Faith Works 3-20-21

Faith Works 3-20-21

Jeff Gill

Following Jesus when you can't move

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This Lent I've been inviting you to reflect with me on where Jesus tells Peter in John 21:18 that: "…another will…carry you where you do not want to go." And as I said before Ash Wednesday, when Lent began, the path to Easter this coming April 4 takes us from verse 18 to verse 19, when Jesus concludes his teaching to Peter and to us by saying "Follow me."

Except, Jesus has been talking about not being in control; he's not telling him or the disciples about good decision making, or what acts are to be honored in his name. Yes, he's spoken just before about feeding the sheep and tending the lambs as the work all who love Jesus are called to share in together, but then he turns to Peter and cautions him that all this is, in a way, preparation for a time when others will carry him where he does not want to go . . . and it is in response to that situation that Jesus tells him "Follow me."

Following Jesus, in this Lent, in our lives, at any time, is not all about what we do. Our acts of faith, our service in Jesus's name, our living out of being sisters and brothers in Christ, is not what following Jesus comes down to. How we respond is a reflection of how we have chosen to follow, but it's not the heart of the following, of the follower-ship, the discipleship of the Christian journey. The work of faith that is the rock on which Jesus promises to build a community of faith is something you can do, in obedience, as following him, when you no longer have any control over external events.

Recently, Tim Keller had an essay in "The Atlantic" which you can find easily enough online, titled "Growing My Faith in the Face of Death." He wrote it because he's dying. He wrote it, as a noted Christian preacher and teacher, because we all are. It's the one most externally obvious thing we all have in common. Rich and poor, whatever our color or ethnic loyalty or personal orientation, and yes, even old or young, we are dying. This is an element of much pastoral work, whether you're a minister in a medium-sized Ohio city or a celebrity preacher in New York City: helping people confront and deal with the reality of death, when much of our culture is deeply invested in the denial of dying and decay and endings.

Keller has written a number of books on Christian themes, one titled "On Death." At the doctor's office when he learned he had pancreatic cancer, he writes how as he waited he "caught a glimpse of 'On Death' on a table nearby. I didn't dare open it to read what I'd written." It's one thing to counsel others, and another to come to terms yourself with this in your own life.

His essay, which I hope you'll seek out yourself, speaks of how his faith had to work through some "head" and some "heart" issues around death and dying. His story continues, for now, and he talks about how putting his immediate existence in the light of eternity, how seeing today's gifts as reflections of God's more lasting promises, makes the current moment more precious, not less.

And I caught an echo of this passage, John 21:18-19, in his reflections. How we find in our hearts the way to "Follow me" when Jesus calls is a turning which starts in there, within our selves, between our heart and his, before the idea rattles through our heads and gets turned into acts and movements and deeds.

A good Calvinist, Keller quotes a great Puritan writer of Colonial America in saying "As the early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argued, it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey."

How do we follow when we can't go anywhere? This is what Jesus is talking to Peter about, there on that long-ago lakeside. And to us.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's listening closely to a few things this Lent. Tell him about your lakeside conversations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-18-21

Notes from my Knapsack 3-18-21

Jeff Gill

What do I have to do?

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Whether it's a stop sign or a face covering, there is law and there is consensus.

Ohio Revised Code or Village Codified Ordinances alike, we have a body of law that can be enforced, but few of us have read those source documents, and we work from a day by day basis on a set of understandings that are part of our local culture, perhaps a result of our upbringing, and frankly can carry with them a wide variety of misunderstandings.

When I spent a long stretch in the honorable duty of homeowner association president, I had many conversations where people were certain that certain things were law that were not. Usually, it was because a certain practice or rule or guideline was true in Santa Barbara, CA or Easton, MD but not in Granville, OH. And I work across the county with school principals who will tell me things that I have the sad obligation of telling them are not true, even if they're correct for Beavercreek or Parma in other school districts of Ohio.

Local option is a very big thing in Ohio, and where in some states a policy in one county is true for all, you'd better not assume that here. Which makes state gatherings of all sorts of professions a challenge, as we share wisdom and best practices that often simply can't be carried across county lines. Townships and judges and school boards have autonomy in a wide variety of areas, and that's how we seem to like it.

So the governor and other state boards and panels have less sway over community decision making than you might think, especially if you came here from somewhere else. And the year of health orders in many states that we've recently experienced, or as some wags say "the first anniversary of 14 days to slow the spread," now behind us, leaves many legislatively minded people wanting to further limit the authority of governors and health commissioners from issuing instructions that can be enforced, which is the basic definition most of us have for a "law." You can call them administrative code or county status announcements, but if a law enforcement officer can enforce it, with fines or force or both, most of us just call it a law.

And understandably, the legislature wants to protect their prerogative to make law by limiting the law-like actions the chief executive officers of the state and cities and counties can issue, certainly when they're for longer than it takes for snow to melt or floodwaters to fall.

Pandemics represent a new challenge for the usual legal perspective on emergency orders. Can you have an emergency that lasts a year and more? Arguably, yes, we just had or are still having one. It's not permanent, even the most worried and cautious will concede that, but 14 days and 30 days and 100 days are now well past 365. How do we govern ourselves in an ongoing emergency? This is the discussion we're in the middle of right now.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's mindful of the old saying about what not to do if you appreciate either law or sausages. Tell him what you think we need in the mid at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-13-21

Faith Works 3-13-21

Jeff Gill

Belief in God, and how to get there

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Jesus tells Peter in John 21:18 that: "…another will…carry you where you do not want to go."

Loss of control is part of faith. If everything is in our control, and clear in front of us, it's not faith. It's simply work. We might need to develop some faithfulness to keep at it, but faith is about wider narratives and how our immediate steps are on a path whose end we do not know.

The things I have the most control over, the paths that are most familiar to me, are reassuring, but they neither challenge me nor give me a deeper hope. They have a place: running laps can be good for the heart and even the mind, but the journey of faith asks me to make a turn off the track, and into what can appear at first to be darkness.

Some trips, I have to be willing to let someone else drive. At some point, I may even need to get into a wheelchair and allow someone else to push. And I've known a few times that queasy feeling of laying back on the gurney and having the attendant wheel me down the hall to a place where I know I'm going to sleep, and then . . . well, I have a rough idea, but I'm not sure.

Those are the times I need faith.

I believe in God. This is my most fundamental faith stance, that I believe there is a divine reality beyond and behind the immediate reality I experience, which knits together past and future, my life and someday my death, lives which I've never met in life who have played a role in my own, and the deaths of others who are with me in one moment and in another . . . gone. Gone somewhere, or nowhere? I believe in God, which is a faith that in one dimension extends into believing that those who die go somewhere, in some part.

This is not a universally held way of looking at the world. You can argue that in the decades of my youth and maturity it held sway in American life, but I can both look back and do research today to show that it wasn't a definite majority view even in 1961, let alone in 2021. Oh, you can find surveys over the last sixty years of a vague, diffuse "86% of Americans believe in God" but it's generally of a very loose, uncertain, deistic sort of belief when you get into any details at all. Regular worship attendance on any given weekend has declined in that period from an optimistic 40% at best to something south of 20%, and as I've written about in this space before, a quick objective check of the numbers will bear that out, with no more than 15% of Licking County attending any service at all each weekend when you add everyone up and even round things in a favorable direction.

I believe in God, creator of heaven and earth, who loves and cares about what has been created, who desires to redeem and save it for a new and more wonderful dawn, and who has promised to come down into the muck and mess and complication of life as it is to show by example and patient teaching what it could yet be. I believe, in fact, in God who is with us, which is the same divine creator we know as Father because he sent a Son, a human form of that divinity into the everyday world. And we still have a Spirit with us and in us and working through us to understand how the everyday and the eternal intersect, cross-wise if you will.

And I have to admit that my faith is not entirely my own. I did not get here by my own efforts. I was picked up and carried on the first stages of the path of faith by my father. He taught me, mostly by example, occasionally when necessary with words, though words were not his strong point. He did. And he didn't look over his shoulder often. He just did what his faith led him to do, and expected that God would lead others to follow. Which we did.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's on a journey of faith this Lent. Tell him about your path into valleys of shadow at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-6-21

Faith Works 3-6-21

Jeff Gill

Everybody wants to clean up, but…

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When Jesus is talking to Peter, at John 21:18, he says to him: "Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go."

And "where you do not want to go" is where much of this past year, and this Lent, is taking me. With apologies, I'm taking you with me, because as with most of scripture, I think what Jesus is saying is for us as well.

Yes, he's talking about death, but only in part. The prophecy implicit in the verse above is Peter's martyrdom, but it's also about aging, and limitations, and endings.

I've also found that it's about dumpsters.

This coming week is the one year anniversary of my father's death, and to be blunt how it came as a crescendo for the losses that began in the Christmas season of 2019, of losing people important to me and whose passing left a mark on my spirit, of nearly a dozen in the span of ten weeks. Yes, I'm still sorting through that.

But Dad's death opened up a giant dumpster lid that I'm still flipping back and forth. My sister and I had a house in Texas to sort quickly (which had twice as much in it as you'd think looking at this little winter home from the outside), a childhood home in Indiana my brothers and others helped with clearing at a modestly more leisurely pace, and then a church office and its storage long shoved aside, needing some final attention as I stepped down from pulpit ministry. 

As I've noted before, this past year I was sifting and sorting and discarding, of necessity (please, no helpful comments at this point about where I could take it or who could use it, it's pretty much all behind me and as COVID hit, everyone was clearing out basements to where many places that took in stuff had to stop doing so), not just my own piled up notes and outlines and memorabilia, but that of five or six other lives in my family going back into the earliest years of the 1900s, and of church history to boot, both of the congregation I was serving and in my church tradition's region. 

The important stuff, I kept. Or tried to. But my sister and I have already had a few incidents of learning that something we pitched was important. All in the "there's no way we could have known that had value" category, a special pencil or a drab brown dress among dozens (hundreds) that had a particular meaning. If you let that haunt you, then you keep everything just in case, and I am here to tell you, that way lies madness.

And overstuffed basements and closets and cabinets.

Our lives produce more meaning than we can save, just as our culture produces more stuff than we can use. Keep one piece out of a hundred, and you still end up with thousands in no time.

So this is not Marie Kondo, or what brings you joy to posses, or any magic clue to how to downsize and sort, except for this: there is a spiritual discipline to accepting the need to put stuff into dumpsters. It's not joy, and it can produce waves of anxiety, but it can also bring peace.

At a certain point, you get into a space of saying, to God, the universe, to your future self, whomever: I can't keep it all, and this is what I am casting aside. Sure, recycle or take for reuse or hand along to others what you can, but I've noticed in both self and others over the years that those idealistic proposals can just be further means of evasion of the reality — most of our lives are junk, trash, detritus, debris. An awful lot of it can be safely thrown into dumpsters. And the regrets over a few stray pieces has to be seen in relation to the impossibility of keeping it all.

Letting it go brings clarity, and yes, peace. Throwing out the trash starts with admitting that's what it is, which is often a place we don't want to go. But there we are called.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's done dumpster diving before, but this is different. Tell him about your spiritual disciplines around taking out the trash at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-4-21

Notes from my Knapsack 3-4-21

Jeff Gill

Consensus, coercion, & community

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Even when we don't all agree on much, our consensus as a community is clear every time you stop at a stop sign.

That red octagonal warning is an instruction, a reminder. It also can be seen as an expression of the law, and we're used to thinking of "the law" as an objective reality, but it's really much more of our community consensus that at certain places, you should stop, and we concur by so doing. We stop.

Okay, sometimes, we roll. Tapping the brakes and slowing, looking back and forth, and not quite stopping. Am I saying too much? Is this just me? No? Didn't think so. Late at night, in a quiet neighborhood, when… well, when no one is looking. And we think, when it doesn't matter much.

Circumstances alter cases. The central intersection in Our Fayre Village, Broadway and Main, has a stop light, and no one would breeze through it, even at midnight… I think. But the stop instruction encoded in the red-yellow-green is enhanced with a "no right turn on red" instruction which means you can't do so before 7:30 pm. But I've been behind more than a few who did so, and I've been in the right turn lane there at 5:15 pm and been honked at while the light is red.

You see what I mean? We have laws, and reminders of said laws, but our community is governed primarily by consensus. If the consensus breaks down, we lose much of the reliable substructure of law and ordinance and policy, even if the written law and technical enforcement remains unchanged.

I'm sure both time of day and distance from the center of town, as well as the amount of traffic nearby all weigh heavily on compliance, because once violated, a law about stop signs is less than the paper it's written on (I'm staying away from the traffic camera debate here entirely). Zoning and building, though, take us into a different category, one I work with regularly with our community board for that. If you are given a variance to build within eight feet of your lot line, and you actually put in your porch or patio to two feet away, it's concrete (sometimes literally!) and visible long after the act. But if you don't make a big deal out of it, and your neighbors don't mind, we might not catch it, especially if it's small. The problem is if a while later a new neighbor moves in, and does care, and the evidence of your breach of consensus is still sitting there, a violation.

So we've got two basic categories here: the passing event or behavior, and the permanent impact in physical or fiscal terms. And in each, you have the big violations, and the small. Small breaches of the social consensus in terms of impermanent acts are those most likely to slide by.

Which brings us to masks, and the policies around them. Did you have a mask on yesterday indoors with strangers, and who's to know? Most of these are like rolling through a stop sign at midnight. But if you say "the consensus is silly" and make a general habit of not sharing in it, day after day, it starts to become a concrete and un-ignorable fact.

How do we build a consensus around behavior, to support personal acts in public spaces?

(To be continued)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's gotten a few speeding tickets in strict enforcement zones. Tell him what kind of consensus you're hoping we can reach as a community at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-27-21

Faith Works 2-27-21

Jeff Gill

When it's not about what you want to do

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Second Sunday of Lent tomorrow. Easter is coming April 4th, but first we prepare to make the journey with Jesus to the cross. There's more to Easter, but all roads go through Calvary. That's why Lent is a penitential season, even a sacrificial season. 

We don't tend to want to make sacrifices, not on our own. Our tendency to self, our general orientation to me first, you second, has to receive a divine corrective, a grace from without to transform the struggle within. It takes an openness to God's activity in the world, and a willingness to work with choices that aren't always apparently to our benefit, to make that first step into holiness, and wholeness.

Jesus says to Peter that the time will come, for him as for all of us, when he will have to go where he does not want to go. And as is so often the case in scripture, Jesus is speaking to us. That passage is for the one spoken to, and it speaks to the audience of faith. "Where you do not want to go."

One year ago, I had no intention of resigning from pulpit ministry. I had some short and long term goals in mind for the church I was serving. There was a vision I was still struggling to speak clearly, and invite others to follow, for the community as a whole. There were obstacles present, but they were fairly typical ones for a church of this area. In the extended church family, we had six funerals since Christmas Eve and had another clearly coming in hospice. Times I'd hope to pivot to a new stage of ministry would turn back to loss and grief and memorialization. Our losses included some pillars of our church which involved the mourning and sorrow of much of the congregation, so momentum tends to stop when everyone has to turn in that direction.

Then my father died. His loss, along with other family complications back in Indiana, suddenly meant I was gone for weeks just as the pandemic was announced March 11, and I was gone or in transit pretty much through Easter. I tried to get back into the online rhythms we were establishing, but it quickly became clear that my family needed me to be away every other weekend, and that this would be the case for a long time. After brief consideration of some kind of leave, and seeing the open-endedness ahead, I gave my notice, and concluded my ministry to that church in August.

For a preacher, there are certain rules, guidelines in some church traditions and canon law in others. One is that you stay away for at least a year. There's a cold logic to this, and the roots of it go back to the 1950s and 60s when in many traditions some of the first diverse clergy candidates came into parish ministry. Without a clear and sweeping guideline like this, parishioners would go back to the retired or former minister, often male and white, rather than turn to the new pastor to allow them to care for them and enter into a ministerial role in their family, for baptisms and weddings and funerals.

Generally, a preacher and their family finds a different church a ways away and goes there. But a strange and disturbing part of the COVID circumstances that helped force me to this choice is that we can't go to another church, either. Caring for an elderly father-in-law regularly means we have to be twice as cautious, so after 40 years of pretty much unbroken church attendance, we're part of the online congregation… of many churches. Like many of you.

This is not where I ever wanted to be; it's not where I wanted to go a year ago. But it is beyond a doubt where God has put me. And I'm learning from this dislocation. I'm experiencing things many of you have and are experiencing, things that having a settled and regular church home, even by video, insulate you from. I'm learning, and I'm getting chances to share perspectives and counsel with a surprising number of fellow clergy still in the thick of things.

This is not where I wanted to go. But it is where I am, and I'm learning this Lent how to be at peace with that. Which is what Lent is for.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not preaching much these days, except in text and print and posts. Tell him how your faith has been forced into new paths at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-20-21

Faith Works 2-20-21

Jeff Gill

Where you do not want to go

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We are now into Lent, the period leading up to Easter, which falls as it does on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, also known as April 4 this year.

I will admit to a certain holy impatience with a tendency to make Lent all about what we don't do, what we do without, and this year especially. Disciplines can and should include sacrifice, and practice in making willing, even cheerful sacrifices can be good for any of us, but Lent can't just be about avoiding "Alleluias" and giving up some dietary treat for 40 days (not counting Sundays, since they're feast days and hence a time to celebrate at any season, each a little Easter).

Yet this is also a good year for a penitential turn, particularly if you've not wrestled with that side of your faith very much. We've been wrestling and resisting and yes, even resenting all that we've given up since last March, and our attitude towards such things can also be a spiritual weathervane whose predictions we perhaps should attend to with care.

A couple of cautions these next seven weeks, for regular readers here. My commission many years ago, and the responsibility I still feel, is that "Faith Works" is meant to be open to how faith is part of the lives of all of us, in many and various ways. The religion column, in a generic sense, almost left these pages when previous writers here used the space to bash on denominations and practices not their own. I was asked, when I inquired about picking up the opportunity to write here, "can you write about faith without telling over 90% of my readers they're idiots?" Beyond that initial request, I've never been told what to write about or what I can't cover, and I appreciate that. And I respect the need for a place to invite seekers and non-believers to hear discussion of faith which is inclusive.

What you'll be getting the next few weeks, though, will be explicitly Christian. I've always been clear about that being my own basic orientation, and what I preach and teach on my own. These next few columns, though, will be written on the assumption that you share some basic propositions of Christianity: if that's not you, come back after Easter, but I think there's still going to be plenty of interest to anyone as I reflect on the purpose and meaning of Lent.

It's going to be a series of mediations on John 21:18-19. And even more particularly on the comment by Jesus to Peter in verse 18: "Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go."

We have in many ways been going where we do not want to go in the last year. Or is that just me? No, didn't think so. Thank you. So "where you do not want to go" is my compass, and in a contradictory way my anchor for this Lent.

And it constitutes my partial answer to the question I ended with last time, asking about how faith community leaders can deal with the mass communication and mass confusion so many people are living with these days: "Is there an answer for preachers and ministers in this misinformation age?" I think we do have an answer for how people can deal with the complex and contradictory messages we all get from the culture around us, but in many ways, that answer is "where we do not want to go." Which is a challenging message to share. In many ways, it won't be popular. It never has been, and is potentially less so now.

If you're willing to think about why we all have to spend some time in our lives "going where we do not want to go" then I invite you to join me here this Lent.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been taken a number of places he did not want to go in 2020. Tell him where you've been at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 2-18-21

Notes from my Knapsack 2-18-21

Jeff Gill

Homeless response is complicated

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While I appreciate well-intended energy and deep concern to help our community reach every last person who has to deal with homelessness, I believe it's important to keep in mind that every night in Licking County, something over 200 people who would otherwise be homeless are sheltered, either in emergency or transitional housing. It isn't accurate to say nothing is being done, or that the groups doing this work aren't regularly talking and working together. This needed work and supportive services are offered through the Licking County Coalition for Housing, by The Center for New Beginnings, by the Salvation Army, along with at least three faith-based groups which do not receive federal or state funding, so they have different guidelines around how they provide their overnight shelter assistance. The more formally organized housing programs do partner with them to help offer transitional services and housing from emergency shelter to independence and stability. That's not even counting a variety of recovery houses and addiction programs, both evidence-based with federal and state funding, and more informal programs, that might as well be called shelter programs in practical fact. There is also some supportive housing that's done in and around the edges of our mental health providers which has rules and guidelines that can be frustrating to navigate, but again, with federal and state money comes federal and state strings that can't be casually cut. But it all adds up to well over 200 people a night in our county who are housed by programs and projects, receiving funds both federal and state as well as locally raised, which all have very tight controls and scrutiny on how and in what ways and over whom we are serving. 

 

And starting two years ago, a group of people, more recently organized into a Warming Shelter Task Force, put together an additional effort to provide emergency shelter to people needing assistance on very cold nights. This is also a group drawn from most of those already working with homelessness, which also asks questions and invites input directly from people experiencing homelessness on how we can respond to their needs. The reasons any one person might be unsheltered on a night below 10 degrees are many and various, and lack of current shelter capacity is only one of the factors leading to there being a few dozen on any given night in vehicles, in unheated buildings or structures, or "out there" with their belongings, such as they have been able to hold onto. Which is part of why people might choose to stay in a tent or hand-made shelter even when it's terribly cold, for fear of losing what little they have. Many of us believe a winter-long "low barriers" shelter might encourage some of those who are unsheltered to come in, and gain more trust and confidence in the supportive programs and opportunities available. But for now, we can only provide this on nights that are expected to be 10 degrees or lower overnight. So in the recent cold snap, when we had only a few "come in" to make use of the overnight warming shelter, we know that's not everyone out there. We also know some situations aren't even going to be met by a low barriers shelter, but need us to go out to where they are, and start rebuilding trust and responding with care to anxieties and issues that are keeping some out in the cold. In fact, LCCH and Newark Homeless Outreach and other faith-based groups are doing that outreach work already, and we share information and opportunities, also using the daytime warming setting of Vertical 196 to make contacts and start building those relationships that can lead people to try supportive and assistive programs that are available to them.

 

Homelessness is a complex issue. But I regret any time public statements are made that imply no one is doing anything, or that those who are aren't in touch with each other. In fact, the work is going on every day. It is not yet enough, I'd be the first to agree, but we do well to build on the foundations of what is, as we look to building up what may yet be done, to care for those with the most pressing of needs, the need for shelter and housing security.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been working on ending chronic homelessness in our community since 1991. Tell him about what you're thankful for at home by way of knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-13-21

Faith Works 2-13-21

Jeff Gill

Thinking like a community

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If a worshiper hears one thing from the pulpit for sixty minutes on Sunday and then gets a completely different message from twenty-seven hours of media consumption at home and on their devices, there's an imbalance that's hard to fight.

But the message of a ministry, the good news however you frame it — the Christian gospel, the call to faith of Islam, the noble truths of Buddhism, the rationalism of atheism, even — is often at odds with the surrounding culture. I am a Christian, by upbringing and by adult conviction, and I know much of what I believe is ultimately true about life and death and eternity is regularly contradicted by the culture in which I live.

One of the tensions of recent years is that we had a few decades where people of my faith perspective could expect the surrounding culture to mostly affirm our beliefs, and rarely if ever challenge them, let alone contradict them. This is a secret advantage minority beliefs had in the Twentieth Century: they never assumed for a minute that classroom instruction or popular media would do their work for them. If they wanted children and families and newly convicted adults to come to their understandings, they would have to teach and reinforce them on their own. Christians, especially Protestant Christians, got . . . well, we got lazy. And took for granted that Hollywood and TV news and Miss McGillicuddy in the third grade would do at least some of our work for us. When the overarching culture got crude and profane and agnostic at best, anti-theistic at worst, it not only has been a shock for many, it also has laid bare how our assumptions have not served us well in teaching and forming faith into adulthood.

But there's another challenge today: for a congregation of 100 people in, say, 1970 there were three TV networks, and you generally watched one or another, let's say Walter. There were three news magazines, and your house got Newsweek. You subscribed to either the morning Columbus Citizen-Journal or the evening Dispatch, along with the Newark Advocate. At church, your minister promoted the denominational publication, which was generally a monthly, often mailed in bulk to the church and distributed at the door with the bulletin. There were still a few movie theaters downtown, but each was a single screen, maybe rotating a pair of movies per week at most. And the discussions about politics and culture people had outside of church were largely defined at workplaces and in neighborhoods. There's your whole media environment.

Today, a congregation of 100 people has 1000 different ways to consume media, with tens of thousands of programs and channels. My 1970 predecessor could at least be conversant and generally aware of the entire incoming information environment, or close enough to speak to it all in general, with their interpretation of God's Word for the day. A preacher today cannot even begin to be certain what images, ideas, or impressions have bounced off of the imaginations and intentions of their congregation just in the week since they were last together.

A hundred years ago, ministers really were, and were expected, to be one of the best informed people a church member would meet, and their suggestions, let alone pulpit proclamations, about what people should read or reflect on or even to think about had the weight of respect and status behind them. If you were a thoughtful farmer or factory worker or even local professional person, the minister's reading and knowledge was taken as one of the best and most reliable guides you could rely on.

Today, we find we are often just one more opinion in people's ears. They don't mean to be disrespectful or dismissive, but trust me (see what I did there?) we feel it. A passing blog post can sweep away a point we've been building up carefully for weeks; a TV commentator's vast generalization pushes past a very personal message we've been trying to share.

Is there an answer for preachers and ministers in this misinformation age? I think so. Come back next week, and we'll be in Lent, a good time to reflect on this very question.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking a great deal about media and ministry this past year. Tell him what you're thinking at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-6-21

Faith Works 2-6-21

Jeff Gill

Discussion, declaration, and discernment

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If you agree, as I said recently, that neither you nor I are God, then it's not a big leap to accepting that neither of us can know everything.

This is where the firehose of the internet becomes a challenge. You can be tempted (aha! theologically familiar ground) to think you can know much, even almost everything you need to know, if you take enough bites out of the apple of online information.

Looked at reasonably, let alone theologically, we know that's not true. In fact, many of us have had reason to look back at things once often said, including by ourselves, about how the main barrier to understanding and transformation was lack of information. "If only people knew more about others, different cultures, various ways of being, we would have a better and more loving world." Yeah, that experiment has been run, and having at least access to, and maybe even actually getting more information doesn't necessarily change behavior or attitudes or feelings. 

And that's really what I've been talking about here for the last few weeks. More information actually is creating room for confusion, even adding to tension and dissension. On a personal and practical level, I don't think less access is a good thing, so censorship or restrictions on free speech aren't where I'm going, but in truth I do believe we need to think and even pray about how we do consume content, how we choose what to read and view and take in. Or in the metaphor I keep coming back to, I don't want government or even, up to a certain point, my faith community, to tell me exactly what to eat, but I do think it's a part of healthy religious dialogue and teaching to be reminded that "we are what we eat."

Everyone generally acknowledges this with food: eat junk, especially too much junk or exclusively fast food, highly processed and additive-laden, and you will get poor outcomes in your physical health. "You are what you eat." Eat junk, feel junky.

How much more so, then, your media diet. "You are what you view." If you watch crud, your thinking and emotions and reactions are going to get cruddy. If you view lots of porn, your understanding of intimate relationships will become twisted and unrealistic and damaging for both you and those you love. If you absorb mass quantities of celebrity gossip, I think it's emotional and financial pornography of a sort: it messes up your understanding of what real life and relationships are like. And when it comes to political news . . .

These are perilous waters I'm proposing we paddle in. It's easier for me to talk about why you should avoid porn or gossip entirely for the health of your soul, and I hope that case is clear here as well. But civic affairs and electoral activities are something you really can't avoid 100%, nor do I want to make that case. Yet if I even hint I have the absolute solution for which channel or outlet to watch, I'm going to push the eject button for many of you still reading this far into my reflections on this terribly important subject.

Can I for this week say this much, as a former parish pastor and still an ordained Christian minister: in most churches I've served, if I had two solid hours a week of your ear, I was doing well. Sunday morning worship, maybe a Bible study midweek or evening prayer and devotions service. A newsletter could add to that impact, and now we have email and social media, but it's still in bits and chunks.

Two hours plus some change is the absolute most I could imagine having access to your ear and mind and heart. But what my predecessors in ministry couldn't imagine is a time where, on leaving the church building, many of the most devoted members would then go home and give another perspective an average of three to 23 hours (or more!) per week.

Look, I've always known some would leave church and go home and hear what Robert Schuller had to say. And would hear about how my message didn't quite measure up to his. Made my (relative) peace with that a long time ago. But I had an hour, and the Crystal Cathedral had an hour. Now, with 24 hour cable news, and online push notifications, Sean Hannity has at least five hours a week to my one; Rachel Maddow or Wolf Blitzer ditto. How does a preacher compete, just on the hour by hour basis? On a certain level, you just don't.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking a great deal about media and ministry this past year. Tell him what you're thinking at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 2-4-21

Notes from my Knapsack 2-4-21

Jeff Gill

Waiting my turn

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My wife and I are thankful that our respective parents in Indiana, her dad and my mom, are now vaccinated, or will be by the time this hits print.  They both have gotten their first shots, and second shots are set up. Now, we wait on getting our own.

I'm also thankful that I have been a regular blood donor for many years, creeping up on 15 gallons here in a few months. This means every 60 days I get a COVID test, and I've been negative thus far, one time I like being called a negative sort of guy. Between us, we've had a scattering of official and work-related tests that have confirmed for us that we've been able to stay clear of the virus, while doing what needs to be done.

But we're also just young enough (a phrase neither of us has much occasion to use!) to not be on any of the criteria for getting scheduled soon for the COVID vaccine. And may not until towards the end of this thing. Word out of Washington and the state of Ohio is that we might need to wait until the end of May until we'd be unambiguously candidates for our shots.

That means we wait, and watch, and listen. The various cases are made for who should be "next," and I'll admit we have plenty of discussions at home about the relative ethics and practicalities of which group or demographic should be versus what is. Opinions? We have a few.

In general, I think everyone is doing the best they can, and as long as our elderly parents are protected, I'm willing to wait. I'm also going to be as quick to say yes as I could possibly be if someone offers. If one of those "hey, we have a couple extra defrosted and our appointments are all done and you're just walking by" situations comes up, oh yeah, I will roll up a sleeve and say "hit me!" What I don't want to do is work angles to sneak in early if we're still struggling to get shots lined up for those who need and want them.

The situation I hope to avoid, though, is getting my turn soon because so many who are, with reasons and rights in line in front of me, say "nope, won't let them inject that into me." No one thought this would be 100% willingness from the outset, but the numbers of care center staff and front line workers who are declining have surprised the Governor, policy makers, and me. 

Don't want to be a guinea pig? Hey, after the first million, who's the guinea pig? My mom? The person working down the linefrom you who said yes when you said no? I think the testing is done, and the results are clear. These vaccines are as safe as anything you'd buy in the produce or snack food sections at the grocery store. And honestly, if it means I have to wait longer, I am happy to, if it means more people who need the vaccine sooner say yes to receiving it. Don't take a pass on it on my account. Make me wait.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been patient, on occasion, but not consistently. Tell him how you wait productively at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 1-30-21

Faith Works 1-30-21

Jeff Gill

Notes towards a theology of media consumption
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Where I've been going in recent weeks, in thinking out loud about media consumption and curatorial work and clergy, is in a direction that I intend to be towards the theological.

That's a word which sadly makes many tune out. Ewwww, theology. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin (the answer is three, by the way) or how to justify the ways of God to humanity by way of a twenty-seven point five volume work.

Actually, I hope I've been doing theology these last few weeks, I just didn't say so. To be, theology is just what the word is derived from: talk about, or better yet, talking with God. Theos, or God in Greek, and Logos, which is often translated "Word" but is something a bit more essential and also relational. Dialogue is a "logos" passed back and forth between two people, not so much an argument as a subject we're trying to understand between the two of us ("dio" in Greek for two and dia- is between two, got it?), and so we're having a dialogue about a subject of mutual interest.

Likewise a discussion about things having to do with God, or with God: that's a theology in process, at work. You and I "talk" here about the Divine, and we're doing theology.

Now, as to the theological topic at hand, here's a theological statement I think even my agnostic and even atheist friends would agree with: I'm not God. Nor are you, fair enough? [Much head nodding, I'm sure.]

Okay then. If, whatever your approach to theism, you agree that I am not God, let me take the dialogue a step further: whatever or whomever God is, if I am not God, then among other things I can't know everything. We might stretch our dialogue into more of a group free-for-all as some say "but I don't agree there is a God" and others have various opinions about the nature of the Almighty, but a common reference point is that the Western tradition for a thousand years has said "God is a being beyond which none greater can be imagined." Details to come later, but that's a good starting point.

And I, as well as you, if you don't mind me saying so, necessarily know less than such a being. God knows all, or at least all that is knowable, and we do not.

Folks, this is abstract, but important in application, because the obvious implication is that no matter how late we stay up on the internet, we will never know everything there is to know about aardvarks, anarchists, atoms, let alone the events of recent weeks. We can try to know more, but we will never know all. At which point we have to start making choices. Choices about whom to believe, where we put our trust, how we assemble our partial facts into an actual plan for what to do when we get up tomorrow.

My lack of certainty, of absolute knowledge about aardvarks is unlikely to come up tomorrow, so I let that go entirely. Anarchists? I wonder what they're up to, but if I'm sure none are under the bed I can sleep soundly. Atoms most people don't think about, but they're fascinating, even if you can't trust them. (Why can't you trust them? Because they make up everything.)

Now of course you're thinking "how can I trust anyone who would make a joke like that?" Fair point. And that might be a reason to dismiss me as a partner in dialogue. Hey, I've had people tell me "you're not serious enough." That is one criteria people can use for information: is it a serious and substantive source? A comic book may or may not put accuracy above humor, let alone a weekly columnist.

And for many, the mere fact that I'm both a religious person (guilty) and an ordained minister (guilty as charged) makes my statements on facts or opinions untrustworthy. The interesting thing here is that this is a relatively new state of affairs in our general culture. I hope to say more about in whom we do put our trust next week. 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's made worse jokes, believe it or not. Tell him your favorite "Dad joke" at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.