the bar in the back or in the greenhouse and tell stories. Orville and Audrey had met at Bible college, he'd been a minister and she a music minister early in their marriage, then both teachers and he a principal. We'd talk about faith and education and ghosts and things past and things yet to come. He was always smiling, and I suspect his guests remembered him that way as well.

Perhaps their daughter Amy or some other family member has tried to do the math on how many guests they served over the years. Tens, even hundreds of thousands in sum, most of which saw either Audrey or Orville or both during their stay, let alone those who just came for a meal but wandered into the lobby and ended up talking to one or both.

The Orrs were the face of Granville to those thousands, carrying that image back to their homes, in Canada, across the United States, and not a few far beyond this continent. They represented us, and made us look good. I wonder now how many come to Granville because of a second- or third-hand sense of the hospitality we offer here, which is rooted in a visit someone made years ago to our place set apart.

Blessings on their memory, on Orville and Audrey and Melanie Orr, and the memories they made for so many of Granville as we hope to be at our very, very best.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he and Orville traded preacher stories, you can be sure. Tell him your memories of the Orrs at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 9-5-2025 & 9-12-2025

Faith Works 9-5-2025
Jeff Gill

Prayer and evangelism
___


One of the areas of pastoral care I think I'm worst at is teaching people how to pray.

Part of the problem may be that people are hoping for a simpler method than I am able to offer. They'd like a "30 days couch to 5K" kind of step by step program, and honestly I don't think there is such a thing.

People are different, and I really don't believe prayer is exactly the same for one person than another. Some of us pray better in motion than at rest, and I don't see anything in scripture to say that's a problem. Walking prayer has a long tradition in spirituality, and it's very different from having a chair and a cup of tea and quiet time with God in front of a window: which is a spiritual discipline I know has great value for some lovely people.

Prayer books, like the Anglican "Book of Common Prayer" going back to 1549 in England, have an honored place in many spiritual traditions. I do most frequently, I think, direct people to the Psalms in their Bibles; it's both hymnbook and prayer book, with a range of models for addressing God with one's heart and mind. Others strongly call for extemporaneous prayer as the most sincere, best form of personal prayer. I think those can be heartfelt, but I also know how "impromptu" prayers can turn into a familiar cycle of phrases and statements as unvarying as the pages of any old book.

One book I do often recommend, but not always (because people are different!), is a very slim volume called "Beginning to Pray." It was written in the 1970s in England by a Russian Orthodox archbishop, whose name is usually found in title and author listings as Anthony Bloom.

There's no method outlined, really, in "Beginning to Pray." Bloom tells stories about his journey to faith and spiritual practice, and the lessons come indirectly, inductively. His story is one of adventures only obliquely referenced as well, but he was a doctor before his ordination, serving in the French Resistance during World War II. He is familiar with tragedy and questions about God's purpose, even existence, which you'll also find I might add in the Psalms. But as a pastor and priest and bishop and finally a metropolitan in his tradition (something like a Catholic cardinal) he is still "Beginning to Pray."

I tried years ago to write a pamphlet for local church use modeled on this little book, an even shorter treatment I titled "Praying on Asphalt." But so much of prayer is like riding a bicycle; it's the kind of thing you learn by doing. You fall down a bit, there's no helping it, even with training wheels. And the real question becomes whether or not you get back up and try again after skinning a knee or scraping an elbow.

You don't need a teacher or coach or an archbishop to tell you that if your praying is just asking for stuff, you may not be approaching the whole matter in the right way. On the other hand, your relationship with a parent may not be all it can be if you just come to them when you need help, but that doesn't mean they don't still love you. They're just waiting for the relationship to develop and mature. That's pretty much what the Bible says God is thinking as we muddle along, calling only occasionally and perfunctorily when we need something.

All of which makes me think of evangelism, but we'll save that for another week.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still beginning to pray, too. Tell him what resources helped you learn to pray at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

===

[and for next week...]

===

Faith Works 9-12-2025
Jeff Gill

Twenty years of unbinding the gospel
___


We're coming up on twenty years since "Unbinding the Gospel" was published in 2006.

As is the case with research and analysis, which is at the heart of Martha Grace Reese's book, the data which is underneath "Unbinding the Gospel" is even older now, collected between 1999 and 2003. Martha Grace, or "Gay" as she's known to her friends, sat down and wrestled her data into the book on evangelism among mainline Christian churches over the next two years, calling and visiting in person when she could churches where the "e-word" was visibly, demonstrably being put into practice.

So as a friend and associate of Gay Reese, I know it was in 2005 she was putting the finishing touches on her study, a slim volume still very much in print. Evangelism is still interesting to many people, but intimidating. This book says it doesn't have to be.

Times have changed since 2005. We've had some overseas turmoil, domestic politics in an uproar, a global pandemic since then. But I think the fundamental insights of Gay's book still hold.

"Unbinding the Gospel" is not a cookbook with a simple set of steps for every church to follow. It's more a description of how some outstanding restaurants's finished products looked and tasted, with a look into the back of the house as to how the dishes were prepared and served.

One of the reactions — even strong reactions — we got as Gay Reese organized a group of us to help field test and roll out the process loosely described in the book, from church leaders in multiple denominations, was incredulity that there wasn't more of a step-by-step process outlined. The book, and some supporting volumes that came out in the next few years after 2006, offers a series of exercises out of which each congregation would develop its own unique approach to sharing the good news, the Gospel, with others in their area.

As I said last week about books on prayer, that's not a subject that really supports an approach like "30 days from couch to 5K" but that's what people are used to looking for. Give me a methodical model which will work for me like it does for almost anyone else. Judicatory heads, regional ministers, district superintendents, synod bishops, executive presbyters: they wanted a clear consistent model with predictable outcomes.

What Gay's research showed us, drawn mostly from a few hundred congregations out of some 30,000 in the initial data set, those who had shown the fruit, the outcomes of evangelism in their settings, was three characteristics they had in common. It wasn't just that they were new church plants, or of a single generational or ethnic cohort, or any of the other usual assumptions about evangelistically effective churches.

Three elements the evangelism-centered congregations had in common: a lively sense of the presence of God, a deep knowledge within the church of each other's faith stories, and prayer was a profound and persistent element of all they did. That's it. Those three things. Presence, personal faith stories, and prayer. And note: that's not about telling strangers your faith story. It was the context of how sharing faith stories within the fellowship was the apparent engine, the driver of how invitation and inclusion became norms for the evangelistically effective churches.

You can practice these things; I'm not sure you can teach them, exactly. This is why Anthony Bloom's thin volume, and Gay Reese's little book, both come to mind together for me. Like riding a bike, or sailing a boat, you really have to be willing to just jump on, jump in, and do it. Teaching just tells you in advance which rope to pull on, and that you'll inevitably end up overboard a few times.

But once you get moving, you'll be glad you did.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad he read both of these books. Tell him what's inspired you recently at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 at Threads or Bluesky.


Sociological study used for the book:

http://unbindingthegospel.com/documents/Wenger%20Reese%20Survey%20Report.pdf

Faith Works 8-29-2025

Faith Works 8-29-2025
Jeff Gill

Do you have a calling?
___


With Labor Day weekend, it's common for preachers to talk about vocation, which from the Latin is literally "calling," or how God speaks to us about what it is we are to do.

Some of us are still working on that one.

I'll be honest: I worry about how to talk to younger people about callings and vocations and God's best counsel for how to live your life. Believe it or not, my own vocation is not to be a contrarian, but often I feel like one. Or at least I wonder how what I want to say is being heard when there's loud voices speaking up for a different view, one I know anyone I'm speaking to or corresponding with is going to hear.

Writing is certainly one vocation that's spoken to me, but I've had many people ask me how to make a living at it, and my most common opening response is "you likely will not."

Quickly I would add: can you find outlets for your writing? Yes. Can you get paid for writing? Yes, for certain kinds in certain circumstances (and we will NOT be talking about how AI writes workaday prose at the drop of a return key, not today, but let that rest as a place marker for later).

Can writing be your calling? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Oh, so you can make a living at writing? This is where it gets sticky.

Karen Swallow Prior is a writer I've respected for years; she would probably like to note she's made her living as a professor. Keep that in mind, for sure. She has just come out with a book titled "You Have a Calling" which is short, small, pocketable, and a good gift to anyone of I would say any age wrestling with God and the question "what should I do when I grow up?" Full disclosure: I bought my own copy of the book, have given it away twice even before I got around to writing this review-ish column.

Karen points out that much of our contemporary love of saying things like "do what you love, the money will follow" or "follow your passion" has the awkward side effect of dismissing the experiences of centuries of faithful Christians — she writes, as do I, from that perspective — who none of them had the chance to look for work that was personally rewarding. They had to weed the rutabagas, churn the butter, and chase goats around the farmstead.

I feel a similar concern with the wider tone taken towards people looking at the workplace who hear advice to "do what you love." That's just not always possible, and it can feel denigrating to people who really don't have any choice. Maybe the clerk at checkout loves their view from the register and interacting with people all day, but many of them are paying the bills as best they can.

What you CAN do, though, is work hard to make space for doing, well, what you love. It may not be all that you do, it is very likely not to pay all the household bills, but you can almost certainly find a place in your life to do what you love even if in part, as a volunteer, as an amateur.

We live in an era of increasing professionalization of full time jobs, which I think exists even more awkwardly with "follow your passion." But you can ask yourself to be honest about your calling, where you feel most strongly led, and how you are making a life, which is the calling to which we all are led.

"You Have a Calling" opens this question up well in about 130 pages; if you try the book and have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear from you.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still growing up, too. Tell him what you wanted to be when you grew up, and how that's changed, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 8-28-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 8-28-2025
Jeff Gill

Summer's end, and new beginnings
___


Summer is over.

Many cultures, including indigenous ones to North America, consider the crossquarter -- midway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox -- to be the marker for the seasons. It was August 7th this year. Harvest time is already beginning, and will continue through the end of October.

Summer, to me, is a necklace with a string of occasional beads: there's the end of school & commencements, Memorial Day, Newark's Strawberry Festival, Cub Scout Day Camp, Granville's Fourth of July Street Fair, usually a quick vacation wedged in, either way trips to the Ohio State Fair and in the last five years the Indiana State Fair, all closing with the Hartford Fair.

With the last day of the fair, and the harness races which have been part of the state and county fairs since the mid-1800s, summer concludes. Some school districts have already started; high school band camps and athletic workouts ratcheted up to full practice weeks with Aug. 1, and the high school and college football seasons start before this month ends.

Summer is over, and a few moments of reflection around where we didn't go, what didn't get done, what needs to happen next spring before summer comes again. Many memories to sift, some muddled with similar summer events that occur and reoccur, like those harness races, all different, all the same.

There is a marvelous old engraving of the Great Circle Earthwork, on the boundary of Newark and Heath, which was from 1853 to 1933 the Licking County Agricultural Society's fairgrounds. The LCAS going bankrupt with the Great Depression is part of how that property stopped being a fairground, and turned into a park, now operated by the Ohio History Connection.

But for some eighty years it was a fairground and also within that period, an amusement park. In all seasons, there was also a racetrack within the ancient enclosure, mostly for harness racing, which you see in the Nineteenth Century engraving.

Then you go out to the Hartford Independent Fair and see horses and one-rider contraptions that could be riding right out of that old picture. In the midst of great change, there are things that have not. We still have a fair, we just share it with Knox and part of Delaware Counties; the horses have their lineages that race fans follow avidly, with today's trotters carrying the tradition on around the track. It's something I've never bet on, but I wouldn't miss it. Plus, I like to go to the last day of the Hartford Fair, because it brings the summer, for me, to a close.

We see there people we haven't run into for a year, unique to that setting; I also encounter there people I mostly know from other locations, but fairs and activities bring us together for that moment of "oh, right, you — hello!" We eat foods we may not consume again for another eleven months or so, but we'll pursue sweet corn as long as we can into August.

Summer's end, and fall's beginning. This, to me, is the true new year season, the time in August & September when the world truly seems to re-set. January? Eh. Champagne if you must. But as the last bugle "call to post" plays, I'm ready for a fresh start, as the crops come in, and the leaves turn.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready for autumn, if not the autumnal equinox. Tell him how you prepare for September at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 8-22-2025

Faith Works 8-22-2025
Jeff Gill

A journey with few familiar landmarks
___


My sister and I spent some good time with our mother this past week. I was in and out a couple of times during the day, tending to some of the practical matters of having a family member in a memory care facility.

We are past the point where I worry about her seeing me walk past and recognizing me. Unless I walk directly up to her and announce who I am, she's not going to see me.

Mom is one of the more verbal, and social individuals among the forty or so residents of the place where she now lives. Verbal as in she talks, but even when you own a copy of the guidebook, what she says doesn't track well. There are broken signposts of familiar stories which still stick up from her monologues, but we're past the point where you can gently nudge or fill in a story to get her back onto solid ground.

When we come in and address her, she will still recognize us with a clear prompt as to who we are, up to a point. She will launch into a story whose fragments are related to one of us, and if we point that out, she laughs and says "no, no, not you, one of the original boys." Free gift: if you need a band name, "The Original Boys" is available.

She used to like it when one of us would get out a phone to take a picture; now, she just can't make sense of what we're doing, so it's catch as catch can if we get her looking. And the incomprehension continues to spread in weird & sometimes awful ways… but she is consistently, almost always, unreservedly happy. Griefs & grudges that used to consume her are gone. This is a blessing.

I'm not making the best of a bad situation here, I'm quite serious. To see my mother as happy as she's been over the last few months has been a surprise I did not expect, as much as I've been familiar as a minister over the years with convalescent homes and memory units and Alzheimer's as it erodes away memory and personality.

Memory loss means she generally doesn't know who I am, but she's if anything even happier to see me. There are things she used to talk about to our frustration, burdens and sorrows which I would have loved to have taken from her, but she had a long-standing tendency to pick back up whenever she could one of those jagged rocks, and would pitch it into whatever conversation we were having.

They're gone. She's not bothered by them anymore. They've been left behind. There's still a shadow of those past events that shows up at times, because they're such a part of her life that as long as there's still anything left of her, we'll hear a mention of them, but they don't dominate the conversation.

She's happy to tell you her stories, and her pleasure in doing so is more obvious for the shadows that are gone. The fact that her stories don't make much sense anymore? That's a trade I'm surprised to be happy to make. What have we wanted for her, after all, except that she could be happy: and now she is. It doesn't quite look like what we might have imagined, but that's where she's still a unique individual, even if without some of the memories we assumed had to be there for her to be her.

There are blessings on this journey, you just have to make sure to look closely for them. They can be hard to miss, but they're there. And those blessings make me wonder what I need to be forgetting, of my own free will. It might be a good thing to remember, this forgetting.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's aware that forgetting might be a better way to remember some things. Tell him what you've forgotten at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky. 

Faith Works 8-15-2025

Faith Works 8-15-2025
Jeff Gill

How to see beyond your horizon
___


What do we see when we look at the horizon from a comfortable place?

It's a distant spot that we may visit, but it can remain just barely in sight for quite a while if we aren't moving. Especially if we have no reason to move.

That point looks a little different if we're already in motion. It might be the perspective focus up ahead where the sides of the road and the telephone poles alongside all come together and meet where earth and sky converge. We watch it, because we'll be there soon.

Off to the sides, we might look around, especially if we're coming up to an intersection; our driver's ed teacher is in our heads reminding us to check the mirrors to look back, and see who's coming up behind.

But if we're on a pleasant porch, with a wide view around, and heat shimmering up the hills, the horizon is something that's just part of the surroundings.

One of the things Rev. Dr. Lee H. Butler Jr. made me think about at a conference I recently attended was how getting too comfortable in a particular spot can be a form of narcissism.

There could be discomfort or sorrow or tragedy over the horizon, or even around the corner from us, but if we can't see it, there's a human tendency (dare we call it sin?) to assume if we're fine, so is everyone else. And that if we're satisfied in a particular place, then that's where we're supposed to be.

For churches, the comfort and security of our faith perspective is something that can be very appealing. Folks come to worship to draw on those reserves of settledness, to borrow a cup of confidence, to find a solid rock on which to stand. That's true for individuals and families looking to a future that's coming at them fast, hoping a faith community perspective can help them know they're in the right place, or moving in the right direction.

Theological narcissism is a warning Dr. Butler offered to us as church leaders. He was talking about our assumptions about ourselves as being on the right path when a quick look around would tell us we might be on the wrong path. His cautions reminded me of my own religious tradition's Preston Taylor, an African American preacher and leader in the late 1800s & early 1900s who said in 1917 "…if the white brother can include in his religious theory and practice the colored people as real brothers, he will have avoided the heresy of all heresies."

You might say you can think of worse heresies, and that would be an interesting discussion for us to have. But increasingly I see his point, focused through the warnings of "theological narcissism" Dr. Butler shared: when we see other people as lesser in God's sight, or of lesser value among humanity, based on any external or incidental quality you can think of, skin color included, you've bent the needle on the compass of your theology to where it won't get you anywhere accurately.

Much of the church in America today has been sitting in a comfortable place, not really noticing where we're going, and we've been in a moving vehicle, not on a pleasant veranda. Suddenly, we look up and the neighborhood looks different, the people are unfamiliar, and we're not sure where we go from here.

The next step is to get off the wagon and look honestly at ourselves and where we are. And realize, for most of us, we're right where God wants us to be. Now what? Maybe the direction we need to go is to be more fully where we are, as life is, to the people we can reach right here.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's on a journey himself. Tell him where you're going at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 8-14-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 8-14-2025
Jeff Gill

Shifting silt and scenes sliding astray
___


If you haven't heard of the Sultana, it's not because Doug Stout, and Dan Fleming, and Chris Evans, and a number of us local historians haven't tried to let you know about it.

On April 27, 1865, after the Civil War was generally over, and as the nation's attention was focused on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and his funeral procession heading for Springfield, Illinois had only made it to Cleveland, Ohio — on that date, a side-wheel steamboat on the Mississippi River, built for a maximum 376 passengers, was carrying at least 2,100 soldiers, most of them recently released from Confederate captivity. 

Seven miles north of Memphis its steam boilers exploded, ultimately killing over 1,800 passengers, by either searing steam in the initial blast, or by way of the still frigid springtime waters of the mighty river, to this day the worst maritime disaster in the United States.

The Titanic sinking in 1912, some 47 years later, killed about 1,500. The steamboat Sultana's sinking killed 20% more people, but it was a footnote at the end of the Civil War's carnage. With something at or over 620,000 deaths North and South, about 2% of the nation's population, another 1,800 dead in the wake of Lincoln's death just didn't get too many headlines.

The released prisoners who filled the Sultana's decks were mostly Midwesterners, a majority of them from Ohio. They had been held in Cahaba prison outside of Selma, Alabama, and the even more notorious Andersonville prison camp near Atlanta, Georgia. These Union prisoners had been brought to a transfer camp outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi for release to their homes. The federal government was offering $2.75 per enlisted man and $8 per officer to steamboats who would take them north, so steamboats were interested in loading up as many released prisoners as possible.

We're sure of William Albert Norris in Granville's Maple Grove Cemetery, and of Daniel Lugenbeal in Perryton Cemetery, as Licking County survivors of the Sultana disaster. How many Licking Countians died in the waters of the Mississippi on the dark night of April 27, 1865?

Mansfield, Ohio has a Sultana marker saluting some 73 residents of that city who died on the Sultana, and Richland County claims 101 citizens who did not make it home due to the disaster. Licking County is not so clear, but even if behind the Mansfield area, it probably wasn't too far off.

Marion, Arkansas has a new Sultana Disaster Museum. East of that town, you can meander down gravel roads to the levee today, alongside of the Mississippi. Even now, the site of where the burnt wreckage of the Sultana came to rest is in a backwater, a bayou, an oxbow of the Mississippi River far to the east. The channel of the Mississippi River in 1865 is today a side stream, a western addition to the larger main channel. The site of the explosion of the over-loaded boilers was miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, and the last resting place of the wreckage is now on the Arkansas side of the river, located in 1982 near the complex historic location of Mound City, Arkansas.

Not all history can be solidly located. But it is interesting to look to curving streams and bent bottomlands, and think about the impact in history of those deaths, and that ending atop the Civil War's ending, as we continue to seek that elusive thing called closure.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad he went to the Sultana wreck site, even if he couldn't really see it. Tell him about obscure successes you've known at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 8-8-2025

Faith Works 8-8-2025
Jeff Gill

When the Bible Belt comes unbuckled
___


"Is this a no-sin zone?"

That was the question Rev. Dr. Lee H. Butler Jr. asked at a conference I just attended in Memphis, in the shadow of the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid, next to the American Nile.

Dr. Butler is a seminary president, recently dean, with wide ranging ecumenical credentials as well as his academic work in history, psychology, and pastoral theology. With all of that background, he was asking us on a hot July day alongside the Mississippi River to consider the images of ancient empires, such as Egypt, and the social context we are called to preach to and minister in today.

"We are in the heart of the Bible Belt here, almost at the very buckle of its embrace," Dr. Butler said. Especially in the early years of Memphis and the Mississippi valley, across the legendary Delta bottomlands extending south from here towards New Orleans, Christianity was pre-eminent. Christian teaching was dominant, the (Protestant) Bible at the center of the culture, ministers and congregations the heart of civil affairs, and well past the Civil War into the modern era it has been Christian teachings which stood to the fore of the schoolhouse, the courthouse, even in the storehouse and into the jail house.

Yet it is also an area where infidelity and illegitimate birth, abortion and poverty, robbery and murder along with illiteracy and illness are present at record levels. What's wrong here, asked Dr. Butler? If the Christian church is allowed to be a dominant influence, as it has been in so many ways over the last two centuries, shouldn't this be a no-sin zone? "Is this a no-sin zone?" he asked, piercingly?

So what went wrong? Dr. Butler suggested there was a flaw in our theology. It could be, he allowed, that Christianity if practiced might not reduce sin, but he did not believe that was true. Faith in God and trust in Christ should reduce, if not completely eliminate sin. If the church was largely in control of a culture, and sin abounded, there is a flaw, even a heresy at work. He called his primary suspect "theological narcissism."

Theological narcissism, Dr. Butler said, is an assumption that one's own self is closer to God than someone different than one's self. And I trust I do no violence to his thesis to fill in from a theologian of a century ago but just two hundred miles to the east, in Nashville.

In my religious tradition's history, there are few figures more amazing in range and scope of their work and thought than Preston Taylor (1849-1931). As a leader among African American churches in the Restoration Movement, he served in the Civil War, had success in constructing railroads, and founded a funeral home and cemetery in Nashville, having served as an elder and preacher in his church from age 20. He formed the National Christian Missionary Convention for African American Disciples of Christ churches and preachers in 1917.

In his inaugural address to the convention, which he served as President for fourteen years, he proclaimed to the wider church "…if the white brother can include in his religious theory and practice the colored people as real brothers, he will have avoided the heresy of all heresies."

The heresy of all heresies. I thought of Rev. Taylor in 1917 Nashville as I listened to Dr. Butler in 2025 Memphis, and about the theological narcissism he warned us about. It was this blindness, this lack of fellow feeling, this absence of basic justice, this heresy of all heresies, which explained why the Bible Belt failed to become a no-sin zone.

Our faith can change human hearts and transform the world, but our cultural barriers and exclusions can block how that faith flows and moves people. By the banks of the mighty Mississippi, I found myself thinking about how we divert the flow of grace, and let sin flourish.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in avoiding heresy and promoting justice. Tell him what flows through your gardens at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 8-1-2025

Faith Works 8-1-2025
Jeff Gill

Theological narcissism and other human errors in the church
___


Last month I made a pilgrimage to Memphis, where I encountered a variety of experiences, from yes, Graceland on the southern edge of the city (saw it, didn't take the tour), and the Lorraine Motel just south of downtown, whose story requires a space all its own, but it was a moving experience in its own right.

But I was there for a church gathering of my religious tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). They aren't every year, I ain't getting any younger, and I had an assortment of reasons for wanting to attend, even if in part. I got there late, but made the most of the time I had.

You need to be open to the Holy Spirit in events like this, because with thousands present and hundreds of opportunities in any given day, there's the official schedule and there's what you do with it.

However, I went to a keynote almost against my better judgment, and was glad I did so. Sometimes those formal, official opportunities to learn are so over-prepared, so forced and managed, they become much less than they could be. When Dr. Lee H. Butler, Jr. spoke, it was all I could have hoped for; in some ways, that half hour or so might have been sufficient reason for all my time and expense involved in getting to Memphis, to hear that sermon-slash-lecture.

Dr. Butler is now President of Iliff School of Theology; that's a United Methodist theological school, where he is an American Baptist ordained clergyperson. My previous awareness of him was as Vice-President and Academic Dean for Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma; we overlapped one year as I began teaching for them in their online certificate program, but he left for Iliff in 2023 before I could visit the campus in person (which I still haven't done!).

Plus before Phillips, he taught at Chicago Theological Seminary, which is a seminary affiliated with the United Church of Christ (UCC), a tradition with which my own faith story is deeply entwined. Dr. Butler is a very ecumenical Christian teacher, with special emphasis on the traditions I'm closest to.

He opened with an observation that at least in part had occurred to most of us. I drove up to the convention center dimly aware of, but still startled to see in person, a giant oddly illuminated pyramid across the street. It is apparently two-thirds the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza, a nod to the Egyptian roots of the name Memphis, and now hosts a Bass Pro Shop megastore inside.

Dr. Butler turned to the deeper roots of why a Memphis was here in Tennessee, and the Mississippi River flowing past, known more often in earlier days as "the American Nile." And he began to unpack in detail the history of the American Nile, the image of empire in monumental form, the story of the Deep South which opens downstream in the Delta region, and of course about slavery, and the imperfect end of the era of slavery into the reality of a century of lynchings and terror and injustice, still hanging in the humid air of the river valley, weighed down by the heat of the sun and depth of the nighttime.

All of which he turned, slowly, steadily, into a calm, dispassionate analysis of theological narcissism, and how we struggle in every generation to turn our eyes toward God, even as we have a tendency to make everything about ourselves, our needs, our wants. And he broke it down into some very basic, simple problems.

I hope you can return next week and allow me to share them with you.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been ecumenical more often than not himself. Tell him how you've learned about your faith while on the road at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-31-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 7-31-2025
Jeff Gill

August is a month filled with promise, and heat
___


For anyone who played football in years past, there's something about the beginning of August which evokes a very particular memory.

Two-a-days.

Generally, you couldn't start two-a-days until August 1, which just added to their exquisite torture. They usually ran for two weeks, then eased back into one practice a day after school started (but the single one would last longer, a different sort of challenge). It was also the case that the heat and humidity of two-a-days tested everyone to the maximum, helping the coaches whittle down the roster simply by having some prospective players not come back on Monday of week two.

For those of us who did return, there was the battle for a starting role, or a position (or both). But that first week of two-a-days was a physical and also psychological, even spiritual challenge.

Why am I here? Is this really what I want to do? Is the short-term pain worth the long-term gain? These are questions that can rattle around inside your helmet while you run the drills, do the wind sprints, hit the blocking sled, start the full contact practices. Maybe I'm done here . . . maybe if I put my all into this next set of over-unders, the coach will notice me . . . maybe the coach hates me. Lots of questions.

Some get answered by the end of the two weeks, some never do, except inside your own head. Since you have to live there, you need to sort your own answers out. Maybe you should have been starting tackle; perhaps you could have been a running back and not a cornerback. Only one person will be starting quarterback, which gets lots of sideline conversation and debate in the stands, but there are forty or more dramatic narratives playing out inside each player. What am I doing this for, and how can I find my place on this team? And when can we stop running . . .

You may compare boot camp to two-a-days, but you are much younger when you start playing offense and defense on the gridiron, so those memories may last even longer, go deeper, at least as deep as basic training in the armed services will mark you.

My four years of football were just on this side of the divide my father never quite understood; in his day, not drinking water was a sign of strength, and if the coach whistled everyone to the fountains, it was a mark of toughness, or so they thought, for you to stand to one side and decline a spot in line. He took some convincing at the new normal, which was coaches lining us up regularly to drink up, and standing over us to make sure everyone did. The idea that it was unwise and unhealthy to drink less water on brutally hot days never quite set well with my dad.

We've learned a few things. Added a few more bars to his one bar helmet; now the concussion prevention technology makes helmets safer than the ones I wore. Football gets debated as a social presence and a youth activity; I just know when the calendar turns to August 1, I think "time for two-a-days, better go run a few laps to get ready."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he was a truly untalented football player. Tell him your memories of summer practices at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 7-25-2025

Faith Works 7-25-2025
Jeff Gill

Endorsements are a matter worth some ethical consideration
___


Recently there was a notice out of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) modifying their guidelines around political endorsements, or so some claimed.

I'm reading all this more cautiously; you don't want to hear the whole history of the Johnson Amendment, which goes back to when ol' Lyndon Baines Johnson was in the U.S. Senate, and in 1954 was part of an effort to limit how non-profits in general and churches in particular could endorse particular candidates.

It hasn't been used much, but the existence of this guideline was said to have a "chilling effect" on political speech by clergy in their pulpits.

What has changed is a court filing by the IRS, and an indication that they do not intend to apply the Johnson Amendment the same way, with the new understanding that when a preacher or church leader "in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith" this is a conversation within the family, and something that comes under free speech.

Hmmm. Lots of wiggle room there in multiple directions.

What I'd say as a preacher over many decades is that I've never endorsed a particular candidate, or electoral option, from the pulpit. Not because I was worried about the implications for our tax-exempt status, but because it feels like it's on the wrong side of an ethical issue for me.

Let's try a different angle. It's well known that there is a general exemption for clergy around "confessions" and what we can be forced to share about what's said when a parishioner confesses a sinful act to us in our ministerial role.

Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that; some religious traditions have a "seal of the confessional" as a principle of their faith, many of us do not. Legally, if you're in the latter camp, you can't claim immunity from interrogation on the basis of a religious restriction you don't have, though I suspect law enforcement or prosecutors would go a long way around to try and avoid requiring a minister to testify about something said to them in confidence in their official role.

Yet we are all mandatory reporters; if a minister becomes aware of abuse or neglect, under Ohio law we're expected to report it. If clergy-penitent privilege applies to you, there may still be an expectation of reporting what you've observed, even if you first learned about abuse or neglect through a confessional disclosure. At a certain point, you have to consider what your ethical obligation is, and do what is right. When two rights conflict (protecting the sanctity of confession versus protecting children or dependent adults) you need to have a solid ethical framework to reason from.

Which brings me back to politics. I don't see myself ever endorsing a candidate because it simply is too far over a line of subordinating the truth claims of my faith to placing my preaching role in service of a particular office seeker. As you may have heard, politicians can disappoint you as time goes by. You may agree with them on many things, then find out later you loaned your credibility and the stature of your witness to a bent reed, a broken bough.

I have political opinions. Lots of them. They're easy to find! But not in the pulpit. I'm going to step out of that place of privilege and responsibility before I tell you what I think about the race for dog catcher.

Ethically, not legally, that's what appears to me to be the right place to stand.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has so many opinions they can trip him up sometimes. Tell him yours at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 7-18-2025

Faith Works 7-18-2025
Jeff Gill

All is not lost, even when it's gone


___


Already, it feels foolish and self-indulgent to say this, but here goes.

There's a feeling of deep personal loss haunting me. It's over the impending demolition of Tom Sawyer's Island at Walt Disney World in Florida.

Actually, not just the destruction of the island, but of the Rivers of America attraction as a whole, including the Liberty Belle riverboat ride, the Tom Sawyer rafts, and Fort Langhorn with its escape tunnel to the riverside back to the barrel bridge and Harper's Mill. All of it is going to be taken down to build a "Cars" themed area as Piston Peak National Park. No river. No island.

Arguments about Disney changing rides and architecture are as old as Disneyland (c. 1955). I can spin this reflection around change, or loss. Change is an ongoing point of debate, because most of us don't like it, mostly, but I'm thinking more in terms of just the loss of something special, something personally meaningful, something valued that's now gone.

As I was thinking about how I wanted to say this, another memory burned to cinders: the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. If you've never been there, I am sorry. You will never see the North Rim I've known; I've been trying to get back for years, but I won't get there either. My family has some very special memories about that unique place, which is different from the much more visited South Rim. It's a thousand feet and more higher, open a shorter stretch of the year, and the whole Kaibab Plateau is a place apart.

But the North Rim's Grand Canyon Lodge, the dining room and viewing terraces and associated cabins and campground and camp store, are all gone. A wildfire flared up, swerved, and in a series of unexpected events was almost all destroyed last weekend.

No lives were lost. Given the size and violence of the loss, that's amazing. I am glad, truly, that no risks were taken to try and save these remarkable timber structures with so much history and memories built into them, such that someone died in the attempt.

And at Walt Disney World, there's nothing life and death there, either. Some executives looked at visitor surveys, time spent and money expended, and made a business decision. Delete Jeff's fond memories, and build something more kids will clamor to visit and convince families to come spend thousands of dollars. Tom Sawyer's Island was a throwback, a quiet place in the middle of a busy park, an almost passive attraction with cool tunnels going effectively nowhere, but interestingly. It was atmosphere, with no buzz to it. For some of us, that was the attraction. To a park manager, that may have been the problem.

Tom Sawyer's Island is being torn down; Grand Canyon Lodge and the North Rim camp store burned down. The church I grew up in was demolished decades ago now; my childhood home is sold and was gutted and renovated. Stuff happens. Grow up, some of you are saying. Get over it!

I know that's all true. I just met an old friend I see at church conferences not often, and he told me "I miss my hair." Things change. This is part of life as we know it. In fact, we seek some change: weight loss, increased fitness, developing knowledge and wisdom and deeper insight. Getting smarter is a change. Going on vacation is a change, for that matter.

We like the change we want; the changes we resist are the ones we call bad. Here is where Buddhism suggests all attachments bring suffering; as a Christian, I'm looking for a middle ground. Tom Sawyer's Island and the North Rim hinted to me something of the eternal, of Heaven itself in temporary, earthly form. My intention is to be thankful for the glimpses they gave me, and to stay mindful of how the only enduring good is yet to come.

I'll still miss them.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still got the Haunted Mansion. Tell him what you miss in this life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-17-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 7-17-2025
Jeff Gill

Just to belabor the obvious
___




With summer in full swing, and the Fourth of July behind us, it's worth a glance on down the road… to the summer of 2026.

If you've been at almost any public event in the last month or two, you've probably picked up on the fact that we have some big events coming in celebration of 250 years since 1776, and that significant Fourth of July from which our subsequent celebrations spring.

America 250-Ohio and its state executive director Todd Kleismit have been around Licking County and Granville helping us get ready; our friends in the Daughters as well as the Sons of the American Revolution are excited and full of big plans themselves.

Obviously, the focal point of all these "America 250" plans is July 4, 2026. In Granville, Ohio if you ask "will there be anything going on for the Fourth of July?" the answer is "you have got to be kidding me." Of course there is: Granville's Fourth of July Celebration, an annual street fair, fireworks, and parade which Granville Kiwanis have been presenting since 1964.

My point here is not just to toot the horn of Granville Kiwanis: for one thing, I'm a member. It would be unseemly.

However, I've been around the discussions for the America 250-Ohio planning enough to know that the question in many parts of the state, or even elsewhere for Licking County, is "who will help us put on a big deal for 250 years of American independence?" Not everywhere is there a long tradition of a major series of events for the Fourth of July. In Granville, it's become easy to sort of take it for granted.

Trust me, there's gonna be a big event in Granville for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Simply because there's always a big event for the Fourth of July! We won't hold back in 2026. The county effort to participate in America 250-Ohio means there will be even more than usual going on, all through the year, which will help make July 4, 2026 even more special.

This just makes me want even more to point out how fortunate we are in Granville to have the history and traditions around the Fourth of July which make it an event people come from long distances to experience along with us. In the summer of 1806 when Granville was just getting started, the early records indicate "young America" observed the Fourth by using gunpowder to blow up stumps, which shows some things never change. Speeches were made, and festivities have been observed in every year since. It's just had a particular shape and form since 1964.

As a participant in the effort, though, I want to note here how not every town or community can pull this kind of program off. The banner we used to put up, and the tagline we still have, is a laconic "Just Another Granville Kiwanis 4th of July Celebration." As in "yeah, we did it before, and we'll do it again." With Granville Rotary helming the Firecracker Five, and the Granville Arts Boosters committing violence against lemon halves, and the GHS Football team tending the trash and hoisting bleacher sections, and our Marching Blue Aces and 4-H Band, plus the various Scouting units doing their parts… it is a complex web of interlocking mutually supportive efforts which take both leadership and participation to pull off.

Or as is often said: the planning for 2026 is already started. And it's gonna be great!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's proud to be a Kiwanian, especially around the Fourth. Tell him what you want to see happen in 2026 at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 7-11-2025

Faith Works 7-11-2025
Jeff Gill

On having watched fireworks
___




You can post your pictures of fireworks on social media, but will anyone really look at them?

We all know fireworks on a screen, TV or computer or phone, are not at all like watching them in person. Yet I know each year walking to the field where we set up our chairs and wait for dark to fall and the fireworks to rise, I say to myself "this year I'm not taking any fireworks photos" and then I do anyhow… and post them later.

Call it a tradition of sorts.

What I do know for sure is that the experience of watching fireworks is something that passes by, that you try to catch with your attention, your focus, even as they flare and fade. Taking pictures is a reminder of this, as you see a certain stage of explosion and expansion but your picture tends to be a beat or two too soon, or a little too late. The photograph is a discrete moment, but the experience is a passage, a flow.

Which ends. The boom followed by the expanding arcs and sudden flashes then sizzle downwards and drizzle back into darkness. They come (ooooh!) and go (ahhhh!). Some of the big city fireworks you see on television I wonder about, where the show is a constant fusillade of multiple shots all overlaid, one to another then another and boom then another and on and on. How do you get the sense of the pinnacle of the explosion from the eruption before to the dissolution that follows? It's just boom boom boom boom and your eye and mind can't quite catch up from one fireworks shell to the next.

This seems to be a classic case of how less really can be more. The grand finale is a fireworks classic, but if the whole show is finale, are you really getting more fireworks experience, or in a peculiar way, less?

There's also an awareness I know others have along with me. While there are more events than formerly with a closing fireworks show, from Disney World evenings to Denison commencement eves, in general you get about one live fireworks a show a year, if that. Not everyone goes to see the fireworks, even if it feels like it trudging back into Granville from Wildwood Park, or waiting in traffic in Heath heading out of the parking lots, let alone the boats piled up near the ramp at Buckeye Lake. For all of us in sum who attend them, there are some who opt out.

What I think as an annual attender, though, is that I've got about twenty more fireworks to see, give or take. Looking at my family longevity and general patterns of mobility as one ages, it's reasonable to ballpark my remaining budget of firework shows at two dozen for the most, possibly less. Twenty sounds like quite a few yet, but it's like what a twenty dollar bill used to feel like, but once broken tends to vanish quickly. So too with more fireworks shows behind me than ahead.

When I was a Scout at summer camp, the director in the closing campfire told us to look at the sparks rising, as the logs shifted in the huge pile at the center of the firebowl. Some rose a short distance and turned, twisted, and faded; others kept climbing up an updraft, ascending far overhead. He would talk about those sparks as representing us, some achieving great heights, others perhaps sputtering and fizzling out early. His point obviously was to exhort us to be those towering sparks, even as we all warily watched the ones with less aspiration, but wandered over towards our seats glowing brightly, until they didn't.

Interestingly, what's endured is that memory. Of those sparks, high or low, of the story by firelight, and other faces not all of whom are still with us. As well with fireworks past, long faded, but bright in recollection, with faces upturned, and even all the oohs and ahhhs still echoing decades later.

The fireworks are over, but the experience of their passing somehow lasts.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's content with one fireworks show a year (your mileage may vary). Tell him what annual events you value at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 7-4-2025

Faith Works 7-4-2025
Jeff Gill

If you're pursuing happiness, it might be in Micah
___


There's a key line of the Declaration of Independence, whose passage by we mark on the Glorious Fourth of July, now 249 years later: how the people of these United States "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Thomas Jefferson was going for a more poetic phrase with "the pursuit of Happiness," when many if not most of his initial readers would have known the triad of "Life, Liberty and…" was phrased differently in John Locke's influential writings, filtered through the French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu, as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property."

Clank, goes the phrase. That word! Property? It's like Lucy telling Santa Claus what she wants for Christmas was "real estate." Happiness is much more inspiring, and surely more universal a human impulse?

Jefferson was very much in keeping with Montesquieu, though, in seeing a rational shift from "property" to "happiness." They saw in Locke's seminal treatises a case being made for the chief work of government to be the protection of basic rights, starting with the right to life — so even a monarch could not justly take a life merely on a whim — which points toward the right to liberty, which gives rise to "habeas corpus" rights we trace back to the Magna Carta of 1215 A.D. (which is now honored in the chief courtroom of the Licking County Courthouse) and beyond, to restrictions placed on the king in 1166, limiting a ruler's ability to imprison their subjects.

So a right to life, sure; a right to freedom, unless with specific reasons why they should lose it, of course. But a right to pursue owning property?

It's a logical next step, though. If even the rights of kings are limited as to taking life away, or taking freedoms away, then there is surely some kind of right for a subject, or citizen, to own what is theirs without fear of the nobility just riding in and taking it. In fact, say Locke and Montesquieu and Jefferson, there is an affirmative obligation on the part of a just government, of whatever sort, to protect property rights, so that a worker can enjoy the fruits of their labors.

George Washington most loved quoting a particular verse of the Bible: Micah 4:4. He refers to it in one form or another some fifty times in his personal correspondence: "But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid."

"None shall make them afraid." Washington, too, saw the role of government as being the bulwark, the shield against misuse and abuse of authority or opportunism to prevent people from the simple enjoyment of their property. Why else have laws and government? So that a person who simply has a grapevine on a hillside and a fig tree near their front door has no need to fear that their efforts can be stolen or appropriated without due cause.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of… a life that is free from the impositions of the powerful, in which you can enjoy the fruits of your labors. King George III was too loose and indifferent about how his government took away property or liberty or even lives, and so the Founders on July 4, 1776 declared that such an unjust government was no government at all.

They declared their independence from it, and set before themselves a challenge to do better, to be a government which respects the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of… happiness, in the most basic of forms, the kind of happiness we have to earn, but which should never be taken away from us.

That is what we continue to pursue.



Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's enjoyed looking up a few of Washington's usages of Micah 4:4. Tell him your favorite verses at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 6-27-2025

Faith Works 6-27-2025
Jeff Gill

1700 years of religious guidance, plus a little controversy
___




Irenaeus and Tertullian in the very early Christian church talk about a "regula fidei," a "rule of faith" which was a statement of common belief the community could use to explain to new folk what their faith was in essence.

We have pieces, fragments of those old rules or symbols or statements (all terms used in Latin and Greek for these confessional statements). On one level, they all stem from the most basic statements of faith for Christianity: Simon Peter's confession in Mark 8 "You are the Christ," or Matthew 16's "You are the Christ, the son of the Living God" made at Caesarea Philippi, or Martha's statement in John 11:27 "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."

In a sense, "Jesus is Lord" (as Paul sums up in I Corinthians 12) is an elegant statement of faith which may, in some senses, be enough.

It didn't take long for the early church, as it spread throughout the Roman world, to run into complications. And complications lead to more complicated answers. The "symbol of faith" or confessional statements got longer, and themselves disputed.

Constantine becomes emperor over the Roman Empire at York, England in 306, defeats his primary opposition in 312, and in 313 issues the Edict of Milan requiring the toleration of Christianity… just a few years after the intense persecution of the faith by the emperors preceding Constantine, peaking in 303. Soon, the new emperor is suggesting that Christianity can be a new source of unity across the Mediterranean and beyond.

But he's disturbed at learning there are disputes within the recently beleaguered church, with some leaders or bishops disagreeing with others on the nature of Christ, and how God is at work in the person of Jesus. Given his military and imperial background, it's no surprise Constantine says "we should fix this" and calls the bishops together for a council, in a suburb of the city he had decided in 324 to declare as a "New Rome," what had been Byzantium and would now be Constantinople, today known as Istanbul.

So it was in 325 there was a council of bishops in Nicaea, just east of the new capital; some 300 bishops were present, plus a thousand or more priests and deacons and imperial officials, including Constantine himself for at least parts of it (though he did not ask to be allowed to vote, since he was not a bishop, and by some accounts not yet baptized).

Ultimately, the council of Nicaea came together in late May of 325, deliberated and discussed through June, and left by mid-July to attend formal events in Constantinople. During that time, they developed the "rule of faith" or creed we still call the Nicene Creed.

Less than 200 words in English translation from the Latin original, it is a succinct statement about what the Christian church held in common, mostly about the nature and role of Jesus. It is not a trinitarian document per se, focusing more on the subject of Christology, or the theology of who Christ is and his relationship to God. Somewhat infamously, the third person of the Trinity is given just five words as almost an afterthought: "And in the Holy Spirit."

I come from a non-creedal tradition: not opposed to the Nicene Creed, but not using it as a test of fellowship. There is also the Apostles' Creed, which many traditions use somewhat interchangeably with the Nicene, whose history may or may not go back as far. I'll leave that for scholars.

What Christians do have here is a testimony: a witness to the consensus they found in 325 A.D., now 1,700 years ago this June. All but two bishops could agree to the words we still share to try and explain to those new to our faith what it is we believe about a subject that is deep, and ancient, and we would affirm as true.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still wrestling with creeds himself. Tell him how you see tests of fellowship in church life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-3-2025

Getting a little ahead for the July holidays...

Notes from my Knapsack 7-3-2025
Jeff Gill

Democracy and other old habits
___




249 years since the Second Continental Congress in a hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia put down on paper their reasons for declaring the colonies to be a group of states, united even, independent from Great Britain and her monarch.

It's reliably reported that George III's descendant, King Charles III (his great-grandmother's great-grandfather was George III), does not hold this against us. Much. Which is kind of him.

It was actually some years later, in 1787 as the Constitution was being finalized, that a lady not allowed inside the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall for those 1776 events), named Elizabeth Willing Powel had a question for Benjamin Franklin: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" She wasn't being sarcastic, she just wasn't sure what the Constitutional Convention had decided upon.

Franklin's response has entered American legend: "A republic, if you can keep it."

That semi-sardonic closer, "if you can keep it," has echoed through a dozen generations or so. Can we keep it? Franklin was saying to Mrs. Powel that the Constitutional Convention had not chosen monarchy as our form of American continuity, but if we want our governance to be done as a democratic republic, we're going to have to keep working at it. Working, in order to keep it.

The historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt perhaps helps Franklin make his point with her aphorism: "In every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them 'children.'"

Children come in a variety of sizes, and even ages in a way. Franklin and Arendt are just reminding us it takes an ongoing teaching effort to maintain an idea, let alone a complex interlocking set of ideas, in common currency.

The American experiment is based on democracy, but of a particular sort. We don't vote on everything, even if the vote of the people, or the "demos" is at the foundation of how we intend our government to operate. We don't have town meetings to decide on war powers or the amount of inside millage. We ask elected representatives to handle the "public things," the "res publica" if you'll forgive a little Latin, on our behalf. In a democratic republic, we vote in people to exercise wisdom and discernment, knowing if they govern too far off the popular will, we can vote again to remove them.

Polling isn't in the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence. I think the Founders would have been baffled by how much time we spend politically thinking about poll results, but they would have understood the basic concept. They knew in their day that maybe 15-20% of the Thirteen Colonies were Loyalists, wanting to maintain historic and legal ties to the British Crown, and maybe 15-20% were avidly for independence.

That meant 60-70% of the new United States were "yeah, okay, whatever" about independence. If it worked out for them, they were for it; if things went pear-shaped, they might change their minds. To govern meant to find a path where a working consensus could hold.

"If you can keep it." The challenge continues in 2025. To teach what democracy is and isn't, why a republic operates the way it does, and to vote (and sometimes impeach, or otherwise let elected officials know where they need to be wary) for the elected officials who will govern wisely and well. I think we can keep it, but the question will remain.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's found democracy in a republic to be a neat trick. Tell him how you see it working at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 6-20-2025

Faith Works 6-20-2025
Jeff Gill

Longest days, shortest nights, time in balance
___


"To stand still" is the literal meaning of solstice, with "sol" added to the standing stillness, as the sun's apparent movement on the horizon stops.

Each morning for some time now, the sun has appeared from our perspective to rise further and further north. It arcs higher and higher in the sky, and the days are getting longer in ways you don't need to check your phone to verify.

Daylight is longer (and hotter) while nights are shorter (and often warmer themselves). This has been happening since March and the equinox, or equalness of night and day, the Sun rising due east. Now the light starts far to the northeast.

During the period around a solstice, the rise point is stable. Steady. But you know what that means. No one will thank me for pointing out that in a day or two further on, the Sun's appearances will start sliding south, to the east at the autumnal equinox in September, heading for the other solstice, winter's own, in late December.

Of course that's all far away. Half the year. For now, we have long days well into July and verging into August, but you will start to notice the change in the mornings. The angle of the sunlight on the bedroom floor, where your morning chair sits as dawn breaks . . . and daytime will slowly, steadily reduce.

For now we can hold onto what we have. The longest days of the year this weekend give us lengthy mornings, and evenings that go on as if we were in Alaska or something, the light only grudgingly retiring into night.

Our church calendars are focused on the darker half of the year, with Advent taking us into the darkest stretch of time, and Lent helping open up daylight from early spring towards Easter. Those seasons and celebrations from Christmas to Pentecost allow us to frame and manage the loss of light and warmth through our devotions and disciplines. The rest of the year is labeled "Common" or "Ordinary Time," but I'll dispute it enough to say there's nothing ordinary about the weeks we're privileged to be living through.

It is peculiar that we treat trees fully in leaf as normal, when they spend a majority of their time otherwise. My father taught me to know trees by their bark and shape, as well as leaves "because most of the time they don't have them!" An ordinary day might be spent running through sprinklers and sitting in lawn chairs listening to a concert on the green, but how ordinary is that sort of experience?

We all know that when things get stable and steady, like they are around a solstice, the next thing to come is change. And for most of us, we don't like it. This can deteriorate quickly into always mistrusting security or comfort or any simple pleasure, because the experience of it can become a signal to us it soon will end. That way lies discontent.

My mother, who just celebrated a major birthday, is content. She has lost most of her memory, and yes, that's a sorrow, one we children of hers feel often. What can't be denied, though, is that a woman who has spent many of her ninety years worried about what will happen next, not without reason given her memories of the past, is now happy. Sincerely, seriously happy. In ways we really didn't see coming.

Since she no longer remembers most of what has worried her in the past, she's delighted by almost any enjoyment that comes her way. The party, the cake, her kids and friends of theirs: she delighted in pretty much all of it. Not despite, but because she can't remember much. It's enough to make you think about forgetting some stuff.

We are in the time of solstice. If you recall, that means days will soon get shorter, and that can worry us. Or you could just forget it, and give thanks for the long warm sunny days we are getting right now.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has a list of things he really should just forget about. Tell him how forgetting helps you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 6-19-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 6-19-2025
Jeff Gill

When a canal boat is a vehicle into the future


___



Saturday morning in downtown Newark, 10:00 am June 28th under the broad canopy of the Canal Market District just south of Courthouse Square (which I promise I will get back to after the Fourth of July!), there's an occasion of some living history I'd love to invite you to.

We will be sitting "in" the Ohio and Erie Canal, so to speak. Newark's Canal Street marks where the canal itself, once filled with water and the passing canal boat, formerly rippled past the old County Jail and on towards an aqueduct over the North Fork of the Licking River, heading east towards Coshocton and ultimately Cleveland, or west if you prefer, back through Lockport's many canal locks, and then south down to Portsmouth.

Canal Street is a street today. It hasn't flowed since the Flood of 1913 gave it a final flush. But it all began 200 years ago, with the first spadefuls dug for this massive project for 1825 America, actually just south of the city, in today's Heath, Ohio.

Considered the "Licking Summit," a practical high point on the way from the Ohio River to Lake Erie, governors of Ohio and New York State came to the rural countryside of Licking County to formally get the Ohio and Erie Canal project started, a companion to New York's famous Erie Canal which was already changing the economic and social landscape of the Midwest. Begun in 1817, it was already in use but was a few weeks away from formal opening ceremonies when New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, a presidential hopeful, came to Licking County to help break ground for the state-spanning project.

July 4, 1825 was the groundbreaking, and after speeches by Thomas Ewing of Lancaster and Gov. Clinton, and a few remarks by Governor Jeremiah Morrow of Ohio, the two governors took turns with shovels before a large crowd of appreciative onlookers from not just Newark & Granville, but from all over the state. The Erie Canal connected the Hudson River, and in effect New York City, to Lake Erie at North Tonawanda, New York next door to Buffalo; the new means of transportation helped grow and develop both cities as hubs of commerce and industry, along with lowering food prices on the Atlantic Coast while helping enrich farmers and brokers in the Midwest.

The hope was that from Buffalo to Cleveland, lake passage would then connect to even deeper access to more of the Midwest, with financial benefits (it was said) to all involved.

The Ohio and Erie Canal was in use in parts by 1828, and from end to end by 1832. Granted, the rise of railroads in the 1850s began the obsolescence of the canal system, but canals played a key role in opening up the heart of the United States to commercial development. DeWitt Clinton unexpectedly died in 1828; Jeremiah Morrow ended his second two year term as governor in 1826, and would later serve in the U.S. House of Representative, but refused to run again in 1842 because he thought he was too old to serve. He was 70 years old at the time; he would live to age 80, and Morrow County to our north is named in his honor.

Fourth of July events take precedence, so our 200th anniversary for our pioneering infrastructure project will be on June 28th. It's a good time in any case for us to look back at canals and transportation, and look ahead to how business and industry are changing our landscape today. Come join us!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to speaking on behalf of the unsung Jeremiah Morrow at the program. Tell him what living history you've learned from at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 6-13-2025

Faith Works 6-13-2025
Jeff Gill

Two giant shadows across this summer's landscape
___


Walter Brueggemann said not long ago: "Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town."

Born in 1933, he died on June 5; it seems no coincidence to many ministers and teachers of religion in this area that David Woodyard, born less than a year earlier, died at the end of March, with a memorial service at Denison's Swasey Chapel last weekend, where he ministered as chaplain and taught as a professor for over 60 years. David and his wife Joanne were married in Swasey on her graduation in 1955, together 70 years as a couple.

There were echoes of Brueggemann's passing in the air as we talked about Dave Woodyard, Dr. Woodyard, Dean Woodyard, depending on who was speaking. Dignitaries from the stage, and friends of long-standing in the aisles before and after. David's father was an alumnus (Class of 1916), and later board member, so in sum there have been Woodyards shaping Denison University for over half its existence.

Both Woodyard and Brueggemann were known for their commitment to their students, sometimes to their discomfiture. I only knew Brueggemann by his writings, and one workshop almost thirty years ago where I heard him speak twice, preach once, and a couple of interactions afterwards in the hallways. Still I can say they shared a passionate intensity about the human ability to know something of God's intentions in this world, and a kind but relentless insistence that the text of the Bible shows us a divine purpose that is often at cross purposes to our own desires.

One thing said in a number of ways by multiple speakers at David Woodyard's memorial was "Dave showed up." He practiced a ministry of presence, on campus, in student spaces when invited, opening his home with Joanne to students and new faculty in many ways. He kept more than office hours, he came when called no matter the circumstances or tensions afoot, and in many ways we all called him fearless.

Which made him hard to argue with sometimes; I still did, and I enjoy some of the memories of our interactions even when they were disputes. Like Brueggemann, Dave Woodyard felt American Christians in general, and his own mainline Protestant fellows, were too comfortable. He argued from the sincerely held belief that church should not simply be a place you come to in order to find reassurance, especially to be reassured that you were right.

Walter Brueggemann said not long ago, according to Carey Newman in Baptist News, to a room full of pastors: "You are afraid of the text." 

Then, Newman says, he paused.

"You are afraid of what the Bible says."

Again, there was a pause.

"You are afraid of the what the Bible says because you are afraid of what the Bible will ask you to do."

That sounds very like something Dave Woodyard would say.

As someone who has spent the bulk of his professional life in congregational ministry, I pushed back occasionally on Dave's assertions that Christians are too comfortable, and needed to be challenged at every turn. I would offer from my own experience a counter-perspective about the very real pain and needs of even middle-class American Protestants, while admitting that there was a point to his concerns with how comfortable churchgoing people could insist on being.

Dave didn't blast me out of my seat, he listened, as I know he did with his students. Then he would, with respect but a sharp wit, push back. These were always useful discussions, I think for both of us.

Having taken that side so often in life, I will admit on his passing, and that of his fellow Christian and peer in both age and perspective, he and Brueggemann are right to worry. Now that they are gone from our midst, we need to pick up the theme. If faith is simply a source of comfort, it may not be the clarion call of God for justice and sacrificial love that scripture testifies so consistently.

Let us be uncomfortable at times in church, and thank Walter and Dave for the reminders of how this is part of God's love for us, as well.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he always knows it's a fine line between discomfort and justice in this life. Tell him how you need to be pushed at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.