Faith Works 7-26-24

Faith Works 7-26-24

Jeff Gill

Trust as the technology of faith in action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith Works 7-19-24

Faith Works 7-19-24

Jeff Gill

The theology of experience, spiritual and technological

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What is "a community of trust"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith Works 7-12-24

Faith Works 7-12-24

Jeff Gill

Face to face in an electronic age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24

Notes from my Knapsack 7-25-24

Jeff Gill

An extended consideration of the life and times of Patrick Cunningham

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Who was Patrick Cunningham?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith Works 7-5-24

Faith Works 7-5-24

Jeff Gill

Making connections in a divisive era

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

I get it. I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes from my Knapsack 7-11-24

Notes from my Knapsack 7-11-24
Jeff Gill

New tours of the vastness of the Newark Earthworks
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On Saturday, July 20th, I will be leading two tours, one at 9 am and another at 6 pm, of the eastern half of the Newark Earthworks.

This is a double helping of the tour I've led many times over the last few decades, starting and ending at the Great Circle just off of Rt. 79 on the border of Newark and Heath, but walking the streets to view "remnants" in between the major preserved elements of that two thousand year old, four and a half square mile complex.

We have two major portions preserved by citizens of Licking County back in the Nineteenth Century, acts of awareness which we benefit from today: the Great Circle set aside in the 1850s as the county fairground, and the Octagon Earthworks in 1891 by vote of the citizens on a ten year bond issue to purchase the parcel. Yet in between, spanning a mile and more of today's Newark neighborhoods, there are bits and pieces, remnants of the original complex, you can still see.

The long running "Remnants Tour" I lead takes about three hours, covering three and a half miles of walking, down side streets and along a few alleys, to surprise even longtime local residents with what's still visible beyond the two large earthwork parks. But it covers barely half of the eastern half of the complex as it once was.

This is why I'm excited about the opportunity on Monday, July 22nd, at 9 am, to lead a "Remnants West" tour for the first time, starting and ending at the Octagon Earthworks which has one of its four "open house" days on that date. This one will be a bit shorter, taking about two hours and covering not quite two and a half miles, staying west of 21st St. just as the Remnants East tour (as we'll need to call it now!) loops north and back to the south all well east of 21st. St.

These Remnants tours help the visitor see how much of the Newark Earthworks are still present on the landscape, and by walking the outlines of what was once fully present here you get a sense of the scale of what Native American builders accomplished along Raccoon Creek two millennia ago.

While the route is fairly level and easy, we do cross busy streets, and walkers are asked to bring a good hat or sunscreen, and water (it is July in Ohio, after all!). In previous years we've had two ventures at walking the entire outline of the Newark Earthworks, which takes most of a day and covers about seven miles, so it seems prudent to keep with two shorter loops for logistical purposes: but if you come to one of the Remnants East walking tours on Saturday, and then Remnants West on Monday morning, you'll see most of the whole between the two!

Or just enjoy the grounds of Octagon Earthworks at the corner of Parkview and 33rd St. between 10 am and 4 pm on Monday, July 22 for yourself. It is indeed a sight to see, and to experience.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to covering some "new ground" this month. Tell him where you're seeing sights this summer at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-28-24

Faith Works 6-28-24
Jeff Gill

Contact and communication in the summertime
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Word out of Los Angeles is that their giant school district is taking steps to ban or block student use of cell phones on campus. Still many details to come, I can tell.

When I've written about school staff talking about their concerns around student use and misuse of smartphones during the school day, I've quickly gotten pushback from parents about the core concern they have over being able to be in touch with their children, and the issues they raise are not just "to prevent them from having a bad day" or other easy retorts one could offer.

Health and medical issues, as well as problems with existing student care plans arising, are real and a problem. It's not as simple as "well, write the IEP to give them permission to have a cell phone on their person" which is one reaction that comes up often. Having one in a hundred students with an authorized phone creates issues all their own, including pressure from peers to use their phone, et cetera. You can imagine how some of those scenarios would play out.

Meanwhile, reputable scholars and educators, Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt foremost among them, are mustering evidence that smartphones and social media should be held back from children until age 16 or thereabouts. And as I've said here before, local educators have said to me they believe the harm they see done between youth with this technology makes them want to treat smartphones like firearms: legal in society, perhaps, but completely banned on school property. I'll admit, it seems drastic, but I got to grow up without these tools, and didn't have to learn how to manage them until I was, um, old. Older, anyhow. It was still fairly new when my child got to that age, and we simply didn't have to deal with the question of a nine year old having an Instagram account, or a twelve year old with Snapchat.

What I recall each summer, now, is my work in the 1970s through the early 2000s as a director of summer camp programs, Scout camps and later church camps. There was an arc to the week that you got used to, starting with arrival and check-in on Sunday.

Sunday night to some degree, but more insistently on Mondays, you dealt with homesickness. I worked early on with mostly middle and high school youth, later on third through fifth graders. If you had a hundred kids at that particular week, you would have two or three "homesickers" to deal with. The cabin counselor would do what they could, but the most upset or fearful would end up referred to you, sobbing on a bench while the rest of the group went to the pool or had some other activity, or maybe even outside of the dining hall during meal time.

I always had an ace in the hole, though. There was one, count 'em, one phone in camp, usually in the kitchen. Maybe a second one in the camp office at the other end of the grounds. No kid got to a phone without the director's say-so. Some camp directors used the "phone's down, no idea when it will be working" trick. To each their own, but I never did that one. I just explained they couldn't use the phone until I gave permission, and as the single path to calling home, they had to talk to me.

Let's just say that is not an option any camp director has today. And that's a huge loss of leverage. But the toothpaste is out of the tube.

How should people of faith think about and talk about social media? There's more to consider here, and the summertime may be a good time to do that.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he had a candy bar phone as long as he could. Tell him how you would like to see churches respond to this issue at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 6-21-24

Faith Works 6-21-24
Jeff Gill

Retail and religion in tension and relation
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If you would indulge me in a mental meander, I thank you! My plan is to end up in church, but we won't start there.

What I'm thinking about is the development of retail, and how over time the architecture and community relationships to and through our stores have changed.

Far enough back, you have dry goods and grocery stores in the heart of a settlement or village. A shop, usually with a table or counter between you and the goods, versus the more transient markets where a cart or wagon pulls up loaded with produce or trade items. You walk up and dicker or work out exchanges, and go home with your food and materials that augment what you've raised and grown and made on your own.

These develop into larger mercantile establishments, with more shelving and increased inventory, until Piggly Wiggly comes along about a hundred years ago and invents self-service. The customer walks along the aisles, prices are marked, and you check out with a clerk, rather than having the clerk get your items for you off restricted shelves. Before 1916, no one saw this; by the 1930s they were the norm (but a new norm).

Markets were still neighborhood affairs, though. When I first came to Hebron in 1999, people still remembered the storefront which had been the Kroger outlet in town, long before the large modern Kroger supermarket was built out on the edge of the community. This also got my father-in-law talking about the corner store Kroger he helped run through World War II as a pre-teen with a lady manager, in Indianapolis. There was produce, and a butcher in the back, but the whole thing couldn't have been a thousand square feet (we visited the corner, where the building still stands).

Supermarkets after the war were just that: super. They had a full service produce department, milk coolers in the back, a meat counter with friendly butchers, and often a pharmacy to boot. They were bigger, in purpose built buildings, and out on the edge of town usually. Growing up in the Sixties, I remember my mother going to our fairly new supermarket, but also sometimes visiting the local IGA, mysteriously smaller but just as capacious, and would ride my bike to one of a couple of neighborhood groceries which were holding on another decade or two, mostly as package liquor stores with a few sundries before they closed.

Big box retail was developing in the South, though, and by 2000 was all across the country, with grocery and retail in the same sprawling complex, built further out of town and continuing to empty downtowns beyond what malls had already done.

Yet as big box retail and supercenters peaked, the A-word comes along, nibbling away at profit margins to an even smaller percentage, but with volume accomplished through delivery. Now, even further out of most communities, built in cornfields, are giant distribution centers where we're back to pre-Piggly Wiggly retail. The goods are all behind the electronic counter, and the e-clerk gets our goods and delivers them to our homes.

Where am I going with this obvious but perhaps not often enough considered narrative? Well, once we had rural frame churches, then town brick and stone edifices, with full time preachers. Suburbs attracted growth and new church plants, with education wings and added staff.

Now we have, well, big boxes built on land out beyond the edge of things, with increasing numbers of people receiving their spiritual care by way of online means. I guess what I'm mulling is how our retail development and changes in church life are in parallel. What does this mean, and where will it take us? More to contemplate.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he still gets to preach in small wood frame churches from time to time, they're out there. Tell him what this all makes you think about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Notes from my Knapsack 6-27-24

Notes from my Knapsack 6-27-24
Jeff Gill

A "Million Dollar Year" with a century of implications
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1924 was perhaps the most remarkable year in Granville history since 1805, and would not be matched until possibly 2022.

Even Intel coming to the area has not (yet) had the direct impact on the immediate visual and functional landscape of Our Fayre Village that 1924 had, and still haves.

In fact, looking at why the "Granville Times" newspaper called that year a "Million Dollar" occasion, and back when a million dollars was [cough] a large sum of money, it's hard to imagine clearly what it was like before then.

Swasey Chapel up atop the hill was dedicated, anchoring the campus and creating a landmark for miles around pointing to Granville. Two new dormitories on the East Quad were going up, signaling larger changes in the student population of Denison University.

In the heart of the village, the Baptist state offices, now our village hall, were going up even as a new bank building, now Park National, was being completed on the other end of that block on Broadway.

Just to the east, the Sinnett House was moved off of Broadway to make room for a new library, not finished in this remarkable year but under way; a little further east on the other side of the main thoroughfare, Granville was getting a new high school on Granger Street, now almost 30 years gone.

And in between, where once stood the Granville Female College, now demolished, rose The Granville Inn. It would be dedicated with a great celebration on June 26, 1924. Costing over $600,000 at the time, adjusted for inflation would make that more like $11,000,000 today. Capping off that expenditure of effective millions, John Sutphin Jones also built a fine golf course just east of the village, west of his country home the Bryn Du Mansion. 1924 was truly a "Million Dollar Year."

I invite you to try to imagine Granville without Swasey overhead, no Frank Packard library or inn along Broadway, or the two major buildings of the core downtown block built that year. Erase them in your imagination. True, we still have the four churches, and there's still education going on atop College Hill, but the Greek Revival style is a bit more dominant at St. Luke's and the Avery-Downer House, and you can ask if our community has the vitality it has taken to preserve even those two buildings if all the other activity had not come to pass.

Earlier historians like William Utter and Jamie Hale have noted how it was only a few years earlier that electricity to the village, and a public sewer system, had started to make Granville a more salubrious location to live. There are hints in the record that our local coal magnate had made such civic infrastructure a condition before he spent his money to build the inn and support the fine new library. In the history of local development, which comes first? Just as water is key to industrial and residential development today, so was the addition of what in 1920 was still a new and controversial step to electrify and make more flushable our community.

The Granville Inn will celebrate a century this month; that occasion also reminds us to think together about the century ahead, and what future Granville residents couldn't imagine our village without.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; there's a story behind every building worth learning and telling. What building can't you imagine living without? Tell him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 6-14-24

Faith Works 6-14-24
Jeff Gill

Hearing good news, 80 years ago
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The most prep time I ever put into a single sermon was for Sunday, June 5, 1994, which turns out to be thirty years ago. That sermon was weak, perhaps, on preaching the Gospel, but it did have the overt intention of tying the meaning of "gospel" & "good news" together.

What I was trying to communicate was how people felt when they heard about D-Day, then fifty years before. We had no one in the congregation I served at the time in Fairmont, West Virginia who had landed in Normandy that day, but there were many still in that community who had been serving both overseas and "fighting the home front" in 1944.

So I went around speaking to now 70 & 80 & 90 year olds, just trying to capture something of what they felt on hearing the news that the Allies had landed in Europe on June 6th. I talked to a woman who had been young that day, with a boyfriend overseas, who thought "they'll be home soon." Not as soon as she hoped, but D-Day meant it would be sooner. Another woman working in a cafeteria downtown told of how the radio was brought out of the kitchen and set up on the counter, so all could hear the news. One lady told me about being called inside by her mother as she hung laundry out back: "you'd better hear this for yourself."

There were a number of men who had been serving in the Pacific, aboard Navy ships; each felt a surge of pride, and a question: how soon will this bring more forces over to our theatre of the war? Some heard it secondhand down in the engineering spaces from a runner off the bridge, some on their ship's intercom system rebroadcasting to the whole crew while under weigh. Other men and women were at work in defense industry in California, riveting armor onto bomber airframes or testing plexiglas canopies, and the news came along the line in bits and pieces, while the work went on. My Uncle Clair, reached on the phone in 1994, almost as deaf as my father but who didn't like wearing hearing aids, had trouble catching my question, but when he did, after explaining he was in New Guinea sweating up a storm replacing engines in B-24s, bellowed "well, we were damned glad to hear about it, let me tell you!"

I talked closer to home with men who had been aircrew on B-17s waiting on bases in northern England, all dimly aware of preparations in the south for invasion, but all cloaked with secrecy. "Now it's come," they thought. "Soon we will be flying all the way to Berlin."

And perhaps most riveting was a lady in a nursing care wing of the hospital, whose English was still poor, born and raised in Holland, grew up a young woman in Southeast Asia, come to America with a man with a complex story of her journey from Florida to West Virginia: but on June 6, 1944, she was a Resistance member riding a trolleycar in Rotterdam, when the story was whispered from one seat to the next "the Allies have landed in France." Antje told me the tale whipped around the city, and as she walked home with a meager harvest of groceries, the German soldiers on every street corner seemed even more on edge, wary, tense.

She felt hope, for the first time in a long while.

That, I tried to connect, is what hearing the Gospel, God's good news of grace, can and should be like for any of us. Those stories have also kept me tied to that day, June 6th, 1944, ever since. All those I spoke to those weeks before the 50th anniversary are gone; I share their stories with you now so you might pass them along, too.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's always glad to hear new stories, especially about old things. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 6-7-24

Faith Works 6-7-24
Jeff Gill

Spending time in jail, good for the soul?
___


"In Ohio, about 16,500 people are in jail on any given night and 300,000 are booked into jails each year. Jails hold people immediately after arrest, who are awaiting trial and are serving less than 12-month sentence."

That passage was recently in the pages of the Newark Advocate, and also in a number of our partners in the USA TODAY Network Ohio. I invite you to pause, whether you can read the whole piece (or series) or not -- kudos to USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau reporters Laura Bischoff and Erin Glynn, who anchored the reporting and writing of it, and you really should subscribe! -- to consider what that data point alone tells you. 2.5% of ALL Ohioans will be booked this year. Over any 10 year period, that ends up somewhere between 7 to as much as 10% of the population allowing for repeat visitors.

That's one thing you learn in pastoral ministry over time; I had to get out into parish work to learn the difference between jails (see definition above) and prisons (mostly felony charges with a year or more), but it was also a slowly dawning realization — friends, when a preacher gets up into the pulpit on Sunday, you are talking to a group of people of whom 10 to 20% (remember, we're talking lifetime now) have spent at least one night in jail. It does change how you talk about certain things, but it's not something you often refer to directly. Maybe we should.

Think about it, though: this year, almost 3 of every 100 adults you meet will have been through intake at the county justice center. And that's just THIS year. Or to be more direct: the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US.

When I came to Licking County in 1989, the year before a group of clergy had launched Licking County Jail Ministries (LCJM), a collaboration between many local churches and clergy to serve the newly opened Licking County Justice Center, our county jail (LCJC). Then Sheriff Gerry Billy was supportive and a real blessing to the work we did, allowing us to enter the facility with appropriate training, and for us to help his staff serve those incarcerated at the LCJC, and ultimately for us to employ a chaplain, Mark Shoemaker. He and his successor, Scott Hayes, are the only two jail chaplains we've had in some thirty-five years, a testimony to the stability and quality of the ministry they both have provided: all at the expense of the jail ministry board and supporting churches, not the taxpayers, I should note.

Sheriff Randy Thorp has continued to value the work of the LCJM, and Chaplain Hayes is deeply respected across our community. But I have to admit as a former board member and president and volunteer inside the LCJC, we may not pause to remind people often enough of the facts that Laura and her USA TODAY Network Ohio have put before us.

Again, the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US. And for Christians, we are called very directly in scripture to minister to those who are locked up; I would read those passages as enjoining us to reach out to the guilty and innocent alike. To give them hope, and a plan for their future.

Some of the most powerful Bible study experiences I've had in my life were inside the LCJC. They were holy moments, and those classrooms and modules can be holy ground. If you don't believe me, you may need to go in there sometime yourself.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not spent any nights in jail (yet), but plenty of time there. Tell him about your experiences seeking justice at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Notes from my Knapsack 6-6-24

Notes from my Knapsack 6-6-24
Jeff Gill

Narratives in nature unfolding around us
___


Selborne is a village in southern England, in Hampshire (old, not new), and I've never been there.

However, I feel like I know it well, thanks to Gilbert White.

White was a clergyman in the Anglican Church, a graduate of Oxford, and both grew up in and returned to Selborne for most of his adult life. His fascination with birds makes White perhaps the "original" birdwatcher; while not a professional scientist, there were very few in the late 1700s, so he is by default a naturalist and ornithologist of his time, and in many ways a pioneering environmentalist.

But all of this is due to his writing, more than his scientific work, such as it was. He wrote "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," which to my chagrin is better known today simply as "The Natural History of Selborne" with the antiquities, the history and archaeology, clipped off to make a shorter and more straightforward volume which has never been out of print since 1789.

I've mentioned Rev. White here before; he shames me a bit because his record keeping supports his lyrical writing about nature and creatures around him in rustic Selborne. He practiced what's called today "phenology," or the study of cycles and starting points: when trees leaf out, when certain blossoms bloom, and of course the arrival of migrating birds.

White in a comic mode is almost certainly the reason British birdwatching helped create the running joke in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" which I can't pause to explain here, but many of you will know exactly what I'm talking about. If you know the bit, it will echo in your head at many points in "The Natural History of Selborne."

As I've also noted before, there is an Ohio State "Phenology Calendar" which you can consult online at "weather.cfaes.osu.edu/gdd/" for your zip code. To track recurring biological events makes you more aware of weather and the climate more generally, starting with something as simple as the frost free date. If you are planting tomatoes, "Mothers Day" is a standard metric around here, but if you lived further north you'd have grown up with a different bit of folk phenology. We all can watch bird migration and think about when those new arrivals relate to calendar events in our own lives; I think about the seasonal appearance of insects across the summer season from my many years of Scout camp staffing.

This column has often been directly as well as indirectly inspired by Gilbert White; it has never quite been "The Natural History of Granville" but writing something similar certainly has crossed my mind (but inevitably with "and Antiquities" added, even if a later generation would take it back out). Tony Stoneburner has written me on occasion to encourage my keeping up with such observations, and I wish I'd done more along those lines.

It fascinates me that we tend to think of summer, and high summer at that, as "normal," with leaves covering the trees and hillsides obscured by foliage, birds overhead. In fact, that's less than half the year. My dad always pushed me to learn trees by bark and by shape "because they don't have leaves all the time, do they?"

But nature is all around us all the time, ever changing.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes to walk as much as he writes this summer. Tell him what's normal in your environment at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 5-31-24

Faith Works 5-31-24
Jeff Gill

A story with a modest moral for preachers
___

This Sunday I'm looking forward to attending worship in the Wyandot Mission Church in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and hearing Chief Billy Friend of today's Wyandotte Nation preach there. He's a preacher and a leader for his people, in Oklahoma but with deep roots still in Ohio.

In advance of Chief Friend coming to preach, I was doing some looking around online about the establishment of that Methodist mission station, the first in this county for them, the church building constructed in 1824.

I found an 1884 volume, talking about the early 1830s for a Methodist circuit rider in Ohio, Elnathan Gavitt, who was born in Granville in 1809. Elnathan as a young preacher had an older and perhaps more loquacious partner who at this time helped cover a large preaching circuit in northern Ohio, which centered on the Wyandot mission at Upper Sandusky. He tells this story from 1831 or 1832:

"On the Scioto river, near where the Pisgah Church now stands, was a log tavern kept by a friend, not a member of the Church. This was one of our preaching places where we remained over night with the landlord; and in the morning when we called for our bill he said he would prefer settling with us at the close of the year. This being the best we could do, we had to trust to his liberality in the final settlement, though with our limited means we could have wished it otherwise. However, as he was a friend to the cause of Christianity, we hoped for the best. At the close of the year we called for a final settlement. He said, as there was some credits in our favor, he would have to look over our account.

"This was a mistake, as we had not paid him anything during the year, but he insisted that he had kept a correct account, and knew more about it than we did. His account against us was quite reasonable, and somewhat better than we had expected; and now the next thing was to see for what we could have credit. Turning over the next page, he showed that he had credited us with every sermon preached, with every instance of worship, and with every blessing asked at the table. For a long sermon the credit was twenty-five cents; for a short sermon, fifty cents; long family service, twelve and one-half cents; short prayer and chapter, twenty-five cents, and the same in proportion for grace at the table. Being young and often embarrassed, all my services had received his approbation, and he now fell in my debt. My colleague being older and more prolific, fell in his debt.

"However, considering the benefit the community had received, as well as his family, and allowing something for good company, he would balance the account and call it all settled, provided we would call on him another year, if we were returned to the same charge; he then presented each of us with five dollars."

As a preacher myself, I'm going to keep that fee scale in mind! The Pisgah church is no more; it was near the Shawnee Ford on the Scioto River in Hardin County, Dudley Township, at Pfeiffer Station (unincorporated). On my way home I may stop by there and offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the generosity of Mr. Wheeler (as he was later named in Gavitt's account), in advancing the Gospel on the Ohio frontier.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been known to go on sometimes. Tell him what you thought about this story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 5-24-24

Faith Works 5-24-24
Jeff Gill

On being faithfully an American Christian
___

It is my honor to be speaking on Memorial Day at the Granville observance in Maple Grove Cemetery at 11:00 am. We will follow the usual procedure hallowed by time and tradition of a procession to the cemetery and a brief program, closing with the raising of the flag from half-staff, as it is to honor the dead from dawn, at noon to full-staff, in thanks for their service to our nation.

There's been discussion in church circles in recent years around the concept of Christian nationalism, ranging from well-founded concern to extreme anxiety projected into imagined futures. Doom saying is a popular pursuit in any season: if you say something bad is about to happen often enough, you'll always end up right sooner or later.

But we do have, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the books that are the Christian Old Testament, a whole bunch of prophets speaking who demand our attention as people of faith. I'm partial to Amos, and Isaiah has so much to say in any era, plus we need Micah if only to give us a simple basis for how to proceed.

It's in Micah we get one of the most clear, distinct, and follow-able commands from God through that prophet's speech: what does the Lord require of us? That we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8 if you want to check me on this.)

Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God. Those would constitute the basics, in any country, any age, for all people. Do justice, which means show a loving impatience with injustice; love kindness, which suggests we not be as impressed with harsh, mean, arrogant declarations as we can tend to be when they agree with our own pre-existing assumptions; finally, we look each day to a humble walk through this life towards the one who has the keys to the next, the One who Is from age to age the same, even as this world changes, passes, decays, and ultimately ends. Walk humbly towards the One who will endure, and promises to take us along for a glimpse of what is yet to come.

I am an American. That's a phrase which has a wide variety of vivid associations for me, as a Christian, as a preacher, as a person walking through this world. I was born one, but I've known many who have had the experience, strange to me, of choosing to come here (and a few brought here, to be sure). I claim a certain place in the American story, but know as a male of European descent with height and health and other privileges not earned but given I need to walk humbly in the great procession of Americans not all of whom begin from that kind of head start.

Walking humbly with God, let alone loving justice, means my national pride always needs to be held with a certain kindly caution. I hope and pray I'm as aware of that as I should be. To be an American Christian is no more an advantage to me than it is to be a Yorkshire Christian, or a Zimbabwean Christian. In fact, it may put certain extra obligations on my need to love justice, in a global sense.

The world is something God loved so much, it all was worth some sacrifice to redeem, to restore, to make whole. Not just any one country. As an American on this globe, I'm thankful my faith asks me to care about the destiny of it all, but tells me how to do so from the place where I stand.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a bit more to say on Monday, but not too long. Tell him how you mark Memorial Day at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 5-17-24

Faith Works 5-17-24
Jeff Gill

Political perspectives and religious priorities
___


As a praying person, a preacher on occasion filling in pulpits, and an individual whose public identity is often that of a minister, I do tend to steer around political stances just as a matter of habit, and to some degree by inclination.

It's not that I don't have political impulses, and those who know me well are aware of them. My ability to do political prognostication is notably poor, so if you want to know which way electoral winds are blowing, you really don't want to ask me. You could infer from that I'm clueless politically, which may be true. I think my real weakness is an idealism I let get in the way of my practical side when it comes to where things are going.

Late this summer and into the fall, in a general election year, politics will be weighing heavily in the atmosphere, and I will, as a religion columnist, be more likely to lean away from that. There are other opinion page writers and editorial functions which fill that space, and I'm in these pages to try and represent a perspective of faith at work in our corner of central Ohio, both churchgoing and perhaps less so, but to speak for and to people who find faith an important part of their lives.

If you are a person of faith, I'm sure you take those viewpoints with you to the polling place, and they are part of the toolbox you use to assemble the ticket you vote for, the causes you support, the initiatives you favor.

Church folk used to be famous, or infamous if you wish, for supporting temperance causes and opposing gambling. As in a number of areas of public life, Christians in general and Protestants in particular have left those issues aside as the culture has turned decisively in favor of alcohol in all sorts of public spaces I didn't see coming decades ago, and now we're betting not just on lottery tickets but on our phones. Churches may speak against these sorts of behavioral choices, and even restrict leadership positions or roles in the faith community based on drinking or gambling, but they don't spend much time on public policy around them. I recall when the Ohio Council of Churches was a powerful voice against expansion of gaming, but once that train rolled over them, they shifted to other topics of justice and policy. Maybe excesses will open that door again, I don't know.

But on individual candidates, most preachers are averse to endorsement or condemnation in specific electoral races, and not for reasons to do with tax status. It has been for my entire adult life in ministry a subject that clergy would avoid, other than by implication (which to be fair can end up pretty clear if you're paying attention).

My own aversion has, I think, a Biblical basis; Jesus doesn't whack away at names in the Gospels. He isn't off on Augustus or Tiberius. Jesus is threatened by Herod Antipas, whom he calls in response "that fox" which was in those days an insult, more "that unclean animal which causes trouble for good people," which wasn't at all inaccurate.

Jesus does say "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," which is less about the person than the office.

When should a religious leader call out a political candidate? The Antipas precedent doesn't give us clear guidance, given that Jesus wasn't talking in a voting context to start with. I do want to think more about faith and politics in coming weeks, before the campaigns kick all of us into high gear and loud volume.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has plenty of political viewpoints to share, just not here. Tell him how your faith informs your citizenship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-16-24

Notes from my Knapsack 5-16-24
Jeff Gill

Memorial Day is a time for everyone
___


For almost 160 years, Granville has come together as a community at Maple Grove Cemetery to remember.

We have many occasions for memory: the Fourth of July takes us back nearly 250 years to remember our national roots, and Christmas season has a number of events recalling us to our own history, long or short, from childhood to more recent celebrations, as well as a birth two thousand years ago.

Commencements are a time of remembering a student's arc through school, and often those attending or even presiding recall their own graduations. We have those in this month, too.

What I think is a powerful act of communal memory, though, is our tradition of gathering at Maple Grove at 11 am on Memorial Day. It is May 27 this year, the Monday holiday we've made it, with a procession from Broadway and Main at our village core, on to the east then down Pearl St. to what was once named "Solemn Street" and into the cemetery.

For some, this is the only time they visit this place; others of us have been there many times, laying to rest what we call "earthly remains" and trusting to heavenly hopes for a greater part of those we love.

Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day, is a time of remembering those who died while serving others, rooted in the losses of the Civil War from which our specific tradition begins. It picked up a pattern of getting long-untended graves "decorated" or tended; I have many memories of traveling around the rural roads of Illinois with my mother and grandmother, a flat or two of geraniums in the trunk of the car, planting them at family markers after pulling weeds and the grass grown long close to the stone.

My father was very intent on honoring Memorial Day itself; he was not a fan of the Monday holiday bill that moved a number of federal observances to the end of what are now "holiday weekends," but he reconciled himself to it over the years as a pragmatic solution. In our community, where I grew up, Memorial Day had largely lapsed as a civic event, and he was a leader in bringing it back as a public occasion, with solemn ceremony and patriotic salutes.

As a lover of Civil War history, and a re-enactor himself with the full uniform and Springfield muzzleloader, he had most of General Order Number 11 committed to memory, especially Gen. John Logan's lines about how "If other eyes grow dull and other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remains in us."

That commission, given the Grand Army of the Republic in 1868, was one my father felt strongly about fulfilling; it is a sacred trust of sorts that Granville has honored through the years. We will be one link in that chain for 2024. I am honored to be your speaker this year, as we gather, and remember.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he remembers many things each Memorial Day. Tell him what the occasion reminds you of at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 5-10-24

Faith Works 5-10-24
Jeff Gill

A matter of identification
___


My mother doesn't know who I am.

She lives with my sister, and Mom doesn't know her all the time, either; she will argue with her about whether my sister is coming home for dinner.

One of my brothers is there most weekdays helping care for her, and she doesn't know him, but calls him "a friend of the family." True enough, as far as that goes.

We suspect there's in her current phase of dementia a sort of face blindness: Mom has told people after I've left, even the next day, that her son Jeff came to visit, even when during that visit she'd ask me if my parents lived nearby. She has trouble coming up with exactly who people are when she is looking at them, but often later has a recollection of their identity.

The term dementia is an awkward fit, just because of assumptions and stereotypes that go with the word. Mom can talk to you in coherent, complete sentences (though the silences are getting longer at times), and she's more mobile in some ways than she was for years before she moved in with my sister. If you don't know the backstory, you could sit and talk to her for a goodly stretch and not know her mind is seriously impaired.

But both of her parents have been gone over forty years, yet she talks about them coming over to stay for the night, or going to teach for her father, who was a school superintendent almost up to his death in 1970. In her mind these days, she taught until last year (she retired in 1999) and drove until a few weeks ago (we don't think she'd driven herself anywhere since 2017, definitely not since we brought her to Indiana in 2020).

Sometimes when I describe the current situation, people will say "oh, my, that's terrible: that's just the worst thing." And I don't want to argue exactly with such sympathy. It's odd, to say the very least.

Yet there's a fair amount to be thankful for, and I don't believe I'm just putting a good face on things. Mom was never a big fan of new experiences in the years we knew her (I'll leave a window open from before our childhoods), and if we took her to a restaurant or location she didn't like, she'd insist on leaving fairly quickly. She preferred what she liked, the more familiar the better.

In this current incarnation, she's open to possibilities. Last summer I took her to a restaurant where my brother was performing, and we got there early to eat. It was a college town bar cum bistro, concrete floored and loud, with food served in baskets. The Mom I've known would have hated it. The Mom I have now? She was fascinated by it, and pleased at her food when it arrived. She ate approximately three micrograms of it, but that's par for the course. I recall many a meal where she ate the whole thing, grimly condemning the food, the service, and the location; these days, she goes with my sister to outdoor performance venues and strange houses of friends of my sister, and she's all in.

In general, she's content. I might even use the word happy. And here's the question: would I rather my mother know who I am, and be miserable, or that she be happy, but uncertain why I'm sitting with her watching the Cubs play? The latter is working out just fine.

My mother is happy, and that's a blessing. May you find a blessing in your mother's life worth holding onto this Mother's Day.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; yes, he's learned a great deal about memory care issues the last few years. Tell him how you mark family celebrations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 5-3-24

Faith Works 5-3-24
Jeff Gill

Graduates and gratitude and good works abounding
___

The month of May means many things to different people; it includes Mothers Day, of course, and is in some Christian traditions devoted as a whole to Mary as the Mother of God. It also includes the anniversary and feast day of Our Lady of Fatima on May 13th; I have a personal reason for celebrating St. Dunstan's Day on the 19th.

Plus it ends with Memorial Day, of which you'll hear more shortly.

Meanwhile, most of our area high schools and colleges are holding commencement programs during May; I believe Ohio State Newark slipped by me at the end of April, and my best to those graduates as well.

This means May gets packed full of graduate open houses and other family celebrations; often churches will include graduate recognition on a Sunday, honoring those who have completed twelfth grade or their bachelors degree, other certificates or graduate programs.

In American Christianity, education has been a main interest of local churches. Many colleges and universities have their roots in a single congregation or group of local churches launching an educational establishment on the frontier. From Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1636 to Denison University in Granville in 1831, churches have started and supported higher education as a way to ensure a literate laity, able to read and study scripture on their own, as much as to educate clergy, which is part of the deeper roots of the university model back into Oxford and Cambridge in the English-speaking world.

The history of Sunday schools and Christian education is a separate but parallel track; what I'd like to lift up is how most of us with church families around us are standing in a tradition which honors learning and study and certainly the successful completion of a course of study.

That's why Graduate Recognition is such a common part of church life in May. It can be tricky for ministers and committee chairs: people want grandkids recognized who've not been to church in years, there are those who get missed with the best of efforts, and parents or other relatives have lots to keep track of approaching a graduation ceremony, so they forget to tell the church but are expecting someone to remember for them. (All of which is to say: be kind, roll with it, y'all!)

When everything comes together, it is an occasion to honor not just the proud and nervous graduates standing before the gathered church, but the support of a community that buoyed them up through the wind and waves of educational progress. We're finally getting to a point where we aren't going to keep saying "you got through COVID" to a high school audience or a college crowd, since a four grade or four year group has gone through their experience entirely after 2020.

We would be missing a theological opportunity to not say something, as well, about the place of grace, and blessing, and privilege both earned and unearned, which allowed our graduates to reach the platforms they will soon cross. None of us, as many baccalaureate and commencement speakers will say in a variety of ways, makes this journey alone. We all, in our education, had teachers and mentors, examples near and far, and those who went before, even generations before, to lay the path down for our feet to follow.

There are good ghosts and joyful spirits and God walking with us; like the old tale, we look back to realize how often we were guided, aided, even carried. None of that takes away from the deserved feelings of accomplishment, for our graduates and for all those who love them. Well done, good and faithful students.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's attended many commencement ceremonies. Tell him about one you've been to, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-24

Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-24
Jeff Gill

Chronophobia isn't a new diagnosis
___


My impression is chronophobia is not precisely a clinically accepted diagnosis, but it's been around a while.

It would be, from the root words, fear of time's passage. Not too far removed from Lucy's diagnosis of pantophobia, which she suggested to Charlie Brown, to her own discomfiture. (You can look up the clip.)

Pantophobia, the fear of everything; chronophobia, the fear of the most inevitable issue any of us have. Time will pass, things will change.

As they always have. I hear people worry about our village's unique qualities, growth coming to the school district, changes on highways and byways, and my head goes back into history.

Introducing stoves for warmth into our church buildings was a BIG deal in our second decade as a village. Heat the church, and soften the moral fiber. Our parents had cold churches, and . . . ah, we put them in anyhow.

There were worries in the 1820s and 1830s as the Granville Academy, the Granville Literary and Theological Institution, and the Granville Female Seminary were all founded in short order. Will our rural retreat be overrun with students? Yet we adapted, and endured, and survived. The GLTI became Denison University in the mid-1850s.

Around this same period the Cumberland Pike was being extended across the continent just to the south, later to become The National Road (US 40 today), and then the Ohio & Erie Canal to our east, with Lucius Mower spearheading the Granville Feeder over to the foot of the village, and all the economic disruption faster transport might offer. What remains of that project is the former aqueduct, now roadway bridge over Raccoon Creek which will soon be pre-empted and re-routed from onto the Thornwood Crossing.

Railroads began to undercut canals and turnpikes almost as soon as they were completed, and Granville sought a rail connection avidly for many years; we didn't get a station in town closer than Union Station until 1880 (now a place to get fresh and tasty muffins). Rail traffic didn't do much for Granville, to the chagrin of some; the real impact on the community was when the interurban electric railway came down Broadway in 1890, a pioneering effort connecting us to Newark where you could catch trains to anywhere, and buy almost anything. We only just got a regular bus route back between the two this year, after decades of absence.

Oft-told but not too frequently said is the poetic tragedy of Charles Webster Bryant, our village pharmacist who campaigned for an historical society successfully in 1885, and for a clean public water supply — making it all too ironic that he died of typhoid in 1886. Change did not quite come fast enough in that case.

Residential electricity and telephones, radio broadcasts, television, liquor sales in the village . . . each innovation had its advocates, and also a chorus to proclaim the coming doom each would bring. The internet, smartphones, teleconferencing . . . these are the new horse-people of the apocalypse.

Or will we adapt, and adjust, and find a way to be Granville while incorporating changes, even big ones, into the fabric of our everyday lives? History says we're likely to do just fine.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not sure if adding thermostats to churches was a good idea, but that's a different story. Tell him your fear of what's to come at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 4-26-14

Faith Works 4-26-14
Jeff Gill

Polity is a funny word for important work
___


It would be easier to say I teach church history.

Not accurate, but easier.

I did have the honor of teaching American history for five years at Fairmont State University; since then, I've been an adjunct lecturer or instructor for Bethany College, Ashland Theological Seminary, Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and now Phillips Theological Seminary online.

All of the latter four, I've taught Disciples of Christ history and polity.

Now, sometimes people know about the Disciples of Christ, but occasionally I have to explain this particular Christian tradition, with roots nearby in western Pennsylvania and northern Kentucky. That's the easy part.

What's always more complicated is that odd little word after history. Most people have some idea of what "church history" means. But history and . . . polity?

Polity is basically a term for governance. Our polity in secular terms for the United States is as a democratic republic; Great Britain's polity is a constitutional monarchy. And so on.

Church polity has to do with visible elements like bishops or synods; it also relates to less obvious aspects of church life like the rules around ordination, who can become a minister and under what guidelines. Polity and theology intersect with issues such as who can preside over communion, or even who can preach during a service. As a regular supply preacher in multiple traditions, there are denominations where I can preach on invitation any time, but can't preside over communion that Sunday; I have been asked by local lay leaders to preach for congregations where I've been in the odd position of having to explain to them I'd love to preach for them, but I am not allowed by their church polity.

Even that term "laity" or lay person, versus clergy: that's an indication of polity at work, which is different for various church groups. In some Christian bodies, laity can preside at communion any time, in others only under certain circumstances, and for others the distinction doesn't even exist.

Polity may be like Robert's Rules of Order to many of you: something that may have a purpose, but not much understood. Anyhow, that's why I tend to grit my teeth and explain, because it's worth explaining what it means to say I teach "history and polity" for my tradition.

Whether that word is used or not, it's in the air right now. The United Methodist Church (UMC) is in their General Conference at the end of April into May, where hugely significant issues of their polity are slated to go under review. A number of Licking County Methodist local churches have left for the Global Methodist Church, in large part to work and serve under a polity they believe serves their purposes better; their local annual conference will come later in May.

In early June, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) meets just down the road in Indianapolis; they meet annually, while the UMC historically meets only every fourth year, but they're still sorting out rescheduling from COVID. When the SBC gathers, they are scheduled to make a theological vote with major polity consequences, as to whether or not women can serve as pastor of a local church, or even as a staff pastor where a male is senior pastor. Last June on the floor of their convention, polity actions removed a number of churches from full fellowship, including Saddleback in California, founded by Rick Warren but now led by a clergy couple.

In fact, most polity is theology working out in a practical fashion. Technically, I don't teach theology; practically speaking, history and polity always turn on a theological hinge. All three are worth understanding!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hoping the word polity didn't drive off too many readers. Tell him what you think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.