Notes from my Knapsack 7-4-19

Notes from my Knapsack 7-4-19

Jeff Gill

 

Seeking refuge in America

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It's a commonplace to say that we all came here from somewhere else.

 

Native Americans chuckle at our usual oversight, but archaeologists note that if you go back far enough, we all are migrants to Ohio.

 

Just on the eastern border of the village, thirty years ago, I helped with a dig where we found a flint tool going back to the days just after the glaciers retreated up past Johnstown and Croton, when cedar and sedge were the bulk of the greenstuff, and protein was hazardous to obtain from giant creatures padding across the sub-Arctic landscape.

 

And this December is the thirtieth anniversary of the re-discovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon, down past Heath off Ridgely Tract Road but not far from the not-yet Welsh Hills. Our excavations then and in the summer of 1990 revealed bones with flint tool cut marks, some 12,000 years in the muck of a former bog. The first marks of humanity passing through Licking County are those cut marks on rib and pelvic bones, from preliminary butchering and likely caching into a glacial pond as winter approached.

 

The cache was not accessed again, suggesting that the original hunters did not stay in the area, but were migrants, passing through. Did they get luckier later, or not survive to return? We will surely never know. Migrants often die without anyone even noticing.

 

More recently, the Welsh came to these hills; as is evident, they came here from Wales. A reputable place, perhaps, but still they crossed water and mountains to get here.

 

South of Wales, but closer to there than here, I was thinking of Italy and Italians the other day. I happened to catch a bit of "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" on TV, and there's much to connect to anyone who's moved to Granville in recent decades. The steadily increasing price of the house as the plans are worked out, the challenges faced in both site circumstances and sub-contractors, and of course the racism.

 

Oh, sorry. I mean the stereotypical presentation of ethnic types as . . . nah, let's just call it racism, shall we? But the big bogeyman, or men in this telling is the ignorance and incomprehension of the . . . Italian workmen.

 

Yes, Louise Beavers is the African American servant who bails Blandings out of a fix, and she's portrayed as somewhat hapless herself as was the racist stereotype of the time (1948), but I was struck by the almost equally unpleasant portrayal of the Italians. World War II movies hadn't quite finished flushing that bias out of the system.

 

Frankly, the scenes with the Italians made me think of half a dozen conversations I've had in Our Fayre Village with people about Hispanic landscapers and roofers. A group regarded nervously, speaking their own language, not noticing us nor we noticing them, but necessary to make the project come in on budget.

 

We need them, we virtually expect them, but we're not sure how to deal with them. There's a human sense of wanting to relate personally to them, but a barrier, a wall of sorts, that may someday come down but for now is a tangible distance between us.

 

What's going on along the Rio Grande is driven both by instability and unrest behind refugees, and the hunger for cheap or cheaper labor in front of them. Those scenes to our south are no more distant from us then 12,000 years ago is apart from us as we stand here today.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he knows we're all connected to each other and struggles with how to live like that's true. Tell him about your local connections at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-29-19

Faith Works 6-29-19

Jeff Gill

 

Faith out of doors

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Last week I talked here about Sunday school, Vacation Bible School (or VBS), and Christian education in general; its history from England to America and its development from a substitute for what we now call public education to a faith formation adjunct to church life.

 

When in the early 1900s Ohio and most other states made education legally required for all youth up to age 18, the original intent behind Sunday school and VBS had to change. The growth of formal public education also started to change expectations parents had around the school experience, both secular and religious.

 

Churches built special rooms or wings or buildings for education, and these were generally well filled through the Baby Boom era. What hit many churches like a one-two punch was a decline in overall numbers just demographically, in the "baby bust" that followed the spike of births in the "baby boom" post-war; then the culture shifts around Sunday closing laws ending and entertainment and activity options for youth increasing dramatically.

 

One program that leapt into this gap was church camp. Youth conferences on college campuses or at camp locations began to be popular between the 1890s and 1920s; by World War II one of the most common requests for exemptions in wartime rationing of gasoline was for travel permits to go to church camps.

 

The building boom that echoed the Baby Boom after 1945 took place out in the countryside as well as for new church buildings. Camps added swimming pools, full service dining halls, and bathrooms to replace pit latrines.

 

And an observation got made all across the denominational spectrum: if you get a child to Sunday school every week, that's 52 hours of Christian education – if you get a child to camp at 3 pm on Sunday and pick them up at 10 am on Saturday, then end up with 70 or more hours of exposure to preaching, teaching, and religious oriented conversation and fellowship.

 

That was important, because as camps took off, Sunday school began to struggle. Older youth became less in evidence on Sunday mornings, and more travel plus changes resulting from the increase in divorce meant visitation schedules often complicated regular participation. Camp was an ideal supplement as the standard method of Christian formation grew weaker.

 

But as any of you reading this have already realized, summer time has gotten shorter, and the options are greater. I'll pull out the dreaded phrase "when I was young," but it was true that, as a kid, my parents had the choice of Scout camp, church camp, or "get out of the house, you're driving me crazy."

 

Today, many parents – and in two households – wrestle with concerns about "how are we to best allocate the precious resource of summer schedules for the kids' educational enhancement and athletic opportunities?" Training camps start with August 1, school leaks into the first week of June, and in between there are many and diverse enrichment programs, day camps and residential programs – in air conditioned dorms on quiet campuses empty during the summer – all competing to convince parents that their program will get the kids into a better college, or at least prepare them for success in higher education.

 

How, exactly, does church camp compete with that? We can say – and we do – that we aren't preparing kids for college, we're preparing them for life (and eternal life, at that), but it's a tough sell. It's a highly competitive marketplace, and many church camps have a hatful of deferred maintenance on top of their no-longer-as-appealing rustic atmosphere.

 

Which is why church camps are struggling, too. There are big events that attract Christian youth, music events with preaching in between the bands and camping nearby, or mission camps which involve more travel and much more hands-on application of faith to life. Many of these new options are excellent in their own right, and the parachurch organizations which often sponsor them can sidestep some of the denominational politics that plague other programs.

 

What's a parent to do then? Will you come back next week, and let me offer a few thoughts, if not for this summer, on summer experiences and education in faith in general? Thank you!

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's learned much at camp and not just about faith. Tell him what you've learned or taught at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter. 

Faith Works 6-22-19

Faith Works 6-22-19

Jeff Gill

 

Faith seeking understanding, in or out of church

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From Sunday school to Vacation Bible School (or VBS), Christians have had a deep commitment to education in this country's history.

 

The "Sunday school movement" began in England in the 1700s when young people were working in factories six days a week, and Sunday was the one day the church could help youth by teaching them basic literacy and general history, all through a Biblical lens.

 

When it came to this country in the early 1800s, public schools were common but not mandatory, and a Sunday school was still a vital option for youth education, if not a primary path for many.

 

By the early 1900s, education was legally required for all youth up to age 18 in places like Ohio, and into the 1920s and 1930s the shift to adult Sunday school meant there were a surprising number of churches where attendance at Sunday school was larger than worship attendance. In the move from the country to the city, adult Sunday school classes became an important place for networking and social support as well as a church entry point for new members. Nothing else was open Sunday mornings, and apparently from the numbers recorded, many grown-ups came to large class meetings, heard a lesson from a teacher, enjoyed some fellowship around the coffee urn, and then left, with sometimes as little as half that number staying for church services themselves.

 

As a youth experience, obviously the curriculum and approach of Sunday school changed after compulsory education became the norm. Now that kids were in school and learning reading, writing, and arithmetic five days a week, Sunday needed to strike a different chord. Faith formation became the core of the experience, teaching Bible content and religious understandings; weekday religious education was also a feature of many school districts for a few decades after World War II.

 

The Baby Boom after World War II, giving rise to the Boomer generation, meant that between 1950 and 1970 Sunday school classes were packed, and adult Sunday school slid back down in numbers; the attention churches gave reasonably shifted to creating a solid Sunday school program for the kids being born and then brought into church.

 

What hit many churches like a one-two punch was a decline in overall numbers just demographically, in the "baby bust" that followed the spike of births in the "baby boom" post-war; this natural trough in Sunday school attendance came right after many churches built education annexes to house the increased numbers . . . and as churches struggled to deal with changing from packed classrooms to empty hallways in the Seventies and Eighties, the culture shifted as well, with Sunday closing laws overturned and entertainment and activity options for youth increasing dramatically. For many churches, a relatively recently built "ed wing" suddenly sat largely empty, and active youth programs went dormant.

 

This was a standard arc for many "traditional" style churches; meanwhile, the rise of "contemporary" worship and new non-denominational churches in un-traditional spaces brought a new approach to youth programming which focused on events, activity, and energy. Rows of chairs and film strips gave way to multi-media and Christian rock as a way to attract and invite youth to explore their understandings around faith and practice.

 

Many of these "youth night" programs are large, and the size becomes an attraction as well; like the parallel experience in many communities with churches and overall worship participation, the total involvement decreases . . . in a manner of speaking, you go from ten churches each with twenty youth in a fellowship program (200 total) to two new churches with 60 at each of their programs, and the ten older churches have none or a couple of kids involved, so what looks like the new successful model still means a growing town has 120 or so involved in youth events, versus 200 years before when the community was smaller.

 

All of these changes and trends have impacted the youth camp and conference programs of most churches, and we'll talk about that experience in faith formation next week!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's learned much in church and not just about faith. Tell him what you've learned or taught at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 6-15-19

Faith Works 6-15-19

Jeff Gill

 

Asking questions, getting answers

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Many years ago I heard a Christian preacher make a fairly dramatic assertion: ask God a question, and you can expect an answer.

 

He was a missionary, and said he had not only tested out this means of communication himself but he had counseled others to use it, and was not aware of a time it had not worked. Part of his message was to encourage we who were his listeners that day to venture into this means of communion, and of course the rest of it was to invite us to use this approach to see if we were called into missionary service.

 

I'll admit my attempt at the latter probably lacked sincerity at the time; what my more ambiguous response meant may have been that my calling into the mission field would be across the Indiana border into Ohio, and not an overseas posting which was more to his intention.

 

But the path to getting direct guidance from the Lord he commended to us, and I pass along as having a fair amount of validity in my life, is this: formulate a clear, direct, specific question for God, and ask it out loud, in prayer, for three days in a row. He claimed, and I would affirm, that you will get an answer by the end of that third day. It might come in a dream, it could be a startling coincidence, or even something someone says to you relatively unbidden or unexpectedly, and some report an auditory experience of hearing an voice speak to them. But when that odd occurrence or sense of an answer comes, you'll know it's the answer for which you requested.

 

There are, of course, many arguments to be made against this means of divine communication. The most common modern era answer is to say it's purely wish fulfillment. You want to hear an answer, you open yourself up to getting one, and your mind essentially creates one for you. No God (or god) needed.

A more therapeutic reaction is that you or your subconscious knows what the answer is to the question you've probably been mulling for some time, and this three day's asking lowers some of your internal barriers to hearing what the right path is for you. Pragmatically, there's a criticism referred to as pareidolia – seeing patterns where there are none, like the face of Elvis in Mars surface photography, or the image of a rabbit on the Moon. Apophenia is similar, seeking out connection where there aren't any, and yes, it can be a form of madness as you start to hear everything as part of some vast conspiracy.

 

So it's understandable if some pause to look at what might be a pious exercise and ask those of us practicing it: is this just a hard-wired tendency of the evolved brain and nervous system to help us pick up on environmental cues, be alert to predators and remember food sources, and simply to survive? A fair question.

 

But the counterpart is the set of presuppositions we bring to such a discussion. If you start from "there is no God" and hence no one speaking to us, then you immediately look for other answers to how some say they find guidance and wisdom and peace. Likewise, if you turn every passing breeze or muttered observation from passers-by into divine commands, you can find yourself in a whirl of constant confusion.

 

What I've found to be valid is a simple question, framed in the most concrete terms I can manage (not "will there ever be peace in our time?" but more of a "should I go this direction, or that one, to find peace?"), and to prayerfully and respectfully ask on three successive days for guidance on that inquiry.

 

Here's where the psychological or materialistic or therapeutic interpretations don't go away, but I'll warn the spiritually minded that it can still turn out in some unexpected ways. Sometimes, in this three day practice, I find that as the days go by, my question becomes more clearly irrelevant. I realize it just doesn't matter the way I thought it did. Was that God answering? I think it was.

 

And indeed some answers take you where you didn't expect to go. After being called to Ohio out of seminary, my wife and I ended up somewhere else for a few years. Our lives were clearly at a turning point, and we had some very interesting options in front of us. I asked for three days, and got an answer that was not one of the options I thought I was asking about.

 

I got told to go back to Ohio! Was that God speaking? Over the last two decades, I've become ever more certain that is so.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he doesn't always know what to do, but usually his wife sets him straight. You can try if you like at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 6-8-19

Faith Works 6-8-19

Jeff Gill

 

Pride and pluralism on the local level

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Last June, I participated in the first Newark Pride Festival. Or at least, that's one way to put it.

 

Full disclosure: I'm probably going to put off friends and adversaries alike with my thoughts on this subject. Moderates of any stripe are not very well received these days, but this is my heart (my moderate heart) on this subject, and I offer these musings for what they're worth in Newark and Licking County, circa 2019.

 

I was there to help the Licking County Coalition for Housing (LCCH) put up and staff a booth to share information about housing and homelessness. I've been involved in this effort for over a quarter-century, and from the very beginning we've been very clear about the fact that our services and support are available without bias, however defined. We provide housing services to veterans and single mothers, families and individuals, and it's still a work in progress to make sure everyone is served, but since 1992 we've been doing that work out on the street as well as up in offices.

 

So an event aimed at the LGBT community is a logical place for us to be. Young people who come out are not infrequently kicked out of their homes; there is bias both overt and covert in rental arrangements, and as I've written here and elsewhere over the years, the large "in between" population of homelessness that's always looming in shelter discussions, emergency or transitional, is what's called "couch surfing." Staying with family or friends who don't have to keep you, and at any point can say "you need to leave." These can be mothers with children staying with a great-aunt, it can be a guy who's worn out his welcome with everyone but grandma, and grandma is getting to her last nerve ending. Couch surfing can turn into unsheltered, HUD-certified homelessness at any time.

 

And in fact, sitting at the LCCH booth last year, I talked to young people I knew from marching band and drama club and Scouting past involvements. They recognized me, and talked about their situation. We didn't talk about sex, they didn't bring it up, they were dealing with homelessness or impending homelessness, and it was at this event they were present where we were ready. Whether any of them were "openly" this or "practicing" that I didn't know, just that they were drawn to this "Pride Festival" and took an opportunity to learn about how to take care of themselves.

 

I also witnessed a group down on the public street end of the Canal Market District try to do what they called "witnessing" to the LGBT community. They were Christians, as am I, and they wanted to preach Christ, which I affirm, and they did so by condemning the event and the behaviors they believed this event promoted.

 

I'm not writing this to say they shouldn't have spoken their minds, but I am going to preach this: it sure didn't sound like it was working. If their goal was to tell a group of people that their personal choices are not in line with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the message of exclusion was clear, the opening for good news less so.

 

Myself, I'm skeptical about most of what our modern age says about sexuality. I don't think sex, of any sort, is going to save us or redeem anyone, and I actually don't mind going on record as saying I suspect the world might benefit from less sexual activity, not more of it. I believe keeping sexual intimacy within the secure boundaries of a marriage is a very, very good thing for everyone involved, especially the children that can and often will result.

 

I also know there is a lot of misuse of sexuality in the world, and in our community. I'm against that. I'm a little less clear on what groups or factions or movements to be for or against in order to reduce that, gay or straight, monogamous or uncommitted, religious or less so. What I do know is that people often use sex to replace the lack of connection and community they feel in their lives. And the best counter to this is to be present to and with people, especially people in need. To listen.

 

And I fully respect the concern that many have in asking when "pride" becomes "promotion" of lifestyles. In a pluralistic community, there are questions we have to ask and talk about out loud. So I plan to help set up a booth again this year, and there are events I'll be at, and others I won't be. Our county will continue to need places where everyone can be heard, and where anyone can listen.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he believes everyone should have the right to access for safe and secure shelter, and is proud of how hard this county works to achieve that goal. Tell him what you think should be done at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.