Constructing a Faith at Work
(& Building Small Groups)
- - -
Working among Carpenters, Gardeners, and Sweepers in the Gospels

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Introduction
(for reading to the group; leader’s notes at end)

Jesus used parables to teach the Good News of God’s love, or "gospel" message (an old word for "good news"). When we gather as Christians to reflect on God’s word in the four books we call "Gospels," Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we hear Jesus’ good news story through some very everyday examples, or parables.

Parables tell us about men building barns, women sweeping floors, and children singing and dancing. It all sounds pretty familiar. And even when the world of the parables looks a little different, it isn’t hard to imagine a truck in place of a mule when neither wants to start in the morning. Or you can see working in a vineyard then, as the shop floor or warehouse crew today.

John the Baptist was a preacher’s kid, Jesus grew up in a carpenter’s home, and James and John were sons of a sailor themselves. The work their families did shaped how they saw the world and what examples they used to describe it. We are just getting going as a small group to study the Bible and look for God’s direction in our lives. To begin, thinking about what our parents did for a living, and what we do ourselves at work is part of how we hear those verses of scripture. We can understand each other and support one another better when we listen to how different people respond to the same parables and teachings.

In each of these six sessions, after readings from the Gospels and a short prayer, some discussion questions are shown here to start a conversation. Everyone should have a chance to say their piece, but no one needs to feel like they have to talk. Remember, even a simple job can have an eternal place when Jesus talks about it, so don’t think that your story or viewpoint isn’t worth sharing because you haven’t done anything as interesting as the last person to talk! And your work or job perspective can be something you’ve done for a living, or it may be a hobby, too. The point is to bring our real world experiences into the equally real world of Jesus and the disciples 2000 years ago.

The idea is to put ourselves so completely inside the stories of the Bible that we can see ourselves, and each other, as part of them. The last step is to reflect on how being a part of this story of faith tells us where we’re going, as Christians and as part of this faith community. Let’s listen to each other, and listen to what the Living Word, Jesus himself, is saying to us right now!

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Session One – "Where Are You From?"

Readings – Mark 6:1-6; Luke 1: 57-66

Even Jesus and John the Baptist had to deal with family pressures, even from birth. We all know the story about how Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem, taking a pregnant Mary with him, because that’s where he was from. Everyone talks about how "it’s not what you know, it’s who you know," but the fact of where we’re from, and who our family is, can make problems for us, or limit how people see us as much as open new doors.

Even when we may not want it, our family and background define us and start our course through life. Our parents can also be our introduction into the adult world in ways that we never would have reached on our own.

1. What did your parents do for a living?

2. How does that show up in your speech, or your habits? Is their way of organizing the garage or setting up the kitchen still how you do it without even thinking about it? Are there phrases you use that reflect their upbringing or workplaces, like the farm or a business?

3. What did your family want you to be when you grew up? How did that work out?

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4. What do you do for a living?

5. How does your workplace affect your homelife – do you bring work home, or does work follow you there?

6. Was there, or is there, something else you’ve always wanted to try as a job?

[closing prayer]

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Session Two – "Learning a Trade"

Readings – Luke 2: 39-52; Matthew 4: 18-22

Even Jesus needed to grow, "in wisdom and in stature." We assume this included Joseph teaching him the trade of carpentry, along with his religious duties that their family observed like the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The word usually translated "carpenter" from last week’s reading is "tekton," which is a very particular craft. More than just a worker in wood, a tekton would have been the skilled craftsman who took the valuable solid timbers, so hard to find and precious in a rocky, desert environment, and made scaffolding and framing for the stoneworkers. The buildings of Jesus’ day, poor or rich, were mostly stone, but doors and archways had to each be filled with a wooden framework for the stone to fit around. Once finished, the framing would carefully be removed and quickly rebuilt for the next opening. To keep ahead of the stonemasons without wasting wood required a careful, meticulous eye and steady hard work.

There are many places in Jesus’ teaching where the mark of Joseph’s trade seems to show up (Matthew 7: 24-27, Mt. 16: 18, Luke 13: 4, Lk. 14: 28-30)*.

1. Have you ever known a real craftsman, a person, male or female, with a real talent or skill? What was it? Did you learn anything about that skill from them?

2. What did knowing that person show you about how to live? How did their skill translate into their life?

3. What talents do you think are born into a person, and which can be learned?

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4. Read over the building verses* (let four people look them up, and each read one). What is the most complicated or difficult thing you’ve ever built? (Yes, Christmas morning stories count!)

5. Where did you turn for help?

6. What did you learn as you worked and after you finished?

[closing prayer]

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Session Three – "In the Garden"

Readings -- Luke 13: 6-9; John 20: 1, 11-17

We tend to see spiritual growth as pretty much like developing physical fitness. More exercise, increased activity, walking farther (or running!) is what leads to growth in physical fitness. So we expect spiritual growth to result from more prayer, more Bible readings, getting more books on spirituality (look at how many are on sale these days), and just plain doing more.

But the Biblical model of spiritual growth is "fruitfulness." Images of gardens and gardening run through all the Bible, from the Garden of Eden to the Tree of Life in Revelation. In Jesus’ teaching, we "bear good fruit" like a well tended olive tree or healthy grape vine when our spirit is in line with God’s purposes.

How to develop this part of our lives is seen in the image of the gardener. Gardening is the single most popular hobby in America today, but for men and women in Bible times it was not a hobby but part of feeding your family. Fruitfulness was life or death in the countryside, so learning the skill of encouraging fruitfulness was for everyone.

Tending vines and olive trees involved a great deal of pruning, or cutting back the unproductive parts of a plant (see John 15: 1-11 for a very practical description). And manure whether from mules or cows or wherever – don’t ask! – was a precious commodity for promoting growth in thin and dry soil. Did it smell? Yes, but how they felt about the smell was very different than we do in a drive through the country today.

1. When have you felt the need to "prune back" your life?

2. Do you feel like you run yours or your family’s schedule, or does your schedule run you? How does that happen, and what can you do about it?

3. Has there been a time when you felt really good about getting out of a rut, or stopping a bad habit? Do you just replace one thing with another, or could you just "prune it back"?

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4. Do you remember a time when some "manure" in your life led to new growth – something that seemed bad at the time, but turned out for good?

5. Has there been a project or practice that you really didn’t look forward to, but once you got into it, became really rewarding?

6. Does a spiritual discipline have to be hard or demanding? Can it just be fun?

[closing prayer]

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Session Four – "A Clean Sweep"

Readings – Luke 13: 10-17, Lk. 15: 1-10

Nowadays, both women and men have a share in housekeeping. Modern schedules and fast moving families need everyone to pitch in sometimes whether it’s with cooking or laundry, mowing the lawn or checking the tire pressure.

Women have a special role in the home as mothers, and often particular tasks go along with that role. In Bible times, women were much more likely to sweep than men, and men were more likely to go out and pick the ripe olives. But ancient books show that not only did roles sometimes switch, but many jobs tied to the seasons were shared. Grape stomping and grain threshing called on the entire household to the fields or barns.

All of scripture is intended for everyone, even if particular passages might strike home better for some than others. Jesus knew that while we might not do each others’ chores, we were aware of them and knew something about how they were performed. Parables about housework and homemaking work in this way for all of us.

1. What is the biggest clean-up job you’ve ever been involved with? What made it so big, or hard? How did you get it done?

2. What’s the biggest meal you’ve ever been involved in: in your home, and then anywhere (but think about both kinds of meal). What role did you play, & how did it go?

3. How do men and women split the household tasks in your house now, and/or in the home you grew up in? (And how does that shape the way you read these verses?)

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4. Read Luke 10: 38-42; when are you Mary, and when are you more of a Martha?

5. Talk about some Marys and Marthas you’ve known: which example comes easier, and why do you think that is?

6. Is this story more about how we should be like both Mary and Martha, or that we should figure out which one we’re like and just learn to be happy with who we are?

[closing prayer]

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Session Five – "Doing the Dirty Work"

Readings – Luke 2: 8-20, Matthew 20: 1-16

Shepherds are charming figures in robes with crook-ended staffs wandering among the little white sheep, right? That’s the image we have after years of Christmas pageants and pictures in children’s books.

But in Jesus’ day, shepherds were about the lowest of the low, the most unclean of the ritually filthy, and the bottom of the social totem pole. Even tax collectors and prostitutes had more status than nasty, stinky, ignorant sheepherders. The Temple folk saw them as wilderness dwellers, far from proper washing facilities, so they couldn’t maintain any degree of ritual purity for prayer and religious observance (you hear another echo of this with John the Baptist), and they were poor enough to not even be able to afford simple sacrifices like a pair of pigeons. The sheep they herded were generally not their own, so they were usually hired help, but even with their own herds the profit margin was small.

Yet shepherds were who first heard the "Good News," or Gospel, out in their fields, watching their flocks by night. Away from official buildings, unable to keep the purity laws of their faith, and after darkness fell no less: this is as far as you can get from priests and temples and the official way of doing things in the light of day.

God clearly is sending a message here about who’s in and who’s out. We need to keep rethinking this message for our own time.

1. What jobs seem most awful to you; what job would you least like to have, and why?

2. What is the worst job you’ve ever had, and what did you dislike about it?

3. How can you keep God present at work, no matter what the job?

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4. Read over Mt. 20: 1-16; have you ever been cheated of your fair pay on a job?

5. Have you ever seen someone else get a better deal than you that seemed unfair; how did you deal with that situation, in your work, and with that person?

6. Is there any work that God can’t be part of? Are some jobs just plain harder to keep God close to?

[closing prayer]

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Session Six – "The Hardest Work There Is"

Readings – Mark 3: 31-35; John 19: 23-30

Mothers and fathers and parenting (and sometimes grandparenting) is, beyond a doubt, the hardest job there is. We know the story about Abraham and Isaac in Genesis (chpt. 22), and while we wonder about the faith that Abraham showed, most parents know that it can feel like a sacrifice every time we send our children out the front door, whether to school, sports, or off on their own. There is a feeling of pain or heartsickness that comes with watching our children experience hurt or rejection or failure.

We can barely imagine how God must experience the world’s response to Jesus in these terms. But the other side of this problem is that, as there are few challenges more difficult than parenting, there are also no joys greater than watching a child under your care learn and grow and develop.

For many of us, the experience of having and raising children also makes us re-visit what our parents must have gone through with us. Taking on the new perspective of parent changes many other perspectives we thought were settled, and can help us understand our childhood and our raising from a new angle.

1. Did you ever get told "wait ‘til you have children of your own!"? What do you think that means?

2. One of the Ten Commandments is "honor your father and mother;" how do you do that when you find you have to disagree with them? What does Mk. 3:31-35 say to you?

3. How does your understanding of parenting affect your understanding of who God is?

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4. Read the passage from John again; what is Jesus saying from the cross about parents and children in the church?

5. How do you see Mary’s role in the story of Jesus? What does her life say to you?

6. When you read Paul’s letters to the first Christian communities, he speaks often about "adoption" as a model for who we become in faith, as brothers and sisters to one another, and as children of God. How does the idea of adoption work for you as a way to understand what God is doing in Jesus?

7. How has your relationship changed with the members of this small group over the six sessions? Do you feel more like co-workers, like adopted kids in a household, like re-united family members, or something else?

[closing prayer]

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For the leader:

This small group outline is designed with two main purposes in mind: to create a basis for a small group, with prayer, discussion, and sharing all a natural outgrowth of the group sessions; and to give all participants a good overview of the four Gospels as they do so. The themes and questions focus on a very basic area of life – work -- and how our jobs or roles shape the way we see the world, and read the Bible. They are intended to give everyone a chance to hear how others do so, from their own perspective, in different ways.

The time spent on the material itself, with time for the readings, discussion questions, and prayer celebrations & concerns at the end, should be 20 to no more than 45 minutes; each may actually be done in two parts if you like, for 12 sessions together. Ideally, your group has another activity which is before or after the study time, whether it’s sewing or cycling, eating or exercising, serving or ministering in your group’s particular style. You could be the Repairs on Wheels fix-it squad, the Jocks for Jesus group playing basketball, the Christian Motorcycle Riders just before a run into the hills, or a Mother’s Day Out on second Saturdays of the month.

Our goal is to give participants a chance to see what small group sharing is like in a fairly comfortable setting, and to encourage them in continuing with spiritual growth in this kind of group. Basic Bible skills, like where the Gospels are and how the stories in them parallel and reinforce each other, will also support continued study and involvement.

After these six sessions, whether over six months, six weeks, or whatever your meeting frequency, the group and the members should be ready to decide what kind of group they want to be (prayer & study, mission-focused, program support for the church, etc.) and look for material to support a continued pattern of group-building.

From "A Life With Purpose," a book about Rick Warren and the work that has come from "The Purpose-Driven Life," these words about fellowship and small group sharing:

"Traditionally, fellowship means "shared experience." Although for many it may stand for chit-chat and a cup of coffee, according to Rick (Warren) it should signify much more than being a church member and faithful attendee. True fellowship emerges out of the formation of small groups, no larger than ten, who open themselves up to honest, soul-baring discussions. . .true fellowship means trusting one another enough to risk hurt and humiliation by being completely open, but knowing that your brothers and sisters won’t judge you." (pp. 146-7)

Preservation and Parks: A Historical Perspective

The story of how Octagon State Memorial is occupied by a golf course is tied to the developing story of preservation in the United States. The idea of "state parks" or "national parks" whether for natural areas or historic sites is only about a century old, but the history of local preservation at Newark goes back even further. Leaders like Israel Dille and Isaac Smucker in the 1800’s began a discussion that traces all the way back to comments recorded from Sen. Daniel Webster, suggesting that the Newark Earthworks be preserved in some fashion.

With the National Park Service not formally established until after 1900, the model for preserving sites such as Yellowstone or Serpent Mound was a combination of mixed use and private group partnership, with military training grounds a common way to have personnel and resources used to maintain open land that was not farmed. Private groups bought Serpent Mound and Fort Ancient in the late 1800’s, but the urgent question was "how will we manage this property?"

Until the concept of a park service, interpretive guides, and civic support of budgeting for park management was developed, largely in the period immediately following World War I, a variety of concepts were tried to answer the question of parkland management. Leasing to a country club, like similar arrangements at the turn of the century for leasing public lands to amusement park operators or state militia groups, was one of a variety of approaches that made sense at the time.

The public debate over land management and access continues today, at the Octagon and other sites around the nation.

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Preservation and Parks: A Historical Perspective (extended text)

The sight of a golf course occupying one of "The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World" is odd and to many, upsetting. Octagon State Memorial, leased to Moundbuilders Country Club since 1911, has been called "playing miniature golf in St. Peter’s" and likened to "soccer practice in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity."

The future of this amazingly important piece of land is tied to its past, and solutions will necessarily take into account the entire story. That story is both more surprising and less thoughtless than a casual visitor to today’s Octagon might think, and shows the still developing course of preservation and public interest into our time, a story still unfinished.

We can go back to a tantalizing hint in records from a Kenyon College commencement, where Daniel Webster, famed Senator from pre-Civil War days, gave an address and was said to have expressed a wish to see the Newark Earthworks preserved by the federal government. While the Congressional Record shows no evidence that this possibly well-intended statement was ever acted on by Sen. Webster, the idea had clearly been heard discussed in public.

If such action had been taken, it would have been the first National Park, supplanting Yellowstone, which was set apart for "the public good" in March of 1872. Other lands and sites in subsequent years were "reserved" by states and private organizations (Mount Vernon and Monticello are still operated by associations much like the Ohio Historical Society, private organizations with public funds supporting their work).

But the National Park Service as we know it did not really come into existence until after World War I, with the Federal Antiquities Act and a number of other initiatives pressed by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt passing after his term in 1919. For most of Yellowstone’s first half-century, the Department of War (now Defense) had responsibility for protecting, managing, and to some degree interpreting the park. The distinctive uniforms of today’s "park rangers" dates in large part to the U.S. Army uniform of that time.

1890 saw a century ending, but the city of Newark’s growth just beginning to spill across Raccoon Creek toward the west. It was in this period, when public parks were only just becoming popular with the work of designers like Olmstead and Burnham, that the leadership of both Licking County and Newark saw the gathering threat to the earthworks. The Smithsonian Institution, under Cyrus Thomas, had surveyed the Octagon and Circle in that year, with erosion starting to take a toll on the northern half of the two enclosures where farming was ongoing. Most of the aboveground part of the structure was still in the same condition it had been when Charles Whittlesey had first surveyed in 1847, with only the Observatory Mound at the southwest point of the Circle severely damaged.

Possibly the interest taken by scientists from Washington D.C. spurred action, and the work of an early association of preservationists led by Isaac Smucker of Newark, inspired by the groundwork laid by former Mayor Israel Dille, meant that most officials with the city, county, and schools were aware of and interested in the mounds. However the effort began, what is clear is that a levy was placed on the ballot for a bond issue to purchase the Octagon and Circle (the Great Circle, or "Fairgrounds Circle" was considered safe as the Licking County Agricultural Society owned it for a county fairgrounds), and voters countywide passed it overwhelmingly.

Now that the public owned it, what to do with it? What seems obvious today – make it a park – was much less obvious in 1891. Effectively speaking, there was no National Park System, and in Ohio the original Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society (forerunner to OHS) was just started two years before, and was struggling to convince the state Legislature to purchase and preserve Fort Ancient. The question asked of the OAHS members by the state had to be in the minds of the local leaders with the Octagon: how will you manage this site?

The federal government used soldiers at Yellowstone, but the state had no standing body to detail onto such work. While OAHS debated how they could responsibly care for Fort Ancient, the proposal from Licking County’s elected officials in state government was admirably adroit: use the property for a State Militia Training Ground. This way, restoration work and management of the grounds could be done in the summer, local economic benefits from the visiting militiamen would help to balance the books, and everyone is happy.

At first, this situation did work to everyone’s advantage. Quickly named "Camp McKinley," the site was popular with visiting soldiers from around the sate, with a cool river to the north, shady woods to the south, and along the riverbanks down below the Octagon was a river bottom perfect for a firing range.

Unfortunately, what political power can grant, clout can take away. Other areas with influential politicians started to see the spin-off benefits of having the militia grounds in their district, and clamored to move it around. Finally, pitches made to the Adjutant-General that included cash inducements for equipment and other supplies shifted the weight of argument away from Licking County, and the militia departed.

They left behind a well-groomed property, where busy soldiers under scientifically minded officers had re-surveyed and stabilized areas of the geometric earthworks where ancient trees had fallen over and torn at the slopes. Uneven spots along the tops were leveled to the height first measured 50 years earlier. In fact, jumping to the present day, one wall of the Octagon was "extended" by a crew supervised by an officer who wanted to "straighten out" the otherwise geometric earthen walls; this was found by Hively and Horn in the 1980’s when they were trying to figure out why only one particular lunar alignment didn’t fit the right gateway, and realized later that it had been "fixed" by the militia.

But by 1900, the Octagon area was left open and empty, and comments in local newspapers referred to grass grown long and tree limbs littering the lanes around it. What to do? Even in that year, for the city and county leaders to allocate funds to staff and maintain a site simply for the purposes of preservation would have been remarkably visionary. We might wish that they had been, but it is hard to criticize them for not seeing a solution barely known to governments anywhere at that time.

In 1901, we read of a Newark High School teacher laying out a golf course on the "old militia grounds." This would have been an arrangement of stakes and holes that could be set up and taken down quickly, without sand-traps or other features we think of today; much more like a "Frisbee golf course" and serving the same purpose as Columbus Metro Parks does at Blendon Woods, encouraging walking around the park and experiencing nature while having little impact on the landscape.

By 1910, the Newark Board of Trade (a predecessor body to the Licking County Chamber of Commerce) had been given title to the Octagon property by the local governments, as they had given the board responsibility for promoting business, industry, and residential development. Their track record in these areas, following the serious downturn from 1893, was one of success and improvement except for one area: downtown Newark. Riots became a regular feature of the weekends, with closing time for countless bars around the south side of the Square a dangerous time for police and citizens alike. Brothels, pawnshops, and cheap lodging for industrial workers further intensified the concern that what had been good for industry was not good for the community.

So when a group of local leaders suggested the building of a "Licking County Country Club," they meant it literally: they wanted to establish a place in the country, out in fresh air and open landscape, away from the "miasmas" of the unhealthy air that was thought at the time to bring tuberculosis and other ailments, as well as to keep their children away from the fogs of industrial smoke and barroom atmosphere. This new game, golf, had made a hit with the young people in high school, so why not go . . .

Again, the idea that a group would "get" the mounds sounds odd in today’s context, but the officials in 1910 were sincerely perplexed by how the property could be both protected and maintained. A park system as we know it was still barely even a reality in places like New York and Boston, and an unimaginable luxury to a small city like Newark. Leasing to a group that would allow public access, but take on maintenance for health and safety was extremely attractive.

1911 saw the establishment of Moundbuilders Country Club’s first nine holes (today’s back nine) at the site known since 1933 as Octagon State Memorial, when the Board of Trade, then defunct, handed the property over to the Ohio Archaeological & Historical Society. The city and county expressed some concern over the turnover, noting in the press that this was land bought with taxpayer’s money, but assurances that public access would be maintained removed the final obstacles. By this date, OAHS owned and managed a number of properties, but then as now, their budget was tight, and sharing responsibilities with a local group to cover expenses was attractive, as is still done with sites in Zoar, Mt. Pleasant, and others around the state.

With an extension in 1997 making the effective term of the lease last until 2077, the relationship between preservation and access has grown more problematic. But like the Great Circle unit of the Newark Earthworks, with a history incorporating the State Fair, a Civil War encampment, the County Agricultural Society fairs, and Idlewilde Park, not to mention the WPA Camp Moundbuilders of the CCC in the 1930’s, all of these uses are now part of the living history of a site which still has a powerful influence on visitors and area residents.

The next chapters of the history of preservation at Octagon State memorial are still being drafted, with a "cultural resource management plan" (see www.ohiohistory.org for full text) assembled in 2003 by OHS, using a large advisory team from all over central Ohio. The Moonrise events will be a further page, with many more yet to be written.

Denison Magazine Summer 2005

“A Christian College of Liberal Arts”
Jeff Gill

From a distance, the first view of Denison an arriving student and family get is of the chapel spire rising above the trees on the top of the hill.
Closer up, their first sight of a piece of campus close enough to touch is the brick and stone entrance where Granville’s Main St. crosses College St. and becomes President’s Drive, more familiarly “the Drag.”
What you see to your right as you turn onto the steep road up to the main campus is a yards-wide carved panel in Vermont granite, looking as if its been there forever, is the name Denison University carved above the college seal, and the words beneath: “A Christian College of Liberal Arts.”
After passing through the four church corner just before seeing that entrance, and driving past it under the downward gaze of Swasey Chapel’s façade, those few words are relatively unremarkable in that context. But fairly regularly prospective students or their families ask in Admissions or call the President’s office to ask “Is this school really a Christian college?”
Their point is one of openness and acceptance for other faith perspectives, or none at all, and the answer to that at Denison for many years has been “all are welcome.” Yet the question still lingers: “Is this school a Christian college?”
One could turn the phrase around for a partial answer. Denison offers many classes well beyond any basic definition of “liberal arts,” and no one doubts that a school can be both/and. In the same sense, many other creeds than Christianity find a welcome place on the hill and around the village of Granville, which doesn’t mean it can’t be in some way a Christian college.
Part of the problem is that today, “Christian college” has a very specific meaning in modern society. That label is usually kept for schools with a narrow sectarian background, often with a “Statement of Faith” that both teachers and students must agree to and even sign, and tight limits on acceptable public behavior both in and between classes on campus, let alone mandatory attendance at worship services.
Of course, within living memory, all those things were true of Dension University.
Through the 1920’s and 1930’s, issues like dancing, non-Christian faculty, attendance at preaching services on campus, even whether female students could smoke off-campus, all occupied a great deal of time for the Board of Trustees and administration.
While protestations of “preserving the high moral character” of the student body were a common reaction to motions toward loosening restrictive rules on conduct and behavior, the fact that these initiatives came so often from the student organizations and staff indicates that interest in things like dancing, smoking (and possibly even drinking!), and not going to chapel services was not purely hypothetical. Memoirs of the period, even back to the 1890’s, show that inattention to the sermon during mandatory worship and inebriated students wreathed with tobacco smoke were already a common feature of campus (or at least near-campus) life.
When the Granville Literary and Theological Institution was founded in 1831 by Ohio Baptists, they were following in a long-standing tradition of church bodies starting schools to train both clergy and future leaders for their denominations. Harvard began with Puritan ministers in 1636 who wanted a school on their side of the Atlantic to train scholars in theology; Yale was started in 1701 by Congregationalists who wanted a place more in line with their differing views on church government. Brown University grew out of the dissenters from Massachusetts and Connecticut who were in many early cases expelled for their religious beliefs, and was founded by Baptists in 1764 (although, like Denison, the “College of the Colony of Rhode Island” did not pick up a benefactor’s name until 1804).
Brown was a source of both inspiration and practical design – as well as a number of early presidents and faculty – for much of Denison’s early history. While Baptists began Colgate in 1819 and Kalamazoo College in 1833, Brown was the touchstone for Denison’s formative years.
Yet even prototypical Brown had gone independent by the 1930’s, cutting the cord that bound it to Baptist polity and structures. The reasons for the general departure of higher education from religious connection were many, but a core issue was survival. Denominational bodies no longer provided prospective students in large numbers, and they certainly did not fulfill capital and annual fundraising support with meaningful numbers.
Denison’s experience with the Baptist “New World Campaign” in the 1920’s was all too typical: a broadbased fundraising campaign by the national and regional church body promised huge returns, and college efforts to raise capital funds were graciously deferred out of respect for their formal relationship. But the quality and professionalism of the effort were not what they could have been, and the results were as much as ten times less than what Denison administrators had hoped and planned for (and likely thought they could have successfully achieved on their own).
Failure at fundraising, and declining student referrals out of churches left board members concerned about tying the future of Denison as an institution too closely to the quality of outside religious administrators.
So as the centennial of Denison’s founding approached in 1931, the question of raising funds beyond the traditional Baptist base and interest in recruiting a larger number of board members from successful alumni rather than just Ohio Baptists, no matter how respected within that small orbit, reached fever pitch.
On one hand, promotional material like aerial photographs of the late 1920’s campus based on long-standing patterns of development work within historic supporters could include text that sounded like this: “Our Baptist Institution at Granville . . .Denison was founded by Baptists in 1831 . . .In order to secure funds . . . the Denison Centennial Movement is being conducted in the Baptist Churches . . . Every loyal Baptist will want to take this opportunity to aid our church school.”
That picture did not include the modern gateway. The other hand was an outstretched gesture to a wider, broader public in Ohio and beyond, claiming a set of ideals and aspirations less Baptist, and more generally Christian. At the dawn of Denison’s second century in 1930, Indiana limestone was employed to suggest that Denison had purposes and plans that went beyond the Baptist heritage, extending to all of Christendom. To say Denison was a Christian college was not to deny the Baptist heritage that had built the path to 1931 over a century, but it did clearly claim a wider scope for her work than the merely sectarian.
Today’s Denison looks even further afield, and as limestone gave way to granite in 1967, the current gateway may yet be revised and expanded in ways the founders could not have anticipated. A vision of education rooted in transcendent ideals with practical application is still at the heart of what the college on the hill is all about; how best to tie the deep sources of transcendence with practical realities of everyday faith, and current forms of religious expression, still challenges the board, students, and supporters of this almost 175 year old “Christian College of Liberal Arts.”

Events at Disciples Village, 14 Apr 2105
(Press Release courtesy Disciples Future Service, embargoed to 15 Apr 2105, Noon EST)
(DFS) Robin Run Cryofacility & Disciples Village Historic Site
Spring is always an exciting time for the costumed interpreters at Disciples Village, an interpretive site operated by the Indiana State Museum and Robin Run Cryonics.
With men in "neck-ties" and women in period "Laura Ashley" dresses, you will be greeted for an afternoon of singing 19th and early 20th century "hymnody" accompanied by antiquarian expert Luis Jones-Carfagna on a restored Hammond B-3 electronic organ. Lengthy readings from actual simulated paper sheets (made from fractal planar fungi, reconstituted as laminar material), which do not scroll up like modern electronic/reloadable wireless paper, but are actually read page by page. This creates an atmospheric effect in the worship space, with an audible rustling as the group turns their pages roughly in unison, while sharing the unique theological language and rhythms of this point in time. There is a vaguely hypnotic effect in the recite and respond pattern which no doubt was part of the popularity this quaint form had through the 1950's, supplanted by more general availability of psychotropic drugs in the decades following.
Along with an immersion experience in the particular ritual behavior of the socially dominant group of the day, you will also hear a sermon "preached," or read from an elevated, enclosed platform. The attention paid to this archaic form of exhortation and education will help you further sense and understand this bygone age.
After your "worship experience," the interpretive experience continues in our on-site restaurant, named appropriately enough, "Fellowship Hall" and placed in a semi-belowground structure, approximating the mystery and seclusion considered part of a church meal at that time. Most entrees include the key ingredient "cream of mushroom soup" as a binder, which was so ubiquitous as to possibly include sacred connotations. Deviled eggs (simulated with various soy proteins with vegetable dyes), green bean casserole, and something our historian/chef calls "bing cherry jello" are also on the menu.
Please join us for our Spring Festival at Disciples Village! All proceed go for the upkeep and maintenance of the Cryofacility at Robin Run. To register, key your homepad to Zone 12-6374, and credit 8 communals apiece to prepay and reserve your space at the meal. We hope to have actual restored "folding chairs" for each attendee to sit on at the meal; if you are in medical category 4 or above, a cushion may be helpful -- all other ability classes are provided for fully!

This is the *original* draft of the chapter that appeared in the Ohio Bicentennial "Religion in Ohio" volume from Ohio University Press in revised form under the heading "Jeff Gill and Dennis Sparks." When the fourth re-edit asked me to change Scots-Irish to "Scotch-Irish" as the print version reads, and retract that Garfield was the only ordained minister elected president of the United States (his ordination certificate is on file at the Garfield Presidential Library in Mentor, Ohio), I was, shall we say, less than co-operative. This version is the one I still prefer, oddly enough.

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 the 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.”

A Public Faith

23 poems on stepping back from ministry

by Jeff Gill

* * * * * * *

Bibles piled high

Green cloth bound and worn, an RSV
given at fourth grade graduation
from my Sunday school teacher,
before the congregation.
Frayed along the sweat-marked binding,
held at hundreds of funerals and weddings,
all unimagined when presented.
A map of Jerusalem in the back,
with faint lines tracing modern streets over
the solidity of ancient, invisible walls
were a guide to me and a fellow tourist pastor
when we were lost in the Old City
between the gates.
(I carried it there out of sentiment,
used it from pragmatism, and was
startled by its effectiveness.)

Rebound in leather edges
over renewed covers, still
coffee stained and edge marked,
my Oxford Annotated: a guide
to seminary, and a friend into ministry.
Sermons structured, Bible studies poured out,
Underlining, marginally cluttered, the pages
are full to overflowing.
A bookbinder friend, with ties to Disciple
history and heritage, put her skill
at the service of preserving
my own mindprints.

New black leather, with gold lettering
already worn away in part;
an NRSV, annotated but in larger print,
built for preaching right down
to floppy covers.
Waving my Bible in the air
has never been my style, but flexible
is what I aspire to, if not floppy.
This pulpit Bible started my service here,
dedicated by my beloved to uphold
my purpose and my mission.
When I close it Sunday mornings after reading,
it is to begin the sermon.
I close my ministry now, to begin a new message.

* * * * * * *

A Pilgrim Pastor

My ordination was in a tent, musty and green
that was returned once we ended the scene
of folding chairs and draped tables stood
upon the lawn, next to where we should
have held the ceremony. Condemmed,
it was, a renovation 40 years back intent
on improvement had destroyed in slow motion.
So my home church, another century’s construction
soon would be demolished. We entered illegally,
the ordination party, whispered a prayer quietly,
where my baptism, first sermon, so much more
had happened – then left one last time the door
where I as Jospeh, as Wise Men, as Valjean had entered.
We stood on grass, spoke over traffic’s mutter,
swatted flies with programs, sang together.
(We were, of course, blest with gorgeous weather.)
Then, kneeling where my youth group played at tag,
where the Women’s Yard Sale and Scout’s capture-the-flag,
there the hands of elders and pastors, bishops and friends
laid on my hands and shoulders where yoke-like tradition commands
the blessing needed for ministry in Christ’s name,
the traveling mercies from all those friends who came.
Then the troop struck the tent, and rolled it back,
stuffed it, swaddled it in ropes, on the bus’s rack.

* * * * * * *

Time Management

A little early, October morn, I creep inside
and turn back the clocks. Five of them,
a microwave, a coffee-pot, two thermostats.
With the law’s license and weatherman’s consent,
I steal an hour. I’ll give it back
come Spring, but for now and this winter,
in this sanctuary, the hour is mine.
So many tasks steal my time, it seems,
in keeping up the church,
keeping up appearances,
keeping up with expectations.
Sweeping, mopping, painting, taking out trash,
all feel taken from some storehouse
of work not done, yet undone, still to be done.
This one chore, though, gives me back an hour.
To pray, to read, to reflect, to plan & dream.
It comes back, these chore’s times, to a store
of certainty and hope that work done, work well done
is worth doing, worth doing well,
and will tell, in some record unwritten.
I feel this in that hour, having turned back the clocks.

* * * * * * *

Church Architecture

Akron plan is fine
“Apse and nave” less to my taste
Just keep the Table

* * * * * * *

Long Hallways Growing

Geometry projecting through space
windows and cases under artful fluorescence
shining the terrazzo, easily mopped,
hard to tread at length.
Angling around the narrow halls
windows step back through doorways,
rooms, patientless, patient,
await their projected occupants.
Heart centers, they call them.
Too easily ironic I ask, “where’s the heart?”
The logic of construction is more certain than irony.
Here, there, across town, down the road,
Heart centers aplenty to draw all
diseased hearts to them, and be
Lifted up
by the highway, above the valet parking,
near to the heart of medicine.
And yes, my footsteps echo; hollowly, even.

* * * * * * *

Church, building

“A building not made with hands”
must have no dedications. No plaques,
no inscription tablets to maintain.
“This earthly tent” can be pitched wherever,
dropped as unnecessary, without consulting
trustees, boards, or chairpeople at all.
“A temple for the Holy Spirit” sounds
adaptable, modifiable, changeable
even beyond the dreams of the task forces,
special committees, or vision groups.
What blueprint can encompass “the Heavenly City,
the New Jerusalem”? Which architect designs
“the City of God”?
By the absence of these, we will know
we are in Heaven.
Where they are at work, subject (of course) to the
outcome of the capital campaign,
we will know ourselves to be still
stewards of earthen vessels,
It will be enough to know that they contain
God’s treaure, and recall
that the container is necessary,
even if not the essence.

* * * * * * *

Attic Explorations

Churches have no basements, as houses have.
The lowest floor a room open wide,
while the higher you go are places to hide.
An attic, not a cellar, holds the past.
On past the bell rope, records packed tight,
up wooden stairs no ADA could redeem,
through a hatch flung back athud.
Here the bell perches, weighty but mobile,
ready always to swing and peal.
Beyond the bell are darkness and gables,
below the beams are platforms and piles.
Even across the trusses are draped
old maps, Judea and Assyria folded in mildewed borders.
Christian Endeavor oaths and pledges to the Bible
in Gothic script on oil-cloth sheets, frilling away.
Clawed light fixtures ready for gas laid on,
taken off of walls where they replaced
oil lamp sconces, now relegated here
above the tangle of supplanting wire and aged insulator.
Christ at the door askew, Good Shepherd in litho discolored,
frameless edges showing a former trace,
colors now faded from over-exposure to light.
Might we ascend to our longer term storage,
worn with service, keeping good company,
faded from time spent in the Light;
enduring with the fading tone of the bell,
continuing to far places even dimly,
deepening, dying into life.

* * * * * * *

The Men’s Bible Class at the Rivoli

Restoring the theater uptown
meant paint and gilding,
plaster renewed and ornament replaced.
Joining the crowd back for a show,
there were on view the posters
in art deco aluminum frames, “Gone With the Wind,”
“Metropolis,” “Grand Hotel.”
Carpet once thin now plush,
wallpaper peeled on off, and now
seen and felt in flocked glory.
I had been here before, though
it was my first time inside.
Our narthex at the church had
a picture, “Mr. Fletcher’s Young Men’s Bible Class,
Easter, 1948.” The crowd of men,
high spirits barely hiding behind
stern looks,
gazing row on row back at the camera.
Looking out from the stage,
looking down at
the mustached man in the middle of the front,
who looks back at me each day far more
than any of the hundreds in the Rivoli.
He says, “Look at my class. See my work.
Show me what you’ve done with my legacy.”
He would not be pleased, I think most days.
Particularly Sundays, but surely today.
The Rivoli, and the Young Men’s Bible Class, went downhill;
adult films in the theater, and the young men
met adulthood setting Sunday School behind them.
The neighborhood declined, and rebounded,
the class dwindled, and vanished ---
save five elderly men in the Galilee Class,
who have “temporarily” joined the ladies.
The theater now shows films Mr. Fletcher
would like less than “It Happened One Night,”
but it has opened again, after years of dark.
Young men? Those who are not now old
are now in stadiums, arenas, under domes,
either cheering their teams or
praying their dreams, with preachers
more attuned to their pulses or passions than i.
Mr. Fletcher and I may have more in common
than he’d know, or like, and therein lies the problem.
His approach and my own are more akin
than either of us are to the crowd-pleasing din
of today.
Which is why I’m here, in the balcony,
watching Charlie Chaplin, wondering
what would it take to fill this space
with faces eagerly looking for God’s good news?

* * * * * * *

Idolatry, Isaiah, and Short Chairs

You’ve been to one of these, I know
A conference, modestly run, overcome by registrations
(the speaker committee succeeded beyond
their wildest imaginations),
crams the plenary into the sanctuary,
packs the workshops into the ed wing,
using every available space.
Signing up late (attracted by the keynoter, natch)
I take the workshop I’m given, “The Prophets.”
Exhilarated by the opening, we troop boldly
down Sunday School halls to our rooms.
We prophetic folk are in “The Little Shepherds,”
and the convenor, lately recruited, is aghast.
Every chair, save one, is small.
Very small, in size and height,
and my knees are higher than my hips.
The workshop leader strides in, unafraid,
sizes up the situation, and saves us all.
Inspired me then and now, overwhelming
even my memory of the big name speaker.
He sits in the big chair, beams at us
in the short chairs, on ledges, and on the floor,
and says, “Hosea was speaking of exactly this,”
making our situation part of the explication,
took our expectations, turned them into a story
broke them like idols cast down from their glory.

* * * * * * *

Who Is Evangelized

If Christ is not the only way, why bother?
This question often asked, still grates.
Why bother? Is there time enough to say
all the many, myriad ways Christ relates
our simple selves to a world, a cosmos,
a heaven free of such debates?
And why this passion for negation?
There is the call to share, to spread –
an impulse that can overdo –
to proselytize or baptize your dead.
Evangelism is a very real calling,
and cannot be imprisoned in your head;
for fishing, laboring, harvesting together
the task is out and with and for.
Easy it is to mock the pairs of men
who work their way door-to-door,
but if they burn brighter for denial,
this trial, their calling builds a ready store
Of reasons that the heart knows not of,
stockpiled in the harvest: work done all for love.

* * * * * * *

After the Service

Attending a funeral, as I rarely do,
the pastor in closing
(a rude and homely man)
calls out, “I do not stand at the coffin
as other clergy do, to gather praise.
I’ll come to you.” He stood and thanked
each one in the aisle, inviting them
to hold him close. Or he them.
“So that is why I stand at death’s head,”
I mused. In training, my steps were guided
to that post, to stand and greet,
to stay and meet, with those who needed
to see and weep.

Some fall down,
or start to melt; my task (was told)
to hold, and help
‘til family arms can shoulder in,
support, and bear away.

Still I stand,
a witness, a sgin
that death cannot chase the faith away,
here at death’s door, we fear not to stay.
Or so I was told, anyway.

* * * * * * *

The Casket Door

Two double doors enter in.
One set called “Main,”
the other set rarely said, spoken of,
often used. The name is known,
but rarely invoked.
“The casket door,” thrown wide,
takes steps away and offers up
easy access to the sanctuary floor,
straight to the table to the door.
We set the table aside, when funerals come,
and caskets carried in.
That also is the last door out,
with pallbearers in their place,
the pastor leading,
the coach waiting with open door itself.

We use it every Sunday, but call it
nothing.
Not main, not side, that door.
A long ago plan usefully designed it in,
for carrying out.
We still haven’t figured out
what to call it.

* * * * * * *

At Main St. Christian

See the Jordan scene behind the baptistery
exotic in flatness (and parched plain)
strange with palm trees, rows
over-orderly along the river banks.
Turbaned men in wooden crafts,
Whaleboats extended by an Oriental angle;
Nets, draped and heavy, sag under
A leaden sky once bright blue –
Aged by the ages, long years untouched,
a view of the 20’s as much as 2000 years.
The Jordan rolls mutely by,
frozen in paint within desert horizons,
flowing to and through you,
the baptized, the washed,
heirs of the promise
and the painting.
We are descended from a hand
that painted a sunlit scene.

We inherit a picture changed with time
whose intent changeth not;
but the weathered hues and dust-weighed shadows
make the forecast a dim and stormy one,
filled with threat and gloom.
Who would enter those waters?
A little solution on a swab,
a light wash across the surface,
a few strokes of renewed cerulean,
and the times indeed could change.
But tradition, and no little fear
leaves the canvas alone, unwashed;
and the storm clouds gather.

* * * * * * *

Records On the Wall

High in the steeple
light beams and cross members
intersecting, supporting;
Stage by stage ladders
scissor up to the peak within.
At each level, a panel
of whitewash, inscribed in black
or brown, or tan letters.
Each block tells a date,
and a list of names.
1928, 1934, 1947
Folden, Slater, Sands
1953, 1964, 1972
Dernberger, Mason, Orr
1985, 1989, 1997
The best way to hold and hide
the tally of work done,
the reminder of work yet to do.

* * * * * * *

The Pulpit

This couple (well, her mother)
asked if it could go.
“Go? Go where?”
They were talking about the pulpit.
Old as the congregation – older, really
since the yellow poplar and red oak
of 1867 were trees centuries old
even then. Older than the church itself . . .
Their vision of wedding photos
did not include a preaching stand,
wide and tall, inlaid, crafted by hand,
with square handforged nails and adze marks
inside the unseen back.

In truth, it had been moved often.
From north wall and center aisle days
to west side platform spanning
a now raked room, sloping floor under
balcony rooms added with baptistery behind.
But cracks crossed the coffering, and
the strain of a century and more of preaching
(plus casual pinning of paraments)
had taken their toll.

“It cannot be moved,” I said definitively.
They looked at me, and saw
a wobbly, overcomeable obstacle;
glanced at the pulpit, and saw
solidity, confidence, weight.
“We’ll work around it,” they said glumly
(or the bride’s mother did).
“Does the cross have to stay where it is?”

* * * * * * *

Deathbed Confession

Dying isn’t what it used to be,
a “final battleground of the soul.”
In a long, slow fade
under waves of medicated calm
so little awareness of choice, of choosing,
less struggle, a lighter drama
even as the last act plays out,
once filled with sound and fury –
signifying? Well, in struggle or in sleep,
less than decision,
so slight an occasion,
signifying everything.

* * * * * * *

Preserving Cane Ridge

We had to save Cane Ridge, you know.
We built a stone enclosure around
the wooden galleries,
embracing their hand-hewn table & pulpit.
We walled off the light –
and rain, and rot, and gnawing beetle
or perching pigeon.
We sealed in the old church, and built for her a tomb.

It had to be done, no one doubts.
They did it for Abe (well, not actually his cabin,
but a replica now old itself);
They did it in Capernaum (Peter’s home, that is);
Thus we saved Cane Ridge, and pierced
the walls with stained glass to church it,
and paved the earth to hold it
with flagstones and drainage
around the meeting house.

At night, by moonlight, camped a few yards off,
the lines of stone soften. The trees still bend
over the roofline.
Soil and stone and heat and stars
clamber up and around, bobbing in breezes
not yet felt.
There is a museum, a house, a port-a-let.
All very necessary, so that 200 years
after the Great Revival, this would still be here.
But no one else was.
The anniversary this night, lit by imagined fires,
humming with inaudible murmurs and whinneys,
people by ghosts and gravestones . . . & me.

There was a commemoration under way,
and safely in their hotels and trailers down the pike
were some hundreds – gathered here to mark the
thousands (tens? thirty?) met in the
scattered day of the early frontier.

What could save Cane Ridge? If 30,000 came
and worshiped for a week, then
the ash and sewage and wear and tear . . .
. . . would redeem and baptize and restore
the Cane Ridge that was and is and could be.

As it is, a discreet few stepped through
the ceremonial door, lightly trod the timbered floor,
and left no richer or no poorer.
My tent left no mark, and my trash left with me;
but a jingling of harnesses in the night,
the distant (imagined?) snap of kindling over a spectral knee
gave value to my night there
by Cane Ridge.

* * * * * * *

Hidden In Plain Sight

Backing the baptistery, above
plaster steps leading down, and up
is fixed to the wall
a cross of local wood,
fine grained, rich toned,
cut but full of life.
Once someone said “There’s a story
under that cross.” Indeed.

And it seems there was – when the baptistery
was built, block by block –
hands that shaped an earlier cross.
Thin armed, darker lumber, so then overpainted,
soon a subtle rising in the whitewash.
When the new cross was made,
a voice cried out in the congregation:
“My father set that cross there.”
And pry bar hands were stilled.
Then a craftsman clasped a chisel,
set to work quietly, showed his plan
to those concerned.

The new cross laid over the old,
even more invisible but still in place,
and all was well.
The new cross covered the old,
and all was well.
Everyone who needed to know
knew that the old cross remained,
and all manner of things shall be well.

Well we would be in each change or shift
if we could see the old embedded
in, within the new, as it always is,
hidden in plain sight
underneath the cross of today.

* * * * * * *

The Common Cup

Pewter says old right off,
even polished which it rarely is.
Sideboard safe, a plate for loaf and common cup,
passed to lift communion up,
sipped by lips from aisle to aisle,
face set hard or mouths to smile,
all meeting on that chalice rim.
These days some contact, indirect,
can barely contemplate that connect.
Germs, disease, illness, touch,
we now associate all such
as one. So goes the common cup, apart
save honored memory in the heart.
This now abandoned practice
(as lips now do not touch, or kiss)
gives reason to regret ‘tis gone
for safety now we’re more alone;
a tradition antiseptically tossed,
an image, and actuality lost.

* * * * * * *

Preaching My Heart Out

So the sermon didn’t suit?
I asked, of the elder who took me to task.
The message made a mark, his face showed:
one of discomfort, left dissatisfaction in its wake.
Enough to rouse him to call me to his home.
No; you must understand, I know
good preaching when I hear it, after so many years.
Too little Jesus, too much of you,
he said with satisfaction.
Such a critique I cannot but take to heart.
In whole or in part, more Jesus, less me
sounds right, to me as well as him.
But what were we speaking of?
A message rooted from scripture, that then
tagged the monarch in migration wide,
wove the web of suspension bridges vast,
and returned to Jesus as God’s creation, first and last.
What me? And where was Jesus missing?
Not riding on the butterfly breeze, not weeping
over the loss of their trees; not humming through
the cables strung far
above the roadway for truck and car?
Yet the subjects had caught my eye, not his;
the ideas my mind had illumined, not his:
those images rang cold and hollow in his ear.
There was no reassuring, renewing Christ for him here.
How shall I wear his Christ, to play that part
and seize his heart, putting on the role
already seen, now lost between
his need and what my own heart’s seen?

* * * * * * *

Sun and Rain Out a Sealed Window

A fellow asks, in blue sky thanks,
“Preacher, how ‘bout the rain?”
And an old saying in my thinking clanks
“Can’t take the credit if you don’t want the blame.”
Sometimes people ask for prayer
in hospital or at home, in a time not planned.
You offer words of comfort there,
mindful of the limits wherein you may command.
When words do heal, or organs work
and even nurses say “Well done,”
recall what future setbacks lurk:
defer congratulations while tests are run.
Can’t take the credit if you don’t want the blame.
So true for weather, yet even more for health;
it’s good to bring comfort, but silly to cause pain
by claiming cause and effect by stealth.
We know full well how many prayers unanswered
float down hospice corridors.
Our job is not in claiming, but affirming; we answer
questions, not petitions – for those, we’re auditors.

* * * * * * *

Pillars Of the Church

Boaz and Jachin, these are the names
Bible and tradition (historic and esoteric)
give to the pillars guarding the entrance
to the Jerusalem Temple.
Echoed in our windows, glass stained but restrained,
simple designs with ancient resonance,
Eastern, Ionic, hieratic, symbolic.
Entrance to the holy things of the church
is guarded by pillars still,
who carry newer names,
but whose meaning still is inscrutable.

* * * * * * *

Marriage Preparation

We’ve sat, just three, right here
now with hundreds behind, attendants beside
Standing, robed, suited, entrained,
we share vows that leave nowhere to hide.
The language, yes, of legal bonds,
medieval even edited now,
but unmistakable assertions
of passion, commitment, “and all my wordly goods I thee endow.”

Exclusive and inclusive they are,
and we’ve discussed
the challenge of fidelity, monogamy,
the renewal and reformation of trust
in a relationship beyond the physical,
the nuptial, nearly (?) sacramental.
Have we said enough, we three?
Or did they even notice me, reverential
figure, needed to sign the license.
Perhaps on days to come, in nights too long,
they will recall the meaning if not the memory,
and invoke the Cana winemaker, if not recall their song.

+ + +

October 4, 2004

2005 Newark Earthworks Moonrise Working Group

Mission Statement

The purpose of the 2005 Newark Earthworks Moonrise Working Group is
twofold:

1. We will join together at the Octagon Earthworks to witness this
once in a generation event and help make that experience accesible to
as wide an audience as possible;

2. We will use this event to celebrate the achievements of the
builders of this ancient wonder of the world.

We, as citizens of Ohio and representatives of various groups and
institutions with a vested interest in the Newark Earthworks state that
it is our responsibility and privilege to serve as organizers and facilitators for groups and individuals who wish to come and participate in the wonder. We are committed to fostering good will and encouraging participation from a wide spectrum of perspectives, interests, and beliefs.

The schedule of events associated with the 2005 Moonrise and the organization of appropriate ceremonies will present certain difficulties. For example, the Observatory Mound will not accomodate everyone who wishes to observe the moonrise. Decisions must be made about who, if anyone, will observe the moonrise from this particular vantage. If there are to be be welcoming addresses or dedicatory speeches or ceremonials, these should be coordinated. In conjunction with the Newark Earthworks Center of OSU-N and the Ohio
Historical Society, we will plan and develop recommendations for the
organization of the event.

We are not a closed group, and invite any interested groups or individuals who share the goals of inclusivity and good will to be part of this working group.

An Inkling

A gleam as through a window seen
Shimmering, shining, dimly lighting
Sill or frame beneath the flame;
One pool of light against the night
Viewed afar, this earthbound star
Grounded in a niche ‘tween hill and ditch
Implies, beneath the lowering skies,
A room behind, a place of warmth to find
For travelers tired, the last miles inspired
Toward a house unseen. All inferred from just one gleam.

So too, we find, standing (in a way) behind
The scene of Mary and blessed Baby
A larger structure, beyond conjecture
Of God and life, peace beyond strife,
New hope today, and in every day
A guide and friend; promise without end.

Should we let this little gleam
Cause us to trust here (in between
Eternities before and begone)
That there’s a larger home hereon?
Can the rooms of faith open one to the other
Like one candle lit from another?

Our steps hasten on to the stable door,
But eyes fixed higher up one floor
To the light in the window, the room behind,
And the house beyond, whose Host we’ll find.

- Christmas Eve, 2003

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.
* * * * * * *

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’?”
* * * * * * *

So how’d we get here? The following historical narrative is an informal organizational and evolutionary gloss on the more formal version found at the end of the document. It tends to focus on the Ohio and Anglo-European stream of development and does not pretend to be a normative description of even every early experience of Restoration origins and growth.

After the initial 1804-1809 withdrawal/expulsion from the Presbyterian structure of the Stone and Campbell groups, Restoration congregations were linked by their origins and originators, either through the Campbells, Scott, Smith, or a few others. “Our congregation was founded by Alexander Campbell on a preaching tour,” or “Samuel Rogers, one of the original Cane Ridge preachers, established this church with a series of evangelistic meetings” are typical statements at the head of congregational histories.

Ongoing connectedness, for the early group, was three-fold: through founder-preachers in their sermonizing (even non-resident evangelists tended to come back regularly and preach “the simple New Testament plea” or re-teach the initial “five finger exercise” as well as share stories of fellow new church starts), through publications (“Disciples don’t have bishops, they have editors” was a long time catch-phrase of our movement, and still is in the Independent/NACC wing) such as The Millenial Harbinger, Christian Messenger, or American Christian Review, and by means of “The Christian Hymnbook,” published by A. Campbell at Bethany and re-released in successive editions that steadily incorporated works by W. Scott, B. W. Stone, and J. T. Johnson, further consolidating various branches of the Restoration Movement (aka “the Stone-Campbell movement”).

In the pages of The Millenial Harbinger discussions were early and often about how to maintain ties of fellowship and encouragement, with annual meetings in a “district” or a “School of Preachers” on a semi-annual basis serving some of those purposes. Shortly these informal gatherings began to collect offerings for various causes heard abroad, and no doubt just as quickly appeals began to be made at these meetings. Proper distribution and administration was a concern, and officers were elected in a manner well described by DeTocqueville as common on the early frontier in the 1830’s.

By 1849 the pressures, emotional and logistical, had grown to form an official “American Christian Missionary Society,” to join together the work of various district and state missionary funds. Individuals like the doctor/preacher James Turner Barclay had shown an interest in being sent to serve as missionaries, with Barclay arguing from the “scripture principle” that, as the early church, we should send our missionaries “first to Jerusalem, and then. . .to the ends of the earth.” The outlay to support a mission in Jerusalem could only be underwritten by a number of churches together, and a large number of churches could, at that date, only be pulled and held together by Campbell, Stone having died a few years before.

The formal organization into a “missionary society” began a process of division that both preceded and followed the Civil War, while drawing no small measure of strength from the divisions causing and deriving from that conflict. The “scripture principle” mixed with the strong preference for radical independence and autonomy of the frontier areas to empower a loud challenge: “where do missionary societies appear in Holy Scripture?” Paul may have taken up offerings to carry to Jerusalem, and John may have encouraged mutual support and upbuilding, but “the question of societies” would plague the Restoration Movement into, well, the present day.

Various evangelists, publications, and institutions took up a variety of stances, but Campbell himself tried to finesse the question by a) not showing up in Cincinnati for the founding meeting of the ACMS in 1849 and b) accepting the presidency of the new organization. On this subject, as with slavery, the entire movement would likely have benefited from a strong, clear statement staking out a position for the movement and challenging opponents to account for themselves, but Campbell’s fear of outright division likely led, sadly, to greater division in the long run. A lesson here, perhaps. . . . .?

“Our” wing of Restoration Christianity is sometimes referenced as “the cooperatives,” or “those defending the societies.” Coordinated mission work is one of our distinctives within the history that produced us, but is so typical in the rest of Christendom as to provoke no notice at all, as is our use of musical instruments, which also led to separation in the era following the Civil War, considered by some a reaction against the North by the South, by others a screen on which the battle against “modernism” was projected, and by a few, a simple case of literal faithfulness or lack thereof to the words of the Bible.

The point I would like to make here, before moving on to illuminate some key aspects of our structure today with developments of the 1900’s, is that both early and late in our history, the Disciples of Christ have struggled with distinctive features that need explaining to show why they’re distinctive. Cooperative missionary societies and melodeon/pipe organ use in worship over a century ago, or open and weekly communion with acceptance of Christians from other traditions more recently, are elements of our history that we’re used to thinking of internally as defining, but that to the newcomer looks pretty much like how everybody else does things, so what’s the fuss? Let’s just move on. . .lightin’ out for the territories, headin’ for the frontier where we can leave controversy behind us, even as we pack those debates into our interior baggage.

In that same way, allow me to lightly skip across some other issues that were seen as titanic, fellowship-breaking controversies in their day, and simply note that from the American (and later United) Christian Missionary Society we saw (State Name Here, such as Ohio) Christian Missionary Societies around the US and Canada, working sometimes with and more often alongside equally well developed and staffed structures for the International Sunday School Society, plus officers and women’s relief society subgroups of the International Convention (predecessor of what we now call the General Assembly), boards and occasionally staff of conference grounds, and state/district ministerial associations. All these groups, plus agents for Disciples’ colleges and charitable institutions, were holding meetings, rallies, and doing fundraising in and among the congregations of the now well established Christian Churches.

Some states merged their missionary society and Sunday School association organization and staff fairly early in the 20th century, and Ohio was an “early adopter” in this respect. While ministerial associations tended to stay independent longer, the centrifugal force that slowly urged those groups toward an accountability relationship with the “state secretary” was the ministerial search process. In those days, pulpit committees would write, and later call, the nearest Disciples’ college president, their friends in the relief societies (proto-ICWF and/or Disciples’ Men), and most importantly the State Secretary for guidance and recommendations. With no national “database” to draw on, and no recommended procedure to follow, these informal networks were (were?!) the main way ministerial relocation took place. Obviously, these state secretaries, of whom our own Gaines Cook and Herald Monroe were exemplars, gained a large measure of informal but unmistakable influence over both church life and clergy, even in areas not related to the formal roles of their job as state secretary of the Ohio Christian Missionary Society.

More uniquely, Herald Monroe pulled into the growing nexus of influences for state society life the power of the camp meeting, the youth conference, the burgeoning camp movement post-WWI. Few state societies carried their assembly ground structure with them into the pre-Restructure fellowship they were creating (such as our neighbors in Indiana, who saw only debts and maintenance worries after the Depression neglect of such institutions as Bethany Park), but the energy of Chautauqua-type events and their own network of contacts carried into the Monroe years in a manner few regions took advantage of.

Is this “just” history? Obviously I don’t think so, and my point here is that these influences still affect the Christian Church in Ohio today. The sense, at least, of the independence of some districts, the semi-autonomous role of the Commission on Ministry, the influence of camp and conference ties in regional life, right down to the fact that many congregations still have a Sunday School Superintendent (or even Christian Ed department) with relative autonomy from the rest of the organizational structure, as well as the peculiar assumptions people bring to the regional staff and their given authority versus their assumed responsibility – all of these have specific ties to sources of authority and practices in pre-Restructure Disciple life. The roots of why congregations and pastors give no formal authority to regional staff, even when they ask them to intervene, but have very high expectations of regional impact, are not shallowly placed in modern trends against institutional structures, but have deep sources in how we put our current structure together.

We have a strong dose of what Harold Bloom calls in literary studies “the anxiety of influence,” where we in the West, and especially America, want to show ourselves as both inheritors of distant tradition and as self-generating unique creations. The idea that we are direct beneficiaries of an immediately preceding tradition is something to be quashed or hidden: but by being unacknowledged, it controls us all the more. For a quick example, look at how, in a tradition whose deep roots are supposed to be in “New Testament faith and practice as our only rule,” we go through paroxysms of angst over changing phrasing in the printed bulletin at most congregations. The fact that it might be largely lifted from Methodist or Presbyterian sources is not even a conversation starter, let alone a resolution for how to proceed. Influence must be consciously acknowledged in order to be deliberately shaped.

So, the main sources of regional influence historically derive from the state missionary society, the Sunday School association, and the camp & conference system. An overarching focus of authority from those three is the ability to recommend pastors to pulpits and vice versa. Today, with mission passion at an ebb, and Sunday School more a function than a vital source of fellowship and identity, the main flow of influence between the region and congregation is through ministerial placement and Camp Christian. When, due to factors largely beyond the staff’s control, the ministerial search function is a source of frustration and not of empowerment (fewer candidates to choose from, lower quality in the pool, new packets slowly forthcoming after the initial round), it isn’t surprising from an historical perspective that camp and conference (and to a lesser degree the women’s and men’s work) are the primary springs of regional vitality.

Another odd factor to note here is that as our regional presuppositions aren’t what they used to be, it is also the case that much of what once was controversial and somewhat exciting to be involved in – doing cooperative missions, introducing organs into worship, starting a Sunday school class -- is now mundane or defunct. Regional work, which was actually a theologically risqué area of church life less than a hundred years ago, is now mainstream, everyday work in a streambed whose sources are drying-up.

What do Christians in congregations look to regions for more recently? For that perspective, let me turn to a little personal history.
* * * * * * *

Looking back to growing up between my home Disciples congregation and an independent Christian church in my mother’s hometown (Kansas IL, Z. T. Sweeney’s home church), somehow I learned through both that congregational life had particular purposes common to each, even though individual conversion was the only language I remember hearing. I’d try to put this clear but unspoken teaching into words thusly: “The Work of the church is to care for its members and manifest God’s love through charitable works and social action in Christ’s name.” But if it was unspoken, where/how did that image come? How was it taught?

I knew myself as part of a congregation before I ever thought of myself as a Christian. That may be described as an experience unique to those born and raised in the church, but the reading and talking I’ve done both before and during this temporary covenant of futuring together tells me that most unchurched are looking for belonging before they take much interest in believing.

Belonging to the church family, I knew congregational life as a rhythmic cycle of setting up folding chairs and unwieldy tables, decorating the sanctuary and stowing away the last round of wreaths and banners, with worship services in between. Without worship, there would be no point to most of the other activities, but all of the potlucks and meetings (while we kids played in the nursery or colored in the library) and conversations in the parking lot were the location where I got my clearest picture of how church was more than building, that others like and unlike me were doing much the same in other places (but differently).

Perhaps it should have been (should be?) otherwise, but I recall little within worship itself that made an impact as to the reach and scope of Christendom beyond our own walls. I can affirm my home congregation’s effectiveness in communicating the mission and ministry of the Disciples of Christ, but it was through Sunday School and evening programs, in the newsletter and on bulletin boards.

The quotidian affairs of First Christian Church, Valparaiso, Indiana, were where I was most likely to encounter the “larger church,” the “mission field,” or “the Brotherhood.” I’m sure that announcements or offering meditations touched on the Christian Church in Indiana or the Unified Promotion theme or Basic Mission Finance, but I can honestly report that I left for college without consciously hearing about any of that in worship, save a single dimly recalled missionary in the pulpit on a Sunday.

As of this date, I have only eight total years of personal experience in Ohio, but I pray you allow me the ethnographic ear of a pastor and the insights of a historian to claim that, heresy though it may be, it does not seem that Indiana and the Buckeye State, neighbors that they are geographically, are not significantly different. In fact, Henry Shaw went on to write “Hoosier Disciples,” the still definitive history of that region, and made much the same point – at least as of the mid-1960’s. My memories kick in just after that, so. . .

Covenant, the bond initiated by God as a free and grace-filled gift to a lost and wandering people, was not a hard concept to understand when it was first introduced to me. As I said, I was made to feel part of a supportive and affirming community long before I had anything to contribute or offer, and well in advance of when it might have been obvious how I might respond to the gift of being made part of that covenant. Just as God to Abraham or Moses took the initiative in offering the relationship, and much as the Creator had no intrinsic need to be obligated to the creation, let alone to any individual created being, the congregation “named me and claimed me” and made me their own.

As my earliest memories of church life came out of the period right around “restructure,” that contentious period of the late ‘60’s for the Disciples, I have a number of recollections around seeing posters and bulletin boards proclaiming our obligations to “the Brotherhood” in faithfulness and faithful giving, exhortations around the tables in Fellowship Hall but dimly understood to a child about our “sister congregations in Indiana and around the world,” and “the sacred debt” owed to the missionaries who served in our name from Tibet to inner city Chicago. There were flyers and displays about Disciple-related colleges, projects for the youth group supporting NBA homes, and traveling speakers and choirs from other outposts of Discipledom (who often stayed at our house as they passed through).

Learning about the Disciples of Christ came through things we did and people we saw, not what we were told. On one level, I would like to think that this is a more ideal form of learning, but looking around me today, I do wonder just how well it worked. A preliminary thought: perhaps the object lessons needed some intentional grounding, not to replace but to reinforce the meaning behind the activity.

When a bit older, I got a clearer – or at least more specific – image of the wider church when serving on a pulpit committee, and meeting the first person I recall as a regional staffer (Jim Powell, for those curious about such things) when he came to meet with us about the ministerial search process. From Rev. Powell to y’all on the Futuring Task Force, my ongoing best sense of what it means to be part of the wider church has been through personal relationship: names and faces and overheard stories brought back from General Assemblies and CWF Workshops and State Youth Conventions about people.

What I hear today, in congregations I serve or pass through regularly, is a gravely attenuated sense of what it means to be part of the Christian Church in Ohio, because the relationships aren’t there. A few in each church go to all manner of events, and even tell stories about who they saw and what they heard, but most are only vaguely aware of faces and names they can associate with “the region.” Mind you, they don’t mean full-time paid staff, they mean “other than you, Jeff, who represents the region?” Does the district president? The CCH rep in the pulpit? The state CYF officer visiting on a Sunday in a pew? The sense that one is “encountering the region” is limited, but does it have to be; how could many others appropriately embody the regional church? And how can most of those many responsibly teach the meaning of covenant relationship along with their ministry of presence, in harmony with the “preaching and teaching elder,” the pastor?

But along with good teaching necessarily comes truth-telling.


Part Two -- A Rant
(From the last two paragraphs of the book:)
Five hundred churches, many schools and colleges, missionary and benevolent agencies, and a voluminous literary heritage have been bequeathed to next century Disciples . . .The second century of Ohio Disciples’ history should be more glorious than the last.
Buckeye Disciples (1952)
Henry Shaw



Many of us, Buckeye Disciples or not, know the story of the James DeForest Murch letter(s) out of Canton that, through misstatement and deception, led hundreds of congregations to withdraw from the yearbook in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. That accounts for at least 200 of that 500 now independent, or closed . . . as independence was far from the panacea Murch and others proclaimed. But we can also look at recent yearbooks of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and see that, realistically speaking, we are far under 200 congregations still in covenant, still self-identified as “Disciple” congregations, still contributing to ODO or DMF or whatever one wants to call it: 170? 165 perhaps? Counted by congregations that choose to support the capital campaign even in the most minimal fashion, one could even argue for a number around 100. Look at the “Keep The Fire Burning” numbers, if you like. I don’t like.

So at least another 125 or more congregations have either gone independent or gone under in the last 25 years, then. Institutions have gone independent or gone away as well, under a variety of auspices – Hiram College, Cleveland Christian Children’s Home, ecumenical campus ministries, to name a few.

Have we somehow betrayed a glorious future Henry Shaw saw in store for us? Or was he looking with unreasoning eyes at an already implausible prospect in 1953?

Shaw was no Pollyanna; the line immediately after the epigraph cited above (and next to last of the entire work) says “So it will be if the spirit, courage, and resourcefulness that characterized the pioneers remain at the core of the movement.”

Resourcefulness, in a pioneer context, is flexibility, is adaptability. Many of the closures or departures represented a healthy break with the past. What seems less healthy is the sense that the rest of what we’re doing now, what hasn’t closed or ended, is fine as it is; that the diminution is a loss only of the unfit and unwilling, and that we somehow grow in strength as we decline in numbers.

While we seem to share a fair degree of anxiety on individual issues and in particular situations, the institutional impression projected is one of “stay the course,” keep on within the same general outlines of the Christian Church in Ohio, with the same governance structure, same staff priorities, same programs at camp, conference, and regional meetings, since this carefully constructed plan has served us well thus far.

My concern here is to show that a) we didn’t really carefully construct the framework we’re using, we just compromised our way into it, which itself is a reason to be open to reform; and b) for all the outside factors which have challenged us, from Murch et al to a modern culture of narcissism, it is the structure itself that hasn’t served us well at all, the most compelling argument for “blank sheet of paper” reforms.

Aside from shrinking numbers from departures and decay, on what do I base my internal sense of how Buckeye Disciples need to radically rework our covenantal life? For this process, along with the readings we assigned and the additional ones I chose to take on, I’ve spoken to 47 clergy/church staff; of that number, 27 are Disciple (22 CCiO, with five from other regions), 9 UCC, 4 Church of Christ, 4 United Methodist, and 3 Episcopal clergy, all from Ohio or neighboring parts of West Virginia.

In these conversations, what I’ve heard is this:

• Institutional Trust is gone, gone, gone. Skepticism is part of the landscape, and travel in any direction has to take that into account. Institutions may be used or worked with, but skeptically: no one should take that personally, but no one gets a personal exemption from it, either.

• Clergy alienation and isolation is “deep and wide” and real. . .and while known, is in practice not acknowledged. (“Why, sure most clergy feel alienated, but not you, Jeff, right?” “Um, why yes; yes I am. . .sorry about that!”) Loren Mead in “The Once And Future Church” has this well analyzed and defined.

• There is an over-focus on what is wrong, what’s missing, which keeps us from building on what we’re doing well (gotcha: you just thought “what on earth does he think that would be?” which kinda makes my point, doesn’t it?)

• Deep breath: we have lots of money and plenty of people. Yes, we do, just not as much as we think we should, or as much as we’d like (a good impulse, that), but there are 15,000 to 18,000 souls worshipping in our sanctuaries and 1,500 going through our camp and conference program and a seven figure budget, however we choose to spend it. Would we like more? Welcome to the club. . .but are we valuing properly what we have? (Which is my Counsel Number One to couples talking to me about financial crisis, who usually make more than I do, but feel poorer.)

• Fear of failure is so strong we self-limit our chances to ever succeed at anything. If the Christian Church in Ohio was really about the work of dynamic mission & ministry, we’d have more big, splashy failures to reminisce about these days. To start a Sunday school class or any small group with “legs” you have to start three, of which maybe one will last the year. That’s true on the regional level as well, but we don’t let anything live until we’ve studied it to death. . .or something like that.

• Parallel point: Let things die! Stop reading and look up John 12:24! Shaw’s “Buckeye Disciples” is filled with fascinating sounding regional programs and annual events from the 1920’s through the 50’s that don’t exist anymore, but worked fine then. If A. Campbell had kept Buffalo Seminary going, he would have never started Bethany College; when the Christian Baptist lost its reason to be, he closed it and started The Millenial Harbinger.

• Our Long Range Plan(s) in 1994 and (mildly) updated in 1999 were good; I’ve given them to a number of trusted, active lay leaders here in Hebron, and their reactions parallel mine: this is good stuff. . .why didn’t we follow it? A good question, and one worth our time: how did we end up doing fifteen other things than the helpful handful prioritized by these folks tasked by the region to do that for us? (Come to think of it, that’s kind of discouraging for us, but nevermind. . .) Which leads directly to:

• Any coalition/aggregation (like, say, the Christian Church in Ohio) can do one new thing a year. Maybe two, possibly three, but. . .wait, see, now I’m doing it. Let’s go back and try again – A freely associating organization can do one new thing a year well. And as my wife is always reminding me about new books in the house: when one new one comes in, probably an old one goes out. OK, maybe we can do two new things a year. . .

• We have a great resource in the role of elder in our congregations, and we don’t use them. This office is a gift of the Disciple ethos to the church in reclaiming this scriptural role for local leadership, and unless we just want to disavow it (yes, I have my concerns about CUIC, and no, Dick Bowman and I aren’t good buddies by a long shot). The pre-General Assembly event for congregational elders and the “regional elders” concept for pastoral care to clergy, staff, and congregations represent huge steps forward in my opinion (but see immediately previous point), and this revitalization area has plenty of acreage to plow.

• Preaching and teaching elders, aka clergy (I Timothy 5:17) are doing precious little of either, and this represents a challenge for the faith and a dilemma for the region. With clergy using pre-packed sermons in large numbers (10% a minimum, some analysts say closer to 50%), and very few pastors regularly teaching in any way with the congregation (see a random sample of newsletters), how are we communicating our wider connection and the deeper meaning of that covenantal relationship to the membership, let alone new Christians who likely come with a) no church background, or b) a Catholic, Methodist, or other very different set of understandings. Do we take a “if we can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” tack and prepare our own pre-written sermons for pulpit use? How do we resource ministries and ministers to communicate the meaning and the method of co-operative missions?

Obviously, there’s what people thought they were telling me, and what I thought I heard them saying. I take full responsibility for this formulation of what my conversations may have added up to. But the status of “covenant” among Disciple clergy is barely that of an abstruse Biblical concept, not a living principle binding us together. We’ve forgotten much we once knew, and practice little of what once gave us vitality – though we sing the songs we sang then with gusto tinged with sadness.

How’d we get there?
* * * * * * *

To answer that, let me go off on another historic tangent.

Covenant’s closest analogue is modern church life is marriage. When it comes to Restoration Christianity and weddings, our history is rather interesting. Campbell and most of the early reformers, concerned about ecclesiastical abuses and a profusion of sacraments, stepped way, way back from weddings as part of church life, refusing to conduct them within the church building.

In fact, up to and through WWII, even in the Disciples’ wing of the movement, weddings were conducted either in the bride’s home or in the parlor of the parsonage: not in the church itself. (Believe it or not, Campbell and others early in the movement would not perform weddings at all, but only quietly relented in the face of seeing couples go to other clergy when judges were hard to find on the frontier.) Church weddings were for sacramental traditions, and most of the full-blown ritual surrounding a wedding was tied to such theology. Having no theology of marriage, the vacuum of Disciples’ wedding practice was gradually filled by Methodist and Episcopal service books, the wedding sliding over to the church parlor, on down the hall into the auditorium/sanctuary, and the next thing you know (but not until well into the 1950’s) we have bridesmaids, groomsmen, Lohengrin, and aisle runners to match the lengthy train of a vast dress topped by a veil (symbolic meanings available on request).

Today, many Disciple clergy struggle to reform a set of assumptions around when and how the congregation affirms weddings which are themselves based on assumptions largely foreign to our own basic understandings of church. We’re trying to tidy up loose ends on a sweater that isn’t ours and that we don’t know how we ended up with – and we’re not sure how to get rid of, or even if we can. Did we get it from Mom, or was it just a grab bag present we can unload painlessly?

In this regard, allow me to sound again as if I’m changing the subject – trust me, that’s not the intention here, either. Here’s a piece of a conversation between two Vineyard pastors on the dilemma all too familiar to Disciples’ pastors as well: how to respond to certain wedding requests. Noted – I’m aware that every DoC pastor handles this a bit differently, but I doubt any of this dialogue will require much translation. (The full conversation can be seen at: http://www.next-wave.org/may03/marriage.htm)
“So where did you leave it with that young couple?”
“I don’t know. I guess I kind of wimped out. I talked to them about the idea of covenant relationship, but they just didn’t get it. It was like I was speaking Latin.”
“I guess the language of covenant is not familiar to people in general.”
“I’m not even sure it’s familiar to me. This getting married thing is starting to make me crazy. We are increasingly operating around a traditional paradigm of marriage that presupposes pre-marriage celibacy accompanied by deep lifetime commitments. The statistics just don’t bear that out anymore.”
“I know what you mean, Mike. I recently attended a wedding where the bride was marrying a guy she had lived with for over a year. She had two other live-in boyfriends before that. Nobody seemed to see the irony in her wearing of a beautiful white dress that has traditionally symbolized virginity. It does become a little surreal when you really think about it.”
“I think I’m beyond just despairing over the state of the culture. That really isn’t my primary issue. My concern is how to authentically address the reality of the life situations without seeing my job as reorganizing their lives to give the appearance of respectability.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it: A typical conservative pastor meets with a couple for the first time. He finds out they are living together or at least sleeping together regularly. What does he advise them to do?”
“Move out. Quit having sex.”
“Right. I understand a couple making a new commitment about their lives before God and then separating temporarily as an act of faith. I think that can be a profound symbol of trust and faithfulness before God. But what does it really, truly change? What if the couple has been together for a number of years—maybe they even have had a child together—are we OK with dismantling them for the sake of appearances—for the sake of performing a ‘sin free’ wedding?”
“But Mike—Isn’t it for more than just the sake of appearances? Isn’t it a statement of their lives? On the other hand, I see what you mean about the incredible disruption in someone’s life. That’s a tough one.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking about: What if we began to see our roles more in terms of being spiritual directors for people? What if we let people tell us about their lives, and then, in the context of our understanding of covenant relationship, identified the truth of their lives and led them from that point? Is it possible that we have allowed the validation of a marriage by the civil authorities to become the benchmark of legitimacy? Have we somehow submitted ourselves to the wrong standard?”
“Wow. You’re suggesting something that could be really disturbing.”

The dialogue “Stumbling Towards A Theology of Getting Married” goes on, but our implications take off from here. What’s disturbing in the context of the Christian Church in Ohio is not a matter that is liberal or conservative, but the question of benchmarks, of submitting ourselves to the wrong standards. These pastors are trying to resolve a functional problem by thinking theologically; they’re taking the current situation, laying it next to the ideal of a closer relationship with God through Jesus Christ mediated within a community of faith, and looking at how to get from one to the other.

Disciples tend, in my experience, to take a felt need or perceived problem, and lay it next to what we expect people to do, or in Bellah’s formulation of “a nation of behavers,” how to behave in conformity with expectations. When those expectations are grounded in societal norms instead of theological assumptions, they can change out from under us in the blink of a societal shift, and we’re left looking for solid ground.

Covenant and modern American marriage do not, of necessity, have much in common. Covenant and a wider understanding of the Body of Christ, such as in the regional and general manifestations of the Disciples of Christ, do not automatically compute for most people; if their basic understanding of covenant is based in societal norms of marriage, they may relate it much more closely to contracts and contract law. . .and the language of duty, obligation, and accountability heard in the church around covenant tends to hew much closer to legal norms of contract than self-giving, mutual standards of covenant out of Scripture.

Do we have a Disciples of Christ theology of covenant? If we had one, how would it be taught? Who would embody this theology into the common life of our communion? What structures and traditions would model the teaching described and lived out by clergy and regional/general staff? How are we already communicating such a theology through our actions as a region, and how does that hold together?

Our theology of covenant is much like our theology of marriage: we’ve accidentally and unintentionally borrowed much of it by default from sources that carry other baggage. We need to develop a theological, a “God-talk” understanding of why we structure our common life the way we do, just as those marryin’ pastors were willing to go back to first principles to re-vision their approach to weddings and marriage, even if it wasn’t in line with behavioral expectations that are more societal than theological.

How do we do this? Well, to borrow a line from a friend who borrowed it himself (thanks, Bob), “we make the road by walking.” Let’s head down the Way toward a closer relationship among the various parts of the Body of Christ, and re-member them, knit them together in a new shalom for a new day, a new wholeness for these times. But we need to be willing to face that we have been walking for some time down a road which defines us in ways that may not be what we intended.


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

* * * * * * *

Appendix
[Due to budget, format, and various other unexplained changes in the proposed volume, “Ohio Religious Experience 1803-2003,” what will come out in March 2004 from OU Press will be about half of this, with assorted additions and edits for format consistency contributed by Dennis Sparks. – 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.”