Faith Works 8-11-18

Faith Works 8-11-18

Jeff Gill

 

Preaching in the wild

___

 

 

Preaching is generally associated with pulpits. A formal stand for your notes, and a platform from which you generally have a bit of a view, not to mention an advantage, over your audience.

 

My family was at Colonial Williamsburg last month and visited the historic Bruton Parish Church, and I marveled at the raised pulpit, with a soundboard dangling overhead, a canopy designed to help the speaker's pre-electronic voice project into the nave. It looked like an adventure just getting up into it!

 

But what about preaching where there is no pulpit? And no, I don't mean contemporary style worship without a formal space and chancel furniture with pews and paraments, but preaching . . . in the wild.

 

I am not a Methodist, but I have been accused of having a Wesleyan heart, to which I plead guilty. On multiple counts! John Wesley began his movement of Bible study classes and a method of spiritual growth with the controversial practice of "preaching in the open." Part of this was because he got banned from preaching in "official" settings of the Church of England; he had a spiritual experience in a prayer meeting well known as when his "heart was strangely warmed" in 1738. That didn't happen in a formal church setting, and as he struggled to find a way to fulfill his calling, a friend who was already himself banned from Anglican pulpits, George Whitefield, invited him to come from London to Bristol where the great evangelist was already preaching in open fields to unemployed and impoverished coal miners.

 

Whitefield had been banned in part because he condemned the ways the established state church was blocking or banning the poor and dispossessed from Sunday worship – so he took worship to the people, and literally stood in a field, sometimes on a stump, later in a small portable "preaching box" that gave him a foot of elevation at best. Later, in America, he became friends with Benjamin Franklin, who conducted a sort of scientific study of how audible Whitefield was from a distance, and found to his surprise that he could be heard by upwards of 10,000 people!

 

But in earlier days, he was outside of Bristol, and after Wesley's arrival, invited John to try his hand at preaching out-of-doors. It seemed to go against all he had been taught in seminary (pulpits, vestments, liturgy), and he was reluctant – then laughed as he saw the lectionary reading for his first scheduled attempt at this practice was the "Sermon on the Mount." So Wesley thought "if it was fine for Jesus, it's good enough for me."

 

Preaching to 3,000 that Sunday from a make-shift pulpit on the edge of a field, John Wesley began a revival that turned into a movement, the Methodist movement. But preaching "in the open" is still somewhat controversial. It has challenges, I will admit.

 

But looking through my 1978 high school yearbook, I was reminded as my class had a 40^th reunion last weekend, of our Fellowship of Christian Athletes group organized by junior year, and how it had influenced me in ways I'd almost forgotten. I had preached in my home church three times, for youth Sundays and a laity Sunday. But our FCA group was asked to do an early Sunday service at the pool for a swim meet, and after assigning the opening prayer, readings, and song leader, the basketball coach and adviser said "we need someone to do the sermon." And our team's leading scorer and co-captain raised his hand, the coach pointed to him, and he said "I think Gill should preach." (Thanks, Brad.)

 

So the next weekend I'm standing nervously with a Bible, my notes, a pool behind my heels, and a few dozen people sitting on short stands along the side, with warm-ups and splashing and shouting all around. But I got through it. I preached good news to nervous swimmers and parents and friends, and it was fine. Weird, but fine.

 

Much of my formation in ministry, I realized, was like this; I learned to speak in public in Scout camp dining halls and campfire bowls. Most of the early worship leadership I've done was at lake sides and on piers and even in the middle of a cluster of canoes in the middle of the water. I've grown accustomed to sharing a message in the middle of cafeterias and lounges as nursing home staff shout and laugh and walk through our midst, with overhead music that "can't be turned off, sorry" and PA announcements interrupting.

 

And last week, Sunday morning's songs and prayers were interleaved with the outcry of goats and sheep, the mooing of cows in the background and the rumble of diesel firing up. But it was all good.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's preached in some weirder spots than he's admitting to here. Tell him strange and wonderful places you've worshiped in at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 8-4-18

Faith Works 8-4-18

Jeff Gill

 

 

It's just a matter of trust

___

 

Folks are moving in for the week out at the Hartford Fair, and I'm looking forward to leading a non-denominational Christian service at 8:30 tomorrow morning. It's a great way to start a Sunday with the sheep baa-ing and the pigs snorting and all the waking up soundtrack of the fairgrounds.

 

During the week ahead I hope to get out there a number of times. My family went to the Ohio State Fair last week, and it has its attractions, but our local independent fair is special. From the livestock barns to demolition derby (Tuesday night!) to the midway rides, the size and spectacle of it all is embraceable, comprehendible.

 

There's lots to see, many people to meet, plenty of food booths to check out, but you don't walk away feeling as if you've only seen small part of the whole. One lap around the big track, where harness racing and tractor pulls and concerts take place different nights (demolition derby on Tuesday night!) and you can hold the map in your head, and find that concession you walked past that looked tasty but you had just eaten most of a blooming onion.

 

The Hartford Fair may not be perfect, but I have enough of a relationship with it, connections around the grounds, that I trust it as a place I want to go.

 

Trust is a funny thing. You can trust a certain event, a nameplate, a brand of peanut butter, a franchise for hotel service, because of past history, a consistent pattern of service, a relationship you have with even inanimate or intangible objects. Break that pattern – find metal shavings in your preferred label product – and trust is gone, hard to get back. You might have rented cars from one company for years, but a single bad experience, and you're wondering about trying the next counter over.

 

It's well known, and the reason you see them knocking on doors even in the internet age, that people tend to vote for a candidate they've met. Let's be honest, it was maybe two, three minutes tops, and a hearty handshake, but you're rethinking your political affiliation and electoral pattern because you made direct eye contact.

 

Politicians are, however, infamously less trusted these days. Back under Eisenhower and Kennedy, the American public registered 80% trust levels in government to do the right thing. Today, that figure is under 20% . . . and the decline has been fairly steady from Johnson and Nixon down through Bush and Obama. Are politicians less trustworthy today than they were before the space program? I doubt it. Something else has changed.

 

To be honest, I don't trust much. I mistrust medical personnel, wondering if their recommendations are in my best interests, or more oriented around maximizing billing to insurance. I do not trust the phone company, which seems to be testing to find out at what level of irritation I will rip the whole thing out of the wall, rather than trying to serve my communications needs.

 

I don't trust food companies to not be conniving to stuff me full of empty calories and trigger my worst impulses with scientific product development. I don't trust news channels to be discerning about what is "breaking news" and what is "next up in our broadcast." I do not trust, at all, my computer to be a safe place for me to feel secure with my personal information, even though I do everything fiscal in my life on it now. I have to do it, but I don't trust it.

 

We paddle around in a deep ocean of mistrust, feeling connected and related and trustful of very little in our everyday social interactions, in person let alone online. Yet we still have to trust in order to live. Very few encounters happen most days, of any sort, where we have a long history and a solid basis for trust. The repair crew from the utility, the service provider on the other end of the phone call, the stuff you buy at the store ("huh, wonder who makes this? looks good…) all tends to require of us a measure of trust.

 

And in the church, as a minister myself and as someone who works with congregations and church organizations quite often and very broadly, I notice that we're all being bogged down by the weight of mistrust. It's such a general reality for us, this constant state of wary skepticism, that we're hard pressed to drop our guard anywhere. That includes faith based organizations, too.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he believes that the truth is important and valuable and often hard to find. Trust me, you can email him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-2-18

Notes From My Knapsack 8-2-18

Jeff Gill

 

The season of life

___

 

It's everywhere. Life.

 

It is the season of life.

 

You pluck weeds in the cracks on your driveway and between the fading hosta, and a few days later they're back as large as when you last pulled them.

 

Along the sidewalk, you see a brownish patch that you realize is in motion, and from closer, it's an ant colony in some sort of civic turmoil, with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands on the move.

 

The lawn is still needing regular mowing, not as much as this soggy spring but still quite often; no matter what your chemical predilections, the edges and odd patches are still showing up filled with anomalous plants which erupt in different shades of green and at odd angles, even after the mower chops them down.

 

Bushes are sending out wild shoots, and even the boxwood threatens to take up a new shape, irregular and expanding. And the foliage of the trees is dense and thick and shimmering in the evening light, with little illumination piercing the canopy where the branches arc overhead.

 

Driving down the roads, there are corners and houses and whole hillsides invisible behind jagged billowing banks of leaves, borne by branches from above bending down and exploding up out of shrubbery and ground cover.

 

There's the orderly life of farm fields, monocultural rows of green growing corn higher than any elephant's eye stretching to the horizon and bouncing back towards your car. High crops or the lower beans and even gardens are wide and full and full of life. The tomatoes are starting to add their red accents, but the leaves are perhaps never more wide and thick and green and heavy with a scent that stays on your hands when you handle the plants.

 

But no more than the basil, which is starting to be ready to be plucked and washed and converted into its true destiny, which is pesto. I almost hate to wash my hands after picking basil, which if I play my cards right, I can do three or four times off of each plant.

 

Because there is an arc to this season of life. We approach the season of harvest. Life and growth and verdance is at its peak; this is part of the reason why the Ohio State Fair is on now and the Hartford Fair for our area next week. Fields have had hay mown off of them once already, but we are at a point of repose now, which will quickly turn into the time of reaping the rewards of cultivating life these last few months.

 

Soon enough the combines and harvesters will be in the fields, the leaves will start turning and contracting, and the hues of green will begin to fade. But for now, it is the season of life. Look for it, revel in it, take life from it one leaf at a time.

 

Maybe in pesto form.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's not much of a gardener, but he loves his herbs. Deer, not so much. Tell him what's growing in your lawn at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-28-18

Faith Works 7-28-18

Jeff Gill

 

Culture, cultures, and worship

___

 

Having commended to you all the practice of attending worship on the road – not to check off a box for your holiness credentials, but because it can be good for your soul! – I had to practice what I had preached, and just got back from a string of short trips where I got visit nine churches and worship in five.

 

We went both west and east, heard majority languages not our own, and experienced worship and devotional practices different than what we're used to. There's no big change I intend spurred by what I've seen, but a different perspective on what I already do, and how I can develop my spiritual life more fully.

 

But I've also been doing this travel and reflection as I help my own religious tradition go through some much needed reassessment. It's true in Ohio as it is in much of the country: as large worship venues, most of them non-denominational, grow and prosper, smaller churches are struggling across the continent. Traditional worship styles are not vanishing, but they are experiencing a period of severe contraction that shows no sign of slowing. For some congregations, it does mean closure or consolidation. For church bodies made up of shrinking congregations in general and a few large thriving ones, it means program and mission efforts are seeing reduced participation and support.

 

And it all provokes some hard questions about faith and life and community. Again, Licking County like the rest of the nation has some new and large and contemporary worship style congregations that are full of families and children. God bless them in that ministry! And they do much more than that in mission, while they also have the clear and unambiguous focus on younger people. For traditional and "legacy" churches which already have a large percentage of older members, longer lifespans and increases in assistive technology means that the number of seniors in many other churches is an overwhelming percentage of the Sunday experience. But in between, the total number of residents who attend anywhere at all, ever, is shrinking. While a few churches blossom, and many older churches shrink, the net percentage of Licking Countians who have a church home is much smaller than it was in 1989 when I first came here. The number of "nones" is larger in every statistical measure that's been done in Ohio or nationally. What's to be done about this disengagement from what was once one of the most significant sources of connection in a community?

 

I was reading recently something by Tom Ferguson, Episcopal clergymember who used to work and live down the road at a Columbus seminary, and still blogs as the "Crusty Old Dean" even though he's back in parish ministry in Massachusetts. He said: "The median age of someone in the United States is about 37; in the Episcopal Church, it's about 57.  The USA is 62% Caucasian; the Episcopal Church is about 87%.  This overall lack of failure to be younger and more diverse is one of the main drivers of the Episcopal Church's decline; in 1960, the Episcopal Church was 90% white in a country that was about 85% white.  Nearly 60 years later, the country diversified and the church didn't."

 

Well, I'm about to turn 57. My own denomination is probably near-identical to these demographics by what measures I can find, so I will be turning the median age. Not to sell myself short, but that's like me saying I'm "middle aged." C'mon. I am unlikely to live to be 114. Yet I know it's true that I am still often the youngest minister in the room at clergy gatherings of my tradition.

 

Even more significantly, I caught that shift Tom describes for his church and I'd also say for my own: in 1960, the nation was 85% white, so a church being 90% likewise, not so out of step. But if today the nation is 62% but we're 85%, we are clearly behind in growing and sharing the Gospel and communicating our church's meaning and purpose. Yes, the total numbers tell that story, too, but these percentages should be a wake up call for any of us. As birthrates and fertility and yes, immigration changes the look and feel and cultural preferences of the nation, it becomes ever more important for churches to look at themselves, and ask what's a culturally conditioned choice, what's really a religious essential.

 

I think this is a conversation many of us will be having in the coming years.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's interested in your views on these topics. Tell him what you're thinking at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 7-19-18

Notes From My Knapsack 7-19-18

Jeff Gill

 

Putting on the brakes, stepping on the gas

___

  

While plenty of folks have said to me that their fondest hopes for Granville are that we all just slow down, I have to admit that I'm not sure this would win an election.

 

To anyone thinking "oh, Jeff, you must be wrong, that's all I hear" I have to invoke the Kael Principle. Pauline Kael was a noted film critic of the last century who became a bit of a cultural commentator; in the Seventies she was much respected in New York literary circles and read all over the country. And it was Kael who famously said, of Richard Nixon's election, that she couldn't believe he had won because no one she knew voted for him.

 

(I also had the privilege of running into Tim Kaine in an elevator about two months after he lost the election with Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump; most of the admittedly jam-packed vehicle said "we voted for you," and he smiled sadly, replying "oddly enough, everyone tells me that.")

 

Looking at the streets and stores and schools I am just not that confident that there's a plurality in favor of everyone slowing down, say, 25%. As Lightning McQueen would say, it seems many are quietly saying to themselves "I. Am. Speed!"

 

So what if the "slow it down" caucus is a minority party in Our Fayre Village? Mind you, I'm working on the assumption that if you're reading a community newspaper like the Sentinel, you have at least some sympathy with that perspective. There are some of us, and I think the point of view for now is to expand the circle, not push for a majority right off.

 

Reading slows the spirit, I would argue. Off a page or pixels, but if you're reading, that's a different pace than videos or earbuds offer. Thank you for reading this, and see where you can find some other local connections with stories to share; thanks to Denison, we have journalists and novelists in our midst, who write for national outlets with next-door perspectives. Margot Singer's book is now in paperback, "Underground Fugue," and Jack Shuler's journalism is available online at "Between Coasts" and other venues.

 

Walking is good for the heart in any sense of the organ; Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay titled "Walking" that's easy enough to find online, and it should cause you to saunter out as soon as you finish. Dennis Cauchon has many community irons in the fire, but is always interested in walking, walkability, and how taking a walk can benefit more than just the walker.

 

And then there's writing. I've found a meditative practice in just making lists sometimes; even with my smart phone and tablet devices and keyboards in every room (or so it seems) I like to find the time to put pen to paper. I almost wonder if cursive writing might someday find a modest resurgence as a spiritual practice, just learning how to loop and link and lay out your thoughts by hand. Jimmy Buffett in "Twelve Volt Man" doesn't seem to think much of having been taught penmanship as a class in school, but what happens when it becomes a part of spirituality like Zen calligraphy?

 

How do you slow down and seek peace in an everyday fashion?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he hasn't gotten a speeding ticket in years. Tell him about your deceleration skills at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.