Notes From My Knapsack 2-25-16

Notes From My Knapsack 2-25-16

Jeff Gill

 

E Pluribus, Multitudinous

___

 

We're heading into a primary election, as if you didn't know it, whether you wanted to or not.

 

The ads are now lapping at the shores of Ohio, after the dollars and mailers and TV spots and robocalls have blanketed Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina. Appearances will start to happen in this state, maybe even by our own Gov. Kasich, after they've tromped through the snow in New England from diner to diner, and around the Low Country from pulpit to pulpit.

 

Debates and town halls and those obscure, real time appearances on CSPAN that we political wonks really love: maybe we'll get us some of those in Ohio in the run-up to March 15.

 

Eight years ago we were heading to a March 4, 2008 contested primary, and there were still presidential matters up in the air enough to bring candidates to the ground in Ohio. As I recall, Licking County's 125 some voting precincts then split in the Democratic contest with 8 going to Sen. Barack Obama, and 117 to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

 

And the eight Obama precincts were all Granville.

 

Our bucolic college town can claim a certain amount of prescience, perhaps, and surely a bit more diversity didn't hurt. The Obama For America meet-ups and events I saw online certainly all focused on this village, and across the rest of the Land of Legend, the union-based support for Hillary was still leaning strongly in a more traditional direction for Democratic organizational and get out the vote efforts (GOTV in pol parlance). Even so, the county as a whole went about 60% Clinton, with a very strong 40% to Obama. He had voters in quantity from the east end of Newark to Pataskala's outer edges, in pockets all over the county.

 

Just not quite as strongly as Granville supported him!

 

(Footnote: those percentages ignore a third candidate who got one to two-plus percent around the county, the now discredited and discreditable John Edwards.)

 

You could infer from all that about Granville that this is a very liberal place, but in that you would be wrong. In the Republican primary of 2008, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul (Rand's dad), Mitt Romney, and the late Fred Thompson got votes in this county of (in the same order) 30%, 50%, 5%, 3%, & 2%.

 

The precinct by precinct breakdowns are no doubt still available at the Licking County Board of Elections (say a prayer for them these next few weeks as the voting is already well under way in their offices!), but not on the website, where just the county totals are present as an aid to memory. (Note to editor: add this or edit it out as makes sense according to current protocols - http://www.electionsonthe.net/oh/licking/elecres.htm)

 

As I recall, Granville was fairly evenly divided in total voters between Democratic and Republican ballots; on the GOP side, unlike the county totals, Huckabee did poorly while McCain and Romney were at the front.

 

Like the country, Granville is split. There are conservatives, social and fiscal, and liberals, progressive and even Democratic Socialist in loyalties; if you assume you can walk into any gathering here and find complete unanimity, you assume wrongly.

 

Is this a bad thing? I'm sure a Granville where everyone agreed on everything would, at the very least, be a different place than the village that we know today.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him how politics is a topic where you hang out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

“We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes just don’t know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter—and they are on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They are individuals and families whose taxes support the Government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet but deep. Their values sustain our national life. We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?”

Faith Works 2-20-16

Faith Works 2-20-16

Jeff Gill

 

Bandwidth and Communications in Churches

___

 

Doing more to get less is generally considered a sign of inefficiency, if not a lack of smarts (or just plain being out of your mind).

 

The goal of communications is to get the biggest bang for the buck, you'd think, but that's not as easy as you might think, not if you're living and working in 2016.

 

Quite a few ministers and church leaders of my acquaintance are somewhere between frustrated and exhausted, and when they come to me for comfort they're more likely to hear more bad news… not a role I like to fill.

 

The dilemma begins with internal communications, which for many faith communities is the main question when it comes to making connections (more on that in a bit).

 

What not long ago was the province of a church newsletter sent by mail weekdays, and a few calendar lines on the back of a worship bulletin Sundays, is now something much more complicated.

 

Add in pastoral care communications, which are more personal, but with an import for the whole church community: it used to be, not so very long ago, an answering machine at home for the pastor, and a secretary answering the church office phone, leaving pink "While You Were Out" slips in a mailbox or on a spike atop the parson's desk.

 

Today the average to smallish size church might have a Facebook page, messaging through that Facebook page both inbound and outbound, a Twitter account with DMs through that, a landline to the church building with voicemail, cell phones to the key leaders, and e-mail accounts for a variety of purposes. I have a personal e-mail, the more public one you always see at the bottom of this column, a church e-mail and a prayer line address. Meanwhile, I have a landline and voicemail at home.

 

All of which adds up to the possibility that prayer concerns or last minute schedule changes can come in through an e-mail to the church, to me personally, to someone else who may forward it to me or it's tucked into a prayer chain e-mail to a group, or it could come as a Facebook post, a message, or a Tweet (posted or messaged), unless it's on the church voicemail, my cell voicemail, or my home voicemail.

 

And to get that word out to people, if need be, we have in the office the options of the monthly print newsletter & calendar, the biweekly e-mail prayer notes and updates, a special e-mail (which you don't want to use too often or people start tuning out your messages), a post on the Facebook page, or putting in the next Sunday bulletin either as a calendar note, brief news article, or insert. (But people don't attend as consistently as they once did…)

 

Plus the big sign out front, which has plusses and minuses of its own.

 

I noticed over Christmas and New Year's that most of the remaining churches I knew that were still bulk mailing large numbers of newsletters had published announcements saying they would be discontinuing this practice. Some would be printed for pick-up, and a few mailed first class to the homebound, but the push was to electronic delivery. Yes, for speed, and this is a year when bulk mail will be oddly delayed on and off with the surge of mailers from political campaigns, but mostly because of cost.

 

So you pick up some monetary savings, but you add to the question "how to communicate with our congregation?" Because more and more people want to be communicated with the way they want to be communicated with, and most of our culture is delivering exactly that. Do you want to hear about it through Instagram or Vines or Snapchat? Then that's where media is going, and churches are struggling to follow.

 

Yet many still want the phone call, the printed sheets in the mailbox, so we find ourselves in church life trying to "do it all." And "all" gets broader, more complex every day.

 

Do you see what gets missed in this kind of discussion? It's all about internal communications, which are important, no question: but what about external communications? How do you share your news – your Good News! – with those not already on your mailing list or e-mail roster? How has that changed, and what can we do with those opportunities?

 

More next week, this time, looking outwards.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County. Tell him how your faith community keeps everyone on the same page, virtual or otherwise, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-13-16

Faith Works 2-13-16

Jeff Gill

 

Boring is better than headline making

___

 

There's an aspect of faith community life, of church involvements, that we all tend to dismiss – intentionally or not.

 

When it comes to the boring minutae of finance and the organizational detail of what's often called "stewardship" (a broad subject, but in board and committee-speak usually meaning the group responsible for managing finances), everyone from clergy to chairmen, from ministers to moderators, all like to wince a little as the financial report comes up.

 

Yes, it involves numbers, and true, we're talking about money. In modern-day America, we could talk about dreadful diseases or sexual activity and not see as many people start looking intently at their shoe-tops. Innumeracy may be worse than illiteracy in our society, and money is the guilty secret everyone wants to keep. So the cultural pressure is to glance, shuffle, and move on. Someone understands this stuff, right? Let them worry about it.

 

And let me (unfairly) speak for clergy. Few of us went into this calling because we loved to work over the budget analysis, or have a head for accounting. It's a different skill-set, and they don't always overlap.

 

It all adds up to church finances, and non-profit accounting, being an area that's seen as a specialist field where most of us not only don't but don't need to understand what's going on.

 

Until there's a problem.

 

Yeah. I feel like I have to write some version of this column about every two years, and it seems that it's time again, so here goes: when someone is caught stealing money from a Little League team, a Girl Scout troop, the Cub Scout pack, the church treasury? I can tell you from painful, hard experience: it NEVER starts as someone thinking "I'll swipe the cookie money from the kids." Really, it doesn't. It begins with a person who is handling too much cash with too few other participants who is dealing with some financial stresses of their own, and says – to themselves, because the set-up doesn't require they talk to anyone else, anyhow – "you know what? this won't be missed for the time being, and I need to pay something over here, and I'll pay it back over there in a few days…weeks….months."

 

And a year goes by, and you owe the club, the group, the fund something on the order of thousands, and the tax return wasn't as big as you hoped, and now you'd have to explain to people why it was going in now, and you can't figure out where to get it from anyhow, and so far no one notices, so… then it gets to five figures.

 

It can be, I've seen, almost a relief to get caught. What's horrible for some of us is having to be one of the two or three who have to sit down with someone, and work through a) denial, b) deflection, c) weeping and sobbing, and get to d) what are we going to do about it? A to D can be a long journey, and sometimes you end up stuck at B and lawyers and the police have to be involved.

 

Here's my sermon for charitable groups in general and churches in particular: if you're taking the easy way out regarding donations and money and giving, STOP. You're creating the circumstances where a decent but weak and/or hurting person could do themselves and your cause a great disservice. Fiscal reports and annual budgets and two-handed deposit and check writing processes and the occasional audit: they can all be SO tedious, and quite frankly, they can be utterly unnecessary for years on end. Until they aren't.

 

Which is why we do it month after month, year after year. The boring way. The "everyone gets a copy" way and the "nothing happens without two un-related sets of eyes on it" way. The responsible way, for your organization and for those taking on the responsibility. When you say "we trust you, just shove it in your left-hand pocket and put it in the bank on Monday!" you mean well, but you might be creating the grounds for misunderstandings later at best, outright crime that could have been prevented at the worst.

 

Do it the right way from the start, and give thanks for all of us tedious, rule-citing people. You will never (I hope) know how much pain our boring ways can prevent.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been a treasurer and board officer a few times, and knows why you do this boring stuff. Tell him what boredom you're thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 2-11-16

Notes From My Knapsack 2-11-16

Jeff Gill

 

Sounds Overheard, All Around the Halls

___

 

Imagine walking down a classroom corridor, hearing over the modulated hubbub of the hallway the sound of voices raised in song, singly and in groups, in English, yes, but also Italian and French and German and Latin.

 

You hear pieces and parts more clearly through some doors, safely closed during performance, than you do others; some vocalists are stronger, others softer, occasionally it's an ensemble or group of some sort singing.

 

On into a different section of the building, or the floor below, and it's instrumentalists at work: woodwind and brass and percussion, strings and keyboards, steel drum groups, clarinet choirs, and orchestral assemblies. Keep moving and you'll hear a fast run of notes, up deliberately then down just as carefully, yet a few steps further on a slow and stately sonata unfurls.

 

You can come upon a stretch of warm-up rooms with a manic charge of scales or arpeggios in the air, or just see a small mountain of instrument cases piled with coats on top, a formally dressed student sound asleep on the tiles before it, as if exhausted with having climbed or built it.

 

Stop and sit yourself, whether on a precious empty chair or bold enough to plop onto the floor, and watch them stride briskly by, tuxedos and formals and a wide variety of black tights, sweaters, jackets, scarves, with just enough jolts of color to remind you these are teenagers under the very professional exteriors.

 

Some look stern, many are laughing, not a few are gazing without focus before them (look out!) as they hum softly and rap a rhythm on their thigh as they walk.

 

You also see a fair number of parents, often obvious as they walk along with their maturing child, young person, youthful adult; the faces and forms echoing across generations to show you how one looked younger and in what ways the other is likely to age.

 

There is an event like this every winter that often takes place right here in Granville.

 

A couple of years ago, it got snowed out, but generally, they plow on. Friday night and Saturday, in late January, the Ohio Music Educators Association holds a Solo and Ensemble "adjudicated event" in this district, and the music programs of Granville Middle and High Schools along with the Music Boosters are delighted to host.

 

Thousands of singers and players, well over a dozen high schools from across east central Ohio, hundreds of parents, chaperones, and those indispensable band and choir and orchestra teachers all ramble the length of GHS & GMS, and you rarely get to know just what an extended sprawl of a building complex we have until your own child has six different performances on a Saturday between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm.

 

Your strength will keep up, thanks to the wonders of the Music Boosters' kitchen in the concession area next to the Commons (huzzah for shredded chicken sandwiches!); and the Commons are bustling and electric all the live-long day.

 

Across the walls, the large sheets of flipchart paper, ruled in magic marker and names and performance levels pre-written – it is ultimately onto these the proctors, students themselves, come to write from the judges' sides (they being music educators themselves, but from outside our area, all skilled and helpful, but somewhat stiff and grim in their adjudicating role).

 

The latest set of scores is carefully written in, and from the crowd which quickly gathers behind the proctor, there are moans, or cheers, or just a happy laugh.

 

It is a day like no other for the music students of our community, and for those adults privileged to watch and listen alongside.

 

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

 

 

Faith Works 2-6-16

Faith Works 2-6-16

Jeff Gill

 

How Not To Kid Yourself

___

 

Fifteen years ago, on the first of March, I drove over to Bethany College, in West Virginia just north of Wheeling.

 

The village was the home base for one of the founders of my religious tradition within Christianity, and where he founded a college that helped to spread his beliefs and priorities. Since Alexander Campbell's death in 1866, they have marked an occasion somewhere in the neighborhood of March 4 as "Founders Day."

 

I was going as a minister, simply to share a brief address and prayer of dedication at a wreath-laying in "God's Acre," the Campbell family cemetery. Founders Day always has a keynote speaker, usually someone of national or even international prominence, and in 2001 it was the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Halberstam.

 

Which is how, after a fashion, I got to have lunch with him. After the keynote, and before the trip out to the cemetery, we went into the student union and a lunch was laid out, with my role allowing me a place at the head table.

 

Halberstam was eloquent, passionate, occasionally infuriated, and matching my own height of nearly six and a half feet, imposing even when seated, with a voice that rumbled down into registers that rattled crockery stored in the cellar. Yet the Bethany students seated at our table were quickly made at ease, mostly, as he found out where they were from, what their studies were, and how they felt about the campus and college life.

 

Then his deep-set eyes swiveled around to the thirty-something clergyman sitting at his right, and Halberstam said to me "So, what about you?"

 

And I found myself being interviewed, as it were, by an expert. (A Pulitzer Prize winning expert.) He wanted to know more about my work as a pastor of a congregation, and he was curious about the denomination this college represented, at least historically. "They sent me some stuff in the mail, and I glanced through it, but I'd like to hear it from you."

 

I did my best to tell our frontier Protestant tale, and he sped me along with well-timed questions, in a hurry to get to the present day: what was the church structure like, how did it work, how was it doing in the purposes it existed for? It was clear he didn't consider himself a religious man, and he admitted at one point he knew less about American church history than probably he should, but his knowledge was fairly extensive for all I could tell.

 

He also fairly quickly got at my unease at the direction of our denomination, not just in numerical decline, but in our overall function and structures. "Have you read my 'The Best and the Brightest'?" he asked.

 

I could just barely honestly answer "Um, yes" from a years-before quick read (McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Acheson, arrogance, hubris, quagmire), to which he said "Good; there's a book a friend of mine, Neil Sheehan wrote a few years ago, 'A Bright Shining Lie," read it? (I shook my head no), and I think you'd find it informative and interesting on this same subject." He asked me about what I was saying at the cemetery; his flight from Pittsburgh meant that he wouldn't join us out there, and I gave him my second copy I had in my folder for the ceremony.

 

"You've got some challenges ahead, that's for sure," Halberstam said in his conversationally prophetic tone; "the best thing I can tell you is this: don't kid yourself."

 

He took a drink of water, looked back at me, very seriously, and added "The best way you can tell if you're kidding yourself is if you find yourself kidding other people." He stood up, shook my hand, said "It's been good talking to you" and strode off to find the college president.

 

I've recently re-read both of those books. I'm starting again this week to teach my church tradition's history and polity to seminarians, and I'm thinking about Halberstam's counsel. "Don't kid yourself….(don't) find yourself kidding other people." I have a truly grand and glorious story to tell about my spiritual forbears, the men and women of the Disciples of Christ, but I also know there's a great deal of kidding ourselves going on out there.

 

There is a place for hope and possibility, and a time for honesty and candor. I pray that I will find the words for both, and am thankful for having met a man who reminded me how to maintain that balance.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about someone who spoke directly to you at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.