Faith Works 3-1-14

Faith Works 3-1-14

Jeff Gill

 

A House Not Made With Hands

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Knapsack 2-27-14

Notes from my Knapsack 2-27-14

Jeff Gill

 

Nature, not always maternal

___

 

The problem is, nature wants to kill you.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Faith Works 2-22-14

Faith Works 2-22-14

Jeff Gill

 

Not quite about George Washington

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Nothing really to say it's bad, either.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Because pastors are no more permanent than church buildings!

 

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

Knapsack - Newark Christian 2-20-14

Notes from my Knapsack 2-20-14

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

In grace & peace, Pastor Jeff

Faith Works 2-15-14

Faith Works 2-15-14

Jeff Gill

 

The end of buildings

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Knapsack 2-13-14

Notes from my Knapsack 2-13-14

Jeff Gill

 

Where to put it all

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Faith Works 2-8-14

Faith Works 2-8-14

Jeff Gill

 

You could write your obituary

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Faith Works 2-1-14

Faith Works 2-1-14

Jeff Gill

 

Seminary education, and structural decline

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Knapsack 1-30-14

Notes From My Knapsack 1-30-14

Jeff Gill

 

Blue beyond blue

___

  

Shoveling snow is certainly an activity that has its benefits. You clear your drive, you open up the sidewalks on your property (and stay in compliance with village ordinances if you live in town), and you get some great upper-body exercise not to mention aerobic exertion.

 

Warmth is relative, since this kind of effort increases our heat generation to heat radiation ratio even when it's below zero, and it has certainly been below zero lately. Keep moving, keep layered, or just keep shoveling! Otherwise the shivers set in, and next thing you know you can't hardly keep your teeth from chattering.

 

I think the Lad's teeth were doing just that when I tried, much to his surprise, to stop him from his labors. He may not have been feeling as warm as I was, partly because I carry a good layer of insulation through the winter (on purely pragmatic grounds, of course), and partly because I may have been chugging along a bit more consistently than he had.

 

What I probably failed to help him appreciate was a sight that's easy to view but even easier to overlook. A shovel's worth of hole into the snowbank freshly fallen reveals, buried in the icy white, a gentle cast of blue.

 

You can miss it in the relative shadow, but it's right there once you look. A lovely, even crystalline hue of what I'd enjoy calling cerulean, since that was a word I recall looking up after seeing it in my mom's 64 color crayon box.

 

Cerulean, sky blue, whatever you call it, why is it there? It's as if the snow has brought down to earth a little of the heaven from which it fell.

 

Scientifically, we know now about light scattering, a phenomenon of optics that gives the cloudless sky its color; that same scattering throws light through the frozen matrix and you end up with a hint of the results overhead: blue-tinged snow. You can confirm that by reaching in, grasping a handful of the stuff, and pulling it out into the sunlight: the blue is gone, and you have the full sparkle of ice and reflection shining back at you, white where it isn't a rainbow.

 

I stop, not too long, in my shoveling and wonder what people long ago thought on a winter day when a footprint in a drift or a pocket in the snowbank revealed this same blue. Did they think it was some of the ceiling paint from the sky? The heavens brought down to earth?

 

What they probably thought in eons past was "oh, blue; now, what am I going to eat next?" and moved on. But that's not fair to prehistoric people, who raised Stonehenge and built the Newark Earthworks and aligned Alligator Mound here in Granville to next week's setting sun, halfway between the equinoxes and the winter solstice.

 

They thought long and hard about such things, and it's me and the Lad who move on too quickly, wanting to finish the job, and get inside where it's warm.

 

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

Faith Works 1-25-14

Faith Works 1-25-14

Jeff Gill

 

An uncertain trumpet

___

 

In First Corinthians 14:8, Paul asks who gets ready for combat when they hear "an uncertain trumpet"?

 

The full King James Version verse is "For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?"

 

American churches after World War One had somewhat the opposite problem.

 

They had played "Charge" to their congregations, whose sons had found themselves in mud-mired trenches facing barbed-wire no-man's-lands and artillery duels punctuated by poison gas. After the equivocal end of post-war deliberations at Versailles, many in America said "What were we doing there, anyhow?"

 

None of this is to say that Germany under the Kaiser was in the right, or even that America shouldn't have joined with the western Allies. But there was a passion for battle and bloodshed on the part of the Christian churches in 1914 and after that, once the war ended, looked in retrospect rather unseemly at best, discreditable at worst.

 

In this third of three columns about the coming centennial of World War I, there's a bit more to say about how that event shaped the role of churches in American life (and possibly European, but that's more complex and even further outside of my skill set).

 

For the generation or two before World War I, church-related organizations had played a dominant role in national policy formation. The Temperance movement made Prohibition the law of the land, blue laws and other proscriptive legislation had passed to constrain and define American life, and churches – especially the so-called "mainline church" bodies, were tone and trend setters on social policy and education. Read newspapers of the era, and you can see that mark of a dominant Christendom on almost every page, on a wide variety of subjects.

 

The so-called "golden age" that people are talking about when they say "how things used to be" with the place of faith in civic life is, I would argue, more the turn of the last century than it is the post-war boom years. Yes, pastors and others are always hearing about how in the 1950s all the education wing was filled (or we built one and filled it) and how there was a line around the block to get in for Easter services, and those reminiscers usually blame some combination of "The Sixties", Vietnam, and Watergate for the breakdown of respect for authority and particularly for the church.

 

I realize I'm committing the practice of sociology without a license here, but I would argue as a pastor myself, who is a bootleg historian of sorts, that this is a confusion borne of the fact that like so many things, the wake of World War II created a ferment and to some degree a smoke screen that hid developments already under way.

 

Folks came back from the common mobilization still saluting authority, and got right to work having babies and raising children (hello, Baby Boom!), and there was a surge of church attendance. But those numbers hide the decline behind them back in the Depression era, which was both financial and numerical.

 

My reading of the national and denominational and local records has led me to say this: in the wake of the hyper-patriotic ferment that swept church life in World War I, the manic passion for "slaughtering our foe" which became nearly mandatory *within* congregational walls, not just in the public press, there was a very strong reaction afterwards. On the one hand, churches lost moral stature in the public arena; on the other, internal hand, denominations winced and withdrew from nationalism in ways that still are being debated within congregations and among clergy to this day. It was in the 1920s that church-founded colleges & universities pulled back from their denominational heritage in a decisive manner; it was in the 1920s that arguments over a conservative/modernist worldview began to split and formally divide denominations in ways that hadn't been seen since the 1840s over slavery.

 

In the 1930s, Prohibition ends to general approval, and social improvement is seen as more the province of government (New Deal programs) or secular wisdom (Jane Addams, settlement houses, social work). Churches close in record numbers, and the place of faith in social efforts becomes steadily more supplemental than central. In the African American community, the church is still central, but when the civil rights era begins the mainline bodies flinch, and that record can be read in heartbreaking full with Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

 

And what is the role of church & faith in the society we're making in the 21^st century? That trumpet call is yet to be played.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him where you think the church's role should focus at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 1-18-14

Faith Works 1-18-14

Jeff Gill

 

Onward, Christian Metaphors

___

 

 

Perhaps "the moral equivalent of war" is a good way to go about mobilizing a culture.

 

William James thought so around 1900, and some sixty years later LBJ declared one against poverty.

 

At the same time, he was pulled into ramping up a . . . war-war, if you will. Not a moral-equivalent-of, but an actual Vietnam War. Did the use of the one metaphor cause some pushback because of the other?

 

I wonder about this. I'm not, as I've said in this column before, not a pacifist, but I don't say that proudly. It's pretty clear Jesus was one, and yet neither he nor his forerunner (and cousin) John the baptizer nor his leading follower, Simon Peter, condemn those who practiced the arts of war. I missed the era of the draft by a few years, but grew up in its shadow, yet I signed up for as complex a set of reasons as anyone who has enlisted. I'm proud to claim the title of United States Marine, even if I'm a bit bemused that I actually have an honorable discharge. My service was short, quiet, and stateside. Anyhow.

 

Obviously, I went on into ministry, and in looking at this history of that trade, I've seen a noticeable knot between warfare and worshipful arts back around 1914.

 

That's right, a centennial this year: The War to End All War. The Great War, they called it during its terrible course in England. Or as we later, more reasonably called it, World War One. Or some might say "The First Phase of the Century Long European-Focused Conflict."

 

It began a hundred years ago this summer. In late June Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, and by late July the armies were mobilized and the mortars began their steady thump, a pounding rhythm that would relentlessly beat away at lives and property until four and half years later on November 11^th, still Armistice Day to many.

 

That conflict began without American involvement, and ended with our entry in 1917 decisively swinging the balance to the Western Allies. There's much to say about how "The Sleepwalkers" let the war begin, and much still to debate about how it all should have ended, but the League of Nations and the Versailles treaty certainly didn't work out the way people had hoped.

 

For churches, specifically American churches, there was arguably an element of their own involvement in the move to a "war footing" that didn't work out as they'd expected, either.

 

A startling book entitled "Preachers Present Arms" came out in 1969, researched and written by a pastor & historian named Ray Abrams. He pulls together the myriad stands of how Christian denominations, congregations, and individual parsons all ended up marching largely in lockstep to encourage entry and celebrate taking an active role in what had been, up to that point in the US, "the European Conflict."

 

It's a hard book to read. It doesn't matter how martially minded you are, or are feeling in that moment: the announcements and proclamations and sermons cited in this book trace a spasm of cheerleading for war and fervor for "slaughtering the Hun" as the German enemy was termed that can't not leave you breathless.

 

The bloodlust was bad enough in and of itself, but the aftermath is one of a stuttering, staggering, flailing Christian community across the nation looking back and asking "what in Heaven's name were we thinking?" The rationale for supporting the Allies entirely aside, the sheer zest for battle and blood specifically on the part of clergy safe in their US pulpits: it was appalling. And in many ways, the church bodies and institutions of ministry said "never again." The country may go to war, but the church doesn't have to lead the charge with fixed bayonets.

 

And whether you see that as a reasonable reaction or a failure of nerve, it was in my reading pretty clear that this war hysteria actually did a great deal to undermine the moral authority Christianity had in American culture. Everyday folk who may have had little heartfelt commitment to a particular church body came away from 1917-1918 with the thought "those folks are easily co-opted, and don't mind getting us into pointless bloodbaths."

 

I would argue the great loss of cultural authority on the part of Christendom that we usually associate with the 1960s actually has its basis in the reaction that began to set in after 1918.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he will have a bit more to say about war and faith next week, but tell him what you think at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 1-16-14

Notes from my Knapsack 1-16-14

Jeff Gill

 

Deep freeze and wide muddy lawns

___

 

 

There's a particular type of mud you find on your shoes this time of year. If you have an awkward tendency to stroll off of paved paths and blacktopped parking from time to time, you know the sort of fluid, glutinous mud I mean.

 

When the soil freezes, thaws, and refreezes, you have a slurry near the surface that squirts into your shoes and makes each step squirm a bit, swivel left, twist right, as you curse the wandering impulse that took you off of the flagstones or concrete walkways.

 

The turf, such as it still is, comes loose when the temps shoot back above freezing, barely a loose skin on the bones of what may still be a deeper solidity below. There's an undead element to the grayish-brown colors that overwhelm the few sickly shades of green left on the ground.

 

A good hard permafrost creating cold snap is actually good for the soil, maybe even for the ecosystem, although your more sensitive perennials may not agree. Some roots of recurring plants can get too cold, too fast; earthworms, whose beneficial effects I think we all know, can get down below the frost line if the cold wave doesn't hit too fast.

 

There are nasty plants and grubs and bugs who are duly "iced" in such weather, and you know the kinds of mold and mildew that grows on the north (and even the east or west) side of your house. A winter full of warmer weather and lots of cloud cover as we had a few years back, and that blackish green rash breaks out on siding, stucco, even fence rails and lawn furniture.

 

A certain amount of freezing "exercises" the earth, the frost lines popping open and heaving shut. Much of the original formation of soil in this area happened as the glaciers retreated barely more than 10,000 years ago. Scientists note that soil (dirt is what's under your fingernails, soil is what grows plants and feeds the world – that's what the Ag Dept. at Purdue taught me!) only forms at a rate of about half an inch every four to five hundred years.

 

So topsoil, the good soil in this neck of the woods, is at most twenty inches deep, and the fact is that not every area was prime for soil formation, nor did those conditions continue steadily throughout pre-history. Six inches is a good layer most places in the county, less of course on slopes, on rocky ridgetops, and so on.

 

To get from those ancient glaciers, tumbled granite washed down from Canada, and native sandstone, an end product of useful soil, you first need: freezing. Not just freezing, but a freeze-thaw cycle. The cracks in the rock that expanding water  pops open begins the long cycle of decay, breakdown, and chemical incorporation that end in rich, organic-filled topsoil.

 

But it starts with freezing. As King Lear says, "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" The ice and wind play their part in preparing the ground for coming spring.

 

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

 

 

Newark Christian - Notes 1-10-14

Notes from my Knapsack (1-10-14) -- Preaching, pastoring, & politics

___

When I was in high school, I got a gift, and in a small way, a burden.

 

At my congregation, during my junior year, I was selected to serve as a deacon, ended up as a substitute board secretary when the elected one had surgery, and finally was put on a pulpit committee when our long-time pastor retired.

 

It was, first of all, a gift and a grace to be called by my fellow Christians to a leadership role. It was humbling then, it's still something meaningful to me today. And as for being asked to be, granted, the "youth representative" on the pulpit committee, well: most of us in ministry have sat in front of pulpit committees, but very few of us have been on them. That experience is a unique one for clergy, and I value what that time has meant to me over the years.

 

But it also is a bit of a burden, because this set of memories from the mid-70s when I was 15 years old can loom larger than perhaps it should as an exemplar of what people are thinking of in looking for pastoral leadership.

 

There are so many vivid stories from that time, but in particular, there was a member of our team who always asked one question, and the same question, of each candidate we interviewed (and we interviewed many, a story in itself).

 

"Do you think ministers should be politically active?"

 

It was only years later that I came to learn and understand all the baggage that question carried. The Sixties were barely past, and alive for many, including that particular person. Our retired pastor had been in the forefront of the civil rights movement in Northwest Indiana, and if you know the Chicagoland area in the late Sixties, they were…. vigorous times. The Democratic convention and the riots outside were just the tip of the iceberg. Black faces had preached in our pulpit, a city where the Klan just forty years earlier had held sway… a Klan whose memory still hung like woodsmoke in summer in the oddest corners.

 

The racial politics of that era were still tugging at the social fabric, and the question was a live wire in a pile of dry leaves: Do you think ministers should be politically active? And honestly, even now, I'm not sure what answer that person was hoping for.

 

I've been remembering those interviews in this past week, as the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty has gone by, with LBJ's first "State of the Union" after JFK's death. Johnson was a born and bred Disciples of Christ product, and so was Ronald Reagan. Our tradition has given formation to political views on both sides of the legislative aisle.

 

Yet our history, as a church, as a communion, is that we care deeply about how faith and freedom and the forgotten all intersect. We don't believe in fatalism about poverty, and we don't have consensus about the role of government's role in helping the disadvantaged, either.

 

Nor are we sure what we want our clergy to be seen as doing, either.

 

So here I am, 37 years later, with a newspaper column along with a church newsletter, a civic role in housing and community development, still cautiously treading where angels fear to wear campaign buttons. How shall we, as a church, as community leaders, take a place in the discussions?

 

All I'm sure of, nearly two generations later, is that we have to take one, but I'm still figuring out what it is.

 

In grace & peace, Pastor Jeff

Faith Works 1-11-14

Faith Works 1-11-14

Jeff Gill

 

Family and faith in formation

___

 

This past week saw a significant national anniversary which got some, but (in my opinion) oddly little attention even in forums where you'd expect it to be a dominant topic, pro or con.

 

Last Wednesday was the fiftieth anniversary of Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson giving his first "State of the Union" address, where he declared an "unconditional war on poverty" with policy plans to put behind that metaphor.

 

That metaphor, by the way, comes down to us by way of that great figure in the history of sociology and religious studies (and psychology, and a hatful of other fields), William James. In his work "Varieties of Religious Experience," (1902), the Harvard professor gave academic legitimacy to the phenomenological study of religion; four years later, he published "The Moral Equivalent of War" where he analyzed the drive towards world peace – the seeds of a hope for a "war to end all war" that were planted before World War I began – and pointed out the values and satisfactions people get from warfare. He makes the case that we can't abolish human nature, but we do need and can benefit from "the moral equivalent of war" in shared values, common struggle, and the achievement of wider goals through general participation in that struggle.

 

In that sense, LBJ was an heir of William James; he had seen warfare from both the security of Washington, and out in the field in the Pacific. He knew the positives and the negatives of warfare between nations, and he came back all the more committed to building up the spirit of national effort in ending the kind of desperate poverty he had known growing up and teaching school, in the Texas hill country outside of Austin, and down along the Rio Grande.

 

Much of LBJ's legacy has been overshadowed by his anguished continuation of the Vietnam War. You can find volumes of debate over what Kennedy would have done had he lived past 1963, and what Johnson could have done and didn't after he came into office following the assassination. It's hard to say for sure.

 

What can be said with some certainty is that Johnson already had more of a record of putting himself publicly on the side of civil rights before 1960, let alone 1964, and his "accidental" accession to the presidency meant he could use both the martyred predecessor's memory and his own considerable political skills to get a Civil Rights & Voting Rights Act through, but also to put alongside a suite of social legislation which he gave the caption "War on Poverty."

 

That legacy, itself, is still debated, but in ways that left the usual suspects on cable news and talk radio largely mute. It's an article of faith on the left that it was too little and not fully deployed, accomplishing less than it might have; equally so the right sees the so-called War programs as having done more harm than good. The impacts on family in particular are decried, in politics and not infrequently in churches.

 

I think you can see where some factors of family decline were reinforced unintentionally, but with no less harm, by AFDC (as one example), but the problem was building before then -- the curve really doesn't begin to bend in 1964, it bends through it. And we're still trying to figure out what was loosening those ties to start with, that AFDC gave some unfortunate momentum to. That's part of my morbid fascination with "Mad Men": I think that show is trying to get at some of the same questions in a way. The War on Poverty becomes an early goalpost for the Sixties, but the game had already begun.

 

Somewhere in the post-war era, we started down a road of no-fault divorce, delayed marriage, and general acceptance of birth control as an unspoken expectation. Oddly enough, poor people having more children than "they can afford" goes back to rural culture and a certain cold logic of farm life, and again, the first generation up from the South and into cities -- Appalachian & African-American -- was digging that hole for themselves years before the Pill and the Check started contorting social norms.

 

This is where reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan is so startling: we could have known this in 1963, but it was not politically palatable to talk about, so we didn't. And part of the resistance was due to what I would call an overemphasis on the problems of the "black family" as Moynihan put it, without realizing the social shift was much broader than any one ethnic group. "There are some mistakes only a Ph.D. can make," he said, and mistakes we can make listening to groups of Ph.D.'s in sum.

 

And at the same time, we see the role & centrality of churches change dramatically. Cause, correlation, or coincidence? There may be a further column here…

 

Jeff Gill is a storyteller, writer, and pastor in Licking County; he's ordained in the same tradition from which came LBJ, Ronald Reagan, & James Garfield. Tell him about your views on the sacred & the secular at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.