Winter Scenes, Licking County
a six (well, it ended up being seven) part series covering a few millenia in our neighborhood

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Notes From My Knapsack 11-19-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part One

They had trudged step by step through the frost-clumped grass, thawing a bit during the height of the sun in the grey sky.
From the wide waters and marshes running south, their path climbed up and then back down into a wider valley, where the waters tending toward the rising sun.
The hunting across the wide waters had been sparse, with little cover or slack water for the game animals their hurling stones and spears best brought down. These ponds and gravely swales were growing up in high sedges and grasses, and fringes of cedar showed green around black still pools.
With the long spear in hand, the strongest of the family walked far ahead of the group, who drug their poles and bundles in a tight, ready to defend mass. They had seen no other people for weeks, but there were big cats and bears with swift reflexes that could suddenly appear from behind a blunt hill.
When it happened, it was a sudden and unexpected event of a good sort, too rare, he thought. A mastodon nearly twice his height, looking away from him while grazing at water’s edge, the breeze into his face and away from the creature’s trunk.
A quick hand signal, instantly understood, to the party behind him freezing them into stillness; a zig-zag forward to a carefully chosen position with room left for fast retreat; a rush forward and a thrust behind the ear, deep into the head.
The great tusks never even swung back in reaction, just a vast exhalation and a shuddering slump to the ground, front knees, almost to the back ones, and then an earth shaking thud to one side.
Another stone knife from his pouch was in his hand before the fur had ruffled to a stillness, and with a wary eye, almost not looking, a careful slash across the neck and a leap backwards.
With no further motion from the dead beast, he stepped back into the huddled embrace of the forelegs, and cupped his hands beneath the slowing flow of blood. A lifted motion to the sky, and then he drank reverently, tasting warmth and life flowing from the hunted to the hunter.
All the rest came up quickly and set to their tasks, familiar with elk and moose, but with broader motions and more effort on this immense carcass. Some to the hide, others began removing more tender accessible cuts of meat as they were revealed. The liver was pried out of place beneath the first ribs lifted up, and slices were shared around for quick energy to the remaining tasks.
One such task was a decision, not greeted happily by all, but accepted. Their bags were still heavy with dried meat from the plains west of the wide waters, and nuts were stuffed everywhere they could go. The major portions of this kill would be cut into moveable, retrievable parts, with a few savory roasts put to cook and be carried where best for travel, in their bellies.
As the feasting went on, the portions would be weighted and sunk in the deep, cold waters of the nearby pond. If the hunt to the east did not go well, if they journeyed even north to where the ice still stood tall on the land, but game animals did not choose to let themselves become theirs, then they could return to this place in the spring, and know there was yet hope. A scraping here and there, and the solid meat below could be eaten without much illness after hard roasting. Then they would all gain even more strength from this animal’s gift, and then return west to the wider plains, more welcoming in the long days than in the time of snow and wind.
Last of all, after camp was broken, the poles and bundles packed, the wide, tusked skull was sunk atop the cache of meat, watching for their return and perhaps, if willing, to warn off interlopers. Eyes closed to this world, but tusks bending toward them as they saw the whole disappear below the water’s surface, even now catching the first flakes of snow.
That duty done, they gathered themselves into journeying order, and set of to the east, towards the rising sun. They would not pass this way again.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and he had the honor of being involved in the recovery and study of the Burning Tree Mastodon in 1989. Tell him what you think as these seven winter scenes of Licking County unfold to knapsack77@gmail.com.

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Notes From My Knapsack 11-26-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Two, 2000 years ago

With the setting sun, basket loads after basket load of earth had settled down into place on the steeper slope of the mound.
Green tufts touched with brown fringed the circle ringing a now high circle. Twice her height at the center, she thought, with another layer of building, working, burning, and burying.
They still sing the songs of the Bear-talker, laid deep within the heart of the family mound. So many generations ago, no one recalls even whether the first singer was a man or woman, just the seer of seasons and wearer of the heavy brown hide. From that bear mask came the words of direction and guidance, still among them, but the earlier voice growing old and cracked, then suddenly younger and higher after the log tomb was set deep in the earth, and the first house of song was built and used and set aflame to conclude the singing.
Now this place of regular return was raised high above the surrounding terrace overlooking the rivers. Long house after long house had taken shape, sheltered the sacred ceremonies, and been lit from their own fire within, until the cool ashes could receive a new coating of turf.
Three cycles of the Moon’s full measure along the eastern horizon had passed since then, long before any living memory, but the People still recalled Bear-talker and the songs of this confluence.
She walked the now well-worn path down to the meeting of rivers where the right clay could be clawed, assisted by deer horn picks, from the banks. Dozens more trips in company with many dozens of sisters and brothers would be needed to close the work, but tomorrow would see the last singing. Their return would come at the same time as a shroud of yellow green covered this latest working on the family mound.
One of the new singers was walking a path pounded round and about the sharp cone of the earthen mound. There had been talk of some clans ringing their family burial mounds with an encircling wall of soil, one opening only to the warmth of spring’s sun. She suspected that a path about the mound was being danced and sung into a foundation for such a shape made of earth, and that their baskets and deer bone hoes and antler picks would be at work on another task if the snows held off.
This year’s harvest in the gardens had been rich and full, so if the singers told them to join a new working to honor this mound, they would all happily join in. The ring of wooden posts, set in a circle back on the plain above the meeting of the rivers, marked a series of spots along the eastern hills that foretold the return of warmth and longer days, promised each year after the celebrations and songs were offered up.
Reaching the clay bank, she quickly began to chip slabs of the malleable earth into her basket. Are there to be yet more shapes on this cradled plain, beyond the mounds and protective circles they had already built? Larger circles, squares, ovals, octagons?
Others it would be to make such a choice, but many there were who would honor the urging, since the People had gained so much in seeds and food and preserved supplies, ground and dried. With this surplus had come measurers, and distributors, and watchkeepers; among them came the shaman leaders and sacred architects.
If they asked for shapes and signs to be written across the landscape, then all would join to complete the work, pivoting on the anchor point of Bear-talker’s mound. Many generations might see their work, and sing their songs, to the rhythm of steady feet along the paths of construction.
So did the Sun pivot down to the darkness, and echoed by the Moon swinging easily into the sky above the growing earthworks.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to these scenes through knapsck77@gmail.com.

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Notes From My Knapsack 12-3-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Three, 1500 years ago

It was time to head west, toward the setting sun. All the game worth hunting had led the way, and even most of the plants were shriveled and bent to the west as well, silently saying "look to where I grow now, not where I have been found in the past."
The growth of numbers among the villages of the People, a long drought, and a restlessness that defied easy explanation, all combined to bring about a wide agreement: we shall move to the west. The years of these valleys have ended, and our time in the well watered valley of the Great Father of Waters is coming. This is what nearly all believed, and many had acted on.
They stood, the two of them, on a high ridge with a wide view of the expanse that spread to the hills beyond, a level space below inscribed with shapes well known to them from years of ceremony, and gently rounded at each corner with age. To their right, invisible in the growing darkness below, was the Long Road, guarding in two parallel walls the pilgrimage path, echoed the angled course of the greater White Way path in the skies above. Now they would walk a longer path, but without ancient walls to guide them.
No more would they carefully fire with torches these ridgetops, when the soft breezes from the south agreed with all the intruding signs of woody plants and strange weeds saying "Set us aflame now, set free the long grasses." In days to come, far from their inscribed prairie and familiar eastern horizon, they could but guess at the Small Cycle and Great Cycle in the moon’s migrations. Their travels would be guided by the sun, and those movements, simpler and more understandable in a strange land, could give them some brief solace.
Crops may yet grow each season, but the thinning of bad fruit and the careful harvesting of the strong would be done by the animals at browse and the wind’s whimsy, not their own hands.
And the mounds of their ancestors would climb no further to the sky; in fact, they would settle and soften into rounder forms.
These were the worries that kept a significant number of the People in this now dusty valley, but the need to find food and return to the camps of their kindred overcame the ties to place and scene.
Could they begin again, or would their children, setting a first chamber in the earth, and raising year by year or generation by generation the layers of homegoing moundbulding? How many generations worth, how many Great Cycles of the Moon would it take to lift their new family resting places as high as these?
A doe dashed past them, unseeing their stillness and running through their upwind side. She was not right for culling, and no weapons were at hand, but she was a sign more than possible meal. She ran due west, straight into the eye of the setting sun, in the direction they knew they must go.
Were they the last to depart? A few sheltering clans were to the north in the bog lands, hunting birds fattened for their own migration, and so also were a few looking for a last kill near the salt licks, at the high marshy valley to the south.
But the valley below them was dark, a strange sight when fires fringing the great ceremonial enclosure had long been a nearly year-round scene.
All the light was now to the west, dimming in the sunset, but still quivering with promise through the bands of high cloud. It was to that light they turned, and walked even more quickly away from where their ancestors had lived and built and reflected on the skies, for time out of mind.
They left only their ancestral mounds and earthworks behind, and the memory of those they left buried there carried easily with them.
As they walked into the dusk before them, behind, unseen, the moon rose in the northwest, and followed them on their way. In fact, the moon would soon go before them.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.

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Notes From My Knapsack 12-10-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Four, 234 years ago

There was a path up the ridge as they plodded east, which surprised Chaplain Jones. The Shawnee guide Duncan had engaged back at their town (Chwlagatha, he thought it was called) told them, in his easy French and broken English, that the valleys beyond the heights east of the Scioto were empty. Rarely hunted, and lived in by none.
When he had been asking about the rough maps of areas beyond Goshagunk, White Woman’s town, in the taverns around Fort Pitt, they said only Christopher Gist had been through that area some twenty years ago and more. When Col. Bouquet had closed the chapter that was Pontiac’s Rebellion, and asked for the captives first promised to Croghan at the Fort Quiatenon negotiations, he made his show of force on the edge of this territory.
But the captives, many who returned unwillingly (and escaped on the road back to Fort Pitt), were handed over by Mingo and Delaware and Wyandot from villages to the north and south. This territory between the Scioto and Goshagunk’s Muskingum Rivers had no stories among the returnees, and little marked on the maps.
David Jones had long felt the pull of the places on the maps where there were no marks. His Baptist congregation in Freehold, New Jersey had raised him up as a preacher in their dissenting tradition, a strong voice among the Presbyterians that surrounded them.
Governor Franklin spoke often of the rich lands to the west of the Alleghenies, and while Rev. Jones knew he thought they were good lands for those he wanted out of his colony, might it not be good for them to move and make an early claim?
There were few in the Freehold Baptist community who were eager to pioneer beyond the Ohio, but they were willing to stake their pastor for a season of missionary work among the Indians, and perhaps to scout out a land of promise. It could come to that.
With a small hop to shift the heavy packs, they came across the ridge to the path, thin but visible, that steeply sidled down the far side. Duncan was farther ahead, chatting in simple Shawnee with their guide.
As he picked his way down the slope, Jones reflected that some God has gifted in certain ways, and others are called in directions they must go. Hours and hours in the Miami and Scioto valley campsites he had struggled to learn a few words of the native tongues, and Duncan appeared to pick up their speech by absorption, just with a few words said and the response was on his tongue without thought.
He would always have to think carefully about each word, Jones acknowledged to himself, and to God. And that meant he might be a fine preacher to his own people, but he would never be a missionary to these tribes. So much for that part of his calling.
The other commission he saw fulfilled all around him. These lands, less settled for whatever reason, could quickly open up to farming and trade. Hardy and adventurous people would find a good living in these level terraces above the wide, winding rivers and soft ridges east and west.
No, the Freehold Baptist Church would not come as a group. He had realized back at Fort Pitt, and as they floated down to Fort Washington and Losantiville, that few of those in New Jersey would welcome this life. But there were still, almost every month, Welsh brothers who came to this land who were looking for something more than apprenticeship or hiring out in others’ farms. They might want to come here, and build a church of their own.
He was ready to go home himself. This frontier life was more to his taste than most, but only in measured doses. He would return, he was sure, but he wanted to get back to Freehold.
Gov. Franklin’s father, Benjamin, and others were writing and speaking of freedom for all in the colonies, from the Atlantic coasts of New Jersey to this nameless valley and beyond to the Mississippi. Rev. Jones wanted to see this "father of waters," but not on this trip. He was heading home, but as he looked around at the hills sheltering around him, he could almost imagine those who would find their home here. And he would lead them.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.

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Notes From My Knapsack 12-17-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Five, 1801

Stadden lifted his rifle quickly to his shoulder, and then slowly swung it down again.
Nothing.
He had seen dozens of fat deer, and not a few plump turkeys, easily trotting by him while he swung an axe, closer to the cabin on the Licking River. He and Ratliff and Hughes had staked out different ends of the "bowling green," the broad flat opening below where the three rivers of the neighborhood came together into what the local Indians called the "Lick-licking." Hughes scowled whenever they came near, muttering about his father’s death back in Virginia up the Monongahela, and kept his hand near his belted knife.
Stadden saw no harm in those he had spoken to, though his hand to knife or gun would have been as fast, or even quicker, than the more impulsive Hughes, if there was any real threat.
Now he was working along the banks of the south fork, well above the confluence, miles from home, and he had seen no deer for hours.
Soon Baby Jesus would have been born eighteen hundred and one years ago, and while they saw little enough of preachers, his wife would like a good dinner and a special few days of rest with this year’s end. He was intent to find more than a young stringy buck or a few geese for the table.
Stadden had been working his way along from stand to stand of tall, nut-rich timber where he could circle in close, the wind in his face and away from his dinner.
Each, in turn, was unaccountably empty of deer. It was getting too late in the afternoon to bleed out a kill and carry it back to the encampment, and he may just have to hope for a wild turkey along the way.
Then he saw a movement up the banks, along the edge of the second terrace, where the river’s valley ended and the wooded plain stretched back to the hills. Side stepping up the bank, watchful for sticks and large dry sycamore leaves that could make his step a sound, he came to the brink, edging his hat and one eye over the verge. There stood a cluster of deer as fine as he could want – oh, Stadden thought, if I could fire just two shots one after another, without having to reload down that long, long muzzle.
Ducking back down, he slid back along the slope, to come up at a better angle to the herd, maybe even giving him a chance to take that second shot, if he could reload fast enough. Looking over again, he saw they had not spooked, but just started a slow, measured trot away from him as a group. Hunched and trotting himself, he began to shadow the herd; he felt like a wolf on the hunt, almost on all fours himself.
Then he looked up, and stood up, startled. They had disappeared, completely. The deer had been working upslope to a small, broad hill, but then were gone. Cautiously, watching the ground which was solid underfoot, and the trees which spread high above, Stadden kept on walking silently, now upright, to the hill’s edge, and stopped.
He had seen mounds throughout the district, but nothing like this. He stood in a gateway, a mouth open wide, where the hill revealed itself to be a vast, high wall, a moat within at the wall’s foot, and curving left and right, disappearing into the distance.
Just before him was the herd of deer, cropping the level space not far within the unexpected enclosure. One looked up at him incuriously, and went back to feeding.
He could have dropped one, two, even three by staying in the gateway and reloading in place, the deer trapped within. Or protected. It felt like that, somehow.
So he did not fire. He stood with them, and stared, and drank in this mysterious sight. Then Stadden turned and headed home.
Not a half-mile from the bowling green he dropped a twelve point buck who stepped right into his path and dared him to shoot. He did, and the sound called out the others who came and helped him with the cleaning out as darkness fell. The preparing and cooking went so quickly that he did not think to tell his wife about what he had seen until the next morning.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.

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Notes From My Knapsack 12-24-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Six, 1860

Civil War, they said. Odd to think that even Americans could fight brother against brother, as they had 200 years before in England. Was Abraham Lincoln another Oliver Cromwell, or more King Charles the First?
Mrs. Dille walked quickly along the sidewalk bordering Courthouse Square, her basket weighing down one arm held out to the side, so she could watch for knotholes in the planks. Since she moved to Newark ten years ago with her once widower husband, she privately thought of mud as the defining characteristic downtown, but would never say so to Mr. Dille.
She knew full well, from frequent retellings around the fireplace at home, how muddy and malarial the heart of the city had been, and how much work he had put into beautifying the space between the frame building and the busy roads on four sides.
These "botanical gardens," as he called them, were raised with many wagon loads of fill, and dotted with strong young saplings sent as cuttings through the post from his many correspondents in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington.
Washington. Few conversations anywhere, let alone in Newark, did not touch on the recent elections and the remarkable victory for Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Remarkable, that is, to everyone but Israel Dille, who had been assuring skeptical listeners for weeks that his candidate and not the Little Giant, Sen. Douglas, would be elected President of the United States.
Even decades after he had served as mayor, most still called him "Mayor Dille," or judge or even general, and while he had no current title, everyone knew that when it came to Ohio politics, and particularly the new Republican party, Israel Dille’s hand was on the levers that powered the locomotive.
Perhaps that was a poor image, given that they had lost years of savings in speculation on a rail line to Licking County. He had bounced back quickly, and their home east of the square, while not as grand as "Elmwood" north of town (soon to be subdivided as Hudson Avenue, they said), but was comfortable enough.
At least when it did not have three or four unexpected guests in it, which was rarely.
They had not the funds for live-in servants (or the space), so she had quietly slipped out to scour the markets for a few more items to fill out the next day’s menu. Having married into respectability, she still was pleasantly surprised by the graciousness of shopkeepers and merchants at such an hour.
She wondered sourly if they, too, hoped for a job in Washington from the new administration. Surely Mr. Dille, who had good reason to expect, let alone hope, would not move the family at this time. The girls just married, and young Willie at home (Mr. Lincoln had a son William, too, she had heard); though Will already spoke of joining the Army to put down any rebellion against the Union.
Some grim faced men in the parlor at home had spoken of armed resistance even to swearing in Mr. Lincoln, and that legislatures in slave states were even now considering seceding from the rest of the nation. Mr. Dille calmly discussed such things far into the night with bishops and senators, congressmen and cart drivers, any of which might be leaning against the mantlepiece when she returned to the house.
He had hinted to her of the possibility that the president-elect himself would be passing through by rail some night soon, and may be pausing at their house. The usual twinkle in his eye doubled at that thought, she could tell.
For his sake, she hoped so, but who knew how to entertain a president-elect? If Mr. Lincoln spoke from the train’s rear rail and then rode on to Zanesville and Wheeling, she would be content to see him and that be all. If he came to the house, she would not apologize for anything, but push aside the stacks of old newspapers and flint arrowheads and mastodon teeth, and simply say "Mr. Lincoln, would you have sugar in your tea?"
As she stepped onto her porch, she wondered as the knob turned: who would be their guests tonight?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.

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Notes From My Knapsack 12-31-06
Jeff Gill

Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Seven

Harry was his name to many, and he answered to it, but his own name was a secret that few knew, and none nearby.
Twelve years and more he had lived in this area, first as a farmhand up from the Ohio River, and then . . . well, then an assortment of things. Nothing that ever lasted long, but that was as much his own restlessness than jobs coming to a close.
By now, he had lived in Licking County longer than he had anywhere else, though with less mark on the official records, little things like driver’s licenses, leases, a name.
He owned very little, but he was proud of owning no record of lawbreaking. Some of his acquaintances along the riverbanks would resort to a few acts of foolishness to seek out the warmth of the jail, but not Harry.
Once he had owned a bicycle, but after the tires went flat he left it leaning gently against a downtown dumpster. It had been handy enough, but his knees didn’t swing up and back as easily as they once did.
His chief possessions were a blue tarp he found blowing down Main Street one day, and a sleeping bag devoid of holes that a kind-faced young woman had given him one night. He had carried a blanket roll with a patchy, zipperless sleeping bag for years, until a conversation on a bench had ended with her return later that evening with the bag he now used.
She was a Denison student, and was working on a project of some sort, Harry thought. He hoped she got an A; that’s what he would have given her. It felt right to take it because he had helped her, so it wasn’t charity. The idea that he had helped someone get a college degree amused him greatly.
Between the odd jobs, the stray work here and there, and canned goods from the Family Dollar, he was content. There was a clinic, they said, on down along the river bank and up the way by the old Children’s Home, but he hadn’t been there yet. If his foot started hurting real bad again, he might go.
For now, he had a camp down among the out-thrust tree roots, well above the water but far below where decent citizens (what his father would have called them) might stumble on him washing up or cooking or just sitting and watching the ripples.
With the rising of a slivered, silvered moon (last quarter, he thought, feeling in his pocket for the Old Farmer’s Almanac that was his annual extravagance), the ripples were clear even after darkness was solid and set.
Not far behind him was where the B&O Roundhouse used to be, and further upstream the old Wehrle ironworks; nearby the stones only he and few others knew were part of the long-gone Ohio & Erie Canal, pacing the Licking River on down past Hanover to Black Hand Gorge. Strange, he thought, to navigate so often by where things used to be, but so much of his life was like that. He laid out his kit each morning as he had in rented rooms and even in homes he once owned, and he got up and followed a schedule no longer expected of him.
What he had never been good at was living in a world that was not yet, but could be. It really shouldn’t be that much different than imagining how things had been, working from just a few clues of brick and block. There were suggestions around about of how things might be, like the student girl had asked him about, and he could live into those hints, too. He wasn’t a river, stuck in the same course for thousands of years. Perhaps it was time for a change.
It would be a new moon, and a new year soon, and he might try again to leave the river bank for good. For now, the moonlight, the owls in the limbs above and the herons picking through the snags below, all felt like home.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.

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(...and a kind of postscript that ran two days before deer gun season opened here in Ohio, as my Faith Works column in the Newark Advocate on Nov. 25, 2006:)

FaithWorks 11-25-06
Jeff Gill

With slow, irregular movements, he worked his left leg around to a better position. He had been up in this tree stand since Orion began to dip down to the western horizon.

That constellation was striding across the sky when hunters first crouched silently waiting for dinner in these woods. Thoughts like that were why he hunted, the opportunity to get out and away from all the noise and buzz and just, well, think thoughts. Even pray sometimes.

He didn’t pray that God would send him a big buck; somehow, that felt wrong, like praying (which he knew he didn’t do with the regularity he ought) when the Browns were down by a touchdown. What he did feel coming up and out of him as a natural, effective prayer, was that he would be careful, that he would be safe.

And praying that no half-wit with a new shotgun would stumble his direction, either.These woods were full of deer; the challenge, he thought, was just not to scare enough of them off by accident. So he wore his blaze orange along with a full kit of camo, he had a rain barrel that sat out back for all the washing of his hunting kit, which was stored in a special bag that hung in the shed away from the house. He didn’t use special scents, which the gear stores were full of, he just worked at keeping his own scents to a minimum.

His homework through the year of tracing the paths through the leaves, watching the deer stroll by without a motion on his part, setting out a bit of salt, placing two tree stands, all came down to this week.

It really was a spiritual discipline for him, and he tried to use it as one, with time set aside for silence and reflection offered to God along with the hunter’s preparation routine. This very moment was a prayer of sorts, with God all around, and he trying not to distract his mind and spirit into the opposite direction.

No, you couldn’t hunt God, but he also had come to the realization over the years, and a few bucks of his own, that you can’t capture this moment with a gunshot, either. When everything comes together, you already know that the end result will call on him to do the hard work of hanging up, bleeding out, and carrying away, the check station and the butchering and the packing away of the venison. There is an intersection of the preparation before and the intention to follow of which the right shot at the right time is only a part.

Whatever the deer’s role in all this was from God’s point of view he wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that God definitely didn’t honor the wasteful and cruel dropping of a deer and leaving the carcass to rot in the woods; and God surely didn’t honor the carnage along the highway of roadkill, either.

If the deer was used well and not shot just as living target practice, there was an integrity in the act that fed back to you. That’s as far as he’d figured it out, but he did know that God sure let them reproduce at crazy rates, and it was hunting, disease, or roadkill for most of them. His freezer was full from bow season already. If he got a deer today, there was a food pantry his church worked with that would end up with the result.

Haze in the east was shimmering, barely at the level of starlight but stretching across the sky opposite the exit of Orion the Hunter. He saw his breath, and thought "what an amazing thing that is," even as he worried about letting that plume show too well.

Crystals of frost, blossoming on branches just below his stand, almost grew fast enough for him to see them expand. How weird it is, he thought, that if this were going on right outside my window, and I was standing in a warm spot with a mug of coffee in my hand, I wouldn’t have the patience to stand still and witness this.

On that thought, he caught a blur of movement, a hop, and then slow, steady movement on four hooves, almost moving right at his perch. If they turned left, he wouldn’t need to shift the gun at all, just a lift and pull. If they turn right, the adjustment he had to make would certainly spook them right off into a trot.

There were three, and they paused, just out of what he considered his range. Muzzles prodding at downed logs, shifting brush, then starting upright, looking around, nearly looking at him. They are beautiful creatures, he thought. He was thankful for them as they were, and he would be thankful for one of them as food for the hungry, while the other two ran away. He would be thankful, as he was thankful right now for this moment.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Share your story of where you hear God with him at http://webmail.windstream.net/agent/MobNewMsg?to=knapsack77@gmail.com.

A poem for "Dissonance and Harmony" – Denison 2006 First Year Program theme

(This is almost an appendix to the poem series down further at http://epicycles.blogspot.com/2004/10/public-faith-23-poems-on-stepping-back.html but doesn't work as well on the computer screen. You have to a) know Swasey Chapel, and b) be able to see the whole page at once. Print it out, if you like, for the full effect.)

Buzzards and Wrens on Swasey Chapel

A
Wren
Wrenched
Out of context
A tower of
Twisting forms,
Shape to shape,
Cupola to circle,
Circle to square,
Square to octagon,
Octagon to ornament,
Ornaments to urns:
Architectural history
From stage to stage.
Out of the London
Great Fire of 1666
Rebuilt churches
From many models
Sir Christopher planned;
Renewal & innovation all
Centering on St. Paul’s Cathedral,
Skyline spanning mighty dome
Supporting a golden Orb & Cross.
Here, perhaps, an academic exercise, turning
The flow of Anglican liturgy into the broad
River of Baptist history, free thought and
Congregational design. But a place for
All to worship, or just to listen, given by
The hand of a scientist turned businessman,
Telescope maker and instrument designer,
Ohio Baptist and American original.
Ambrose Swasey, whose questioning
Mind had to have looked into the saint
With his name, a bishop of Milan, Italy,
Mentor of Augustine and Catholic hero.
Did he look as he would into an eyepiece
Seeing far and considering fairly what he
Saw? Did he offer his share in a chapel to
Open a door to Protestant and Catholic,
Anglican and Methodist, even to minds
Whose free-thinking led them beyond the
Walls of orthodoxy? He built next door a
Tower whose top was an eye carefully made
To calmly survey the heavens, to see what is
There to be seen, and record the sight. So I would
Think that Ambrose, like Christopher, would rest
On the same inscription: "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice"

WLSR at 50: 1975-1985
Jeff Gill

When I first heard about this observance for 2006, I thought, "that can’t be right, because I was part of the 25th anniversary celebration, and that was . . .in 1981, which is 25 years ago. OK then. Owwww . . .
To appreciate Wood Lake Scout Reservation on its 50th anniversary, I have to start my own story as a camp staff member first as a new Scout in Camp To-pe-ne-bee.
Troop 7 from Valparaiso, Indiana had camped in Ottawa campsite before, and in 1973 I was a brand new Tenderfoot, a member of the Panther Patrol, and I was scared. Scared of the lake, filled with long weeds in deep (I thought) water, scared of the dark, filled with eerily hovering fireflies, and even scared of the fireplace in the otherwise reassuringly solid cabin at the south end of our campsite. The fact that older Scouts had told me a detailed account of how young men had been killed and cut into pieces, stirred into the mortar of the stones in that fireplace, all might have had something to do with that particular fear.
But I had been to that camp twice before for Cub Day Camp, with Pack 20, and I loved, not feared, Bruce the Moose at the south end of the Dining Hall. And there were the odd but reassuring stories of Doctor Bob Finehout, our camp director, and the manic energy of J.W. Wright, who was something called the "program director." Between Dr. Bob at the lakeside campfire bowl and J.W. in the wagon wheel chandeliered Dining Hall, leading ever more agitated choruses of "Where, O Where Is Susie," I was hooked.
And I had a small, but important ace in the hole. Some years before, as an indifferent Cub, I had read my dad’s 1948 Scout Field Book, the brown covered masterpiece of Green Bar Bill Hillcourt. A narrative of sorts, and a compendium of both woods wisdom and social pragmatism, the story of my dad’s Field Book carried me necessarily into Scouting, and the deep unknowns of a week at Summer Camp.
That first summer I earned First Aid, Woodcarving, and Fish & Wildlife Management merit badges. Around the Nature area I worked largely with a staffer named Bradley, descended from the famous general, but I remember more clearly a stray visitor from Scoutcraft named Mark Frederick. His energy was less hyper than J.W.’s, but still intense, sweeping woods knowledge and personality quirks into the same inexorable whirlpool.
Another summer, a bit more confidence, and the melancholy announcement that this was the last summer season for camp at Tope: we would, next summer, go to Wood Lake. All of us in Troop 7 agreed we would hate it.
1975 the Sunday dawned, we loaded up our infamous purple bus, and Troop 7 left for Camp Tamarack, Wood Lake, Jones, Michigan, and Hidden Meadow campsite. We arrived, and we loved it. The lake of 50 acres had sailboats (sailboats!), the hidden treasure of Little Wood Lake, the trails through swamp and forest and field across 500 acres . . . and, faithlessly, though we had no Bruce the Moose, the Morris Dining Hall’s high arching ceiling, lined with banners and filled with song.
The songs were led by Mark Frederick, now the Program Director. Merit Badge Midway ringmaster, Critter Race maestro, MC of the deep kettle moraine campfire bowl on Sunday and Friday (the OA owned Wednesday and Mark left them largely in charge): he was the tone setter for the week, and this shy, fairly quiet and bookish boy took to the odd idea that he wanted, almost as much as to be an astronaut, to someday walk in his shoes.
Why? I really can’t account for the desire. Somewhere between J.W. and Mark hero worship, that brown cover ‘48 Field Book and my dad, and the hand of God, I wanted to be something I was not, as others seek a wider fame and fortune. I just wanted to lead songs in the Dining Hall at Tamarack, and tell stories in the firebowl.
And the glory of Scouting for me is, I did just that. The astronaut stuff never quite panned out, but I think I got the better deal in the end.
When I went home from my week at Tamarack in 1975, the first program week, I carried to my parents the CIT paperwork, handed me by camp director Phil Niswonger. Pedro, as one and all called him, saw my eager interest, and gave me the forms and a word to Bill Eckert, my scoutmaster, on Saturday at the Paul Bunyan breakfast before we left.
Dad read the forms and said "$25 a week; you’ll have to earn it." He wasn’t opposed, just wanted me to know the value of what I wanted.
So I went to his place of business, where he sold lumber in the front office; in the warehouse behind, I was taken to a siding and a railcar, filled with molding, in ten foot lengths. "Count ‘em and box ‘em," I was told, and handed a staple gun and shown a stack of flat cardboard panels waiting to be formed into molding boxes.
When the boxcar was empty, it was four weeks later, and I got taken up to camp for the last two weeks as a CIT, or TIC (pronounced "tick" of course), rotating from dining hall (dish duty, the obligatory term locked in the cooler), rifle range, scoutcraft, waterfront, and finally, blessedly, Nature/Conservation – the name I still think of in reference to that program area.
Even after my hitch on the waterfront as a CIT (mainly spent untangling fishing lines and raking lake weed), I was nervous about the water. Jerry Fisher, Bruce Sutter, and Don Harris all went the extra mile to make sure I learned how to swim, sort of.
For all the mild hazing and contempt of my unwilling cabin mate, I was desperate for nothing but to return the next summer. To sum up, I did, as a much too young but terribly happy for all that camp staffer at 14.
Saving some readers a bit of tedium, let me try to sum up my years as a staff member after my CIT service (at $25 a week) in 1975.
1976 – Nature/Conservation aide under Bob Jacques as N/C director, camp director Phil Niswonger and program director Mark Frederick.
1977 – Scoutcraft aide under Rex Rymers as commissioner in "The Swamp," with Mark Frederick back but the business manager last year was now camp director, Don Jordahl, with his wife Judy as business manager, having been South Side director before.
1978 – A foolish attempt to actually make money took me away from camp, while working three jobs in Valpo. I literally dreamed of camp all summer.
1979 – Trading Post manager working for Judy Jordahl as business manager, Don as camp director, and Larry Hill program director. This was Les Hill’s last summer at the range, and the last time he sang "Babyface" leading the whole dining hall when I got up to make, um, "words of wisdom."
1980 – The Marine Corps and I had a prior engagement, with Camp Upshur standing in for Camp Tamarack. Judy turns out to be good preparation for sergeants. I believe Paul LeBrun was program director after four years as a commissioner and chaplain, with Don’s last year as camp director.
1981 – Larry Patterson, district executive for Dunes Moraine, talked to me all winter about coming back as program director. Then he learned that I wouldn’t be 20 until summer’s end, and said "Uh, that won’t work." He asked if I would be Nature area director, and "assistant program director" for a fellow he met at a college job fair in Michigan named Russ Gruenwald, who had never been in Scouting, but liked the idea of a camp job for the summer.
Working with Rusty Snook, my brother Mike Gill in Scoutcraft, and Greg Burns wandering all over camp, it was a good summer, except when it came to campwide activities like flags, dining hall, and campfires. Russ never really liked the uniform and rarely wore much of it, and never quite figured out the Scouting advancement system. He was not a hit, to say the least, with unit leaders, and wasn’t much interested in my suggestions to help him out, but would occasionally argue with scoutmasters in the middle of the firebowl and then storm out, leaving me to wrap up with the "Wood Lake Hymn."
1982 – I went straight from my grandmother’s funeral to National Camp School for program, and from there to Camp Tamarack as . . . program director. No sooner had I realized that a nine year old dream was about to be realized than Ken Durham informed me that he was cutting down a number of trees around the property, including a few around the firebowl "like that crooked old thing just on one side, so you may want to plan a few weeks starting down at the waterfront."
So I ended the opening campfire with a story, a story about that tree, the age of that white oak (quercus alba, as I learned in Nature/Conservation), and the tie to the story of a little boy named Stevie, who grew up to be Lord Robert Stephenson Smythe Baden-Powell of Gilwell.
Ranger Ken shook my hand after the campfire introductions of staff and the singing of the Wood Lake Hymn, saying "you got me, you no-good cheating sucker fish. Nice work." The tree did not come down, at least for some years, and the bend was the top of a loop of rope for a flag many years following.
From 1982 to 1985 I told a story each summer at the end of the opening campfire on Sunday night, usually one story per summer but varying a bit each week. My first and best lessons in preaching sermons as a pastor were learned in the firebowl and dining hall watching and reacting to audience response by cool evening firelight or in crushing midday heat.
From Larry Patterson as camp director in 1982, with Galen Kelly as a proud but overwhelmed business manager, I went to Dave Webb as camp director through 1985. The arrival of Franz Nabicht as business manager was a blessing in 1983 & 1984. Dave Webb and I saw eye-to-eye on almost nothing, but we shared a deep commitment to the Scouting program, which covered a fair amount of conflict, even allowing us to room together at NOAC in 1983 at Rutgers, where we did Show Security for Randy Cline.
Mike Gill took over the kitchen in 1983, Jimmy Doran became waterfront director, and the arrival of Duane Thormahlen as mountin man in that year (later range officer) was a real benefit to me both programmatically and personally; Duane went on to serve as program director himself. Dave Harnish and I worked side by side in 1979, when he was in the quartermaster’s store and I was TP manager, and he moved through Nature (or Ecology as it was then known) and on through dining hall steward to business manager in 1985 and program director himself later, and was a reliable fellow staffer and friend, as was his sister Lisa who was south side director in ’79 and ’80.
In 1984, we had a week where some virus ran through the staff (a biannual occurrence), and it inevitably hit me. Turning in early one Thursday, I was shaken awake, and expected to hear about some camp crisis. It was our TP director that summer, Joe Grabill, telling me "I hate to wake you Jeff, but there’s some old staff guy here and he asked if you were still here; his name’s Frederick?"
So I got dressed and ended up groggily in Constantine (Mark said, "So you guys got kicked out of Marcellus or what?" I blamed it on Alan Eggleston singing opera after a few beers…) with a few other staffers.
Mark had joined the Air Force, and navigated B-52’s across the Arctic Circle: "I really can’t tell you more than that, sorry." And he didn’t.
There was, in fact, little to say; I was feverish, he felt the distance and the awkwardness, but just wanted to know if camp was still camp. I told him we didn’t race turtles any more, and the staff didn’t jump in the lake in Class A’s, but otherwise it was pretty much what he’d recall, and he smiled.
1985 was a year that I really wasn’t sure I would have at Tamarack, but I was (in many ways) the recipient of a great gift. My bride agreed to serve as Nature director a few weeks after we married in West Lafayette, Indiana, with a healthy crew of camp staffers in uniform attending. Our wedding announcement in the Valpo paper closed with the words, "after their honeymoon, the couple will reside in Jones, Michigan." Which was true.
Thirteen days after our wedding, I put Joyce Meredith into a pickup truck with Orbie Lightfoot and P.J. Vandenbossche and Dave Harnish and Bill Skillern (I trusted Orbie implicitly) to head a few hundred miles east for their week at National Camp School at Beaumont Scout Reservation near Cleveland. Before I could reflect on the irony of it all, Duane, Rusty, and a few other OA reprobates grabbed me and put me through my Vigil that night, deferred from the previous September and completely forgotten by me. The next morning, I was eating breakfast in Jones as Meemuns Uiisking, Lenape for, of course, "Babyface." Thanks, Les!
Joyce and I lived in a cabin on the south side, paddling back and forth each day, which is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds. The moonlight canoe trips were awesome and mysterious and downright wearying, and that’s all I have to say about that – but we missed no more than two morning flag ceremonies all summer.
The staff banquet after closing inventory was in Middlebury at the Essenhaus, and among many kind statements and gifts, I’ve always kept a Scout Fieldbook autographed by the whole staff.
Four years later, on August 12, 1989, ten years to the day after I received my Eagle Scout rank at First Christian Church in Valparaiso, Indiana, I stood under a tent next to the now condemmed sanctuary building, pitched there on loan from the National Guard by Troop 7 under Bill Eckert. P.J. Vandenbossche and Franz Nabicht and Dave Harnish and Duane Thormahlen led a large group of Camp Tamarack staffers all in Scout uniform, with John Bliley reading scripture, as they joined in my ordination as a Christian pastor. A tent, ringed by Scouts, where songs and music were a key part of the experience, and stories of Aslan of Narnia and Jesus of Nazareth and our own journey, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in light: this was where my ordination took place.
It felt right then, and it still does.
Now I direct church camps and run an area in our local Cub Day Camp, where my son is now a Bear and I’m an assistant Cubmaster. We’re in the Simon Kenton Council now in central Ohio, and we go to Camp Falling Rock, but the Wood Lake Hymn still runs through my life and the campfire stories still weave through my son’s.
We visited a year ago, and ran into Dick Dunnuck on our short stay. We’re all still in Scouting, and that really says it all, doesn’t it? We’re all older, except for Joyce, but still happy to serve youth with the Scouting program. It’s just that Dick gets to be there, and I’m, well, over here.
I wish we three could join you all for this 50th anniversary, but if you stand between the two paired trees looking down from the Dining Hall slope toward Wood Lake, where I stood waiting for our parade to begin in 1981, you’re in the picture on the cover of our wedding program. There I waited, wearing a campaign hat Earl Kubale, our Scout Executive, bought me to wear with a borrowed 1957 uniform, standing at the head of the procession, and wondering where I’d be 25 years further on.
There you’ll probably feel our presence. We’re there, watching, singing, delighting in the evergreen spirit of Scouting that keeps nervous Tenderfeet walking hesitantly toward the pier for their swim check, hungry Scouts heading for the Dining Hall and Scouters looking desperately for coffee, and all striding excitedly to the campfire for what may be a new story, or an old story told a new way, and always a rousing song.

Crazy Faith – New Life skit 26 March 2006

[Two people, sitting in a boat, holding fishing poles]

One: This is the life!

Two: Sure is.

One: So how did you find this lake, anyhow?

Two: This is my grandpa’s lake, actually. He knew the guy who owns the land around it, and his son still lets me have a key to the gate out on the county road.

One: So you’ve been fishing here a long time?

Two: Yep. With grandpa, with my dad while he was living, and as long as I can get out on the water.

One: Well, then, I’m downright honored you invited me out here.

Two: Hey, I learned one thing from both of them. Fishing alone is fine, but fishing with a buddy is better. Plus there’s someone to pull you out if you fall in.

One: Or push you in . . .

Two: That’s why you have to pick ‘em careful.

One: OK, either way, I’m honored. This is nice, even if we aren’t catching much.

Two: I told you, there are fish in here. You just have to be patient.

One: Your grandpa have any stories about giant ol’ catfish down on the bottom?

Two: Oh, he had stories. He had me believing as a little kid he could walk on water.

One: You really looked up to him, didn’t you?

Two: Yeah, but I mean he had me thinkin’ he actually could walk on the water.

One: (slow take, looks at Two) During the winter, right? When it was frozen?

Two: Hah! I’ve used that joke myself. No, he’d talk while we fished about watching your feet when the ripples came by, not tripping and falling with a splash; he’d think out loud about wandering over to shore to get something and then decide not to.

One: This run in the family?

Two: Well, the big talkin’ sure did, but he didn’t mean to scare me or anything. Just a grandpa having fun with their kids.

(pause, fishing)

One: But he never did, right?

Two: What?

One: Walk on the water?

Two: Not when I was around, no. Wouldn’t have surprised me. It was like he figured he could, and he might, but not right now.

One: Do you think someone could walk on water?

Two: You know the stories.

One: You mean, um, Jesus?

Two: And Peter.

One: But those are Bible stories, not stuff that really happened.

Two: (looks sideways at One) You think?

One: No, not miracles and stuff. That’s not, well, real.

Two: Hmmm. We got physicists that say stuff goes through stuff, like atoms and photons and electrons, and no one sys that’s crazy. Sometimes things are one thing, and then another. (pause) Somedays, I think about grandpa, and I think, you know, I probably ought to be able to walk on water if I put my mind to it.

One: Right. Well, if you do, bring my spoon lure back from the truck, wouldya?

Two: (swings one foot over the side) And if I fall in, you’ll pull me in?

One: You’re not gonna try it, are you?

Two: (pulling foot back) Nah, I’m not in the right frame of mind.

One: (stares directly at Two) But you really think you could, in the right frame of mind?

Two: (long pauses) Maybe. Maybe. At least if I waited ‘til winter…

(both laugh, go back to fishing)

Proposal for Newark Earthworks Day 2006 theme statement --

Newark Earthworks Day is a program intended as an expression of respect and honor for this sacred Native American place. Built 2,000 years ago by the first peoples of this continent, it is both ancient and vitally alive today.

For modern visitors, we seek a renewed and wider perspective, with respect born of broader understanding, where descendants of the builders will honor the site with integrity. The Newark Earthworks connects Native Nations and newer Americans, past and the present, and both loss and recovery of ancient Native knowledge taking place around and within these architectural marvels.

For Winter 2006 Denison Magazine "Uncommon Grounds" --

When Brad Lepper called Tod Frolking of Dension’s Geology Department, he was looking for help in a hurry.
As curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society and a regular teacher on campus for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lepper had been called to an excavation site on a Licking County golf course. What began as a new water hazard ended up a major scientific event for 1990, with the most complete mastodon skeleton ever found, and signs on the bones of butchering by human hands, dating to the period just after the last glaciers left central Ohio.
For microbiologists, their excitement owed a debt of gratitude to the care Lepper and Frolking took even in December frost and with a request of the property owner that they complete the entire removal in only two days. Their scientific thoroughness under difficult conditions helped them see and preserve the gut contents of this massive mammal, not only allowing a new look into mastodon diets over 11,000 years ago (cedar twigs and sedge grasses along with seeds of waterlily and swamp buttercup), but led to the "reactivation" in the lab of intestinal bacteria known for a time as the most ancient living organisms known to science, listed for a time in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon by Lepper, Frolking, and others from the area who came and volunteered made possible a major leap in our understanding of how some of the first residents of Licking County lived and learned.

DenMag – Burning Tree Mastodon

Ten miles southeast of Denison, in December of 1989, a dragline operator digging a new water hazard for a Licking County golf course suddenly saw a giant skull looking up at him out of the muck.
A check with the property owner led to a call to Dr. Brad Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society and a regular teacher on campus for the Department of Sociology and Anthroplogy. When Lepper realized he was looking down into a peat bog containing a mastodon skeleton, he called on local members of the Licking County Archaeology and Landmarks Society, including Dr. Tod Frolking of the Department of Geology at Denison.
With only two days to remove the skeletal remains from the muck, speed could have led to hurry. A careful, if ad hoc plan made on the edge of the excavation, helped lead to a remarkable discovery even under those pressures: the gut contents of what was also the most complete mastodon skeleton ever recovered.
Those gut contents helped make the discovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon, as it was called for the golf course where discovered, a scientific event for 1990, when the intestinal bacteria were "re-activated," becoming known for a time as the most ancient living organisms known to science, at close to 12,000 years old. They were noted in Discovery magazine as one of the most significant science events for that year, and covered by everyone from the New York Times to overseas media when they were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
What has kept the Burning Tree Mastodon at the forefront of "Quaternary" studies (the modern period of geology and paleontology) is the organic content of the mastodon’s digestive system. Along with causing excavators to look more closely in certain contexts for preserved internal organs, microanalysis gave the first clues to the precise nature of the diet of these awesome Midwestern creatures during the retreat of the last glaciers. Cedar twigs, grasses and sedges along with seeds of naiads, pondweed, waterlily, rush, St. Johnswort, bog bean, and swamp buttercup were present.
Even more important was the discovery of cut marks on the bones of this massive mammal, indicating human involvement in the mastodon’s death and dismemberment.
There were also hints of a butchering and caching process in how the portions of the beast were placed in what was then a small pond, likely for an emergency recovery if the hunting season went sour. The recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon by Lepper, Frolking, and others from the area who came and gave of their time made possible a major leap in our understanding of how some of the first residents of Licking County lived and learned.
Recently, a cast of the mastodon’s skull and an interpretive exhibit about the discovery went on display at The Works in downtown Newark, a Smithsonian affiliate museum of science and technology for Licking County.

So Why Haven’t You Ended Homelessness Yet?

Rev. Jeff Gill
Licking Co. Coalition for Housing board president

In 1991 a group of folks with various involvements in helping the homeless got together. Some of us were with non-profits, others in agencies, and a few of us came out of a faith community angle.

All of us had experience trying to help people in Licking County whose lives had hit a crisis of some sort, with one major obstacle to resolving the crisis: they became homeless somewhere along the way. Maybe a relationship had ended, possibly with violence the breaking point, perhaps a family situation had pushed them out the door, or an addiction had snowballed into unsolvable dimensions. Sometimes a lost job triggered a financial meltdown that even finding a new (lower paying) job couldn’t stop.

So all of us who were reliant on the Salvation Army and New Beginnings for emergency shelter (and we still are, bless them), and were all already talking to each other regularly to find housing solutions for people working their way out of crisis, formed a, well, "coalition." We pooled some resources, hustled up some others, studied as we worked about "transitional housing" as a step from emergency shelter to getting back to independence, and started LCCH with four units in 1993.

Fifteen years after we got started, thirteen after we began housing folks, I understand perfectly well why people ask: "When are you going to end homelessness?" In all candor, I feel conflicted between my pride in what this county has done co-operatively over those years, but that we now operate over 30 units of "transitional housing."

On the one hand, I can say that since we reached our current size about six years ago, we haven’t felt much need to expand. Even with the county’s growth in population, the need for transitional housing has held fairly steady. That’s a good sign. But if we are effective, shouldn’t we be able to start shrinking? It’s OK to ask that question, and the staff and volunteers reflect on that question maybe more often than you’d think.

The story I told to begin with is a big part of why I don’t see a decline in the need for our services in the near future. People generally don’t maintain "homelessness" as a lifestyle except for a very small, fairly mobile population – which is the picture too many think of when they hear the word "homeless." LCCH is mandated to serve individuals and families who are county residents, and the 400 some folks we deal with in some direct fashion over the year (and thousands more on the phone with general counsel and advice) are local residents who have hit a crisis. If we could stop all crisis situations from happening, we could put ourselves out of business.

Even the handful (less than 20) folks who come from out of county to establish residency and wait to get help are born and raised from here, or have other family who’ve moved here. They may be trying to get a new start, and it is true that if you draw lines from here east, south, southeast or even northeast, you’d have to go a long ways to hit a county with more jobs available than here, even in a bad month. But the common factor is that they are looking to stop living in crisis, and start living on their own.

That’s why I think that we’re here to stay. You can’t stop crisis events which throw good people into bad times. What we can do, and are doing, is try to make sure that as Licking County, say, doubles in size, that we don’t have to be twice as big. One of our big pushes in the coming year is around "financial literacy," for today’s families and for the youth who will head those of tomorrow. If you understand personal economy and fiscal planning a little better, a crisis doesn’t have to put you on the street. We’re very excited about this way of solving homelessness before it happens!

We promise to keep the county informed as we keep working and listening and teaching, trying to figure out what puts families where they don’t want to be, quite frankly, which is with us. To stay in transitional housing means a fair number of rules to follow and freedoms restricted. It ain’t fun. But it is effective, as our funders often tell others that we’re a model for reducing "repeat business," a record we’re proud of. My Christmas was more enjoyable for knowing that people in crisis have a safe place to fall like LCCH and the other agencies we work with, and all of us associated with the Coalition are proud to claim our involvement. Thanks to all those in Licking County who have supported us in 2005, and look forward to hearing more in ’06.

Being Disciples, Generally

A response to:
http://homepage.mac.com/madcck/myblog/C942134880/E20051219214033/index.html

Michael Davison has issued a call for "Restructure" for the general manifestation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He asks that the decision makers and vision shapers of the general church boards and structures not start a new paragraph in revising how we are church on the wider level – beyond the congregational – but turn the page a begin a fresh chapter.

Undermining this clarion call is the knowledge all of us share who have been involved in regional and general activities through these last thirty plus years. What Michael is correct about is that Restructure ’67 was too tentative, out of fear that the restructionists would be painted as too radical, and then we would, ah, well . . . lose congregations, which we did anyhow. A third, half, more; it depends on how you frame the question. Would the new denominational structure have lost more, or fewer members and churches if they had been more drastic? Did the cautious approach, open to misinterpretation as maneuver and manipulation (framed as such by some who were, themselves, manipulating and maneuvering), actually cause more locations to "go independent"?

Adding to the complication, as those who were part of or witnesses to the Fifties and Sixties in "brotherhood and assembly life" would want to have said, is that they had to work with the structures they inherited. State societies with wide variation from place to place, general boards with their own investments and constituencies, and institutions that had been entirely independent from the early 1800’s were all part of the landscape that would go into making a general church body, with no element having authority over another. Some of the missional bodies in particular were tied by trusts and bylaws so as to limit their actions even with near unanimous agreement by their boards on new directions.

So what look in retrospect like weak compromises and wobbly lines of accountability are in fact the best deals that could be cut between the parts that make our fractious whole, such as it is. Our overall a-historical viewpoint (think churches with "Founded AD 33" on the cornerstone) has an immediate implication as well as a theological one: we don’t get how we ended up where we are because we know so little about the paths that led here. My own attempt to redress this gap for the Christian Church in Ohio, titled "Being Buckeye Disciples" can be seen at http://epicycles.blogspot.com (check the archive, and it’s a twelve page paper in .doc form).

While I feel very limited in how I can make comprehensive suggestions about current restructure options, I’d like to sketch out some of the issues that made the particular set of compromises from the "Restructure period" so un-viable in today’s mission context for the United States and Canada.

The office of General Minister and President is weak by design. Here too, the designers of the Design were concerned about the looming threat of churches disfellowshiping through the early Sixties. Regional ministers or their contemporary equivalent were adamant that this position in the Design have essentially no authority at all. A cynic might say they were protecting their own "episcopal" turf, but a more accurate and fair reading is that the sheer volume of concern from congregations on the edge made them sincerely interested in making sure that new OGMP was unthreatening to such interests. And yes, it served their own interests, as well.

The boards behind the now Homeland Ministries, Global Ministries, Church Extension, and the Pension Fund are rooted (except for the Pension Fund) in campaigns to raise capital from the 1800’s, and each has provisions built into their bylaws that greatly complicate a simple motion to hand their assets over to OGMP, or the assembly (the action which was actually proposed in those days, hamstrung by the fact that legally, there is no legal person standing in as "the assembly" though our internal rules all talk as if there is), or some brand new third party as new Structure.

One way of understanding this is the recent action, surprising to some, of the Pension Fund announcing that they would soon pull out of providing Church Wide Health Care without certain major concessions by the General Board and Assembly. Rather than having any affirmative obligation to provide something they just began offering as a courtesy not so very long ago – about the time of Restructure, in fact – they had to remind us all that their charter (a very legal document indeed) forbids them from using any of their proceeds for purposes other than pensions, and insurance obligations were about to (in fact, had already) spend pension money on paying CWHC bills. They as a board faced the very real likelihood of participant lawsuits for "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if they continued pretending things could go on as they had.

Without going into detail, each group has a public face ("Global Ministries") and a legal reality ("United Christian Missionary Society", dating back to 1849), of which the former can be fiddled with endlessly in terms of name, logo, press releases, and activities, but the latter having fairly tightly constrained options on how and how much to spend of the assets they control.

As a church body/denomination, there is in fact a very simple resolution to these limits. Walk away. Just move on, create new structures from scratch, and maybe someday qualify for support from the boards which, in fact, would continue. If pretty much everyone just walked away from the Disciples of Christ, there are millions of dollars held "in trust" that no one would "get," but would need to be given in the prescribed measured doses that define them, to activities in line with their obligations.

So we have funds that are reliable, but small: not small enough to walk away from, but small enough to require more income to do, um, well, what we’re used to seeing them doing. Unlike congregational giving, you can pretty much count on what’s coming in from it, another attractive quality, but like congregational giving, you can’t just up the amount. (Footnote: the institutions, namely some seminaries and campus ministries, who had rules loose enough to let them start withdrawing capital in a pinch, have all either already done so to the point of extinction, or saw the edge coming soon enough to pass non-breakable rules to forbid themselves from doing it anymore.)

Still, it seems worth pointing out that we could, as a denomination – as the General Board & Assembly – just create a new structure on a blank sheet of paper in pretty much any two year period, as long as you do it with no assumptions about income. All the mechanisms exist to do that right now. But if you have to plug together autonomous giving from congregations/regions with the boards of HM, GM, CE, and PF, respecting everyone’s prerogatives under the law, you can only get . . . what we have. If a new structure was proposed as a truly autonomous upper judicatory, CE and PF would go on basically as they are, and GM would have their stable of missionaries, and HM would . . . I have no idea what they would do. I’d have to read their trust documents to know for sure. After obligatory passthroughs they would have enough money to rent some office space and get a receptionist and a staffer and a half, I’d guess, which is just about where they’re at anyhow.

Then there’s the regions. Oddly enough, to me at least, few know or realize that the regions to this day have some major embedded differences in governance and polity. Some have a strong bishop, others more of an executive director who implements the board’s will, such as more than thirty people who meet four to six times a year have a will (no matter how meaningful the worship time they share).

There are regions with major assets tied up as outlined above, and there are regions who hold a reversion clause on much of the property held by congregations, a shocking idea in some parts of Discipledom. There are regions who have developed an active "Order of Ministry" for their clergy which is a vital center for church life, and others who are heavily centered on their camp or retreat center property, with clergy pretty much interchangeable employees. In all of these, their ability to turn major authority over to a strong vision casting General Pastor-type person is limited, even should the regional board or cabinet want to, by their assets whether physical or fiscal.

On the other hand, if they were to tear the identity of "church" away from the assets and create a new structure from scratch, they could do it tomorrow in most regions. Again, to illustrate for those who are baffled by what I am saying (not proposing, not yet, anyhow), let me offer up Christmount, in North Carolina. A large retreat center, which is a great asset to the region that surrounds them, but if every Disciple disappeared into the Mothership tomorrow, Christmount would continue. Their fundraising mailing list would require some major revision, but they have their own (not enough, I’m told) endowment, a board which owns their property, and their own management plan which includes regional goals and vision, but as a courtesy, not as an absolute legal obligation. Ditto some of the funds and causes which regional boards manage but do not, to the final dollar, control.

Unrealistic? Sure it is, which is why no one has done it. But the moment you commit to creating an authority structure that automatically defers to other legal entities, you commit to managing a shell corporation, not a management structure. We talk management structures a whole bunch, but we actually operate shell corporations.

So many regions have turned, somewhat by default and modestly by design, to creating ever tighter personnel structures. Almost no region in the Disciples had a structure, let alone assets, tied to clergy and ordination, other than a few scholarship programs managed by Commissions on Ministry.

You can require almost anything you want of clergy, unlike congregations who own their property and usually control their budget to a fault ("no one’s gonna tell us how to spend our money!" ™) even as to health insurance. But ministerial standing or licenses are given or withheld entirely by regions since Restructure, though many effectively controlled it before. So the last few years have seen a significant increase in the time and energy regional Commissions on Ministry put into "standing management," requiring creditable but mandatory workshops on sexual abuse, anti-racism, and slated mandates for continuing education or regional participation.

All of which says we prefer to manage that which we can control. Right now, clergy are about all we can control in the Disciples of Christ, so we’re giving them a pretty good once over twice.

But what if . . . what if we tried to create a structure without control? An "accountability hierarchy" without coercion and minimal standardization? There is no management model that will affirm us, but we might be able to feel our way to a Biblical model that could resonate with liberals and conservatives alike. To address Michael’s proposal in detail:

"A new structure could be:
Office of General Minister and President is responsible for proclaiming the Disciple vision of being Christian. . ."

Ok by me; and we could do this right now.

"All DMF funding would flow through the OGMP for the General manifestation."

Let’s come back to this one.

"Disciples Home Mission, Overseas Mission, Church Extension would dissolve their boards and become accountable to OGMP and the CC(DOC) board"

They can’t do it, so this is a nonstarter unless we’re just walkin’ away from the dollars, which we could, in theory . . .

"Working with representatives from the College of Regional Ministers and constituency groups, the GMP would determine the needed services that the General manifestation would offer regions and congregations."

Which they will/are/have been telling us they are doing, but those darn congregations won’t come to the programs and workshops and events we put on! Without sounding like a Bill O’Reilly free-marketeer, there is a remarkable resistance to accepting that if attendance at certain kinds of stuff keeps dropping, that might be meaningful data.

In fact, as Michael points out early in his piece, there are "Disciple dollars" a plenty floating around out there. Week of Compassion, which is amazingly (why is it amazing, he asked himself?) transparent and responsive, gets major funding. I get a weekly – or more – email telling me what they’re doing, with specific things retold, with our giving, and regular breakdowns of the budget in terms any financial idiot (read: most clergy) can understand. I share them in worship because they tell compelling stories, I use them in print materials because they are concise and use everyday language.

"Regions would covenant with each other to keep 47% of the giving to fund regional ministries, and each region's board would affirm this covenant at each regional assembly. Regions would send 53% to OGMP, which would place 3% in a pool developed with the Christian Church Foundation to aid regions with funding issues. The OGMP would then determine the use of the 50% sent to them for the services and ministries they provide by whatever means is appropriate and affirmed by the CC(DOC) board"

Oy. Aside from asking how this would work, let’s set it aside for the moment. No precedent from Scripture or Tradition mandates or affirms this model, anyhow, so we don’t need to wrangle over why people "should" want to follow this model, or how to convince (i.e., force) regions to go along with this.

What happens to the moral and theological authority of the wider church if they simply work with what they receive directly for their ministry? That’s what pastors and congregations do, and – while I know there is very solid Christian teaching and preaching behind mission support – the understanding of what and why we give to middle and upper judicatories has been lost since Restructure behind a screen on indirect obligation and vague guilt.

Where we’re heading now is a version of exactly that: a de facto defunding of wider ministries, based partly on the stresses of supporting an imperfectly professionalized clergy (a whole ‘nother essay) and partly on a growing sense that whatever they are doing in the regional and general office, it ain’t ministry in any way that we understand (I point the reader to Michael’s post on GYC just a bit earlier as Exhibit A).

So walk away. Lose a certain amount of security and full-time staff positions, but gain one of the most amazing tools in the modern world for ministry, a blank sheet of paper, free of legal entanglements. Look at the Episcopal Church USA, which could solve many of the problems weighing them down if people didn’t care about real estate. Leave out the real estate, and you either have two very vital faith bodies with different approaches growing out of a common worship tradition, or a common body made up of significantly diverse interpretations. But leave in the stone arches and fine green lawns, and people have to either agree or go . . . and then some in leadership are indignant that so many are going.

Disciples do not have all that much of a unique heritage, contrary to popular belief. We have weekly communion combined with immersion of mature believers, and congregational ownership of property tied to autonomy (sort of) in hiring and firing clergy under primary lay leadership. That’s it. It is a particular heritage which I treasure, and wish to see continue, but it assumes very little about wider structures, which have changed radically and vary widely over the last mere century.

So I agree with Michael’s thoughts bout how the Disciples need a new chapter, not a new paragraph, but I want us all to be very clear about what the last chapter said, and where the plot necessarily takes us in broad outline.

I hope this dialogue continues, because the current structure has no future to speak of ahead of it, at all. We can shape a new chapter, or get one handed to us by the courts numbered chapter 11 or thereabouts.

Being Buckeye Disciples -- final post of document!

* * * * * * *

Appendix
[Due to budget, format, and various other unexplained changes in the proposed volume, "Ohio Religious Experience 1803-2003," what OU Press published as the book "Religion in Ohio" included about half of this for our denominational chapter, with assorted additions and edits for format consistency contributed by Dennis Sparks. I think it makes a helpful closing note in this extended reflection – JBG]

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
By Jeff Gill

Restoration of "the ancient order of things" and building Christian unity make up the core teaching, or "plea" of Restoration movement churches. Even in the division between Disciples of Christ, Churches of Christ, and independent Christian Churches, all three branches of the Restoration Movement (sometimes called the "Stone-Campbell movement" by historians) still claim this essential plea, and look back to early leaders like Thomas Campbell with their affirmation that "the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one."

How did a movement based on the need for Christian unity, and discarding creeds and doctrine for a re-emphasis on New Testament teaching as a model for church governance, end up becoming a denomination, let alone three? The Restoration Movement story is told in Ohio much as it might be for the United States and Canada as a whole.

From frontier areas of America as they were around 1800, the need for flexible church organization and the desire for leadership (whether ordained or not) sent ripples of change through existing denominational structures. Starting in the Ohio River valley and other margins of settlement, preachers found themselves inviting Christians together who had not worshiped in one place back in Europe, or even along the Atlantic shore. People asked to join in communion celebrations who had not seen clergy of their denomination for months or even years, as well as needing baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Communities used to doing everything from barn raising to militia drill together wanted to hold revival services together, too. Pastors started to wonder, "Why not?"

Barton Stone, a Presbyterian pastor in northern Kentucky, hosted a revival at Cane Ridge in 1801. Methodists and Baptists and scattered other Christian groups were represented in both the preaching and hearing at this celebrated event which drew in thousands from both sides of the Ohio. Presbyterian authorities were highly critical after reports of the eclectic nature of the services, and their attacks led to Stone and others leaving their presbytery, or local organization of churches, and forming their own.

But even that they shortly dissolved, expressing their desire in 1804 to "sink into union with the Body of Christ." This group, calling themselves simply Christians, acknowledged no organization above that of congregation, and pointed to the scriptures as their single authoritative guide. As Duane Cummins has pointed out, "the formalized church of the time. . .became irrelevant to the frontier settlers." Tradition and distant formal authority was not a factor in their social setting, and carried little weight in how the settlers turned towards their God.

Not long after, and equally near the waters of the Ohio, a Scots-Irish preacher came by invitation to western Pennsylvania. Thomas Campbell was admittedly weary of the divisions in the Presbyterian church of northern Ireland, but hoped as he left family behind in 1807 that a new start for Christ’s church could be found in this New World. Instead, the disputes over doctrine had come with the other baggage into the frontier settlements along Chartiers and Cross Creeks, and Thomas was quickly embroiled in the same controversies over open communion tables and who was "fit" to serve and receive at the Lord ’s Table.

Like Stone in Kentucky, Campbell in Pennsylvania withdrew from denominational structures before he could be rejected, and organized on the local, congregational level. He defended his actions in a publication called "Declaration and Address," which closed with thirteen propositions for the restoration of the New Testament church and Christian unity, starting with his declaration about the nature of "the church of Christ upon earth" and continuing in words best summarized by the reforming motto that predates both Stone and Campbell, "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."

Almost immediately upon the publication of "Declaration and Address" in 1809, the rest of Thomas Campbell’s family came to Washington, PA. His 21 year old son Alexander had helped his mother Jane hold the family together through a shipwreck during their first attempt to reach America, and nearly a year in Glasgow, Scotland waiting for their next chance to seek passage aboard the "Hibernia."

Alexander had used the unexpected delay well, attending college at the University of Glasgow, in part out of a commitment to Christian ministry made during the shipwreck that brought them there. He was exposed to Scotland reformers like Glas, Sandeman, and the Haldanes, whose ideas about congregational independence, weekly communion, and believer’s baptism by immersion (given at the "age of accountability" instead of baptizing infants) were to have a lasting impact on the Campbells.

Thomas was relieved to find, when he and Alexander were reunited, that just before departing Glasgow, Alexander too had broken with the Church of Scotland, primarily over the practice of "testing" church members to determine their fitness to receive communion at one of the few times a year the Lord’s Table was set. Both father and son had come to see that baptism and communion are freely given gifts of God through the church to help make souls ready for grace, and that requiring signs of grace before permitting access to those sacraments (or "ordinances" in the language of the reformers) was putting human-made barriers in the way of God’s renewing activity in the world.

During the next year, father and son joined with other families in their area in forming the Christian Association of Washington, PA; meeting in a variety of locations, they soon felt the need to build a place of worship convenient to fellow believers who were coming from all along the valleys and ridges draining into the Ohio. At Brush Run in 1811, right up against the northern panhandle of what was still Virginia (now West Virginia), they built their first church. A fateful trip to borrow precious books, rare on the frontier, took Alexander across the Virginia border to what is now Bethany, West Virginia, where he would meet his future wife Margaret and the place where – when home! – he would live out the rest of his life. He would be ordained by the Brush Run elders on New Year’s Day of 1812.

The newly married couple almost made it to Ohio, now a state, when they considered a move in 1814 to the Zanesville area with a number of younger families out of Brush Run. The plan to pioneer a reforming community, worshiping together and educating their children in the light of "clear teachings of the Bible," was put on a back burner when Margaret’s father offered his Buffalo Creek home and acreage to the young Campbells for one dollar.

Farming, raising a family, and leading a local congregation could have easily been the rest of Alexander’s story, but the desire to be part of a larger fellowship and supportive Christian community led the Brush Run reformers into and out of Baptist associations, which seemed at first a congenial home for their particular religious beliefs and practices. The frontier respect for autonomy and independence continued to attract supporters, and also kept them in conflict with church structures and traditions. These conflicts led them to a firm objection to doctrinal confessions and creeds "as a test of fellowship," even when they might have agreed with the substance of their content. The "Christian Baptist" was a publication begun by Campbell in 1823 to share more widely their belief that a simple "Good Confession" of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was the only requirement for membership in a fellowship of "Disciples," which was scripturally his preferred name for their churches.

The final break with the Mahoning (Baptist) Association in Austintown, OH in 1830 led to a change in the title of Campbell’s publication, and a new self-understanding as "a Restoration movement." Named from Alexander’s belief that the work of the church was to teach and embody the future millennium of Christ’s reign over creation, "The Millennial Harbinger" would carry the Restorationist message not just all across the frontier but ultimately around the world. A compelling preacher from Pittsburgh named Walter Scott joined the growing movement, and began in the Western Reserve area of Ohio to preach in existing churches and begin new congregations. In years to come, many of these northeast Ohioans would follow the frontier to Indiana and Iowa, or south through Missouri to Oklahoma and Texas, repeating the process of church planting they experienced back in Ohio and spreading their model of congregationally governed churches with lay leadership empowered to serve communion and baptize upon hearing the simple words of Peter’s Good Confession.

When Scott moved the center of his ministry down to the Cincinnati area, more connections developed between the "Christians" of Barton Stone and the "Disciples" who had been influenced by the Campbells. New Year’s Day 1832 brought these two streams together in a formal greeting at a worship service in Lexington, KY. While these currents brought strength and power to the Restorationist movement, they also introduced strong forces that Alexander was only just able to hold together until his death in 1866.

As the 1800’s drew to a close, issues of slavery and the Civil War, modernism and "innovations" such as musical instruments in worship, and resistance to co-operative mission work as "unscriptural" led the Churches of Christ down a separate path. Independent Christian Churches have loosely organized around the North American Christian Convention as they parted from the congregations and state societies that came together as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the formal name and structure adopted in the late 1960’s. The Christian Church in Ohio, one of over 30 regional bodies for Disciples’ congregations, grew out of those state missionary and Sunday School societies whose co-operative work had grown out of the initial association started in Cincinnati in 1849, with Alexander Campbell as first president.

Memorable figures from our past still inspire us today, reminding Ohio Disciples of their traditions of honoring education and public service: embodied by names like James A. Garfield, the only ordained minister to serve as President of the United States, and earlier president of Hiram College, a Disciples’ foundation following in the example of Campbell’s Bethany College. During the last century, notable figures like Gaines Cook, Herald Monroe, and Howard Ratcliff have led the evolving institution that we now call the Christian Church in Ohio, made up of 200 congregations around the state. Today, Ohio Disciples look with pride to their camp and conference programs for youth and adults celebrating over 50 years of vital ministry at Camp Christian near Magnetic Springs, and honor the leadership role our denomination continues to play in ecumenical bodies like the Ohio Council of Churches and Churches Uniting in Christ. With Barton Stone, we still affirm that "Christian unity is our polar star."

Being Buckeye Disciples post 4
(Part numbers in the document are from the original full text)


Part Three -- Some Consequences
"Christ has risen." Whoever believes that
Should not behave as we do,
Who have lost the up, the down, the right, the left, heavens, abysses,
And try somehow to muddle on, in cars, in beds,
Men clutching at women, women clutching at men,
Falling, rising, putting coffee on the table,
Buttering bread, for here’s another day.
Six Lectures in Verse, Lecture V
Czeslaw Milosz

Some of the concerns recently voiced among Disciple clergy have to do with a trend that is seen by many as a more coercive, punitive, and legalistic approach toward forcing coherence and community among the members of the Body. Frankenstein methods make for monsters, bolted firmly together but only weakly in harmony between the constituent parts. Good intentions, whether as to clergy sexual ethics or a stand against racism as sin, can pave a long stretch of road to perdition.

How are some of these dismembered, reanimated parts related to who and how we as Disciples understand covenant? Are we digging up limbs from Episcopal or Reformed traditions and trying to graft them with lightning bolts of authority onto our own wounded body? Is there an integral reason for some of the most public actions we’ve taken recently as a region other than "other Christian bodies have done it, and so can we"? We can teach a good thing in a bad way, further undermining by unconscious example the fragile connections we carry into those interactions.

I’d like to go back to my marriage example, and quote a stretch from the tentative close of the meditation, a hypothetical wedding speech/message, especially since covenant is the key concept at work here:
"But today, Bill and Serena are making a new claim: Their relationship will not be characterized by condition, but instead by something that is called covenant.
Please notice that I didn’t say contract. A contract is an agreement between parties under certain conditions and is enforceable by law. Certainly the marriage license that will be signed later has a sense of contract to it, but that license isn’t what makes the marriage.
The kind of covenant that I’m talking about has a lot to do with the God of the Bible. According to the Bible, God established covenant relationships with people. He didn’t negotiate or bargain with them, but in essence said to them, "I will be your God and you will be my people." God took the initiative in these relationships and promised to be faithful to the people. In turn, he called them to be faithful in their love and worship of him.
The people didn’t always live faithfully toward God. Yet, God remained faithful to them. Covenant is all about faithfulness and promise.
So what does this have to do with Bill and Serena? They have already spoken to me of their shared commitment toward one another. They have made promises to one another to live faithfully together. In a few minutes they are going to speak those commitments and promises before you and before God. They are making public something that already exists in their hearts: The transition from the world of condition to the world of covenant. There will be no looking over the shoulder, no question about permanence. It is their intention that theirs be a life of faithfulness and promise."

How do we live out covenant without contracts and enforcement? With the Biblical example of loving initiative as our guide, started with Noah and Abram and vividly fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, let me offer these self-giving proposals for our regional life. Most of these are means of providing an example, of living out a different kind of embodiment appropriate to the kind of "church" a region is to Disciples:

1. A Training emphasis for the region, aka "equipping the saints." Seminary is not seen by hardly anyone (including many seminary faculty) as a place where the work of parish ministry is communicated – or even necessarily affirmed. So why not take our vaunted Ohio certification and supervisory process, plus the human resources of a region like ours, and create a benchmark training program for new pastors during their first three to five years. . .when the odds of departing ministry are also the highest. This also allows us to offer a gift while mandating a certification or set of benchmarks, instead of just imposing requirements.

Elders also need and in many cases want training, but our workshops at regional assemblies et alia assume basic training and orientation to Disciples’ theology, history, and polity, and offer advanced skills, which can be confusing for many/most elders who aren’t up to speed with the concepts and principles involved. A majority of elders in many/most of our churches (to repeat myself) did not grow up Disciple, and carry a wide variety of assumptions about how the larger church works into their service and teaching.

And the diaconate and officers common to most of our churches would benefit from the availability of regular baseline training. Each of these would give regional staff and leadership an opportunity to scout for prospects to groom for regional leadership.
(Note: we and other regions/conferences already do this for camp directors and counselors, which gives us a good model to work from and an example to point towards.)

2. Focus on Gift and Call. If you know how to translate from Catholic dialect to Protestant lingo, see www.siena.org for a model here. If covenant has any meaning at all, then God is giving to us more than we are being asked to give: how are we faithfully expecting and anticipating God’s participation in this covenant?

The unique training issue for us as Ohio Disciples is the near-universal phenomena of "Nominating Committees," which in many congregations are statutorily required to exclude key leadership (pastors, even elders as a whole) and are deeply shaped by secular models of "slot filling" along the lines of Kiwanis, Lions, and Eastern Star. Christian leadership needs to focus on identifying spiritual gifts, from administration (Rom. 12:8) to hospitality (Rom. 12:13) to persistence (II Tim. 4:2), and the ministry of linking, of re-membering the Body of Christ together with where their vocation, their calling can be fulfilled. My favorite quote as to this profound theological truth is Fredrick Buechner’s: "God’s calling is where your heart’s desire and the world’s deepest need intersect."

This also has everything to do with burnout as both a clergy and laity phenomena. I have a near heretical belief that burnout has almost nothing to do with how much/how hard you work, and everything to do with whether or not you have a sense of calling about your work, with the consequent ability to be spiritually fed by right use of the gifts God gives you. You can burn out on one small task or in a 30 hour a week job if it feels at odds with where and who you are called to be, or if you cannot be filled faster than you are being emptied by the work.

Elected, appointed, or employed staff of the church (in any manifestation) need to have gifts identified in line with the call to be extended. Job descriptions help, but they don’t replace a whole lotta prayer and discernment versus slot filling, whether for the diaconate locally or for regional president and pastor. And the discernment goes both ways, toward what we call someone to do, as well as illumining whether an individual is the one gifted to fulfill the call, even when the search has gone on a long, long time.

By the same token, if the responsibility/authority balance is out of skew ("You are held entirely accountable for how this turns out, and we give you precisely no influence in how the task will be done") then whether extravert or intuitive, introvert or sensing, the person in the role will be drained while the structure blocks the hidden sources of renewal, the involvements that can fill one even as the demands tax you to your limits. God’s gifts are promised to those involved in the work of the vineyard, but we can stop their delivery at the garden gate; for our leaders in congregation, region, and general life, we often do just that, and then wonder why the ideal person for a job staggers away some time later looking dazed and weary.

3. Regional elders. Well, recent developments have outstripped suggestions here, and save me some space; but let’s make sure this isn’t seen as simply a cost savings measure for the short term – this is a good idea even if we had tons o’ cash and staff to spare. We need to be visible, be present, be embodied, and be teaching and preaching as the region in the congregations, and for most of our folk, that rarely happens. For implementation, see items 1 and 2.

4. Who’s Afraid of WWW Woolf? Again, we’re already seeing some movement on this front with the ministers’ mailing, but under the auspices of "cost savings." Nope, this is just plain a good idea; it is, in fact, the iceberg tip of a good idea. We need further conversation and communication about what the Restoration Christianity theology and ethos in Ohio means for our day, and in our day that means a) e-mail lists, message boards, and weblogs, b) on-line publicity and registration for events and programs, c) teleconference and internet connectivity for regional staff and contract workers (see items 3 & 5), and d) distance learning for things like items 1 & 2. Until recently, it appeared that faxes were about the only technology we had adopted since 1975.

This point is not about efficiency only, but one about increased communication on intentional, structured grounds to explore what contemporary Disciple theology says about the questions that nag at us, and to share the results of that conversation. As the general office discovered through the discussion boards at disciples.org, there are many challenges to doing this, but the problem is that someone has to be willing to shape the discussion – it doesn’t just happen. A discussion board left to its own devices is not pure democracy, but becomes total anarchy in a matter of months. A managed, moderated discussion (see http://www.marriagedebate.com/mdblog.php for one example) can move in constructive directions fairly steadily, but someone has to be willing to take on the teaching office, on-line just as in a circle of folding chairs.

5. Staffing and Portfolios. Along with technology, new approaches towards organizational strategy and institutional affiliation indicate that a more dispersed approach to staffing should be deployed. This may include a new look at what makes for an ideal location, or even the best configuration is for the regional office, as well. Rented space, contracted work, and more effective use of volunteer help are more and more common in congregational life and with new church starts – should the region be able to model and teach by example on this, as well? Fellowship ministries (women’s, men’s, youth and young adult), special initiatives (see items 1 through 4, for instance), and other programmatic administrative responsibilities could be assigned to volunteer or short-term paid individuals who have the identified gifts for a particular task and who can embody calling in their context. We already do this with three camps, but some still see that as "what we have to do because we don’t have enough staff." Affirming and supporting that kind of regional ministry as a positive option instead of "a second best that we’re settling for" opens the door to further application of the principle of "a pilgrim people."

We will always need full-time, set-apart, called individuals to serve the regional office; but "until someone can articulate a clear, strong vision for the regional manifestation of the Christian church, it will be difficult to support these regional positions." A gifted, talented lay member of our congregation here in Hebron said that in response to "how many regional staff do we really need;" which is another way of saying: first, we have to explain to people why we need one. Then, later, we start to extrapolate from that how many the region needs. That’s what my wife says, anyhow.

Part Four – A Conclusion

The Prince of This World governs number.
The singular is the hidden God’s dominion,
The Lord of rescues and exception’s Father
Who from the start inhabited my errors.

One against the multiplication table.
Particular, free from the general.
Without hands or eyes yet real.
Who is, every day, though unrevealed.
One And Many
Czeslaw Milosz


One place where covenant still feels real, where it never really went away, among both conservative and liberal Disciples’ congregations and even in the midst of some of our independent kin as well as with ecumenical partners, is at the communion table. We come to be made one, and where God has promised to be present, the signs of God’s presence are made manifest. God’s love is embodied in the beloved community assembled around the joyful feast, whether in the form of fish food and thimbles of grape-like juice (symbolizing our too often frugal parceling out of good news?), or through a hearty loaf and rich red wine. One bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing, which we bless. . .

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope
Zechariah 9:12

We have some great strengths in our Stone-Campbell tradition, in this branch of the Restoration Movement. The central rock on which we stand is a broken loaf of bread and a cup of crushed grapes, which by eating and drinking as Jesus asked "in remembrance of me" makes of us a whole, as the living Body of Christ. Our times of communion together as Buckeye Disciples have seen us through many times of brokenness and season of fracturing. I wonder if there aren’t more occasions, when we are about the task of re-membering the divided and drained body, when we could have communion together? Do we do that often enough, at regional board and commission meetings, at other gatherings whether district assemblies or work group rallies? And when we have communion before starting a shared task, we create a circumstance for reflection and conversation on the meaning of what we’re doing.

All things are possible at the table of remembrance and re-membering, even Widow McGillicutty speaking warmly to Mrs. Wilson and her rambunctious brood in the pew behind her. Even Elder Morris to the pierced teen can show acceptance and welcome when sharing the loaf and cup; the grim relax their jawlines and the hopeless take heart, while the weak become strong and the mighty unbend, even if only just a bit.

Everything we do in reforming the Christian Church in Ohio should be measured against the yardstick of the communion table, and we should say so as we’re doing it. Can we say such and such an action is in harmony with our practice of the Lord’s Table? How does this decision fit into the example of the Last Supper? In a church body with little affection for theological benchmarks, the communion table is one standard that everyone can agree on.

But just as we shouldn’t unconsciously appropriate random elements of other faith traditions (signs of the cross over the elements, presence lamps in the "sanctuary") without understanding the whole into which they fit, we shouldn’t imagine that our trials are ours in isolation, either. In the Catholic Church, where theology and ecclesiology is quite different from our own, the task of modern missions asks many of the same questions of Jesus’ friends, however they may live out that relationship. Quoting Amy Welborn on "open book," her weblog: "People are just so tired of institutional conversations. They are so tired of programs and mission statements and policies and long processes that stifle the Spirit. They are tired of layers put by institutions between them and God. The Church is an institution, and its purpose is not to obscure, but to enlighten, to give people not only guidance, but a place, a moment in time in which they know the presence of Jesus - healing, forgiving, binding, nourishing, loving. It is not that complicated. . . . There is nothing to re-invent. There is merely the ancient charge, the commission of Jesus to heed and put into action." (http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/)

You, by reading this, have shown – embodied, even – your interest in the reformation and restoration of a community of believers who see weekly communion, lay leadership, and belief preceding repentance leading to baptism, as crucial means towards having a personal relationship with God, as the Way of Christ into deeper fellowship and lasting meaning for today and into forever. Thank you for your interest and commitment, and know that our prayers and reflections together are part of that movement towards perfect communion that is God’s purpose in creation. We are not alone, we should be unafraid, and Jesus has indeed prayed "that they may all be one." (John 17:21)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time . . .

Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one
Little Gidding
T.S. Eliot