Being Buckeye Disciples, or
A Reminiscence, A Rant, Some Consequences, and A Conclusion

Prologue

"It’s not about you."

Rick Warren opens his best-selling "The Purpose-Driven Life" with these words, which I would heartily echo to our Futuring Task Force as to the Christian Church in Ohio.

"It’s not about us."

We are called into existence by God to share the Good News of freely given love made known in Jesus Christ. Organizationally, we have problems rooted in a lack of vision, and we have to admit that (harder than it sounds when you get to specifics), identify what our vision is, and lay out the first steps to reorienting our work around that vision. But the Gospel will go on regardless. It really isn’t about us, since God has many ways to share the Gospel besides through Buckeye Disciples.

Covenant is the key element of the vision I see laid out before us, the course I believe God has prepared that is most beneficial to follow. We need to define what covenant means for us at this place and time. We have some covenant language among us, but varying usages, historic and cultural, mean that we can’t just simply or uncritically announce "covenant" as our vision for the Christian Church in Ohio. We also need to take some steps to re-establish the kind of theological conversation that can interpret, with integrity, how a renewed covenant can bring us closer to God. . .oh, and help renew the region, but don’t forget: it’s not about us.

Let’s be willing to think the unthinkable, and not get too concerned about the earthen vessel, the "clay jars" we’ve been given to carry treasure in, the gifts from God for this common ministry we have together. (II Corinthians 4:1-12)

Part One -- A Reminiscence
Above all, maintain constant love for one another,
for love covers a multitude of sins.
I Peter 4:8

I didn’t meet Jesus in Ohio. Not at first, anyhow. We first became acquainted in my home church, in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he was a more distant authority figure when I was younger, and then seemed more and more a friend and companion as the years went by. There were times, even years, when I didn’t stay in touch, but I never really forgot about him, and was reassured that Jesus kept coming to look for me when I stayed away too long.

Jesus was sort of an absentee landlord in my home church, a respected name who everyone knew, but with varying degrees of familiarity from nodding acquaintance to close friendship. It did seem that those who knew him best knew others who were Jesus’ friends, both in other Indiana communities as well as far away from the Midwest. There was some kind of correspondence, it seemed, between how close you felt to Jesus and how well you were aware of the size of Christ’s community.

In high school and college, I started meeting people who acted like we were both friends of Jesus, which made me look more seriously at how good a friend I really was, to Jesus or to my fellow Christians, who proved to be a varied lot even within the Disciples’ fellowship I’d been born into. Exposure to and work with other Christians, Disciple and otherwise, made me feel like I was becoming more of a friend of Jesus than I had been, and also showed me through some others how much farther I had to go – even in learning about my relationship with distant others, long dead, through an ever-more-living Christ. Alexander Campbell, Barton Stone, Julian of Norwich, John Woolman, Brother Lawrence, Dorothy Day, Francis of Assisi, George Fox, David Zeisberger, all challenged and encouraged me in my friendship with them through Christ.

On moving to Ohio, I was pleased to learn that Jesus was well known in that state as well, and that many of his friends in the Buckeye State had a relationship with him similar to the one I grew up with. There are times when he seems to be away for a bit, but I know better than to assume he’s gone back to Indiana and is absent from Ohio; while Jesus stays active, we just get busy, and it can be easy to lose track of him. But he always comes back to look for his friends, wherever they may be found.
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All of the interviewing, reading, e-mailing, blogging, prayer, and discernment had to come to an end, at least momentarily. It was now time to write up for you, the other members of the Futuring Task Force, what inspirations and anticipations and conceptions I had come to through our shared and assigned reflections. The books read from the Alban Institute, Rick Warren, and Marva Dawn, works consulted by Len Sweet, Herb Miller, Robert Putnam, Thom Rainer, Walt Wangerin, Bill Hybels, and Robert Bellah (plus a little Harold Bloom, believe it or not), as well as many re-read DoC Restructure era materials from the Blakemore "Panel of Scholars" report thru Ronald Osborn on Restructure and Loren Lair’s "The Christian Church and Its Future," plus pamphlets and booklets by O.L. Shelton and Willard Wickizer on "Functional Church Organization" (predating and prefiguring the Restructure materials), as well as Hayden, DeGroot, and Shaw’s historical works on Restoration Christianity in Ohio – and the 1999 Regional Long Range Plan, electronic files, weblogs, and scribbled notes, index cards and notes from pockets -- all of them had to go into the pile by the computer, and it is/was time to write.

This feels as much like seminary as anything I’ve done since graduation, even though I write professionally and personally for a wide variety of venues apart from the usual scripting of sermons and slapping together of church newsletter articles. The process of research combined with a discipline of prayer, ending with a product that is intended to be both personally revelatory and institutionally functional, created a context that was/is oddly familiar and strange, almost but not quite like writing a systematic theology paper for reading aloud in class to my peers.

Like most contemporary theology, I can neither ignore my immediate context nor do I assume readers expect me to do so. Right now both my local and cultural contexts are placing the question of covenant in the forefront of my mind, whether I’m directly addressing that subject or not. That’s both in the setting of the larger church (middle judicatory, region, whatever), but also in the sense of weddings and marriage. Formal and informal cohabitation, civil unions, same-sex marriage, Episcopal leadership issues, divorce rates, when and how the church should bless a variety of informal and irregular relationships, all are intruding into my consciousness these days as I work out, with the requisite "fear and trembling" (and remember where Paul said that, long before Kierkegaard got to it) my understanding of Christian faith and practice in relation to our cultural moment.

So this is what I’m thinking about: "covenant" is the crucial model coming to mind for interpreting where the fellowship of believers called the Christian Church in Ohio is being called by God. The covenantal relationship we live in as fellow Christians in a congregation, in a region, in the general manifestations of the Disciples of Christ as well as in the wider, global embrace of the Body of Christ is the kind of relatedness that gives focus to my thinking these days. But what in God’s name do we mean by covenant, and how do we, as the CCiO, live out that meaning?

The Biblical and organizational principle of "covenant relationship" has been frequently invoked and less often practiced in the Disciple fellowship, aka "our Brotherhood" as the Stone-Campbell Movement once called itself. In the process of fratricidally subdividing ourselves within Restoration Christianity into tighter and tighter sub-groups over the last hundred years, we have used "covenant" as club as much as shepherd’s staff, as crowbar to pry apart more than to heave together, as an exclusionary tool rather than a safe enclosure. As a result, fragmentation and elusiveness are characteristics of contemporary Disciple understandings of covenant that we’re going to have to work through, not wish away.

Obviously, the current setting of covenant by way of marriage and family is not an uncloudy comparison or even, some would argue, a healthy context. And I’ll admit that my perception of that kind of cultural covenant is a fragmented and elusive one these days, but that may be as much help as hindrance in determining the direction God is calling us towards. The renewal of covenant is a constant theme of scripture, and is even a recurring element in our common history as Buckeye Disciples.

Such is one other idiosyncratic element of my personal context: before starting work on our futuring/visioning task, two years ago, I was asked to write the Disciples of Christ portion of the Ohio Bicentennial Commission volume on "Religious Experience in Ohio." A similar volume was produced 50 years ago, and Henry Shaw, author of "Buckeye Disciples," the standard Christian Church in Ohio history, wrote the Disciples’ section in 1953. For Ohio’s 150th anniversary, Shaw looked back and also forward, and his hopes and dreams, his insights and misinterpretations became my bifocals while putting together a version for the 200th. As a moonlighting history teacher and archaeologist, I can’t help but wonder how what we say today will look in 2053. . .and trust me, someone will read this stuff, and wonder "what were they thinkin’?"
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