Notes from my Knapsack 9-26-24

Notes from my Knapsack 9-26-24
Jeff Gill

Searing summer, sizzling fall
___


Muted colors are likely this autumn here around Our Fayre Village.

If it wasn't for the splash of color accents from the political yard signs, we might be going through one of the lower key fall seasons in recent memory.

We're in a drought: not as bad as just south of us, but enough to render lawns crunchy, plantings frazzled, and the trees are indeed stressed.

Autumn foliage changes are a regular stress the woods are accustomed to, but this kind of stress is likely to leave damage we'll see falling in winter storms and early spring ice coatings.

If you're a farmer, God bless you indeed for the work in general, but certainly farmers need a blessing this year, and of the sort that only the heavens can provide. It really is essentially past the point, though, that any rain can do them any good. Yields will be down, and in some corners not at all.

Is this part of climate change? We are in the middle of an ongoing period of global average temperature increases, with new records set in admittedly short (scientifically speaking) spans of measured high temperatures. The idea that industrialization around the world is adding to greenhouse effects with increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hard to argue with. The debate, as is so often the case, is more in what the best solutions or even just simple responses would be.

The flip side of this question is that all the scientific evidence tells us 15,000 years ago our sunny valley was covered with a deep sheet of ice, only just starting to recede back to the north, its melting and deposits helping shape the landscape we know today. Warming slowly but steadily, the environment when mastodons roamed alongside the streams a few thousand years later, while hunted by the first human residents of Licking County we call Paleoindian peoples, our ecosystem looked much more like northern Alberta or the upper Hudson Bay region does now. Spruces and sedges and lots of lichens, not the oak-hickory climax forest that was present by the time of the Hopewell culture, the Native American builders of the geometric earthworks we marvel at today.

Two thousand years ago, there is archaeological evidence that those humans at that time, right here, were modifying their landscape to benefit their culture. Controlled burning kept some openings in prairie, adding border spaces between grassland and tree cover, where game animals would thrive and also where they could be hunted. Those managed meadows allowed for the sight lines which the Newark Earthworks track and predict, without obscuring trees blocking a clear view of moonrises and sunrises.

In other words, we have been managing our landscape for millennia here in Ohio, and the history of that management oscillates between good management and not-so-good. Pictures of 1860s Granville are striking for the near complete absence of trees: we cut them all down building cabins and early structures, as well as for firewood. It's almost unrecognizable as the Tree City we are today.

We have to have ongoing discussions about we manage our landscape, the environment, our resources. I suspect they had them in the wake of completing the earthworks as pilgrims came from around North America to watch and witness. We can learn a bit of mindfulness about our impact on our world, and attention to the question of how our choices will affect generations yet to come, from the Native American example.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to the Octagon open house on Oct. 20th. Tell him how you're managing your landscape in this drought at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 9-20-24

Faith Works 9-20-24

Jeff Gill

Intervals of reflection, looking back, looking ahead
___

This week marks one year since the World Heritage List declaration added the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, including our own Newark Earthworks, to the global roster of enduringly significant sites.

On Saturday, Sept. 21, there's a program at the Great Circle Museum, off Rt. 79 on the border of Newark and Heath, to officially unveil a plaque marking World Heritage List status, putting us in a distinguished category of locations alongside Mammoth Cave and the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall and a series of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. We are the 25th World Heritage Site in the United States.

The unveiling and speakers are at 10:30 am on Saturday morning, with tours of the Great Circle afterwards, and at 1:00 pm I will be taking anyone interested "off site," as we walk north into Newark and look for "remnants" of the once four and a half square mile complex of interconnected geometric earthworks.

That walking tour takes about three hours and starts and ends at the Great Circle Museum, covering some three and a half miles, mostly of sidewalk and alley. I recommend you bring water, and a hat perhaps: very little shade along the way! But the route is mostly level, and it's no spoiler to tell you we will see a number of bits and pieces and fragments and remnants of the walls and pathways and mounds once dominant between Raccoon Creek and Ramp Creek.

There are events planned for October, around the Octagon open house during the day on Sunday, the 20th, and later that evening as we begin having moonrises along the core alignment of that element of the earthworks complex.

As I've been contemplating in the last couple of columns, it occurred to me that the Newark Earthworks have been around for about a hundred of the 18.6 year lunar cycles they mark (among multiple other functions, no doubt). As scholars have noted, the Native American builders in the Hopewell Culture era had to have watched and monitored and recorded the lunar intervals over some time, at least three full cycles, to have then built what they did at the Octagon. So I claim no precision around my hundred intervals marked silently by the geometric figures west of 30th St.

What I do know is that as I see many in my demographic cohort talk about how "age is just a number, and mine is unlisted," along with other age-defying exhortations, I find it bracing to think about how brief my own span is against the backdrop of these ancient works. Last week I referred to it as "humbling, and I would also say inspiring."

My religious faith is tied in many ways to events of two thousand years past, and I've heard preachers talk about "a hundred generations" between the time of Jesus and our own. We come from a generation, we see . . . what? Three generations or four pass us by, and we have some sense of the passage of time from them. But it is so partial, so limited; our awareness is of a small circle of illumination cast around the place where we currently stand.

There were some in our community who asked when tens of millions of dollars were spent to restore our 1876 courthouse: why not tear it down, and spend the same amount to build a new one, which might be easier to adapt and occupy into the coming century? It's an argument, and one I know our leaders did consider warily.

Their decision in the end, though, I think was wise. We preserve from the past to give us perspective in the present. The future will keep coming at us, but the newest answer is not always the right one. It helps to keep some ancient wisdom on hand.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been around a few generations. Tell him what you're glad to see past at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 9-13-24

Faith Works 9-13-24

Jeff Gill

When you are a generation, marking time
___

When I was talking last week about the span of generations, we were looking past the ubiquitous Baby Boom, to Gen Xers and Millennials and Gen Z.

They're now watching children grow up, kids who are definite "digital natives," always having known not just the internet but smartphones: Generation Alpha has been proposed for those born since 2010, a step into the Greek alphabet. 

Other than these demographic labels, how do we mark the sequence of generations? There's calendars on the wall, and having one up probably dates you right there. Some of us watch our hair turn white, others haunt cemeteries, but all of us note the passage of time by some mental map, using relatives perhaps as our benchmarks, grandparents past and aging aunts and uncles, warily gauging our own relative youth against those newer on the scene.

Which is where I find myself reflecting on the Newark Earthworks, and how the vast landscape constructed by Native Americans here some two thousand years ago can fulfill a number of purposes, both spiritual and practical, and maybe occasionally both at the same time.

As you may know, the central alignment of the Octagon, through where it is connected to Observatory Circle, points from the high mound at the southwestern corner of the earthworks along the symmetry axis of the double geometric enclosure, to a point on the northeast horizon that our moon only reaches every 18.6 years.

Now, the rise point of the moon swings back and forth, south to north again, like a horizontal pendulum from a set observation point, like the logically named Observatory Mound. The sun does the same back and forth, only it takes a year to make an arc from northernmost to southernmost and back again, solstice to solstice.

The moondance is more complicated, swinging back and forth in terms of the rise point on the horizon over 28 days. Then each 28 day cycle expands and contracts, with the peaks approached ever more nearly until the true maximum, then swaying back and forth, retreating progressively in the same stately pattern. So while there's a true northernmost, there are a number of moonrises leading up to and afterwards which are so close you can barely detect the difference. Call them a dozen or so in total when you could see the alignment at its peak, along the architecture.

In any case, you only get a handful of chances, themselves subject to clouds and fog canceling the viewing for all but a few, but once a . . . generation? A time or two to mark the cycle then 18.6 years to wait for it again.

When Brad Lepper pointed out the Hively and Horn archaeo-astronomical research which first revealed this alignment to us, we quickly calculated when the Newark Earthworks would witness it next. It was frustrating in 1989 to realize it had just peaked a couple of years ago, and the cycle was now narrowing. We worked and waited to 2005 & 2006, and had some limited opportunities to see the earthworks stand witness to the astronomical moments it was built to mark.

It has been my privilege to see two cycles of the Moon's movements, and as we come up to the alignments coming into view during the end of 2024 and through 2025, I hope to live into a third.

That's three cycles of what I realize is about a hundred that the Newark Earthworks have marked. Just a few ticks on this cosmic clockwork of light and shadow, walls and enclosed areas, negative space and vertical elevations. A fourth I am unlikely to experience in full.

These lunar cycles, so memorialized, are generations of a sort, placing us in time, as well as shaping space. Humbling, and I would also say inspiring.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's aware the clock is ticking. Tell him how you make the most of your time at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 9-6-24

Faith Works 9-6-24

Jeff Gill

A visual sense of generations passing
___

What is a generation?

Twenty years is one standard definition, but in some contexts you'll find twenty-one years, and thirty years comes up from time to time. The general idea is a span from birth to when a person could begin a generation of their own. 

We also have demographic "generations," such as the "Greatest Generation" or the "Baby Boom." Those intervals have a common definition, and a formal demographic interval. To have been in service in World War II means you were born before about 1924; the formal definitions include those born from 1901 to 1927, but some sources cite 1900 to 1925. Born in 1927, you'd barely make 18 by 1945, but we define World War II service in federal regulations through December 31, 1946.

Baby Boomers? The children of the Greatest Generation, they are sometimes defined as those born from 1946 to 1964, but I find references in sociological literature to Boomers starting as early as 1944 and ending anywhere from 1960 to 1965.

Myself, I'm born in 1961, and I have to say that in common references to the Boomer mindset and worldview I don't know that I fit. In general, I don't feel like a Boomer. There's one definition that does make sense to me, and that's tied to whether or not you remember where you were when JFK was shot. I recall President Kennedy's funeral with odd clarity, but nothing of the day he was assassinated.

Gen X is puzzlingly tagged as being born between 1965 and 1980, which is fifteen years, versus nineteen for the Boomers; Greatest Generation intervals are twenty-five or twenty-six years. Millennials get the period from 1981 to 1986, another fifteen year interval, then Generation Z is the term for those born 1997 to 2012, another fifteen year "generation."

Let's just concede none of us want to see fifteen year olds having children, and admit that demography is an art more than a science.

In any case, we have the passage of years, four seasons in cycle, and the need to find a way to define broader trends in taste and culture and social patterns as "a generation." Times change, and there are characteristics of each era, every succeeding generation, which are somewhat unique to them. We've left out the Silent Generation which was the era my parents were born into (seventeen years, generally), and those born from 2012 are already reaching today what many cultures would call their majority, a new generation called perhaps Generation Alpha ?

Gen Z were the first "digital natives," raised entirely in an internet oriented world. Generation Alpha have always known a world where the broadcast networks and channel guides are an afterthought, where "texts" are primarily digital.

But I go back to 1947, and "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." Have you seen the movie? Black and white, I must confess, with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison and Natalie Wood. Greatest Generation folk loved it from the start, while the Silent Generation and Boomers would have been more likely to watch it on re-run on their broadcast televisions, late at night.

Regardless, there's a scene towards the end where a piling in the ocean surf is seen which had "Anna Muir" carved on it. The passing of generations is shown by a montage sequence of the post slowly tilting as the waves batter it, the inscription steadily aging and softening. Anna then is seen as not a young girl, but an adult woman, the aging timber standing in for her fast-forward development.

Are there other ways to mark the passage of generations? Not in the effects of aging or decay, or the growth of cemeteries and the extent of burials, but to see the passage of time as growth and change in a constructive way?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's watching the generations pass from his front porch, which is one way. Tell him how you mark time at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads

Faith Works 8-30-24

Faith Works 8-30-24

Jeff Gill

Attend a worship service because you don't want to
___

Is inconvenience a positive part of worship?

Stay with me a bit here.

I am quite aware of the Biblical line of argument: Hebrews 10:25 is a common point of reference, chastising Christians and suggesting "not forsaking our meeting together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another."

There is a certain complexity to the textual surroundings there. I think it's fair to argue back it's not simply a call to earning a perfect attendance pin. More interesting to me is the stated justification for calling believers to meet, that they be there for the purpose of "encouraging one another." 

In other words, YOU may say you don't need to come to church, but what if others need YOU? God can work in many ways through many people, but what if you are the needed connection for someone? God can't be stopped, but the consistent message of the Bible is that we really don't want to be getting in the way. God may work around our unfaithfulness, or possibly right over the top of us. Go with God's flow.

Encouraging one another is, to me, even more powerful a reason to attend worship regularly than "because I need it." We go for others, for our part in the wider plan. Yet it can also be true that we need fellowship.

Yes, I heard you in the back. You muttered you don't need THAT fellowship, those people. And there have been moments of "would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?" in worship services, or times for passing of the peace that went on painfully long, which have made me rethink the value of watching services on line at home.

It's true. We Christians can be annoying. I will let prospective Muslim or Buddhist guest columnists, Jewish commentators or Wiccan essayists, confess their own sins. As a Christian, I have no problem saying we Christians gathered together in large groups can be a bit much.

There are praise choruses that go on too long, enthusiasms for catch phrases which may or may not be liturgical, fellow attendees who insist on telling us what they think we need to know: I get it. Church can be very people-y. And it's perfectly fair for some who have to deal with people at work all week to find the gathered community more a burden than an opportunity on Sunday.

Yet I will say it again. Being inconvenienced, even being irritated, might be part of the point. Marva Dawn, a wonderful theologian of worship, liked to say to people who told her they didn't like a particular hymn or song: "ah, then that one wasn't for you, was it?"

Think about it. What is it about our faith in God's love made known through Christ who died to save us that ensures our right to a church service where every element is to our liking? How does that even make sense? "That one wasn't for you." But it might have been the message or music that reached someone else needing to hear it.

When something in a service, or even some person at church bugs me? That might be the message I need to reflect on what's actually going on there. Because in faith, what I am sure of is: it's not all about me.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows he can be irritating, too. Tell him what bugs you in worship at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Notes from my Knapsack — draft September column

Notes from my Knapsack — draft September column
Jeff Gill

Why Gillfish can't vote for Donald Trump
___

[Note for editor: the firm policy, I had heard for years, was that columnists do not do endorsements on any level, federal or local, and I've hewed to that line since beginning my run in the Booster/Sentinel in 2003. Since my erstwhile counterpart made a clear endorsement last week, I've heard from some of my readers asking if I'm making a similar statement. If I were, it would read something like the following…]


With the coveted if reluctant endorsement of my fellow columnist, Don Haven, for Donald Trump in the presidential race, it may be pointless for me to offer my own take on the balloting (early voting starts Oct. 8).

In fact, Brother Haven in detail offers some qualifications on his endorsement with which I'm in full agreement. Still, I have a less than policy related set of reasons for not being able to echo his affirmation. In fact, I have a largely unitary reason for not supporting the former president for a second, non-sequential term, even if it makes for a fun historical asterisk alongside Grover Cleveland.

I dislike intensely his preference for making fun of people's names.

Go ahead, call that a terrible reason for not voting for someone. You might well be right. In fairness to myself, I've been reconciled to not much liking the candidates on offer for much of my voting life: my first campaign as a volunteer worker was for John B. Anderson, and if you don't recall the man from Illinois, that's okay. He was a [whispers] third-party candidate.

But I am quite serious that I cannot support a person for Chief Magistrate of These United States who has so consistently and persistently used mockery of names and physical qualities as his preferred campaign strategy.

In a wider sense, I can appeal to my decades of work in and among youth, and say emphatically that making fun of another person's name or looks is a major challenge in getting young people to have healthy relationships with each other. A tendency to make fun of those around you is the sign of a bully empowered, and when mocking nicknames are normal out loud interactions, you can count on other abusive patterns showing up right behind. In other words, I've worked for years to get youth to be more respectful to each other, kinder and more caring, and there are times I hear the evening news and the sound of that work going down the drain is almost audible. Why would I want to support more of that in public life?

In my elementary years, I picked up a pair of glasses, and a nickname. Two, actually. I hated both, but Gillfish was worse, and of course what I heard all the time. Bookworm was almost inevitable.

Then I got to junior high, and my first English class with Mr. Fred Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell was a legendary basketball coach, but that day he was simply the teacher, and he called the roll, and got to me. "Jeffrey Gill. What are you usually called?" I suspect he expected the reply "Jeff." What I said reflexively was "Gillfish or Bookworm, I answer to either."

He looked up. His brow furrowed. "What do YOU want to be called?"

I actually had to think for a minute. "Um, Jeff is good."

"Well, then," Mr. Mitchell said, "in this classroom, in this building, in my earshot, you will be Jeff. Thank you." And in fact, I don't think I heard Gillfish at school ever again. Anywhere. By that one teacher, his one statement, that first day, it ended.

That's why I can't vote for Donald Trump. A small reason, but for me it's enough. We don't need more mocking name calling, but we could use a few more Fred Mitchells. He just turned 84, and I bless his memory.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's grown philosophical about his old nicknames, up to a point. Tell him what you used to be called at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 8-23-24

Faith Works 8-23-24
Jeff Gill

Why should I attend a worship service?
___


Summer is, I hate to tell you, coming to an end.

You can define it as to astronomical phenomena, or by the academic calendar as most do; if you want to insist summer isn't over until Labor Day evening, feel free!

Christmas is less than 125 days away, too.

With the end of summer and the season of vacations, it's time to address a recurring subject in this column. Why go to church (on Sunday)?

As a teacher of church history, I've had reason to do a little digging on the development of multiple services, something that was relatively rare outside of big city congregations until the Seventies.

The "worship wars" era ended in many locations with an uneasy detente, still on display in a number of churches, between so-called contemporary worship and traditional style services, obviously resulting in at least two services.

Seeker-sensitive church plants, which heralded the explosion of non-denominational congregations (and a fair number of denominational plants which worked hard to appear non-denim), almost always held contemporary worship style services, but they liked to offer multiple services to provide options. Remember, they're seeker sensitive. So you would have two or three Sunday morning, often a Sunday evening service, and increasingly a Saturday night offering.

This was, I suspect, a reaction to the development after the Second Vatican Council among U.S. Catholics to have what are sometimes called "vigil masses," aka Saturday night mass, which might happen well before dusk. There's a fascinating history to how this response grew out of a European preference for Sunday evening masses, which opened the door for a service "after sunset" on Saturday night, as counting for Sunday observance. The liturgical tradition was that the Sabbath began the evening before, so you could have an anticipatory worship Saturday "night" which was liturgically Sunday. The Vatican gave American Catholics formal clearance to do so through the Seventies, and it became a global norm in the early Eighties.

All of which meant by the time I got into parish ministry in the mid-Eighties, even smaller Protestant churches felt a fair amount of pressure to have at least two services, and medium sized ones could have Saturday night worship and three on Sunday.

(There's something to recall historically about how this hearkens back to our colonial Puritan history, echoing down into holiness influenced worship on the early frontier, where many churches held a morning service, ate Sunday dinner then returned for an afternoon service, and sometimes even an evening prayer meeting on top of all that, along with midweek worship often on a Wednesday night.)

COVID triggered what I think was a long impending re-set around worship services. Every time I talk about this online a number of people will jump in to say "my church has grown immensely since COVID!" but the wider picture is clear: church attendance has not bounced back. In Ohio, at any rate, the claim "it's because the government shut down churches" is not correct: there were recommendations and guidance offered, but no mandate to close (other states did so).

What each congregation had to struggle with was how to protect worshipers (especially elderly ones), especially during the peak periods of infection. There were changes begun during COVID that have lasted, including reductions on things being passed around like offering plates or attendance registers, and how communion was done. Changes around distribution of the bread and the cup have tended to last, even as the plethora of hand-sanitizer bottles have slowly dwindled to a few.

Meanwhile, lots of people stopped coming, and haven't started back yet. What are we to make of it, and how to talk about that change?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he fills the pulpit in a variety of church types these days, and has more to say on attendance. Tell him why you go, or don't, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-24

Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-24

Jeff Gill

It's all debatable

___


Presidential debates have perhaps never been more important in U.S. politics than they have been this year.

Arguably a poor debate performance drove incumbent Joe Biden out of the running for the Nov. 5 general election (Ohio early voting starts Oct. 8). So there's an extra dollop of attention on how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris do versus each other in however many debates they end up having.

Historically, debates really haven't done that much. It is often argued the original TV debate, Richard Nixon versus John F. Kennedy in 1960, had an impact on the election's outcome. The usual claim is those who heard it on the radio thought Nixon won, but if you had your TV on, you thought Kennedy did. (Spoiler alert: Kennedy won.)

Gerald Ford stumbled against Jimmy Carter over how he described Poland's status behind the Iron Curtain, reinforcing an existing downward trend on his polling; Ronald Reagan got off a good line about his opponent's relative youth and immaturity, delivered so well even Walter Mondale laughed uproariously. Did either turn of phrase really deliver the election?

Sometimes people are surprised to hear we've only had presidential debates since 1960. "What about the Lincoln-Douglas debates?" Um, well: that was 1858, but it was for the Senate campaign in Illinois, and Douglas won. It did set the table, though, for the 1860 presidential race. (Spoiler again: Lincoln won that time.)

There's a famous management adage from Edward Deming: "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." I think of that when I watch today's presidential debate format, versus the one that gave us Abraham Lincoln as President.

Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had seven debates through the summer and fall of 1858, in different communities all around Illinois. They were held from 2:00 pm to about 5:00 pm. The two took turns starting, and the first debater spoke for (are you sitting down?) an hour, the response had ninety minutes for the second candidate, then the opening speaker had a half-hour to respond.

Shorthand and telegraphy were technologies just becoming widespread, and through them, the debates did become a national phenomenon, with large chunks of the debate speeches being reprinted all across the United States.

But I just think about the vast difference between asking someone to set forward their program across an uninterrupted hour, knowing their opponent was about to have an hour and a half to reply to your proposals. Then thinking as they spoke about how to use your thirty minute reply. As opposed to "you have thirty seconds to reply." 

If every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, then what are we getting from a program of short sound bites and fragmentary replies? Does a short attention span format tend to give us a more distracted and digressive candidate? Or does it just favor that sort of mindset…

(Deming also said "A bad system will beat a good person every time." Spoiler?)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in debates before and isn't sure our presidential debate format deserves the label. Debate that question with him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 8-16-24

Faith Works 8-16-24
Jeff Gill

Bearing one another's burdens
___


Following some recent discussion of what makes us uncomfortable or even indignant as people of faith in a complicated culture, let alone a fallen world, I was reading last week in an online periodical aimed largely at a Catholic audience, but with implications I believe much more broadly applicable.

It was a post in "The Lamp," Issue 24, which calls itself "A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc." What caught my attention was an essay titled "Are All Welcome?" with the subtitle: "On attending Mass with special needs children."

The author, Kevin Tierney, is from Toledo, Ohio, so just up the road, both geographically and culturally. His family includes two special needs children, both with autism and having different degrees of outward symptoms, including something called "stimming" which can seem like noisemaking to someone not used to the situation, but is a largely involuntary response to changes in the environment. It can range from grunts and groans to seemingly nonsense verbalization, and the kind of thing that makes many people think "they should just stop it."

Tierney tries with great patience and charity to help the reader understand what it's like to be a parent with a child having such a diagnosis, and trying to attend worship. As I hope you know, the main point is that you can't "just stop it." Trying to force a child in such a situation to "stop it" is more likely to increase the outward vocalizations and expressions.

His point, which is where I think almost any faith community can stop and ask itself some questions, is around how children like this call the whole community to reflect on what constitutes "normal" behavior. Is silence, and attentiveness, and a reflective focus on what it going on in the service, the most important part of being in community? Are sounds and disruptions the worst thing that can happen, and enough so that it should result in a general wish for those who can't follow the community norms to leave the gathering space?

Or is the value of being together in community reason enough for us to reflect together on how we can gather everyone, even when some of the gathered community are not able to follow the norms of what we're used to thinking of as "normal" group behavior? Could we learn to accept a certain amount of difference across the assembly, and lift up our wholeness as the higher value, over deportment and decorum?

As Tierney asks: "Each member of the community must be willing to embrace being inconvenienced for the sake of the Gospel and its mission. I do not mean this in the clichéd sense of "offering it up." I mean this in the sense of being actively willing to bear the struggles of others. Maybe this involves training yourself not to shoot a glare backwards in the Church at someone who is loud or disruptive. Maybe it involves going over to a stressed parent and asking whether there's anything you can do to help."

If you are at a live performance or watching a movie where you've paid a steep admission price to see and hear the production, I get how there's an expectation to leave the room if you're making it hard for other patrons to get what they paid for. But is worship that sort of consumer experience? Is it necessary to enforce norms of behavior for everyone to get what they came for? It's a question, and I admit not with a simple, easy answer.

Tierney agrees, and as he closes his piece says "I do not write this to condemn. I don't want to offer a five-year plan to fix the Church. I want this to be an examination of conscience."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows what it's like to seek peace and quiet, too. Tell him how you see this issue at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.


Note for editors: https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/are-all-welcome

Faith Works 8-9-24

Nate or Ben — if this is too long, feel free to delete the next-to-last paragraph!
Pax, Jeff

===

Faith Works 8-9-24
Jeff Gill

Indignation is exhausting, but interest is sustainable
___


Reaction to my expression of discomfort over a billboard exhorting people to "Shack Up" along a major local thoroughfare, overlooking a place large numbers of high schoolers will be gathering soon for football games, was about what I expected.

It was almost all "you're upset about that? Here's something you really should be upset by!" Yep, that's the media environment we live in: pile indignation atop indignation, whereby one's point is made by being the most indignant.

In fact, I never said I was upset or indignant, I noted it was "puzzling" and left me feeling "discomfort," because I "wonder at the wisdom of this counsel in general" as to encouraging young environmentally concerned folk to "Shack up." Potayto, potahto one might say, but I'm going to stick to my guns and say I'm not indignant or terribly upset, just asking questions.

Similarly, I got a hatful of questions and comments from a variety of sources about the Olympic opening ceremony controversy. For the record, after the producers, the printed program available in Paris, and the International Olympic Committee all said the scene in question was, in fact, meant as a parody of sorts of "The Last Supper on the Banks of the Seine" the actual focus is really not in question. But I was asked if I was upset by or would condemn it.

Nope. Seriously, this is where Winston Churchill's counsel about such things and barking dogs comes into play (you can look it up). I can think, offhand, of the DaVinci "Last Supper" visual being referenced by "Lost," "Battlestar Galactica," and "Twin Peaks" (at least in promotional materials if not in the shows themselves); the film version of "MASH" famously had a pivotal scene very directly and more than somewhat inappropriately modeled on Jesus and the disciples all sitting on one side of a long table. Some of us suspect the last scenes of "The Sopranos" had an oblique "Last Supper" reference built into one shot from outside the restaurant (IYKYK).

Christianity can take such homages, whether done respectfully or teasingly or even mildly blasphemously. Was it a good idea in the Olympics? I don't think so, and there even was an apology, so to me it's a dead issue and no big deal.

What I find fascinating is that I've read a large number now of critiques of the Olympic opening ceremony from socially conservative viewpoints, and not seen any of them mention what I thought was a bad choice and worthy of an apology.

Not long after the Last Supper morphing into a Dionysian banquet, we had a trio of young people running around in a vast beautiful library, and quick shots of a series of books which were all, shall we say, sexually adventurous. Sigh, I thought, are we really going for that sort of stereotype for France? Oh yes they were.

The extended scene ends with a shredding of even those transgressive books (huh? still don't get that at all, and I don't like tearing up books, whether I like the contents or not), flinging the pages in the air, then running out, up a flight of stairs getting increasingly frisky with each other, then entering an apartment and teasingly closing the door. I don't think it's prudish at all to observe the point of the scene was a) a menage-a-trois, and b) it was not a quick or glancing aside, it was the point of the sequence.

I just think that was an incredibly stupid choice for a global audience with lots of kids watching. Maybe they thought it was late enough in the show kids were in bed, but the torch hadn't even been lit yet. And again, it plays into a silly stereotype about France but hey, I'm just an Ohioan.

But it was fascinating I've heard nary a peep about it in all the "indignation." What did you think?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has questions. Tell him what yours are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

images, if useful

First the newer replacement stone from 1935, now in Old Colony Burying Ground, and a general and close-up view of the older marker now at the Granville Historical Society Museum:

Notes from my Knapsack 8-8-24

Notes from my Knapsack 8-8-24

Jeff Gill

An awkward phrase, a hidden history

___


During the Fourth of July Street Fair (and hurrah to Granville Kiwanis for another wonderful week of community fun) I took a break from the heat and sat on the side porch of the Granville Historical Society, thinking about wording.

I recently shared some of my research around Patrick Cunningham, a shadowy figure if in bold strokes found in Granville's and Licking County's earliest written history.

He has generally been relegated to a secondary, if poignant role around the Jones family as pioneer settlers here who . . . okay, and this is where wording gets awkward. They are called "the first White family" in Granville Township, and while John and Lillie Jones came here in 1801 with two daughters and a son, their fourth child, named for Lillie's father Jonathan Benjamin Jones, was born Oct. 1, 1802 and is called the "first White child born" in the area as well.

Sadly, Lillie dies just a few weeks later, and with Patrick Cunningham's help, John buries his wife and takes the four children back to the Marietta area, where later he would remarry and live out his life, most of the children growing up to move to Illinois. Neighbor Cunningham is notable as I've already explained for re-locating Lillie's remains not once but twice in deference to her family's wishes.

The third burial site, in Granville's Old Colony Burying Ground, makes her the earliest death but not the first burial there, given her circuitous route from Newark-Granville Road to downtown old Newark and back to Granville after those settlers came in 1805. And the marker on her third grave is in fact the second one there; we don't know what rude monument was placed at her first burial site, and there's a chance the older Granville marker was placed on her brief resting place in Newark, then traveled with her remains to her current location. Whatever the earlier story, sometime after coming to Granville, in the very late 1800s, her marker was stolen. The granite tombstone today was placed in 1935, but using the recorded inscription from the older monument . . . which turned up later, and is now on the side porch of the village museum.

You can dimly trace along the bottom those words, uncomfortable to read today: "This is the 1st White family that ever inhabited Granville Tp." There's an overtone to that choice of words which makes today's reader uneasy.

Yet there's two pieces of information I would pull out of that uncomfortable phrase. There is a certain seeking after pre-eminence in that "1st" (as the older stone has it, "First" in the 1935 replacement), but in saying "1st White" family or birth, there's an implicit acknowledgement that there were people, families, and births here before 1801. It was unambiguously understood that Native Americans, "Red Men" in the racist term of the times, had been here, built, thrived, loved, and died. Until 1830 settler accounts would talk of "Indian visitors" passing through on a regular basis. So the monumentalists knew there were previous inhabitants, hence the queasy precision of "1st White family."

And that second qualifier: if they were the first "family," that makes me wonder. In fact, re-reading the earliest accounts, you can get the impression that 50 year old widower Patrick Cunningham in his solitary cabin was here . . . first. Had built up the slope, a little closer to the spring, and was present to welcome the Jones family, perhaps helping them to build their cabin about 20 rods, or 110 yards further south at the foot of the hill.

I wonder.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's finding Patrick Cunningham a fascinating if elusive quarry. Tell him what keeps you looking for more information at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 8-2-24

Faith Works 8-2-24

Jeff Gill

On taking offense in a constructive fashion

___


There's piety, and there's discipleship.

I wouldn't want to say they can't and don't overlap. They often do.

My personal piety runs to practices that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to any person interested in my faith; not all Christians follow the same devotional habits nor would I say they should. You could make a case that, especially in our public faith, any thing we do or say should be at least potentially a recommendation to others, a sort of evangelistic statement in deed and word.

The Apostle Paul famously complicated this question with his statements about marriage, which (at that point in his life, anyhow) he said was not for him, but others might be different. You can look that one up.

In a church I served, we had a program on Bible reading which I supported, adding in an option for listening in your car to your scripture passages on cassette tapes. Someone came to me, sincerely but rather insistently, arguing that this was a mistake: people should read a printed Bible while sitting still, or it didn't count. I pointed out Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch's situation where the latter was reading Isaiah while riding in a chariot, and the reaction was not a happy one to my comparison.

Piety may well be a worn leather-bound King James Version, but discipleship is being well-versed in the Bible, however you access the text. I think we can get general consensus on this.

Piety would include, I'd argue, faithfulness to my word, including my wedding vows; discipleship means extending grace and opening paths into church life for those whose lives may have followed some crooked paths, not always of their choosing. More bluntly, I strongly affirm fidelity in marriage, but I think we've learned that when the church becomes an army that shoots its wounded, and casts off anyone who's been through a divorce as unworthy for membership, let alone leadership, it runs the risk of preaching only to the converted, of being the proverbial "museum for saints, not a hospital for sinners."

I was thinking about this subject because of my recent writings about how faith communities can promote trust, and an intersection with my historical researches venturing into an orphanage effort in my religious tradition in the 1890s. A strong woman in leadership opened up a "foundling hospital" and welcomed abandoned mothers, but was driven out of her role when she refused to bar unmarried mothers from her facility. Married men, of course, were the group that ushered her out the door; she went on to start over and open up a home for mothers in need of all sorts.

My first thought on reading this was "I wonder about those men." It's unfair, perhaps, but I couldn't stop myself from suspecting that not all of those men had been chaste in their singleness or faithful in marriage themselves. Maybe they were. And in wanting to promote marriage and commitment, they took their piety and pushed it over onto how they wanted both discipleship and mission to be practiced, shoving mercy to one side.

More locally, I have been puzzling for months now over a billboard on a major highway, overlooking a field soon to host high school sports, with two toothbrushes in a cup and the oblique legend (on first reading, at least, to the naive) "Conserve energy. Shack up."

The folks behind #TheEnvironmentExcuse want to be clever, certainly not pious, about climate change. To do so they toy with an issue I think is near to my sense of discipleship. I'm not advocating a return to social stigma around cohabitation, but I can't help but wonder at the wisdom of this counsel in general, and feel discomfort because it's against the goals I would want our youth to see held up.

What do you think?


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on his piety and discipleship every day, with mixed results. Tell him how you'd like to decorate a billboard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

[In case you care . . .

Faith Works 7-26-24

Faith Works 7-26-24

Jeff Gill

Trust as the technology of faith in action

___

Preachers ask people to trust the Bible. What I think we wrestle with as ministers today is how people do find the Bible . . . interesting. I really do believe people feel the pull of ancient texts, timeless traditions, deep truths. The Bible is interesting, and even holy to many people. 

What they resist is being told to trust it. And that lack of trust is not so much with whether or not the divine can be channeled through scriptures in a book, but in the human persons interpreting it.

We started this extended meditation with the challenge of technology and apps and connections. Do we walk away from smart phones and tablets and online worship to find a more reliable path to faith in a loving God who is involved in our lives, or can they be used as tools to understand for ourselves and interpret to others what we mean by Heaven, Hell, and "the last things" of eternity?

Where I want to land this series of reflections is exactly here: I don't think it matters. You can go full-on Amish in your relationship to technology, or you can be a highly online internet savvy technophilic believer. It doesn't matter. What does matter given the broad trends in society to day is that question of trust.

Church folk want to communicate to people in general and those seeking truth in particular: you should trust the Bible, trust Jesus, and trust God. All good messages. But to deliver that message? To get the average inquirer to contemplate that course of action?

I'll tell faith communities what I have to tell young people all the time. Trust has to be earned. Maybe the Bible shouldn't have to earn trust, but if believers are the first, or sometimes the only Bible people will "read," then it's on us to turn the page. Maybe Jesus is someone you should trust without question, but to get to that place, you have to hear about who Jesus is and what he does. Paul puts it this way: "So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ." (Romans 10:17)

God's gracious initiative is the starting point for all faith. Yet I'm evangelistic enough to add that the Body of Christ is responsible for getting that word a fair hearing, and not overshadowing the message with our actions. In today's world, the initial deposit of trust that's needed is overdrawn when it comes to institutions of any sort, religious ones included.

Do we want the Gospel heard, and understood, and believed? I think the most effective evangelistic strategy is to earn the trust that opens the door for faith to enter in. Congregations need to earn trust, clergy need to earn trust, church institutions need to earn trust. In many cases, they may not be the ones who caused a lack of trust, but it doesn't matter.

Many of us remember when preachers and religious groups were trusted simply because of who they were. It may not be fair that trust is no longer granted as freely, but the reality is trust today has to be earned, in open and honest dealing, with financial transparency and accountability, and in all things with a humble understanding that trust has to be earned.

If we as believers live lives filled with hope, encouragement, and upbuilding those around us; if in our living there is love shown to those in need, healing offered to those in pain, and joy and hope abounding — then people will ask "what gives you this way of looking at and living in the world?"

That's when our answers might be found worthy, by hearers, of that initial measure of trust which can open up a heart for faith.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows some of you were hoping for a killer app. Tell him how you see trust being earned at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 7-19-24

Faith Works 7-19-24

Jeff Gill

The theology of experience, spiritual and technological

___

What is "a community of trust"?

This is a formulation I closed with last week as we were talking about the firehose of information which obscures as much as it illuminates. It's not just "fake news" or deep fakes or outright falsehoods which confuse us today, I would argue, as it is the sheer volume of what's coming at us, beyond our ability to process.

It's no longer enough to know who in our local marketplace knows what's going on, the senior or revered or simply well-connected person. And we now don't choose between Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley for "the most trusted name in news," either.

In terms of faith and practice, we've lost a huge amount of trust in hierarchies and official channels. I could outline the reasons for this at length: it begins in living memory with Vietnam and Watergate, and continues through revelations around abuse of the vulnerable in church and camp settings, enabled whether intentionally or not by power structures which looked out for their own preservation before protecting children.

You can't just say "because the church says so" about much of anything. Maybe, just maybe that line of argument never really did work, but today it's clear to preachers and evangelists and advocates alike that the appeal to authority is not going to open up an audience.

Yet there are many of us who've worked and served in church leadership, from the local to the more general, who would point out, chastened but firmly, that the appeal to experience is not as reliable as it seems. We can be fooled by what appeals to us personally, and in fact, the degree of intrinsic appeal may actually make us more vulnerable to deception. Our experience is, by definition, limited to what we've experienced, and that's a small slice of the reality now available to us.

In other words, we need some authorities in our lives. Dictionaries to settle arguments in Scrabble, weather apps to let us know what's going on over the horizon, news channels to help us understand what we are called to do as citizens in a democracy. Maybe even a Bible for a witness to the much bigger picture beyond our own experience, a Big Picture into which we fit.

Still, we don't know which authorities we should listen to about the Bible, when we're unsure or even more dangerously resistant to giving "an old book" any authority over our lives. I find many people, even unchurched people, suspect the Bible is a source of more than just "old stuff," but when it comes to life application, to taking ancient lessons and using them to define our current experience, they're wary more of who is telling them what the Bible says than they are of the book itself.

Being an ordained clergy person is not enough; being an established church tradition or denomination carries almost no weight at all. Look at how many choose to be married by a friend or colleague ordained for $25 out of an advertisement, not a formally recognized minister. The same sort of indifference increasingly applies to funeral services and who leads them, how they're handled, or what is said.

This is where most churches are finding we are rebuilding the concept of "a community of trust" from scratch. The old logos and relationships are not working on their own to establish trust. But how do we accomplish that in the media environment of today?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes to be a trustworthy source of illumination. Tell him how you decide whom to trust at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 7-12-24

Faith Works 7-12-24

Jeff Gill

Face to face in an electronic age

___


There's a cause and effect question I continue to have about contact and communications and technology.

I was talking about agoras, marketplaces recently, and how Paul and the early Christian church would communicate the good news of God's love made known in Jesus Christ through simple everyday personal interactions. Paul, and Priscilla and Aquila, and most of the apostles as they moved out from Israel, did their initial evangelistic work through face to face encounters. Tent making on the edge of the market plaza was a setting where you could sit and work and talk to passersby.

Obviously, Paul and Priscilla and Aquila did not compete with re-runs of "Friends" pulling people home to watch TV, or potential customers walking around head down viewing Tik Tok videos on their phone. Talking to each other was pretty much all they had.

Jump ahead in the history of evangelism, and we can make interesting connections between the invention of movable type and printing press technology and the Protestant Reformation (cheer or boo as you are so moved). Sailing and navigation technology combine with improved machining of materials for buggies and coaches to put populations as well as goods on the move. Did all of this change how we both teach rising generations about the faith of their ancestors, or present the Gospel to new audiences and different cultures? Of course it did.

Then we get internal combustion engines, airplanes, and interstate highways: all drawing closer to our time, while speeding up the pace of change. Television follows radio, cell phones replace landlines, and then the internet. [Gasps for air.]

So I asked last week "Can our apps be at least a part of what saves us?" The pace of change, and the impact on faith communities of all sorts, has some wondering if we need to think very differently about how we use technology, even as even small rural congregations have raced to embrace screens in the sanctuary and learned how to stream services.

It's a mess. But did church leaders think that after Gutenberg complicated how information was shared? Did pioneer preachers dread the influence of national radio broadcasts into parishioners' homes? (Yes, and yes.) Religious faith in general and Christianity in particular has dealt with many such transformations over the last two thousand years. We talk about "Dark Ages" not because all human advancement stopped in the Medieval period, but because many leaders, secular and sacred, thought the fall of the Roman Empire would mean the end to effective communication and illumination . . . which is not, in fact, what happened.

Now we seem to be entering an age of not darkness, but of too much illumination, a light beam of so much information pouring over us it blinds us. We do need sunglasses; the future or even the present is so "bright" we gotta wear shades. Or at least filters, like eclipse glasses to allow only a certain amount of illumination through.

The problem with those filters, though, is who decides what is important information? How do we know which authorities to listen to? Because we cannot learn or even internalize everything that's pouring out over us. And I don't even know how to use all the apps that are on my phone as it is.

This is where a community of trust comes in. We need to start identifying what a trustworthy network of leadership and mentorship and teaching looks like, especially around faith. And I think technology can be part of that.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he is setting up some thoughts, but is still open to input. Tell him where you turn for trustworthy information at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24

Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24

Jeff Gill

An extended consideration of the life and times of Patrick Cunningham

___


Who was Patrick Cunningham?

He's a pioneering figure in the history of Licking County.

Born in Ireland, he came to America early enough to have fought in the American Revolution with the Pennsylvania Militia.

Somehow, he ends up alone, a widower, perhaps twice over, in what will become known as Granville Township by 1801; the next fall, in October of 1802, he helps John Jones bury his wife Lillie before leaving to retreat with his children into the Marietta, Ohio area, as a near neighbor to the east willing to offer the last assistance one can offer.

Within a few more years, he takes it upon himself to dig Lillie Jones back up, and move her remains to Newark, Ohio's newly formalized burying ground, so that the "Nash cabin," once the Jones family home, is innocent of mortuary significance by the time the Granville Land Company settlers arrive in November of 1805. Just to the east the outlines of the Cunningham cabin and orchard can still be traced along the hillside to the turn of the century, hints still visible in today's Munson Springs Reserve.

A year or so after her postmortem trip to Newark, Lillie Jones will be dug up and moved once more, back to the west, to the newly laid out Old Colony Burying Ground, established by Granville's settlers, not the first burial there but ironically the oldest.

Meanwhile, Patrick Cunningham, veteran of the Revolution, has established himself in Newark, and became bailiff and jailer for the newly established Licking County Common Pleas Court after 1808. Now called "Paddy" as the county jailer and bailiff, he resides with his likely third wife at the new county jail south of Gen. Schenck's carefully surveyed Courthouse Square. He will outlive her, and bury her at Newark's Sixth Street Cemetery; his son William, who will fight in the War of 1812 and survive a siege and battle outside Fort Detroit, but will be an early interment at Franklinton's old cemetery in 1815 as he tried to return home, now just across the Scioto from Columbus and not far from lower.com Field today. A son of William, John Cunningham would serve as a deputy sheriff, deputy auditor, and perhaps the earliest attendance officer or "enumerator" for Newark schools before his death in 1884.

Meanwhile, having outlived both children and wives, Patrick Cunningham will end his days in the care of a brother in the vicinity of what is now Hebron, Ohio, in southern Licking County. A son of Theophilus Rees, the first Welsh settler of Granville Township in 1802, with the same name as his father, will become an original settler of Hebron and at the historic Licking Baptist Cemetery off Beaver Run there are Cunningham brothers and nephews and other relatives marked, with a single unmarked grave in their midst likely that of Patrick, living out his last days into his late 80s in that vicinity, buried there in 1832.

Patrick Cunningham would have grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were leading citizens of Newark as Licking County grew, but by 1936 the last of his descendants are gone. Cunningham is no longer a pioneer name to reckon with, but his role in our earliest days as a community is worth remembering.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; tell him about pieces of the puzzle he might have missed at @knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 7-5-24

Faith Works 7-5-24

Jeff Gill

Making connections in a divisive era

___


In recent weeks I've ruminated about retail formats and communications technology, and some of you have emailed or messaged me to say "Jeff, you're not talking about faith!"

I get it. I do.

What I'd love to do is spend time in this space outlining spiritual disciplines and personal practices which lead to inner peace and outward work towards God's justice. Maybe I could do a better job of that.

Where today's marketplace is, though, is different.

In the last few months I've had a number of friends and colleagues travel to the eastern Mediterranean and post pictures along with stories from their travels. They put some contemporary images alongside my own awareness of ancient archaeology, and the textual witness. In most Greek speaking cities of the Ancient Near East was an "agora," a marketplace which was where people came to do business, to interact. 

Home was often a compound, a walled enclosure with many buildings backing onto a perimeter barrier and a single gate, and I have friends who in relatively recent years have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, who tell me about such extended family residences.

So combine that more immediate image of a residential enclosure with the ancient world, and marketplace for social interaction which was on the edge of the administrative center, with a central plaza, often a well nearby, and booths set up for short term rental or some in family hands for generations, and downwind a less desirable open end of the three-sided square which was seasonally home for hide tanners and tent makers.

In the middle, an open space, like any courthouse square or main street or "broad way," so to speak, where people on certain days would gather and converse and discuss and even debate.

This was the context, the setting, for Paul's initial teaching and preaching, from the Areopagus in Athens at the foot of the Acropolis, to agoras in smaller cities like Corinth and Thessaly and Ephesus. The public marketplace was a cultural norm and a social technology, like a courthouse square in our more recent past, or a mall very recently.

Today? In 2024 and what is to come, how do we put ourselves in the path of those seeking the way to God, towards hope, in the direction of redemption? Do we go downtown, or the blocks adjoining? That was once the smart way to preach and build and invite: put a church near the center of the city. If we are buying and selling and shopping and investing online, then faith needs to be present, somehow, in those "places" (quotation marks quite intentional).

Yet we do not understand how virtual connections, artificial intelligence, online realities, shape the person, the families, the souls which are the intended focus of faith communities. We just don't. Agoras turned into cities which became malls which are now . . . something else. Churches went from the four corners downtown (look at Granville, for pity's sake) to a ring of steeples a block beyond the retail core to big boxes parked out just beyond the retail big boxes and vast parking areas. It all makes a certain amount of sense, but . . .

Now some suggest we need to create churches, and be faith communities, which are almost Luddite. And I get that, too. We set aside our phones and tablets, and turn back to printed programs, bound books, Bibles in print, not online. That's one way to be counter cultural today. Will it build deeper roots and more lasting institutions? It might, but it might not.

Or is there a way for faith and prophetic vision and religious institutions to create community in the middle of the personalized technology we all carry around with us? Can our apps be at least a part of what saves us?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he is definitely thinking out loud, and that's not always a good thing. Tell him what you think he's trying to say at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.