A poem for "Dissonance and Harmony" – Denison 2006 First Year Program theme
(This is almost an appendix to the poem series down further at http://epicycles.blogspot.com/2004/10/public-faith-23-poems-on-stepping-back.html but doesn't work as well on the computer screen. You have to a) know Swasey Chapel, and b) be able to see the whole page at once. Print it out, if you like, for the full effect.)
Buzzards and Wrens on Swasey Chapel
A
Wren
Wrenched
Out of context
A tower of
Twisting forms,
Shape to shape,
Cupola to circle,
Circle to square,
Square to octagon,
Octagon to ornament,
Ornaments to urns:
Architectural history
From stage to stage.
Out of the London
Great Fire of 1666
Rebuilt churches
From many models
Sir Christopher planned;
Renewal & innovation all
Centering on St. Paul’s Cathedral,
Skyline spanning mighty dome
Supporting a golden Orb & Cross.
Here, perhaps, an academic exercise, turning
The flow of Anglican liturgy into the broad
River of Baptist history, free thought and
Congregational design. But a place for
All to worship, or just to listen, given by
The hand of a scientist turned businessman,
Telescope maker and instrument designer,
Ohio Baptist and American original.
Ambrose Swasey, whose questioning
Mind had to have looked into the saint
With his name, a bishop of Milan, Italy,
Mentor of Augustine and Catholic hero.
Did he look as he would into an eyepiece
Seeing far and considering fairly what he
Saw? Did he offer his share in a chapel to
Open a door to Protestant and Catholic,
Anglican and Methodist, even to minds
Whose free-thinking led them beyond the
Walls of orthodoxy? He built next door a
Tower whose top was an eye carefully made
To calmly survey the heavens, to see what is
There to be seen, and record the sight. So I would
Think that Ambrose, like Christopher, would rest
On the same inscription: "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice"
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Saturday, July 01, 2006
WLSR at 50: 1975-1985
Jeff Gill
When I first heard about this observance for 2006, I thought, "that can’t be right, because I was part of the 25th anniversary celebration, and that was . . .in 1981, which is 25 years ago. OK then. Owwww . . .
To appreciate Wood Lake Scout Reservation on its 50th anniversary, I have to start my own story as a camp staff member first as a new Scout in Camp To-pe-ne-bee.
Troop 7 from Valparaiso, Indiana had camped in Ottawa campsite before, and in 1973 I was a brand new Tenderfoot, a member of the Panther Patrol, and I was scared. Scared of the lake, filled with long weeds in deep (I thought) water, scared of the dark, filled with eerily hovering fireflies, and even scared of the fireplace in the otherwise reassuringly solid cabin at the south end of our campsite. The fact that older Scouts had told me a detailed account of how young men had been killed and cut into pieces, stirred into the mortar of the stones in that fireplace, all might have had something to do with that particular fear.
But I had been to that camp twice before for Cub Day Camp, with Pack 20, and I loved, not feared, Bruce the Moose at the south end of the Dining Hall. And there were the odd but reassuring stories of Doctor Bob Finehout, our camp director, and the manic energy of J.W. Wright, who was something called the "program director." Between Dr. Bob at the lakeside campfire bowl and J.W. in the wagon wheel chandeliered Dining Hall, leading ever more agitated choruses of "Where, O Where Is Susie," I was hooked.
And I had a small, but important ace in the hole. Some years before, as an indifferent Cub, I had read my dad’s 1948 Scout Field Book, the brown covered masterpiece of Green Bar Bill Hillcourt. A narrative of sorts, and a compendium of both woods wisdom and social pragmatism, the story of my dad’s Field Book carried me necessarily into Scouting, and the deep unknowns of a week at Summer Camp.
That first summer I earned First Aid, Woodcarving, and Fish & Wildlife Management merit badges. Around the Nature area I worked largely with a staffer named Bradley, descended from the famous general, but I remember more clearly a stray visitor from Scoutcraft named Mark Frederick. His energy was less hyper than J.W.’s, but still intense, sweeping woods knowledge and personality quirks into the same inexorable whirlpool.
Another summer, a bit more confidence, and the melancholy announcement that this was the last summer season for camp at Tope: we would, next summer, go to Wood Lake. All of us in Troop 7 agreed we would hate it.
1975 the Sunday dawned, we loaded up our infamous purple bus, and Troop 7 left for Camp Tamarack, Wood Lake, Jones, Michigan, and Hidden Meadow campsite. We arrived, and we loved it. The lake of 50 acres had sailboats (sailboats!), the hidden treasure of Little Wood Lake, the trails through swamp and forest and field across 500 acres . . . and, faithlessly, though we had no Bruce the Moose, the Morris Dining Hall’s high arching ceiling, lined with banners and filled with song.
The songs were led by Mark Frederick, now the Program Director. Merit Badge Midway ringmaster, Critter Race maestro, MC of the deep kettle moraine campfire bowl on Sunday and Friday (the OA owned Wednesday and Mark left them largely in charge): he was the tone setter for the week, and this shy, fairly quiet and bookish boy took to the odd idea that he wanted, almost as much as to be an astronaut, to someday walk in his shoes.
Why? I really can’t account for the desire. Somewhere between J.W. and Mark hero worship, that brown cover ‘48 Field Book and my dad, and the hand of God, I wanted to be something I was not, as others seek a wider fame and fortune. I just wanted to lead songs in the Dining Hall at Tamarack, and tell stories in the firebowl.
And the glory of Scouting for me is, I did just that. The astronaut stuff never quite panned out, but I think I got the better deal in the end.
When I went home from my week at Tamarack in 1975, the first program week, I carried to my parents the CIT paperwork, handed me by camp director Phil Niswonger. Pedro, as one and all called him, saw my eager interest, and gave me the forms and a word to Bill Eckert, my scoutmaster, on Saturday at the Paul Bunyan breakfast before we left.
Dad read the forms and said "$25 a week; you’ll have to earn it." He wasn’t opposed, just wanted me to know the value of what I wanted.
So I went to his place of business, where he sold lumber in the front office; in the warehouse behind, I was taken to a siding and a railcar, filled with molding, in ten foot lengths. "Count ‘em and box ‘em," I was told, and handed a staple gun and shown a stack of flat cardboard panels waiting to be formed into molding boxes.
When the boxcar was empty, it was four weeks later, and I got taken up to camp for the last two weeks as a CIT, or TIC (pronounced "tick" of course), rotating from dining hall (dish duty, the obligatory term locked in the cooler), rifle range, scoutcraft, waterfront, and finally, blessedly, Nature/Conservation – the name I still think of in reference to that program area.
Even after my hitch on the waterfront as a CIT (mainly spent untangling fishing lines and raking lake weed), I was nervous about the water. Jerry Fisher, Bruce Sutter, and Don Harris all went the extra mile to make sure I learned how to swim, sort of.
For all the mild hazing and contempt of my unwilling cabin mate, I was desperate for nothing but to return the next summer. To sum up, I did, as a much too young but terribly happy for all that camp staffer at 14.
Saving some readers a bit of tedium, let me try to sum up my years as a staff member after my CIT service (at $25 a week) in 1975.
1976 – Nature/Conservation aide under Bob Jacques as N/C director, camp director Phil Niswonger and program director Mark Frederick.
1977 – Scoutcraft aide under Rex Rymers as commissioner in "The Swamp," with Mark Frederick back but the business manager last year was now camp director, Don Jordahl, with his wife Judy as business manager, having been South Side director before.
1978 – A foolish attempt to actually make money took me away from camp, while working three jobs in Valpo. I literally dreamed of camp all summer.
1979 – Trading Post manager working for Judy Jordahl as business manager, Don as camp director, and Larry Hill program director. This was Les Hill’s last summer at the range, and the last time he sang "Babyface" leading the whole dining hall when I got up to make, um, "words of wisdom."
1980 – The Marine Corps and I had a prior engagement, with Camp Upshur standing in for Camp Tamarack. Judy turns out to be good preparation for sergeants. I believe Paul LeBrun was program director after four years as a commissioner and chaplain, with Don’s last year as camp director.
1981 – Larry Patterson, district executive for Dunes Moraine, talked to me all winter about coming back as program director. Then he learned that I wouldn’t be 20 until summer’s end, and said "Uh, that won’t work." He asked if I would be Nature area director, and "assistant program director" for a fellow he met at a college job fair in Michigan named Russ Gruenwald, who had never been in Scouting, but liked the idea of a camp job for the summer.
Working with Rusty Snook, my brother Mike Gill in Scoutcraft, and Greg Burns wandering all over camp, it was a good summer, except when it came to campwide activities like flags, dining hall, and campfires. Russ never really liked the uniform and rarely wore much of it, and never quite figured out the Scouting advancement system. He was not a hit, to say the least, with unit leaders, and wasn’t much interested in my suggestions to help him out, but would occasionally argue with scoutmasters in the middle of the firebowl and then storm out, leaving me to wrap up with the "Wood Lake Hymn."
1982 – I went straight from my grandmother’s funeral to National Camp School for program, and from there to Camp Tamarack as . . . program director. No sooner had I realized that a nine year old dream was about to be realized than Ken Durham informed me that he was cutting down a number of trees around the property, including a few around the firebowl "like that crooked old thing just on one side, so you may want to plan a few weeks starting down at the waterfront."
So I ended the opening campfire with a story, a story about that tree, the age of that white oak (quercus alba, as I learned in Nature/Conservation), and the tie to the story of a little boy named Stevie, who grew up to be Lord Robert Stephenson Smythe Baden-Powell of Gilwell.
Ranger Ken shook my hand after the campfire introductions of staff and the singing of the Wood Lake Hymn, saying "you got me, you no-good cheating sucker fish. Nice work." The tree did not come down, at least for some years, and the bend was the top of a loop of rope for a flag many years following.
From 1982 to 1985 I told a story each summer at the end of the opening campfire on Sunday night, usually one story per summer but varying a bit each week. My first and best lessons in preaching sermons as a pastor were learned in the firebowl and dining hall watching and reacting to audience response by cool evening firelight or in crushing midday heat.
From Larry Patterson as camp director in 1982, with Galen Kelly as a proud but overwhelmed business manager, I went to Dave Webb as camp director through 1985. The arrival of Franz Nabicht as business manager was a blessing in 1983 & 1984. Dave Webb and I saw eye-to-eye on almost nothing, but we shared a deep commitment to the Scouting program, which covered a fair amount of conflict, even allowing us to room together at NOAC in 1983 at Rutgers, where we did Show Security for Randy Cline.
Mike Gill took over the kitchen in 1983, Jimmy Doran became waterfront director, and the arrival of Duane Thormahlen as mountin man in that year (later range officer) was a real benefit to me both programmatically and personally; Duane went on to serve as program director himself. Dave Harnish and I worked side by side in 1979, when he was in the quartermaster’s store and I was TP manager, and he moved through Nature (or Ecology as it was then known) and on through dining hall steward to business manager in 1985 and program director himself later, and was a reliable fellow staffer and friend, as was his sister Lisa who was south side director in ’79 and ’80.
In 1984, we had a week where some virus ran through the staff (a biannual occurrence), and it inevitably hit me. Turning in early one Thursday, I was shaken awake, and expected to hear about some camp crisis. It was our TP director that summer, Joe Grabill, telling me "I hate to wake you Jeff, but there’s some old staff guy here and he asked if you were still here; his name’s Frederick?"
So I got dressed and ended up groggily in Constantine (Mark said, "So you guys got kicked out of Marcellus or what?" I blamed it on Alan Eggleston singing opera after a few beers…) with a few other staffers.
Mark had joined the Air Force, and navigated B-52’s across the Arctic Circle: "I really can’t tell you more than that, sorry." And he didn’t.
There was, in fact, little to say; I was feverish, he felt the distance and the awkwardness, but just wanted to know if camp was still camp. I told him we didn’t race turtles any more, and the staff didn’t jump in the lake in Class A’s, but otherwise it was pretty much what he’d recall, and he smiled.
1985 was a year that I really wasn’t sure I would have at Tamarack, but I was (in many ways) the recipient of a great gift. My bride agreed to serve as Nature director a few weeks after we married in West Lafayette, Indiana, with a healthy crew of camp staffers in uniform attending. Our wedding announcement in the Valpo paper closed with the words, "after their honeymoon, the couple will reside in Jones, Michigan." Which was true.
Thirteen days after our wedding, I put Joyce Meredith into a pickup truck with Orbie Lightfoot and P.J. Vandenbossche and Dave Harnish and Bill Skillern (I trusted Orbie implicitly) to head a few hundred miles east for their week at National Camp School at Beaumont Scout Reservation near Cleveland. Before I could reflect on the irony of it all, Duane, Rusty, and a few other OA reprobates grabbed me and put me through my Vigil that night, deferred from the previous September and completely forgotten by me. The next morning, I was eating breakfast in Jones as Meemuns Uiisking, Lenape for, of course, "Babyface." Thanks, Les!
Joyce and I lived in a cabin on the south side, paddling back and forth each day, which is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds. The moonlight canoe trips were awesome and mysterious and downright wearying, and that’s all I have to say about that – but we missed no more than two morning flag ceremonies all summer.
The staff banquet after closing inventory was in Middlebury at the Essenhaus, and among many kind statements and gifts, I’ve always kept a Scout Fieldbook autographed by the whole staff.
Four years later, on August 12, 1989, ten years to the day after I received my Eagle Scout rank at First Christian Church in Valparaiso, Indiana, I stood under a tent next to the now condemmed sanctuary building, pitched there on loan from the National Guard by Troop 7 under Bill Eckert. P.J. Vandenbossche and Franz Nabicht and Dave Harnish and Duane Thormahlen led a large group of Camp Tamarack staffers all in Scout uniform, with John Bliley reading scripture, as they joined in my ordination as a Christian pastor. A tent, ringed by Scouts, where songs and music were a key part of the experience, and stories of Aslan of Narnia and Jesus of Nazareth and our own journey, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in light: this was where my ordination took place.
It felt right then, and it still does.
Now I direct church camps and run an area in our local Cub Day Camp, where my son is now a Bear and I’m an assistant Cubmaster. We’re in the Simon Kenton Council now in central Ohio, and we go to Camp Falling Rock, but the Wood Lake Hymn still runs through my life and the campfire stories still weave through my son’s.
We visited a year ago, and ran into Dick Dunnuck on our short stay. We’re all still in Scouting, and that really says it all, doesn’t it? We’re all older, except for Joyce, but still happy to serve youth with the Scouting program. It’s just that Dick gets to be there, and I’m, well, over here.
I wish we three could join you all for this 50th anniversary, but if you stand between the two paired trees looking down from the Dining Hall slope toward Wood Lake, where I stood waiting for our parade to begin in 1981, you’re in the picture on the cover of our wedding program. There I waited, wearing a campaign hat Earl Kubale, our Scout Executive, bought me to wear with a borrowed 1957 uniform, standing at the head of the procession, and wondering where I’d be 25 years further on.
There you’ll probably feel our presence. We’re there, watching, singing, delighting in the evergreen spirit of Scouting that keeps nervous Tenderfeet walking hesitantly toward the pier for their swim check, hungry Scouts heading for the Dining Hall and Scouters looking desperately for coffee, and all striding excitedly to the campfire for what may be a new story, or an old story told a new way, and always a rousing song.
Jeff Gill
When I first heard about this observance for 2006, I thought, "that can’t be right, because I was part of the 25th anniversary celebration, and that was . . .in 1981, which is 25 years ago. OK then. Owwww . . .
To appreciate Wood Lake Scout Reservation on its 50th anniversary, I have to start my own story as a camp staff member first as a new Scout in Camp To-pe-ne-bee.
Troop 7 from Valparaiso, Indiana had camped in Ottawa campsite before, and in 1973 I was a brand new Tenderfoot, a member of the Panther Patrol, and I was scared. Scared of the lake, filled with long weeds in deep (I thought) water, scared of the dark, filled with eerily hovering fireflies, and even scared of the fireplace in the otherwise reassuringly solid cabin at the south end of our campsite. The fact that older Scouts had told me a detailed account of how young men had been killed and cut into pieces, stirred into the mortar of the stones in that fireplace, all might have had something to do with that particular fear.
But I had been to that camp twice before for Cub Day Camp, with Pack 20, and I loved, not feared, Bruce the Moose at the south end of the Dining Hall. And there were the odd but reassuring stories of Doctor Bob Finehout, our camp director, and the manic energy of J.W. Wright, who was something called the "program director." Between Dr. Bob at the lakeside campfire bowl and J.W. in the wagon wheel chandeliered Dining Hall, leading ever more agitated choruses of "Where, O Where Is Susie," I was hooked.
And I had a small, but important ace in the hole. Some years before, as an indifferent Cub, I had read my dad’s 1948 Scout Field Book, the brown covered masterpiece of Green Bar Bill Hillcourt. A narrative of sorts, and a compendium of both woods wisdom and social pragmatism, the story of my dad’s Field Book carried me necessarily into Scouting, and the deep unknowns of a week at Summer Camp.
That first summer I earned First Aid, Woodcarving, and Fish & Wildlife Management merit badges. Around the Nature area I worked largely with a staffer named Bradley, descended from the famous general, but I remember more clearly a stray visitor from Scoutcraft named Mark Frederick. His energy was less hyper than J.W.’s, but still intense, sweeping woods knowledge and personality quirks into the same inexorable whirlpool.
Another summer, a bit more confidence, and the melancholy announcement that this was the last summer season for camp at Tope: we would, next summer, go to Wood Lake. All of us in Troop 7 agreed we would hate it.
1975 the Sunday dawned, we loaded up our infamous purple bus, and Troop 7 left for Camp Tamarack, Wood Lake, Jones, Michigan, and Hidden Meadow campsite. We arrived, and we loved it. The lake of 50 acres had sailboats (sailboats!), the hidden treasure of Little Wood Lake, the trails through swamp and forest and field across 500 acres . . . and, faithlessly, though we had no Bruce the Moose, the Morris Dining Hall’s high arching ceiling, lined with banners and filled with song.
The songs were led by Mark Frederick, now the Program Director. Merit Badge Midway ringmaster, Critter Race maestro, MC of the deep kettle moraine campfire bowl on Sunday and Friday (the OA owned Wednesday and Mark left them largely in charge): he was the tone setter for the week, and this shy, fairly quiet and bookish boy took to the odd idea that he wanted, almost as much as to be an astronaut, to someday walk in his shoes.
Why? I really can’t account for the desire. Somewhere between J.W. and Mark hero worship, that brown cover ‘48 Field Book and my dad, and the hand of God, I wanted to be something I was not, as others seek a wider fame and fortune. I just wanted to lead songs in the Dining Hall at Tamarack, and tell stories in the firebowl.
And the glory of Scouting for me is, I did just that. The astronaut stuff never quite panned out, but I think I got the better deal in the end.
When I went home from my week at Tamarack in 1975, the first program week, I carried to my parents the CIT paperwork, handed me by camp director Phil Niswonger. Pedro, as one and all called him, saw my eager interest, and gave me the forms and a word to Bill Eckert, my scoutmaster, on Saturday at the Paul Bunyan breakfast before we left.
Dad read the forms and said "$25 a week; you’ll have to earn it." He wasn’t opposed, just wanted me to know the value of what I wanted.
So I went to his place of business, where he sold lumber in the front office; in the warehouse behind, I was taken to a siding and a railcar, filled with molding, in ten foot lengths. "Count ‘em and box ‘em," I was told, and handed a staple gun and shown a stack of flat cardboard panels waiting to be formed into molding boxes.
When the boxcar was empty, it was four weeks later, and I got taken up to camp for the last two weeks as a CIT, or TIC (pronounced "tick" of course), rotating from dining hall (dish duty, the obligatory term locked in the cooler), rifle range, scoutcraft, waterfront, and finally, blessedly, Nature/Conservation – the name I still think of in reference to that program area.
Even after my hitch on the waterfront as a CIT (mainly spent untangling fishing lines and raking lake weed), I was nervous about the water. Jerry Fisher, Bruce Sutter, and Don Harris all went the extra mile to make sure I learned how to swim, sort of.
For all the mild hazing and contempt of my unwilling cabin mate, I was desperate for nothing but to return the next summer. To sum up, I did, as a much too young but terribly happy for all that camp staffer at 14.
Saving some readers a bit of tedium, let me try to sum up my years as a staff member after my CIT service (at $25 a week) in 1975.
1976 – Nature/Conservation aide under Bob Jacques as N/C director, camp director Phil Niswonger and program director Mark Frederick.
1977 – Scoutcraft aide under Rex Rymers as commissioner in "The Swamp," with Mark Frederick back but the business manager last year was now camp director, Don Jordahl, with his wife Judy as business manager, having been South Side director before.
1978 – A foolish attempt to actually make money took me away from camp, while working three jobs in Valpo. I literally dreamed of camp all summer.
1979 – Trading Post manager working for Judy Jordahl as business manager, Don as camp director, and Larry Hill program director. This was Les Hill’s last summer at the range, and the last time he sang "Babyface" leading the whole dining hall when I got up to make, um, "words of wisdom."
1980 – The Marine Corps and I had a prior engagement, with Camp Upshur standing in for Camp Tamarack. Judy turns out to be good preparation for sergeants. I believe Paul LeBrun was program director after four years as a commissioner and chaplain, with Don’s last year as camp director.
1981 – Larry Patterson, district executive for Dunes Moraine, talked to me all winter about coming back as program director. Then he learned that I wouldn’t be 20 until summer’s end, and said "Uh, that won’t work." He asked if I would be Nature area director, and "assistant program director" for a fellow he met at a college job fair in Michigan named Russ Gruenwald, who had never been in Scouting, but liked the idea of a camp job for the summer.
Working with Rusty Snook, my brother Mike Gill in Scoutcraft, and Greg Burns wandering all over camp, it was a good summer, except when it came to campwide activities like flags, dining hall, and campfires. Russ never really liked the uniform and rarely wore much of it, and never quite figured out the Scouting advancement system. He was not a hit, to say the least, with unit leaders, and wasn’t much interested in my suggestions to help him out, but would occasionally argue with scoutmasters in the middle of the firebowl and then storm out, leaving me to wrap up with the "Wood Lake Hymn."
1982 – I went straight from my grandmother’s funeral to National Camp School for program, and from there to Camp Tamarack as . . . program director. No sooner had I realized that a nine year old dream was about to be realized than Ken Durham informed me that he was cutting down a number of trees around the property, including a few around the firebowl "like that crooked old thing just on one side, so you may want to plan a few weeks starting down at the waterfront."
So I ended the opening campfire with a story, a story about that tree, the age of that white oak (quercus alba, as I learned in Nature/Conservation), and the tie to the story of a little boy named Stevie, who grew up to be Lord Robert Stephenson Smythe Baden-Powell of Gilwell.
Ranger Ken shook my hand after the campfire introductions of staff and the singing of the Wood Lake Hymn, saying "you got me, you no-good cheating sucker fish. Nice work." The tree did not come down, at least for some years, and the bend was the top of a loop of rope for a flag many years following.
From 1982 to 1985 I told a story each summer at the end of the opening campfire on Sunday night, usually one story per summer but varying a bit each week. My first and best lessons in preaching sermons as a pastor were learned in the firebowl and dining hall watching and reacting to audience response by cool evening firelight or in crushing midday heat.
From Larry Patterson as camp director in 1982, with Galen Kelly as a proud but overwhelmed business manager, I went to Dave Webb as camp director through 1985. The arrival of Franz Nabicht as business manager was a blessing in 1983 & 1984. Dave Webb and I saw eye-to-eye on almost nothing, but we shared a deep commitment to the Scouting program, which covered a fair amount of conflict, even allowing us to room together at NOAC in 1983 at Rutgers, where we did Show Security for Randy Cline.
Mike Gill took over the kitchen in 1983, Jimmy Doran became waterfront director, and the arrival of Duane Thormahlen as mountin man in that year (later range officer) was a real benefit to me both programmatically and personally; Duane went on to serve as program director himself. Dave Harnish and I worked side by side in 1979, when he was in the quartermaster’s store and I was TP manager, and he moved through Nature (or Ecology as it was then known) and on through dining hall steward to business manager in 1985 and program director himself later, and was a reliable fellow staffer and friend, as was his sister Lisa who was south side director in ’79 and ’80.
In 1984, we had a week where some virus ran through the staff (a biannual occurrence), and it inevitably hit me. Turning in early one Thursday, I was shaken awake, and expected to hear about some camp crisis. It was our TP director that summer, Joe Grabill, telling me "I hate to wake you Jeff, but there’s some old staff guy here and he asked if you were still here; his name’s Frederick?"
So I got dressed and ended up groggily in Constantine (Mark said, "So you guys got kicked out of Marcellus or what?" I blamed it on Alan Eggleston singing opera after a few beers…) with a few other staffers.
Mark had joined the Air Force, and navigated B-52’s across the Arctic Circle: "I really can’t tell you more than that, sorry." And he didn’t.
There was, in fact, little to say; I was feverish, he felt the distance and the awkwardness, but just wanted to know if camp was still camp. I told him we didn’t race turtles any more, and the staff didn’t jump in the lake in Class A’s, but otherwise it was pretty much what he’d recall, and he smiled.
1985 was a year that I really wasn’t sure I would have at Tamarack, but I was (in many ways) the recipient of a great gift. My bride agreed to serve as Nature director a few weeks after we married in West Lafayette, Indiana, with a healthy crew of camp staffers in uniform attending. Our wedding announcement in the Valpo paper closed with the words, "after their honeymoon, the couple will reside in Jones, Michigan." Which was true.
Thirteen days after our wedding, I put Joyce Meredith into a pickup truck with Orbie Lightfoot and P.J. Vandenbossche and Dave Harnish and Bill Skillern (I trusted Orbie implicitly) to head a few hundred miles east for their week at National Camp School at Beaumont Scout Reservation near Cleveland. Before I could reflect on the irony of it all, Duane, Rusty, and a few other OA reprobates grabbed me and put me through my Vigil that night, deferred from the previous September and completely forgotten by me. The next morning, I was eating breakfast in Jones as Meemuns Uiisking, Lenape for, of course, "Babyface." Thanks, Les!
Joyce and I lived in a cabin on the south side, paddling back and forth each day, which is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds. The moonlight canoe trips were awesome and mysterious and downright wearying, and that’s all I have to say about that – but we missed no more than two morning flag ceremonies all summer.
The staff banquet after closing inventory was in Middlebury at the Essenhaus, and among many kind statements and gifts, I’ve always kept a Scout Fieldbook autographed by the whole staff.
Four years later, on August 12, 1989, ten years to the day after I received my Eagle Scout rank at First Christian Church in Valparaiso, Indiana, I stood under a tent next to the now condemmed sanctuary building, pitched there on loan from the National Guard by Troop 7 under Bill Eckert. P.J. Vandenbossche and Franz Nabicht and Dave Harnish and Duane Thormahlen led a large group of Camp Tamarack staffers all in Scout uniform, with John Bliley reading scripture, as they joined in my ordination as a Christian pastor. A tent, ringed by Scouts, where songs and music were a key part of the experience, and stories of Aslan of Narnia and Jesus of Nazareth and our own journey, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in light: this was where my ordination took place.
It felt right then, and it still does.
Now I direct church camps and run an area in our local Cub Day Camp, where my son is now a Bear and I’m an assistant Cubmaster. We’re in the Simon Kenton Council now in central Ohio, and we go to Camp Falling Rock, but the Wood Lake Hymn still runs through my life and the campfire stories still weave through my son’s.
We visited a year ago, and ran into Dick Dunnuck on our short stay. We’re all still in Scouting, and that really says it all, doesn’t it? We’re all older, except for Joyce, but still happy to serve youth with the Scouting program. It’s just that Dick gets to be there, and I’m, well, over here.
I wish we three could join you all for this 50th anniversary, but if you stand between the two paired trees looking down from the Dining Hall slope toward Wood Lake, where I stood waiting for our parade to begin in 1981, you’re in the picture on the cover of our wedding program. There I waited, wearing a campaign hat Earl Kubale, our Scout Executive, bought me to wear with a borrowed 1957 uniform, standing at the head of the procession, and wondering where I’d be 25 years further on.
There you’ll probably feel our presence. We’re there, watching, singing, delighting in the evergreen spirit of Scouting that keeps nervous Tenderfeet walking hesitantly toward the pier for their swim check, hungry Scouts heading for the Dining Hall and Scouters looking desperately for coffee, and all striding excitedly to the campfire for what may be a new story, or an old story told a new way, and always a rousing song.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Crazy Faith – New Life skit 26 March 2006
[Two people, sitting in a boat, holding fishing poles]
One: This is the life!
Two: Sure is.
One: So how did you find this lake, anyhow?
Two: This is my grandpa’s lake, actually. He knew the guy who owns the land around it, and his son still lets me have a key to the gate out on the county road.
One: So you’ve been fishing here a long time?
Two: Yep. With grandpa, with my dad while he was living, and as long as I can get out on the water.
One: Well, then, I’m downright honored you invited me out here.
Two: Hey, I learned one thing from both of them. Fishing alone is fine, but fishing with a buddy is better. Plus there’s someone to pull you out if you fall in.
One: Or push you in . . .
Two: That’s why you have to pick ‘em careful.
One: OK, either way, I’m honored. This is nice, even if we aren’t catching much.
Two: I told you, there are fish in here. You just have to be patient.
One: Your grandpa have any stories about giant ol’ catfish down on the bottom?
Two: Oh, he had stories. He had me believing as a little kid he could walk on water.
One: You really looked up to him, didn’t you?
Two: Yeah, but I mean he had me thinkin’ he actually could walk on the water.
One: (slow take, looks at Two) During the winter, right? When it was frozen?
Two: Hah! I’ve used that joke myself. No, he’d talk while we fished about watching your feet when the ripples came by, not tripping and falling with a splash; he’d think out loud about wandering over to shore to get something and then decide not to.
One: This run in the family?
Two: Well, the big talkin’ sure did, but he didn’t mean to scare me or anything. Just a grandpa having fun with their kids.
(pause, fishing)
One: But he never did, right?
Two: What?
One: Walk on the water?
Two: Not when I was around, no. Wouldn’t have surprised me. It was like he figured he could, and he might, but not right now.
One: Do you think someone could walk on water?
Two: You know the stories.
One: You mean, um, Jesus?
Two: And Peter.
One: But those are Bible stories, not stuff that really happened.
Two: (looks sideways at One) You think?
One: No, not miracles and stuff. That’s not, well, real.
Two: Hmmm. We got physicists that say stuff goes through stuff, like atoms and photons and electrons, and no one sys that’s crazy. Sometimes things are one thing, and then another. (pause) Somedays, I think about grandpa, and I think, you know, I probably ought to be able to walk on water if I put my mind to it.
One: Right. Well, if you do, bring my spoon lure back from the truck, wouldya?
Two: (swings one foot over the side) And if I fall in, you’ll pull me in?
One: You’re not gonna try it, are you?
Two: (pulling foot back) Nah, I’m not in the right frame of mind.
One: (stares directly at Two) But you really think you could, in the right frame of mind?
Two: (long pauses) Maybe. Maybe. At least if I waited ‘til winter…
(both laugh, go back to fishing)
[Two people, sitting in a boat, holding fishing poles]
One: This is the life!
Two: Sure is.
One: So how did you find this lake, anyhow?
Two: This is my grandpa’s lake, actually. He knew the guy who owns the land around it, and his son still lets me have a key to the gate out on the county road.
One: So you’ve been fishing here a long time?
Two: Yep. With grandpa, with my dad while he was living, and as long as I can get out on the water.
One: Well, then, I’m downright honored you invited me out here.
Two: Hey, I learned one thing from both of them. Fishing alone is fine, but fishing with a buddy is better. Plus there’s someone to pull you out if you fall in.
One: Or push you in . . .
Two: That’s why you have to pick ‘em careful.
One: OK, either way, I’m honored. This is nice, even if we aren’t catching much.
Two: I told you, there are fish in here. You just have to be patient.
One: Your grandpa have any stories about giant ol’ catfish down on the bottom?
Two: Oh, he had stories. He had me believing as a little kid he could walk on water.
One: You really looked up to him, didn’t you?
Two: Yeah, but I mean he had me thinkin’ he actually could walk on the water.
One: (slow take, looks at Two) During the winter, right? When it was frozen?
Two: Hah! I’ve used that joke myself. No, he’d talk while we fished about watching your feet when the ripples came by, not tripping and falling with a splash; he’d think out loud about wandering over to shore to get something and then decide not to.
One: This run in the family?
Two: Well, the big talkin’ sure did, but he didn’t mean to scare me or anything. Just a grandpa having fun with their kids.
(pause, fishing)
One: But he never did, right?
Two: What?
One: Walk on the water?
Two: Not when I was around, no. Wouldn’t have surprised me. It was like he figured he could, and he might, but not right now.
One: Do you think someone could walk on water?
Two: You know the stories.
One: You mean, um, Jesus?
Two: And Peter.
One: But those are Bible stories, not stuff that really happened.
Two: (looks sideways at One) You think?
One: No, not miracles and stuff. That’s not, well, real.
Two: Hmmm. We got physicists that say stuff goes through stuff, like atoms and photons and electrons, and no one sys that’s crazy. Sometimes things are one thing, and then another. (pause) Somedays, I think about grandpa, and I think, you know, I probably ought to be able to walk on water if I put my mind to it.
One: Right. Well, if you do, bring my spoon lure back from the truck, wouldya?
Two: (swings one foot over the side) And if I fall in, you’ll pull me in?
One: You’re not gonna try it, are you?
Two: (pulling foot back) Nah, I’m not in the right frame of mind.
One: (stares directly at Two) But you really think you could, in the right frame of mind?
Two: (long pauses) Maybe. Maybe. At least if I waited ‘til winter…
(both laugh, go back to fishing)
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Proposal for Newark Earthworks Day 2006 theme statement --
Newark Earthworks Day is a program intended as an expression of respect and honor for this sacred Native American place. Built 2,000 years ago by the first peoples of this continent, it is both ancient and vitally alive today.
For modern visitors, we seek a renewed and wider perspective, with respect born of broader understanding, where descendants of the builders will honor the site with integrity. The Newark Earthworks connects Native Nations and newer Americans, past and the present, and both loss and recovery of ancient Native knowledge taking place around and within these architectural marvels.
Newark Earthworks Day is a program intended as an expression of respect and honor for this sacred Native American place. Built 2,000 years ago by the first peoples of this continent, it is both ancient and vitally alive today.
For modern visitors, we seek a renewed and wider perspective, with respect born of broader understanding, where descendants of the builders will honor the site with integrity. The Newark Earthworks connects Native Nations and newer Americans, past and the present, and both loss and recovery of ancient Native knowledge taking place around and within these architectural marvels.
For Winter 2006 Denison Magazine "Uncommon Grounds" --
When Brad Lepper called Tod Frolking of Dension’s Geology Department, he was looking for help in a hurry.
As curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society and a regular teacher on campus for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lepper had been called to an excavation site on a Licking County golf course. What began as a new water hazard ended up a major scientific event for 1990, with the most complete mastodon skeleton ever found, and signs on the bones of butchering by human hands, dating to the period just after the last glaciers left central Ohio.
For microbiologists, their excitement owed a debt of gratitude to the care Lepper and Frolking took even in December frost and with a request of the property owner that they complete the entire removal in only two days. Their scientific thoroughness under difficult conditions helped them see and preserve the gut contents of this massive mammal, not only allowing a new look into mastodon diets over 11,000 years ago (cedar twigs and sedge grasses along with seeds of waterlily and swamp buttercup), but led to the "reactivation" in the lab of intestinal bacteria known for a time as the most ancient living organisms known to science, listed for a time in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon by Lepper, Frolking, and others from the area who came and volunteered made possible a major leap in our understanding of how some of the first residents of Licking County lived and learned.
When Brad Lepper called Tod Frolking of Dension’s Geology Department, he was looking for help in a hurry.
As curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society and a regular teacher on campus for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lepper had been called to an excavation site on a Licking County golf course. What began as a new water hazard ended up a major scientific event for 1990, with the most complete mastodon skeleton ever found, and signs on the bones of butchering by human hands, dating to the period just after the last glaciers left central Ohio.
For microbiologists, their excitement owed a debt of gratitude to the care Lepper and Frolking took even in December frost and with a request of the property owner that they complete the entire removal in only two days. Their scientific thoroughness under difficult conditions helped them see and preserve the gut contents of this massive mammal, not only allowing a new look into mastodon diets over 11,000 years ago (cedar twigs and sedge grasses along with seeds of waterlily and swamp buttercup), but led to the "reactivation" in the lab of intestinal bacteria known for a time as the most ancient living organisms known to science, listed for a time in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon by Lepper, Frolking, and others from the area who came and volunteered made possible a major leap in our understanding of how some of the first residents of Licking County lived and learned.
Monday, February 13, 2006
DenMag – Burning Tree Mastodon
Ten miles southeast of Denison, in December of 1989, a dragline operator digging a new water hazard for a Licking County golf course suddenly saw a giant skull looking up at him out of the muck.
A check with the property owner led to a call to Dr. Brad Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society and a regular teacher on campus for the Department of Sociology and Anthroplogy. When Lepper realized he was looking down into a peat bog containing a mastodon skeleton, he called on local members of the Licking County Archaeology and Landmarks Society, including Dr. Tod Frolking of the Department of Geology at Denison.
With only two days to remove the skeletal remains from the muck, speed could have led to hurry. A careful, if ad hoc plan made on the edge of the excavation, helped lead to a remarkable discovery even under those pressures: the gut contents of what was also the most complete mastodon skeleton ever recovered.
Those gut contents helped make the discovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon, as it was called for the golf course where discovered, a scientific event for 1990, when the intestinal bacteria were "re-activated," becoming known for a time as the most ancient living organisms known to science, at close to 12,000 years old. They were noted in Discovery magazine as one of the most significant science events for that year, and covered by everyone from the New York Times to overseas media when they were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
What has kept the Burning Tree Mastodon at the forefront of "Quaternary" studies (the modern period of geology and paleontology) is the organic content of the mastodon’s digestive system. Along with causing excavators to look more closely in certain contexts for preserved internal organs, microanalysis gave the first clues to the precise nature of the diet of these awesome Midwestern creatures during the retreat of the last glaciers. Cedar twigs, grasses and sedges along with seeds of naiads, pondweed, waterlily, rush, St. Johnswort, bog bean, and swamp buttercup were present.
Even more important was the discovery of cut marks on the bones of this massive mammal, indicating human involvement in the mastodon’s death and dismemberment.
There were also hints of a butchering and caching process in how the portions of the beast were placed in what was then a small pond, likely for an emergency recovery if the hunting season went sour. The recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon by Lepper, Frolking, and others from the area who came and gave of their time made possible a major leap in our understanding of how some of the first residents of Licking County lived and learned.
Recently, a cast of the mastodon’s skull and an interpretive exhibit about the discovery went on display at The Works in downtown Newark, a Smithsonian affiliate museum of science and technology for Licking County.
Ten miles southeast of Denison, in December of 1989, a dragline operator digging a new water hazard for a Licking County golf course suddenly saw a giant skull looking up at him out of the muck.
A check with the property owner led to a call to Dr. Brad Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society and a regular teacher on campus for the Department of Sociology and Anthroplogy. When Lepper realized he was looking down into a peat bog containing a mastodon skeleton, he called on local members of the Licking County Archaeology and Landmarks Society, including Dr. Tod Frolking of the Department of Geology at Denison.
With only two days to remove the skeletal remains from the muck, speed could have led to hurry. A careful, if ad hoc plan made on the edge of the excavation, helped lead to a remarkable discovery even under those pressures: the gut contents of what was also the most complete mastodon skeleton ever recovered.
Those gut contents helped make the discovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon, as it was called for the golf course where discovered, a scientific event for 1990, when the intestinal bacteria were "re-activated," becoming known for a time as the most ancient living organisms known to science, at close to 12,000 years old. They were noted in Discovery magazine as one of the most significant science events for that year, and covered by everyone from the New York Times to overseas media when they were listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
What has kept the Burning Tree Mastodon at the forefront of "Quaternary" studies (the modern period of geology and paleontology) is the organic content of the mastodon’s digestive system. Along with causing excavators to look more closely in certain contexts for preserved internal organs, microanalysis gave the first clues to the precise nature of the diet of these awesome Midwestern creatures during the retreat of the last glaciers. Cedar twigs, grasses and sedges along with seeds of naiads, pondweed, waterlily, rush, St. Johnswort, bog bean, and swamp buttercup were present.
Even more important was the discovery of cut marks on the bones of this massive mammal, indicating human involvement in the mastodon’s death and dismemberment.
There were also hints of a butchering and caching process in how the portions of the beast were placed in what was then a small pond, likely for an emergency recovery if the hunting season went sour. The recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon by Lepper, Frolking, and others from the area who came and gave of their time made possible a major leap in our understanding of how some of the first residents of Licking County lived and learned.
Recently, a cast of the mastodon’s skull and an interpretive exhibit about the discovery went on display at The Works in downtown Newark, a Smithsonian affiliate museum of science and technology for Licking County.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
So Why Haven’t You Ended Homelessness Yet?
Rev. Jeff Gill
Licking Co. Coalition for Housing board president
In 1991 a group of folks with various involvements in helping the homeless got together. Some of us were with non-profits, others in agencies, and a few of us came out of a faith community angle.
All of us had experience trying to help people in Licking County whose lives had hit a crisis of some sort, with one major obstacle to resolving the crisis: they became homeless somewhere along the way. Maybe a relationship had ended, possibly with violence the breaking point, perhaps a family situation had pushed them out the door, or an addiction had snowballed into unsolvable dimensions. Sometimes a lost job triggered a financial meltdown that even finding a new (lower paying) job couldn’t stop.
So all of us who were reliant on the Salvation Army and New Beginnings for emergency shelter (and we still are, bless them), and were all already talking to each other regularly to find housing solutions for people working their way out of crisis, formed a, well, "coalition." We pooled some resources, hustled up some others, studied as we worked about "transitional housing" as a step from emergency shelter to getting back to independence, and started LCCH with four units in 1993.
Fifteen years after we got started, thirteen after we began housing folks, I understand perfectly well why people ask: "When are you going to end homelessness?" In all candor, I feel conflicted between my pride in what this county has done co-operatively over those years, but that we now operate over 30 units of "transitional housing."
On the one hand, I can say that since we reached our current size about six years ago, we haven’t felt much need to expand. Even with the county’s growth in population, the need for transitional housing has held fairly steady. That’s a good sign. But if we are effective, shouldn’t we be able to start shrinking? It’s OK to ask that question, and the staff and volunteers reflect on that question maybe more often than you’d think.
The story I told to begin with is a big part of why I don’t see a decline in the need for our services in the near future. People generally don’t maintain "homelessness" as a lifestyle except for a very small, fairly mobile population – which is the picture too many think of when they hear the word "homeless." LCCH is mandated to serve individuals and families who are county residents, and the 400 some folks we deal with in some direct fashion over the year (and thousands more on the phone with general counsel and advice) are local residents who have hit a crisis. If we could stop all crisis situations from happening, we could put ourselves out of business.
Even the handful (less than 20) folks who come from out of county to establish residency and wait to get help are born and raised from here, or have other family who’ve moved here. They may be trying to get a new start, and it is true that if you draw lines from here east, south, southeast or even northeast, you’d have to go a long ways to hit a county with more jobs available than here, even in a bad month. But the common factor is that they are looking to stop living in crisis, and start living on their own.
That’s why I think that we’re here to stay. You can’t stop crisis events which throw good people into bad times. What we can do, and are doing, is try to make sure that as Licking County, say, doubles in size, that we don’t have to be twice as big. One of our big pushes in the coming year is around "financial literacy," for today’s families and for the youth who will head those of tomorrow. If you understand personal economy and fiscal planning a little better, a crisis doesn’t have to put you on the street. We’re very excited about this way of solving homelessness before it happens!
We promise to keep the county informed as we keep working and listening and teaching, trying to figure out what puts families where they don’t want to be, quite frankly, which is with us. To stay in transitional housing means a fair number of rules to follow and freedoms restricted. It ain’t fun. But it is effective, as our funders often tell others that we’re a model for reducing "repeat business," a record we’re proud of. My Christmas was more enjoyable for knowing that people in crisis have a safe place to fall like LCCH and the other agencies we work with, and all of us associated with the Coalition are proud to claim our involvement. Thanks to all those in Licking County who have supported us in 2005, and look forward to hearing more in ’06.
Rev. Jeff Gill
Licking Co. Coalition for Housing board president
In 1991 a group of folks with various involvements in helping the homeless got together. Some of us were with non-profits, others in agencies, and a few of us came out of a faith community angle.
All of us had experience trying to help people in Licking County whose lives had hit a crisis of some sort, with one major obstacle to resolving the crisis: they became homeless somewhere along the way. Maybe a relationship had ended, possibly with violence the breaking point, perhaps a family situation had pushed them out the door, or an addiction had snowballed into unsolvable dimensions. Sometimes a lost job triggered a financial meltdown that even finding a new (lower paying) job couldn’t stop.
So all of us who were reliant on the Salvation Army and New Beginnings for emergency shelter (and we still are, bless them), and were all already talking to each other regularly to find housing solutions for people working their way out of crisis, formed a, well, "coalition." We pooled some resources, hustled up some others, studied as we worked about "transitional housing" as a step from emergency shelter to getting back to independence, and started LCCH with four units in 1993.
Fifteen years after we got started, thirteen after we began housing folks, I understand perfectly well why people ask: "When are you going to end homelessness?" In all candor, I feel conflicted between my pride in what this county has done co-operatively over those years, but that we now operate over 30 units of "transitional housing."
On the one hand, I can say that since we reached our current size about six years ago, we haven’t felt much need to expand. Even with the county’s growth in population, the need for transitional housing has held fairly steady. That’s a good sign. But if we are effective, shouldn’t we be able to start shrinking? It’s OK to ask that question, and the staff and volunteers reflect on that question maybe more often than you’d think.
The story I told to begin with is a big part of why I don’t see a decline in the need for our services in the near future. People generally don’t maintain "homelessness" as a lifestyle except for a very small, fairly mobile population – which is the picture too many think of when they hear the word "homeless." LCCH is mandated to serve individuals and families who are county residents, and the 400 some folks we deal with in some direct fashion over the year (and thousands more on the phone with general counsel and advice) are local residents who have hit a crisis. If we could stop all crisis situations from happening, we could put ourselves out of business.
Even the handful (less than 20) folks who come from out of county to establish residency and wait to get help are born and raised from here, or have other family who’ve moved here. They may be trying to get a new start, and it is true that if you draw lines from here east, south, southeast or even northeast, you’d have to go a long ways to hit a county with more jobs available than here, even in a bad month. But the common factor is that they are looking to stop living in crisis, and start living on their own.
That’s why I think that we’re here to stay. You can’t stop crisis events which throw good people into bad times. What we can do, and are doing, is try to make sure that as Licking County, say, doubles in size, that we don’t have to be twice as big. One of our big pushes in the coming year is around "financial literacy," for today’s families and for the youth who will head those of tomorrow. If you understand personal economy and fiscal planning a little better, a crisis doesn’t have to put you on the street. We’re very excited about this way of solving homelessness before it happens!
We promise to keep the county informed as we keep working and listening and teaching, trying to figure out what puts families where they don’t want to be, quite frankly, which is with us. To stay in transitional housing means a fair number of rules to follow and freedoms restricted. It ain’t fun. But it is effective, as our funders often tell others that we’re a model for reducing "repeat business," a record we’re proud of. My Christmas was more enjoyable for knowing that people in crisis have a safe place to fall like LCCH and the other agencies we work with, and all of us associated with the Coalition are proud to claim our involvement. Thanks to all those in Licking County who have supported us in 2005, and look forward to hearing more in ’06.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Being Disciples, Generally
A response to:
http://homepage.mac.com/madcck/myblog/C942134880/E20051219214033/index.html
Michael Davison has issued a call for "Restructure" for the general manifestation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He asks that the decision makers and vision shapers of the general church boards and structures not start a new paragraph in revising how we are church on the wider level – beyond the congregational – but turn the page a begin a fresh chapter.
Undermining this clarion call is the knowledge all of us share who have been involved in regional and general activities through these last thirty plus years. What Michael is correct about is that Restructure ’67 was too tentative, out of fear that the restructionists would be painted as too radical, and then we would, ah, well . . . lose congregations, which we did anyhow. A third, half, more; it depends on how you frame the question. Would the new denominational structure have lost more, or fewer members and churches if they had been more drastic? Did the cautious approach, open to misinterpretation as maneuver and manipulation (framed as such by some who were, themselves, manipulating and maneuvering), actually cause more locations to "go independent"?
Adding to the complication, as those who were part of or witnesses to the Fifties and Sixties in "brotherhood and assembly life" would want to have said, is that they had to work with the structures they inherited. State societies with wide variation from place to place, general boards with their own investments and constituencies, and institutions that had been entirely independent from the early 1800’s were all part of the landscape that would go into making a general church body, with no element having authority over another. Some of the missional bodies in particular were tied by trusts and bylaws so as to limit their actions even with near unanimous agreement by their boards on new directions.
So what look in retrospect like weak compromises and wobbly lines of accountability are in fact the best deals that could be cut between the parts that make our fractious whole, such as it is. Our overall a-historical viewpoint (think churches with "Founded AD 33" on the cornerstone) has an immediate implication as well as a theological one: we don’t get how we ended up where we are because we know so little about the paths that led here. My own attempt to redress this gap for the Christian Church in Ohio, titled "Being Buckeye Disciples" can be seen at http://epicycles.blogspot.com (check the archive, and it’s a twelve page paper in .doc form).
While I feel very limited in how I can make comprehensive suggestions about current restructure options, I’d like to sketch out some of the issues that made the particular set of compromises from the "Restructure period" so un-viable in today’s mission context for the United States and Canada.
The office of General Minister and President is weak by design. Here too, the designers of the Design were concerned about the looming threat of churches disfellowshiping through the early Sixties. Regional ministers or their contemporary equivalent were adamant that this position in the Design have essentially no authority at all. A cynic might say they were protecting their own "episcopal" turf, but a more accurate and fair reading is that the sheer volume of concern from congregations on the edge made them sincerely interested in making sure that new OGMP was unthreatening to such interests. And yes, it served their own interests, as well.
The boards behind the now Homeland Ministries, Global Ministries, Church Extension, and the Pension Fund are rooted (except for the Pension Fund) in campaigns to raise capital from the 1800’s, and each has provisions built into their bylaws that greatly complicate a simple motion to hand their assets over to OGMP, or the assembly (the action which was actually proposed in those days, hamstrung by the fact that legally, there is no legal person standing in as "the assembly" though our internal rules all talk as if there is), or some brand new third party as new Structure.
One way of understanding this is the recent action, surprising to some, of the Pension Fund announcing that they would soon pull out of providing Church Wide Health Care without certain major concessions by the General Board and Assembly. Rather than having any affirmative obligation to provide something they just began offering as a courtesy not so very long ago – about the time of Restructure, in fact – they had to remind us all that their charter (a very legal document indeed) forbids them from using any of their proceeds for purposes other than pensions, and insurance obligations were about to (in fact, had already) spend pension money on paying CWHC bills. They as a board faced the very real likelihood of participant lawsuits for "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if they continued pretending things could go on as they had.
Without going into detail, each group has a public face ("Global Ministries") and a legal reality ("United Christian Missionary Society", dating back to 1849), of which the former can be fiddled with endlessly in terms of name, logo, press releases, and activities, but the latter having fairly tightly constrained options on how and how much to spend of the assets they control.
As a church body/denomination, there is in fact a very simple resolution to these limits. Walk away. Just move on, create new structures from scratch, and maybe someday qualify for support from the boards which, in fact, would continue. If pretty much everyone just walked away from the Disciples of Christ, there are millions of dollars held "in trust" that no one would "get," but would need to be given in the prescribed measured doses that define them, to activities in line with their obligations.
So we have funds that are reliable, but small: not small enough to walk away from, but small enough to require more income to do, um, well, what we’re used to seeing them doing. Unlike congregational giving, you can pretty much count on what’s coming in from it, another attractive quality, but like congregational giving, you can’t just up the amount. (Footnote: the institutions, namely some seminaries and campus ministries, who had rules loose enough to let them start withdrawing capital in a pinch, have all either already done so to the point of extinction, or saw the edge coming soon enough to pass non-breakable rules to forbid themselves from doing it anymore.)
Still, it seems worth pointing out that we could, as a denomination – as the General Board & Assembly – just create a new structure on a blank sheet of paper in pretty much any two year period, as long as you do it with no assumptions about income. All the mechanisms exist to do that right now. But if you have to plug together autonomous giving from congregations/regions with the boards of HM, GM, CE, and PF, respecting everyone’s prerogatives under the law, you can only get . . . what we have. If a new structure was proposed as a truly autonomous upper judicatory, CE and PF would go on basically as they are, and GM would have their stable of missionaries, and HM would . . . I have no idea what they would do. I’d have to read their trust documents to know for sure. After obligatory passthroughs they would have enough money to rent some office space and get a receptionist and a staffer and a half, I’d guess, which is just about where they’re at anyhow.
Then there’s the regions. Oddly enough, to me at least, few know or realize that the regions to this day have some major embedded differences in governance and polity. Some have a strong bishop, others more of an executive director who implements the board’s will, such as more than thirty people who meet four to six times a year have a will (no matter how meaningful the worship time they share).
There are regions with major assets tied up as outlined above, and there are regions who hold a reversion clause on much of the property held by congregations, a shocking idea in some parts of Discipledom. There are regions who have developed an active "Order of Ministry" for their clergy which is a vital center for church life, and others who are heavily centered on their camp or retreat center property, with clergy pretty much interchangeable employees. In all of these, their ability to turn major authority over to a strong vision casting General Pastor-type person is limited, even should the regional board or cabinet want to, by their assets whether physical or fiscal.
On the other hand, if they were to tear the identity of "church" away from the assets and create a new structure from scratch, they could do it tomorrow in most regions. Again, to illustrate for those who are baffled by what I am saying (not proposing, not yet, anyhow), let me offer up Christmount, in North Carolina. A large retreat center, which is a great asset to the region that surrounds them, but if every Disciple disappeared into the Mothership tomorrow, Christmount would continue. Their fundraising mailing list would require some major revision, but they have their own (not enough, I’m told) endowment, a board which owns their property, and their own management plan which includes regional goals and vision, but as a courtesy, not as an absolute legal obligation. Ditto some of the funds and causes which regional boards manage but do not, to the final dollar, control.
Unrealistic? Sure it is, which is why no one has done it. But the moment you commit to creating an authority structure that automatically defers to other legal entities, you commit to managing a shell corporation, not a management structure. We talk management structures a whole bunch, but we actually operate shell corporations.
So many regions have turned, somewhat by default and modestly by design, to creating ever tighter personnel structures. Almost no region in the Disciples had a structure, let alone assets, tied to clergy and ordination, other than a few scholarship programs managed by Commissions on Ministry.
You can require almost anything you want of clergy, unlike congregations who own their property and usually control their budget to a fault ("no one’s gonna tell us how to spend our money!" ™) even as to health insurance. But ministerial standing or licenses are given or withheld entirely by regions since Restructure, though many effectively controlled it before. So the last few years have seen a significant increase in the time and energy regional Commissions on Ministry put into "standing management," requiring creditable but mandatory workshops on sexual abuse, anti-racism, and slated mandates for continuing education or regional participation.
All of which says we prefer to manage that which we can control. Right now, clergy are about all we can control in the Disciples of Christ, so we’re giving them a pretty good once over twice.
But what if . . . what if we tried to create a structure without control? An "accountability hierarchy" without coercion and minimal standardization? There is no management model that will affirm us, but we might be able to feel our way to a Biblical model that could resonate with liberals and conservatives alike. To address Michael’s proposal in detail:
"A new structure could be:
Office of General Minister and President is responsible for proclaiming the Disciple vision of being Christian. . ."
Ok by me; and we could do this right now.
"All DMF funding would flow through the OGMP for the General manifestation."
Let’s come back to this one.
"Disciples Home Mission, Overseas Mission, Church Extension would dissolve their boards and become accountable to OGMP and the CC(DOC) board"
They can’t do it, so this is a nonstarter unless we’re just walkin’ away from the dollars, which we could, in theory . . .
"Working with representatives from the College of Regional Ministers and constituency groups, the GMP would determine the needed services that the General manifestation would offer regions and congregations."
Which they will/are/have been telling us they are doing, but those darn congregations won’t come to the programs and workshops and events we put on! Without sounding like a Bill O’Reilly free-marketeer, there is a remarkable resistance to accepting that if attendance at certain kinds of stuff keeps dropping, that might be meaningful data.
In fact, as Michael points out early in his piece, there are "Disciple dollars" a plenty floating around out there. Week of Compassion, which is amazingly (why is it amazing, he asked himself?) transparent and responsive, gets major funding. I get a weekly – or more – email telling me what they’re doing, with specific things retold, with our giving, and regular breakdowns of the budget in terms any financial idiot (read: most clergy) can understand. I share them in worship because they tell compelling stories, I use them in print materials because they are concise and use everyday language.
"Regions would covenant with each other to keep 47% of the giving to fund regional ministries, and each region's board would affirm this covenant at each regional assembly. Regions would send 53% to OGMP, which would place 3% in a pool developed with the Christian Church Foundation to aid regions with funding issues. The OGMP would then determine the use of the 50% sent to them for the services and ministries they provide by whatever means is appropriate and affirmed by the CC(DOC) board"
Oy. Aside from asking how this would work, let’s set it aside for the moment. No precedent from Scripture or Tradition mandates or affirms this model, anyhow, so we don’t need to wrangle over why people "should" want to follow this model, or how to convince (i.e., force) regions to go along with this.
What happens to the moral and theological authority of the wider church if they simply work with what they receive directly for their ministry? That’s what pastors and congregations do, and – while I know there is very solid Christian teaching and preaching behind mission support – the understanding of what and why we give to middle and upper judicatories has been lost since Restructure behind a screen on indirect obligation and vague guilt.
Where we’re heading now is a version of exactly that: a de facto defunding of wider ministries, based partly on the stresses of supporting an imperfectly professionalized clergy (a whole ‘nother essay) and partly on a growing sense that whatever they are doing in the regional and general office, it ain’t ministry in any way that we understand (I point the reader to Michael’s post on GYC just a bit earlier as Exhibit A).
So walk away. Lose a certain amount of security and full-time staff positions, but gain one of the most amazing tools in the modern world for ministry, a blank sheet of paper, free of legal entanglements. Look at the Episcopal Church USA, which could solve many of the problems weighing them down if people didn’t care about real estate. Leave out the real estate, and you either have two very vital faith bodies with different approaches growing out of a common worship tradition, or a common body made up of significantly diverse interpretations. But leave in the stone arches and fine green lawns, and people have to either agree or go . . . and then some in leadership are indignant that so many are going.
Disciples do not have all that much of a unique heritage, contrary to popular belief. We have weekly communion combined with immersion of mature believers, and congregational ownership of property tied to autonomy (sort of) in hiring and firing clergy under primary lay leadership. That’s it. It is a particular heritage which I treasure, and wish to see continue, but it assumes very little about wider structures, which have changed radically and vary widely over the last mere century.
So I agree with Michael’s thoughts bout how the Disciples need a new chapter, not a new paragraph, but I want us all to be very clear about what the last chapter said, and where the plot necessarily takes us in broad outline.
I hope this dialogue continues, because the current structure has no future to speak of ahead of it, at all. We can shape a new chapter, or get one handed to us by the courts numbered chapter 11 or thereabouts.
A response to:
http://homepage.mac.com/madcck/myblog/C942134880/E20051219214033/index.html
Michael Davison has issued a call for "Restructure" for the general manifestation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He asks that the decision makers and vision shapers of the general church boards and structures not start a new paragraph in revising how we are church on the wider level – beyond the congregational – but turn the page a begin a fresh chapter.
Undermining this clarion call is the knowledge all of us share who have been involved in regional and general activities through these last thirty plus years. What Michael is correct about is that Restructure ’67 was too tentative, out of fear that the restructionists would be painted as too radical, and then we would, ah, well . . . lose congregations, which we did anyhow. A third, half, more; it depends on how you frame the question. Would the new denominational structure have lost more, or fewer members and churches if they had been more drastic? Did the cautious approach, open to misinterpretation as maneuver and manipulation (framed as such by some who were, themselves, manipulating and maneuvering), actually cause more locations to "go independent"?
Adding to the complication, as those who were part of or witnesses to the Fifties and Sixties in "brotherhood and assembly life" would want to have said, is that they had to work with the structures they inherited. State societies with wide variation from place to place, general boards with their own investments and constituencies, and institutions that had been entirely independent from the early 1800’s were all part of the landscape that would go into making a general church body, with no element having authority over another. Some of the missional bodies in particular were tied by trusts and bylaws so as to limit their actions even with near unanimous agreement by their boards on new directions.
So what look in retrospect like weak compromises and wobbly lines of accountability are in fact the best deals that could be cut between the parts that make our fractious whole, such as it is. Our overall a-historical viewpoint (think churches with "Founded AD 33" on the cornerstone) has an immediate implication as well as a theological one: we don’t get how we ended up where we are because we know so little about the paths that led here. My own attempt to redress this gap for the Christian Church in Ohio, titled "Being Buckeye Disciples" can be seen at http://epicycles.blogspot.com (check the archive, and it’s a twelve page paper in .doc form).
While I feel very limited in how I can make comprehensive suggestions about current restructure options, I’d like to sketch out some of the issues that made the particular set of compromises from the "Restructure period" so un-viable in today’s mission context for the United States and Canada.
The office of General Minister and President is weak by design. Here too, the designers of the Design were concerned about the looming threat of churches disfellowshiping through the early Sixties. Regional ministers or their contemporary equivalent were adamant that this position in the Design have essentially no authority at all. A cynic might say they were protecting their own "episcopal" turf, but a more accurate and fair reading is that the sheer volume of concern from congregations on the edge made them sincerely interested in making sure that new OGMP was unthreatening to such interests. And yes, it served their own interests, as well.
The boards behind the now Homeland Ministries, Global Ministries, Church Extension, and the Pension Fund are rooted (except for the Pension Fund) in campaigns to raise capital from the 1800’s, and each has provisions built into their bylaws that greatly complicate a simple motion to hand their assets over to OGMP, or the assembly (the action which was actually proposed in those days, hamstrung by the fact that legally, there is no legal person standing in as "the assembly" though our internal rules all talk as if there is), or some brand new third party as new Structure.
One way of understanding this is the recent action, surprising to some, of the Pension Fund announcing that they would soon pull out of providing Church Wide Health Care without certain major concessions by the General Board and Assembly. Rather than having any affirmative obligation to provide something they just began offering as a courtesy not so very long ago – about the time of Restructure, in fact – they had to remind us all that their charter (a very legal document indeed) forbids them from using any of their proceeds for purposes other than pensions, and insurance obligations were about to (in fact, had already) spend pension money on paying CWHC bills. They as a board faced the very real likelihood of participant lawsuits for "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if they continued pretending things could go on as they had.
Without going into detail, each group has a public face ("Global Ministries") and a legal reality ("United Christian Missionary Society", dating back to 1849), of which the former can be fiddled with endlessly in terms of name, logo, press releases, and activities, but the latter having fairly tightly constrained options on how and how much to spend of the assets they control.
As a church body/denomination, there is in fact a very simple resolution to these limits. Walk away. Just move on, create new structures from scratch, and maybe someday qualify for support from the boards which, in fact, would continue. If pretty much everyone just walked away from the Disciples of Christ, there are millions of dollars held "in trust" that no one would "get," but would need to be given in the prescribed measured doses that define them, to activities in line with their obligations.
So we have funds that are reliable, but small: not small enough to walk away from, but small enough to require more income to do, um, well, what we’re used to seeing them doing. Unlike congregational giving, you can pretty much count on what’s coming in from it, another attractive quality, but like congregational giving, you can’t just up the amount. (Footnote: the institutions, namely some seminaries and campus ministries, who had rules loose enough to let them start withdrawing capital in a pinch, have all either already done so to the point of extinction, or saw the edge coming soon enough to pass non-breakable rules to forbid themselves from doing it anymore.)
Still, it seems worth pointing out that we could, as a denomination – as the General Board & Assembly – just create a new structure on a blank sheet of paper in pretty much any two year period, as long as you do it with no assumptions about income. All the mechanisms exist to do that right now. But if you have to plug together autonomous giving from congregations/regions with the boards of HM, GM, CE, and PF, respecting everyone’s prerogatives under the law, you can only get . . . what we have. If a new structure was proposed as a truly autonomous upper judicatory, CE and PF would go on basically as they are, and GM would have their stable of missionaries, and HM would . . . I have no idea what they would do. I’d have to read their trust documents to know for sure. After obligatory passthroughs they would have enough money to rent some office space and get a receptionist and a staffer and a half, I’d guess, which is just about where they’re at anyhow.
Then there’s the regions. Oddly enough, to me at least, few know or realize that the regions to this day have some major embedded differences in governance and polity. Some have a strong bishop, others more of an executive director who implements the board’s will, such as more than thirty people who meet four to six times a year have a will (no matter how meaningful the worship time they share).
There are regions with major assets tied up as outlined above, and there are regions who hold a reversion clause on much of the property held by congregations, a shocking idea in some parts of Discipledom. There are regions who have developed an active "Order of Ministry" for their clergy which is a vital center for church life, and others who are heavily centered on their camp or retreat center property, with clergy pretty much interchangeable employees. In all of these, their ability to turn major authority over to a strong vision casting General Pastor-type person is limited, even should the regional board or cabinet want to, by their assets whether physical or fiscal.
On the other hand, if they were to tear the identity of "church" away from the assets and create a new structure from scratch, they could do it tomorrow in most regions. Again, to illustrate for those who are baffled by what I am saying (not proposing, not yet, anyhow), let me offer up Christmount, in North Carolina. A large retreat center, which is a great asset to the region that surrounds them, but if every Disciple disappeared into the Mothership tomorrow, Christmount would continue. Their fundraising mailing list would require some major revision, but they have their own (not enough, I’m told) endowment, a board which owns their property, and their own management plan which includes regional goals and vision, but as a courtesy, not as an absolute legal obligation. Ditto some of the funds and causes which regional boards manage but do not, to the final dollar, control.
Unrealistic? Sure it is, which is why no one has done it. But the moment you commit to creating an authority structure that automatically defers to other legal entities, you commit to managing a shell corporation, not a management structure. We talk management structures a whole bunch, but we actually operate shell corporations.
So many regions have turned, somewhat by default and modestly by design, to creating ever tighter personnel structures. Almost no region in the Disciples had a structure, let alone assets, tied to clergy and ordination, other than a few scholarship programs managed by Commissions on Ministry.
You can require almost anything you want of clergy, unlike congregations who own their property and usually control their budget to a fault ("no one’s gonna tell us how to spend our money!" ™) even as to health insurance. But ministerial standing or licenses are given or withheld entirely by regions since Restructure, though many effectively controlled it before. So the last few years have seen a significant increase in the time and energy regional Commissions on Ministry put into "standing management," requiring creditable but mandatory workshops on sexual abuse, anti-racism, and slated mandates for continuing education or regional participation.
All of which says we prefer to manage that which we can control. Right now, clergy are about all we can control in the Disciples of Christ, so we’re giving them a pretty good once over twice.
But what if . . . what if we tried to create a structure without control? An "accountability hierarchy" without coercion and minimal standardization? There is no management model that will affirm us, but we might be able to feel our way to a Biblical model that could resonate with liberals and conservatives alike. To address Michael’s proposal in detail:
"A new structure could be:
Office of General Minister and President is responsible for proclaiming the Disciple vision of being Christian. . ."
Ok by me; and we could do this right now.
"All DMF funding would flow through the OGMP for the General manifestation."
Let’s come back to this one.
"Disciples Home Mission, Overseas Mission, Church Extension would dissolve their boards and become accountable to OGMP and the CC(DOC) board"
They can’t do it, so this is a nonstarter unless we’re just walkin’ away from the dollars, which we could, in theory . . .
"Working with representatives from the College of Regional Ministers and constituency groups, the GMP would determine the needed services that the General manifestation would offer regions and congregations."
Which they will/are/have been telling us they are doing, but those darn congregations won’t come to the programs and workshops and events we put on! Without sounding like a Bill O’Reilly free-marketeer, there is a remarkable resistance to accepting that if attendance at certain kinds of stuff keeps dropping, that might be meaningful data.
In fact, as Michael points out early in his piece, there are "Disciple dollars" a plenty floating around out there. Week of Compassion, which is amazingly (why is it amazing, he asked himself?) transparent and responsive, gets major funding. I get a weekly – or more – email telling me what they’re doing, with specific things retold, with our giving, and regular breakdowns of the budget in terms any financial idiot (read: most clergy) can understand. I share them in worship because they tell compelling stories, I use them in print materials because they are concise and use everyday language.
"Regions would covenant with each other to keep 47% of the giving to fund regional ministries, and each region's board would affirm this covenant at each regional assembly. Regions would send 53% to OGMP, which would place 3% in a pool developed with the Christian Church Foundation to aid regions with funding issues. The OGMP would then determine the use of the 50% sent to them for the services and ministries they provide by whatever means is appropriate and affirmed by the CC(DOC) board"
Oy. Aside from asking how this would work, let’s set it aside for the moment. No precedent from Scripture or Tradition mandates or affirms this model, anyhow, so we don’t need to wrangle over why people "should" want to follow this model, or how to convince (i.e., force) regions to go along with this.
What happens to the moral and theological authority of the wider church if they simply work with what they receive directly for their ministry? That’s what pastors and congregations do, and – while I know there is very solid Christian teaching and preaching behind mission support – the understanding of what and why we give to middle and upper judicatories has been lost since Restructure behind a screen on indirect obligation and vague guilt.
Where we’re heading now is a version of exactly that: a de facto defunding of wider ministries, based partly on the stresses of supporting an imperfectly professionalized clergy (a whole ‘nother essay) and partly on a growing sense that whatever they are doing in the regional and general office, it ain’t ministry in any way that we understand (I point the reader to Michael’s post on GYC just a bit earlier as Exhibit A).
So walk away. Lose a certain amount of security and full-time staff positions, but gain one of the most amazing tools in the modern world for ministry, a blank sheet of paper, free of legal entanglements. Look at the Episcopal Church USA, which could solve many of the problems weighing them down if people didn’t care about real estate. Leave out the real estate, and you either have two very vital faith bodies with different approaches growing out of a common worship tradition, or a common body made up of significantly diverse interpretations. But leave in the stone arches and fine green lawns, and people have to either agree or go . . . and then some in leadership are indignant that so many are going.
Disciples do not have all that much of a unique heritage, contrary to popular belief. We have weekly communion combined with immersion of mature believers, and congregational ownership of property tied to autonomy (sort of) in hiring and firing clergy under primary lay leadership. That’s it. It is a particular heritage which I treasure, and wish to see continue, but it assumes very little about wider structures, which have changed radically and vary widely over the last mere century.
So I agree with Michael’s thoughts bout how the Disciples need a new chapter, not a new paragraph, but I want us all to be very clear about what the last chapter said, and where the plot necessarily takes us in broad outline.
I hope this dialogue continues, because the current structure has no future to speak of ahead of it, at all. We can shape a new chapter, or get one handed to us by the courts numbered chapter 11 or thereabouts.
Being Buckeye Disciples -- final post of document!
* * * * * * *
Appendix
[Due to budget, format, and various other unexplained changes in the proposed volume, "Ohio Religious Experience 1803-2003," what OU Press published as the book "Religion in Ohio" included about half of this for our denominational chapter, with assorted additions and edits for format consistency contributed by Dennis Sparks. I think it makes a helpful closing note in this extended reflection – JBG]
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
By Jeff Gill
Restoration of "the ancient order of things" and building Christian unity make up the core teaching, or "plea" of Restoration movement churches. Even in the division between Disciples of Christ, Churches of Christ, and independent Christian Churches, all three branches of the Restoration Movement (sometimes called the "Stone-Campbell movement" by historians) still claim this essential plea, and look back to early leaders like Thomas Campbell with their affirmation that "the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one."
How did a movement based on the need for Christian unity, and discarding creeds and doctrine for a re-emphasis on New Testament teaching as a model for church governance, end up becoming a denomination, let alone three? The Restoration Movement story is told in Ohio much as it might be for the United States and Canada as a whole.
From frontier areas of America as they were around 1800, the need for flexible church organization and the desire for leadership (whether ordained or not) sent ripples of change through existing denominational structures. Starting in the Ohio River valley and other margins of settlement, preachers found themselves inviting Christians together who had not worshiped in one place back in Europe, or even along the Atlantic shore. People asked to join in communion celebrations who had not seen clergy of their denomination for months or even years, as well as needing baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Communities used to doing everything from barn raising to militia drill together wanted to hold revival services together, too. Pastors started to wonder, "Why not?"
Barton Stone, a Presbyterian pastor in northern Kentucky, hosted a revival at Cane Ridge in 1801. Methodists and Baptists and scattered other Christian groups were represented in both the preaching and hearing at this celebrated event which drew in thousands from both sides of the Ohio. Presbyterian authorities were highly critical after reports of the eclectic nature of the services, and their attacks led to Stone and others leaving their presbytery, or local organization of churches, and forming their own.
But even that they shortly dissolved, expressing their desire in 1804 to "sink into union with the Body of Christ." This group, calling themselves simply Christians, acknowledged no organization above that of congregation, and pointed to the scriptures as their single authoritative guide. As Duane Cummins has pointed out, "the formalized church of the time. . .became irrelevant to the frontier settlers." Tradition and distant formal authority was not a factor in their social setting, and carried little weight in how the settlers turned towards their God.
Not long after, and equally near the waters of the Ohio, a Scots-Irish preacher came by invitation to western Pennsylvania. Thomas Campbell was admittedly weary of the divisions in the Presbyterian church of northern Ireland, but hoped as he left family behind in 1807 that a new start for Christ’s church could be found in this New World. Instead, the disputes over doctrine had come with the other baggage into the frontier settlements along Chartiers and Cross Creeks, and Thomas was quickly embroiled in the same controversies over open communion tables and who was "fit" to serve and receive at the Lord ’s Table.
Like Stone in Kentucky, Campbell in Pennsylvania withdrew from denominational structures before he could be rejected, and organized on the local, congregational level. He defended his actions in a publication called "Declaration and Address," which closed with thirteen propositions for the restoration of the New Testament church and Christian unity, starting with his declaration about the nature of "the church of Christ upon earth" and continuing in words best summarized by the reforming motto that predates both Stone and Campbell, "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."
Almost immediately upon the publication of "Declaration and Address" in 1809, the rest of Thomas Campbell’s family came to Washington, PA. His 21 year old son Alexander had helped his mother Jane hold the family together through a shipwreck during their first attempt to reach America, and nearly a year in Glasgow, Scotland waiting for their next chance to seek passage aboard the "Hibernia."
Alexander had used the unexpected delay well, attending college at the University of Glasgow, in part out of a commitment to Christian ministry made during the shipwreck that brought them there. He was exposed to Scotland reformers like Glas, Sandeman, and the Haldanes, whose ideas about congregational independence, weekly communion, and believer’s baptism by immersion (given at the "age of accountability" instead of baptizing infants) were to have a lasting impact on the Campbells.
Thomas was relieved to find, when he and Alexander were reunited, that just before departing Glasgow, Alexander too had broken with the Church of Scotland, primarily over the practice of "testing" church members to determine their fitness to receive communion at one of the few times a year the Lord’s Table was set. Both father and son had come to see that baptism and communion are freely given gifts of God through the church to help make souls ready for grace, and that requiring signs of grace before permitting access to those sacraments (or "ordinances" in the language of the reformers) was putting human-made barriers in the way of God’s renewing activity in the world.
During the next year, father and son joined with other families in their area in forming the Christian Association of Washington, PA; meeting in a variety of locations, they soon felt the need to build a place of worship convenient to fellow believers who were coming from all along the valleys and ridges draining into the Ohio. At Brush Run in 1811, right up against the northern panhandle of what was still Virginia (now West Virginia), they built their first church. A fateful trip to borrow precious books, rare on the frontier, took Alexander across the Virginia border to what is now Bethany, West Virginia, where he would meet his future wife Margaret and the place where – when home! – he would live out the rest of his life. He would be ordained by the Brush Run elders on New Year’s Day of 1812.
The newly married couple almost made it to Ohio, now a state, when they considered a move in 1814 to the Zanesville area with a number of younger families out of Brush Run. The plan to pioneer a reforming community, worshiping together and educating their children in the light of "clear teachings of the Bible," was put on a back burner when Margaret’s father offered his Buffalo Creek home and acreage to the young Campbells for one dollar.
Farming, raising a family, and leading a local congregation could have easily been the rest of Alexander’s story, but the desire to be part of a larger fellowship and supportive Christian community led the Brush Run reformers into and out of Baptist associations, which seemed at first a congenial home for their particular religious beliefs and practices. The frontier respect for autonomy and independence continued to attract supporters, and also kept them in conflict with church structures and traditions. These conflicts led them to a firm objection to doctrinal confessions and creeds "as a test of fellowship," even when they might have agreed with the substance of their content. The "Christian Baptist" was a publication begun by Campbell in 1823 to share more widely their belief that a simple "Good Confession" of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was the only requirement for membership in a fellowship of "Disciples," which was scripturally his preferred name for their churches.
The final break with the Mahoning (Baptist) Association in Austintown, OH in 1830 led to a change in the title of Campbell’s publication, and a new self-understanding as "a Restoration movement." Named from Alexander’s belief that the work of the church was to teach and embody the future millennium of Christ’s reign over creation, "The Millennial Harbinger" would carry the Restorationist message not just all across the frontier but ultimately around the world. A compelling preacher from Pittsburgh named Walter Scott joined the growing movement, and began in the Western Reserve area of Ohio to preach in existing churches and begin new congregations. In years to come, many of these northeast Ohioans would follow the frontier to Indiana and Iowa, or south through Missouri to Oklahoma and Texas, repeating the process of church planting they experienced back in Ohio and spreading their model of congregationally governed churches with lay leadership empowered to serve communion and baptize upon hearing the simple words of Peter’s Good Confession.
When Scott moved the center of his ministry down to the Cincinnati area, more connections developed between the "Christians" of Barton Stone and the "Disciples" who had been influenced by the Campbells. New Year’s Day 1832 brought these two streams together in a formal greeting at a worship service in Lexington, KY. While these currents brought strength and power to the Restorationist movement, they also introduced strong forces that Alexander was only just able to hold together until his death in 1866.
As the 1800’s drew to a close, issues of slavery and the Civil War, modernism and "innovations" such as musical instruments in worship, and resistance to co-operative mission work as "unscriptural" led the Churches of Christ down a separate path. Independent Christian Churches have loosely organized around the North American Christian Convention as they parted from the congregations and state societies that came together as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the formal name and structure adopted in the late 1960’s. The Christian Church in Ohio, one of over 30 regional bodies for Disciples’ congregations, grew out of those state missionary and Sunday School societies whose co-operative work had grown out of the initial association started in Cincinnati in 1849, with Alexander Campbell as first president.
Memorable figures from our past still inspire us today, reminding Ohio Disciples of their traditions of honoring education and public service: embodied by names like James A. Garfield, the only ordained minister to serve as President of the United States, and earlier president of Hiram College, a Disciples’ foundation following in the example of Campbell’s Bethany College. During the last century, notable figures like Gaines Cook, Herald Monroe, and Howard Ratcliff have led the evolving institution that we now call the Christian Church in Ohio, made up of 200 congregations around the state. Today, Ohio Disciples look with pride to their camp and conference programs for youth and adults celebrating over 50 years of vital ministry at Camp Christian near Magnetic Springs, and honor the leadership role our denomination continues to play in ecumenical bodies like the Ohio Council of Churches and Churches Uniting in Christ. With Barton Stone, we still affirm that "Christian unity is our polar star."
* * * * * * *
Appendix
[Due to budget, format, and various other unexplained changes in the proposed volume, "Ohio Religious Experience 1803-2003," what OU Press published as the book "Religion in Ohio" included about half of this for our denominational chapter, with assorted additions and edits for format consistency contributed by Dennis Sparks. I think it makes a helpful closing note in this extended reflection – JBG]
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
By Jeff Gill
Restoration of "the ancient order of things" and building Christian unity make up the core teaching, or "plea" of Restoration movement churches. Even in the division between Disciples of Christ, Churches of Christ, and independent Christian Churches, all three branches of the Restoration Movement (sometimes called the "Stone-Campbell movement" by historians) still claim this essential plea, and look back to early leaders like Thomas Campbell with their affirmation that "the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one."
How did a movement based on the need for Christian unity, and discarding creeds and doctrine for a re-emphasis on New Testament teaching as a model for church governance, end up becoming a denomination, let alone three? The Restoration Movement story is told in Ohio much as it might be for the United States and Canada as a whole.
From frontier areas of America as they were around 1800, the need for flexible church organization and the desire for leadership (whether ordained or not) sent ripples of change through existing denominational structures. Starting in the Ohio River valley and other margins of settlement, preachers found themselves inviting Christians together who had not worshiped in one place back in Europe, or even along the Atlantic shore. People asked to join in communion celebrations who had not seen clergy of their denomination for months or even years, as well as needing baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Communities used to doing everything from barn raising to militia drill together wanted to hold revival services together, too. Pastors started to wonder, "Why not?"
Barton Stone, a Presbyterian pastor in northern Kentucky, hosted a revival at Cane Ridge in 1801. Methodists and Baptists and scattered other Christian groups were represented in both the preaching and hearing at this celebrated event which drew in thousands from both sides of the Ohio. Presbyterian authorities were highly critical after reports of the eclectic nature of the services, and their attacks led to Stone and others leaving their presbytery, or local organization of churches, and forming their own.
But even that they shortly dissolved, expressing their desire in 1804 to "sink into union with the Body of Christ." This group, calling themselves simply Christians, acknowledged no organization above that of congregation, and pointed to the scriptures as their single authoritative guide. As Duane Cummins has pointed out, "the formalized church of the time. . .became irrelevant to the frontier settlers." Tradition and distant formal authority was not a factor in their social setting, and carried little weight in how the settlers turned towards their God.
Not long after, and equally near the waters of the Ohio, a Scots-Irish preacher came by invitation to western Pennsylvania. Thomas Campbell was admittedly weary of the divisions in the Presbyterian church of northern Ireland, but hoped as he left family behind in 1807 that a new start for Christ’s church could be found in this New World. Instead, the disputes over doctrine had come with the other baggage into the frontier settlements along Chartiers and Cross Creeks, and Thomas was quickly embroiled in the same controversies over open communion tables and who was "fit" to serve and receive at the Lord ’s Table.
Like Stone in Kentucky, Campbell in Pennsylvania withdrew from denominational structures before he could be rejected, and organized on the local, congregational level. He defended his actions in a publication called "Declaration and Address," which closed with thirteen propositions for the restoration of the New Testament church and Christian unity, starting with his declaration about the nature of "the church of Christ upon earth" and continuing in words best summarized by the reforming motto that predates both Stone and Campbell, "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."
Almost immediately upon the publication of "Declaration and Address" in 1809, the rest of Thomas Campbell’s family came to Washington, PA. His 21 year old son Alexander had helped his mother Jane hold the family together through a shipwreck during their first attempt to reach America, and nearly a year in Glasgow, Scotland waiting for their next chance to seek passage aboard the "Hibernia."
Alexander had used the unexpected delay well, attending college at the University of Glasgow, in part out of a commitment to Christian ministry made during the shipwreck that brought them there. He was exposed to Scotland reformers like Glas, Sandeman, and the Haldanes, whose ideas about congregational independence, weekly communion, and believer’s baptism by immersion (given at the "age of accountability" instead of baptizing infants) were to have a lasting impact on the Campbells.
Thomas was relieved to find, when he and Alexander were reunited, that just before departing Glasgow, Alexander too had broken with the Church of Scotland, primarily over the practice of "testing" church members to determine their fitness to receive communion at one of the few times a year the Lord’s Table was set. Both father and son had come to see that baptism and communion are freely given gifts of God through the church to help make souls ready for grace, and that requiring signs of grace before permitting access to those sacraments (or "ordinances" in the language of the reformers) was putting human-made barriers in the way of God’s renewing activity in the world.
During the next year, father and son joined with other families in their area in forming the Christian Association of Washington, PA; meeting in a variety of locations, they soon felt the need to build a place of worship convenient to fellow believers who were coming from all along the valleys and ridges draining into the Ohio. At Brush Run in 1811, right up against the northern panhandle of what was still Virginia (now West Virginia), they built their first church. A fateful trip to borrow precious books, rare on the frontier, took Alexander across the Virginia border to what is now Bethany, West Virginia, where he would meet his future wife Margaret and the place where – when home! – he would live out the rest of his life. He would be ordained by the Brush Run elders on New Year’s Day of 1812.
The newly married couple almost made it to Ohio, now a state, when they considered a move in 1814 to the Zanesville area with a number of younger families out of Brush Run. The plan to pioneer a reforming community, worshiping together and educating their children in the light of "clear teachings of the Bible," was put on a back burner when Margaret’s father offered his Buffalo Creek home and acreage to the young Campbells for one dollar.
Farming, raising a family, and leading a local congregation could have easily been the rest of Alexander’s story, but the desire to be part of a larger fellowship and supportive Christian community led the Brush Run reformers into and out of Baptist associations, which seemed at first a congenial home for their particular religious beliefs and practices. The frontier respect for autonomy and independence continued to attract supporters, and also kept them in conflict with church structures and traditions. These conflicts led them to a firm objection to doctrinal confessions and creeds "as a test of fellowship," even when they might have agreed with the substance of their content. The "Christian Baptist" was a publication begun by Campbell in 1823 to share more widely their belief that a simple "Good Confession" of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was the only requirement for membership in a fellowship of "Disciples," which was scripturally his preferred name for their churches.
The final break with the Mahoning (Baptist) Association in Austintown, OH in 1830 led to a change in the title of Campbell’s publication, and a new self-understanding as "a Restoration movement." Named from Alexander’s belief that the work of the church was to teach and embody the future millennium of Christ’s reign over creation, "The Millennial Harbinger" would carry the Restorationist message not just all across the frontier but ultimately around the world. A compelling preacher from Pittsburgh named Walter Scott joined the growing movement, and began in the Western Reserve area of Ohio to preach in existing churches and begin new congregations. In years to come, many of these northeast Ohioans would follow the frontier to Indiana and Iowa, or south through Missouri to Oklahoma and Texas, repeating the process of church planting they experienced back in Ohio and spreading their model of congregationally governed churches with lay leadership empowered to serve communion and baptize upon hearing the simple words of Peter’s Good Confession.
When Scott moved the center of his ministry down to the Cincinnati area, more connections developed between the "Christians" of Barton Stone and the "Disciples" who had been influenced by the Campbells. New Year’s Day 1832 brought these two streams together in a formal greeting at a worship service in Lexington, KY. While these currents brought strength and power to the Restorationist movement, they also introduced strong forces that Alexander was only just able to hold together until his death in 1866.
As the 1800’s drew to a close, issues of slavery and the Civil War, modernism and "innovations" such as musical instruments in worship, and resistance to co-operative mission work as "unscriptural" led the Churches of Christ down a separate path. Independent Christian Churches have loosely organized around the North American Christian Convention as they parted from the congregations and state societies that came together as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the formal name and structure adopted in the late 1960’s. The Christian Church in Ohio, one of over 30 regional bodies for Disciples’ congregations, grew out of those state missionary and Sunday School societies whose co-operative work had grown out of the initial association started in Cincinnati in 1849, with Alexander Campbell as first president.
Memorable figures from our past still inspire us today, reminding Ohio Disciples of their traditions of honoring education and public service: embodied by names like James A. Garfield, the only ordained minister to serve as President of the United States, and earlier president of Hiram College, a Disciples’ foundation following in the example of Campbell’s Bethany College. During the last century, notable figures like Gaines Cook, Herald Monroe, and Howard Ratcliff have led the evolving institution that we now call the Christian Church in Ohio, made up of 200 congregations around the state. Today, Ohio Disciples look with pride to their camp and conference programs for youth and adults celebrating over 50 years of vital ministry at Camp Christian near Magnetic Springs, and honor the leadership role our denomination continues to play in ecumenical bodies like the Ohio Council of Churches and Churches Uniting in Christ. With Barton Stone, we still affirm that "Christian unity is our polar star."
Being Buckeye Disciples post 4
(Part numbers in the document are from the original full text)
Part Three -- Some Consequences
"Christ has risen." Whoever believes that
Should not behave as we do,
Who have lost the up, the down, the right, the left, heavens, abysses,
And try somehow to muddle on, in cars, in beds,
Men clutching at women, women clutching at men,
Falling, rising, putting coffee on the table,
Buttering bread, for here’s another day.
Six Lectures in Verse, Lecture V
Czeslaw Milosz
Some of the concerns recently voiced among Disciple clergy have to do with a trend that is seen by many as a more coercive, punitive, and legalistic approach toward forcing coherence and community among the members of the Body. Frankenstein methods make for monsters, bolted firmly together but only weakly in harmony between the constituent parts. Good intentions, whether as to clergy sexual ethics or a stand against racism as sin, can pave a long stretch of road to perdition.
How are some of these dismembered, reanimated parts related to who and how we as Disciples understand covenant? Are we digging up limbs from Episcopal or Reformed traditions and trying to graft them with lightning bolts of authority onto our own wounded body? Is there an integral reason for some of the most public actions we’ve taken recently as a region other than "other Christian bodies have done it, and so can we"? We can teach a good thing in a bad way, further undermining by unconscious example the fragile connections we carry into those interactions.
I’d like to go back to my marriage example, and quote a stretch from the tentative close of the meditation, a hypothetical wedding speech/message, especially since covenant is the key concept at work here:
"But today, Bill and Serena are making a new claim: Their relationship will not be characterized by condition, but instead by something that is called covenant.
Please notice that I didn’t say contract. A contract is an agreement between parties under certain conditions and is enforceable by law. Certainly the marriage license that will be signed later has a sense of contract to it, but that license isn’t what makes the marriage.
The kind of covenant that I’m talking about has a lot to do with the God of the Bible. According to the Bible, God established covenant relationships with people. He didn’t negotiate or bargain with them, but in essence said to them, "I will be your God and you will be my people." God took the initiative in these relationships and promised to be faithful to the people. In turn, he called them to be faithful in their love and worship of him.
The people didn’t always live faithfully toward God. Yet, God remained faithful to them. Covenant is all about faithfulness and promise.
So what does this have to do with Bill and Serena? They have already spoken to me of their shared commitment toward one another. They have made promises to one another to live faithfully together. In a few minutes they are going to speak those commitments and promises before you and before God. They are making public something that already exists in their hearts: The transition from the world of condition to the world of covenant. There will be no looking over the shoulder, no question about permanence. It is their intention that theirs be a life of faithfulness and promise."
How do we live out covenant without contracts and enforcement? With the Biblical example of loving initiative as our guide, started with Noah and Abram and vividly fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, let me offer these self-giving proposals for our regional life. Most of these are means of providing an example, of living out a different kind of embodiment appropriate to the kind of "church" a region is to Disciples:
1. A Training emphasis for the region, aka "equipping the saints." Seminary is not seen by hardly anyone (including many seminary faculty) as a place where the work of parish ministry is communicated – or even necessarily affirmed. So why not take our vaunted Ohio certification and supervisory process, plus the human resources of a region like ours, and create a benchmark training program for new pastors during their first three to five years. . .when the odds of departing ministry are also the highest. This also allows us to offer a gift while mandating a certification or set of benchmarks, instead of just imposing requirements.
Elders also need and in many cases want training, but our workshops at regional assemblies et alia assume basic training and orientation to Disciples’ theology, history, and polity, and offer advanced skills, which can be confusing for many/most elders who aren’t up to speed with the concepts and principles involved. A majority of elders in many/most of our churches (to repeat myself) did not grow up Disciple, and carry a wide variety of assumptions about how the larger church works into their service and teaching.
And the diaconate and officers common to most of our churches would benefit from the availability of regular baseline training. Each of these would give regional staff and leadership an opportunity to scout for prospects to groom for regional leadership.
(Note: we and other regions/conferences already do this for camp directors and counselors, which gives us a good model to work from and an example to point towards.)
2. Focus on Gift and Call. If you know how to translate from Catholic dialect to Protestant lingo, see www.siena.org for a model here. If covenant has any meaning at all, then God is giving to us more than we are being asked to give: how are we faithfully expecting and anticipating God’s participation in this covenant?
The unique training issue for us as Ohio Disciples is the near-universal phenomena of "Nominating Committees," which in many congregations are statutorily required to exclude key leadership (pastors, even elders as a whole) and are deeply shaped by secular models of "slot filling" along the lines of Kiwanis, Lions, and Eastern Star. Christian leadership needs to focus on identifying spiritual gifts, from administration (Rom. 12:8) to hospitality (Rom. 12:13) to persistence (II Tim. 4:2), and the ministry of linking, of re-membering the Body of Christ together with where their vocation, their calling can be fulfilled. My favorite quote as to this profound theological truth is Fredrick Buechner’s: "God’s calling is where your heart’s desire and the world’s deepest need intersect."
This also has everything to do with burnout as both a clergy and laity phenomena. I have a near heretical belief that burnout has almost nothing to do with how much/how hard you work, and everything to do with whether or not you have a sense of calling about your work, with the consequent ability to be spiritually fed by right use of the gifts God gives you. You can burn out on one small task or in a 30 hour a week job if it feels at odds with where and who you are called to be, or if you cannot be filled faster than you are being emptied by the work.
Elected, appointed, or employed staff of the church (in any manifestation) need to have gifts identified in line with the call to be extended. Job descriptions help, but they don’t replace a whole lotta prayer and discernment versus slot filling, whether for the diaconate locally or for regional president and pastor. And the discernment goes both ways, toward what we call someone to do, as well as illumining whether an individual is the one gifted to fulfill the call, even when the search has gone on a long, long time.
By the same token, if the responsibility/authority balance is out of skew ("You are held entirely accountable for how this turns out, and we give you precisely no influence in how the task will be done") then whether extravert or intuitive, introvert or sensing, the person in the role will be drained while the structure blocks the hidden sources of renewal, the involvements that can fill one even as the demands tax you to your limits. God’s gifts are promised to those involved in the work of the vineyard, but we can stop their delivery at the garden gate; for our leaders in congregation, region, and general life, we often do just that, and then wonder why the ideal person for a job staggers away some time later looking dazed and weary.
3. Regional elders. Well, recent developments have outstripped suggestions here, and save me some space; but let’s make sure this isn’t seen as simply a cost savings measure for the short term – this is a good idea even if we had tons o’ cash and staff to spare. We need to be visible, be present, be embodied, and be teaching and preaching as the region in the congregations, and for most of our folk, that rarely happens. For implementation, see items 1 and 2.
4. Who’s Afraid of WWW Woolf? Again, we’re already seeing some movement on this front with the ministers’ mailing, but under the auspices of "cost savings." Nope, this is just plain a good idea; it is, in fact, the iceberg tip of a good idea. We need further conversation and communication about what the Restoration Christianity theology and ethos in Ohio means for our day, and in our day that means a) e-mail lists, message boards, and weblogs, b) on-line publicity and registration for events and programs, c) teleconference and internet connectivity for regional staff and contract workers (see items 3 & 5), and d) distance learning for things like items 1 & 2. Until recently, it appeared that faxes were about the only technology we had adopted since 1975.
This point is not about efficiency only, but one about increased communication on intentional, structured grounds to explore what contemporary Disciple theology says about the questions that nag at us, and to share the results of that conversation. As the general office discovered through the discussion boards at disciples.org, there are many challenges to doing this, but the problem is that someone has to be willing to shape the discussion – it doesn’t just happen. A discussion board left to its own devices is not pure democracy, but becomes total anarchy in a matter of months. A managed, moderated discussion (see http://www.marriagedebate.com/mdblog.php for one example) can move in constructive directions fairly steadily, but someone has to be willing to take on the teaching office, on-line just as in a circle of folding chairs.
5. Staffing and Portfolios. Along with technology, new approaches towards organizational strategy and institutional affiliation indicate that a more dispersed approach to staffing should be deployed. This may include a new look at what makes for an ideal location, or even the best configuration is for the regional office, as well. Rented space, contracted work, and more effective use of volunteer help are more and more common in congregational life and with new church starts – should the region be able to model and teach by example on this, as well? Fellowship ministries (women’s, men’s, youth and young adult), special initiatives (see items 1 through 4, for instance), and other programmatic administrative responsibilities could be assigned to volunteer or short-term paid individuals who have the identified gifts for a particular task and who can embody calling in their context. We already do this with three camps, but some still see that as "what we have to do because we don’t have enough staff." Affirming and supporting that kind of regional ministry as a positive option instead of "a second best that we’re settling for" opens the door to further application of the principle of "a pilgrim people."
We will always need full-time, set-apart, called individuals to serve the regional office; but "until someone can articulate a clear, strong vision for the regional manifestation of the Christian church, it will be difficult to support these regional positions." A gifted, talented lay member of our congregation here in Hebron said that in response to "how many regional staff do we really need;" which is another way of saying: first, we have to explain to people why we need one. Then, later, we start to extrapolate from that how many the region needs. That’s what my wife says, anyhow.
Part Four – A Conclusion
The Prince of This World governs number.
The singular is the hidden God’s dominion,
The Lord of rescues and exception’s Father
Who from the start inhabited my errors.
One against the multiplication table.
Particular, free from the general.
Without hands or eyes yet real.
Who is, every day, though unrevealed.
One And Many
Czeslaw Milosz
One place where covenant still feels real, where it never really went away, among both conservative and liberal Disciples’ congregations and even in the midst of some of our independent kin as well as with ecumenical partners, is at the communion table. We come to be made one, and where God has promised to be present, the signs of God’s presence are made manifest. God’s love is embodied in the beloved community assembled around the joyful feast, whether in the form of fish food and thimbles of grape-like juice (symbolizing our too often frugal parceling out of good news?), or through a hearty loaf and rich red wine. One bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing, which we bless. . .
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope
Zechariah 9:12
We have some great strengths in our Stone-Campbell tradition, in this branch of the Restoration Movement. The central rock on which we stand is a broken loaf of bread and a cup of crushed grapes, which by eating and drinking as Jesus asked "in remembrance of me" makes of us a whole, as the living Body of Christ. Our times of communion together as Buckeye Disciples have seen us through many times of brokenness and season of fracturing. I wonder if there aren’t more occasions, when we are about the task of re-membering the divided and drained body, when we could have communion together? Do we do that often enough, at regional board and commission meetings, at other gatherings whether district assemblies or work group rallies? And when we have communion before starting a shared task, we create a circumstance for reflection and conversation on the meaning of what we’re doing.
All things are possible at the table of remembrance and re-membering, even Widow McGillicutty speaking warmly to Mrs. Wilson and her rambunctious brood in the pew behind her. Even Elder Morris to the pierced teen can show acceptance and welcome when sharing the loaf and cup; the grim relax their jawlines and the hopeless take heart, while the weak become strong and the mighty unbend, even if only just a bit.
Everything we do in reforming the Christian Church in Ohio should be measured against the yardstick of the communion table, and we should say so as we’re doing it. Can we say such and such an action is in harmony with our practice of the Lord’s Table? How does this decision fit into the example of the Last Supper? In a church body with little affection for theological benchmarks, the communion table is one standard that everyone can agree on.
But just as we shouldn’t unconsciously appropriate random elements of other faith traditions (signs of the cross over the elements, presence lamps in the "sanctuary") without understanding the whole into which they fit, we shouldn’t imagine that our trials are ours in isolation, either. In the Catholic Church, where theology and ecclesiology is quite different from our own, the task of modern missions asks many of the same questions of Jesus’ friends, however they may live out that relationship. Quoting Amy Welborn on "open book," her weblog: "People are just so tired of institutional conversations. They are so tired of programs and mission statements and policies and long processes that stifle the Spirit. They are tired of layers put by institutions between them and God. The Church is an institution, and its purpose is not to obscure, but to enlighten, to give people not only guidance, but a place, a moment in time in which they know the presence of Jesus - healing, forgiving, binding, nourishing, loving. It is not that complicated. . . . There is nothing to re-invent. There is merely the ancient charge, the commission of Jesus to heed and put into action." (http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/)
You, by reading this, have shown – embodied, even – your interest in the reformation and restoration of a community of believers who see weekly communion, lay leadership, and belief preceding repentance leading to baptism, as crucial means towards having a personal relationship with God, as the Way of Christ into deeper fellowship and lasting meaning for today and into forever. Thank you for your interest and commitment, and know that our prayers and reflections together are part of that movement towards perfect communion that is God’s purpose in creation. We are not alone, we should be unafraid, and Jesus has indeed prayed "that they may all be one." (John 17:21)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time . . .
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one
Little Gidding
T.S. Eliot
(Part numbers in the document are from the original full text)
Part Three -- Some Consequences
"Christ has risen." Whoever believes that
Should not behave as we do,
Who have lost the up, the down, the right, the left, heavens, abysses,
And try somehow to muddle on, in cars, in beds,
Men clutching at women, women clutching at men,
Falling, rising, putting coffee on the table,
Buttering bread, for here’s another day.
Six Lectures in Verse, Lecture V
Czeslaw Milosz
Some of the concerns recently voiced among Disciple clergy have to do with a trend that is seen by many as a more coercive, punitive, and legalistic approach toward forcing coherence and community among the members of the Body. Frankenstein methods make for monsters, bolted firmly together but only weakly in harmony between the constituent parts. Good intentions, whether as to clergy sexual ethics or a stand against racism as sin, can pave a long stretch of road to perdition.
How are some of these dismembered, reanimated parts related to who and how we as Disciples understand covenant? Are we digging up limbs from Episcopal or Reformed traditions and trying to graft them with lightning bolts of authority onto our own wounded body? Is there an integral reason for some of the most public actions we’ve taken recently as a region other than "other Christian bodies have done it, and so can we"? We can teach a good thing in a bad way, further undermining by unconscious example the fragile connections we carry into those interactions.
I’d like to go back to my marriage example, and quote a stretch from the tentative close of the meditation, a hypothetical wedding speech/message, especially since covenant is the key concept at work here:
"But today, Bill and Serena are making a new claim: Their relationship will not be characterized by condition, but instead by something that is called covenant.
Please notice that I didn’t say contract. A contract is an agreement between parties under certain conditions and is enforceable by law. Certainly the marriage license that will be signed later has a sense of contract to it, but that license isn’t what makes the marriage.
The kind of covenant that I’m talking about has a lot to do with the God of the Bible. According to the Bible, God established covenant relationships with people. He didn’t negotiate or bargain with them, but in essence said to them, "I will be your God and you will be my people." God took the initiative in these relationships and promised to be faithful to the people. In turn, he called them to be faithful in their love and worship of him.
The people didn’t always live faithfully toward God. Yet, God remained faithful to them. Covenant is all about faithfulness and promise.
So what does this have to do with Bill and Serena? They have already spoken to me of their shared commitment toward one another. They have made promises to one another to live faithfully together. In a few minutes they are going to speak those commitments and promises before you and before God. They are making public something that already exists in their hearts: The transition from the world of condition to the world of covenant. There will be no looking over the shoulder, no question about permanence. It is their intention that theirs be a life of faithfulness and promise."
How do we live out covenant without contracts and enforcement? With the Biblical example of loving initiative as our guide, started with Noah and Abram and vividly fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, let me offer these self-giving proposals for our regional life. Most of these are means of providing an example, of living out a different kind of embodiment appropriate to the kind of "church" a region is to Disciples:
1. A Training emphasis for the region, aka "equipping the saints." Seminary is not seen by hardly anyone (including many seminary faculty) as a place where the work of parish ministry is communicated – or even necessarily affirmed. So why not take our vaunted Ohio certification and supervisory process, plus the human resources of a region like ours, and create a benchmark training program for new pastors during their first three to five years. . .when the odds of departing ministry are also the highest. This also allows us to offer a gift while mandating a certification or set of benchmarks, instead of just imposing requirements.
Elders also need and in many cases want training, but our workshops at regional assemblies et alia assume basic training and orientation to Disciples’ theology, history, and polity, and offer advanced skills, which can be confusing for many/most elders who aren’t up to speed with the concepts and principles involved. A majority of elders in many/most of our churches (to repeat myself) did not grow up Disciple, and carry a wide variety of assumptions about how the larger church works into their service and teaching.
And the diaconate and officers common to most of our churches would benefit from the availability of regular baseline training. Each of these would give regional staff and leadership an opportunity to scout for prospects to groom for regional leadership.
(Note: we and other regions/conferences already do this for camp directors and counselors, which gives us a good model to work from and an example to point towards.)
2. Focus on Gift and Call. If you know how to translate from Catholic dialect to Protestant lingo, see www.siena.org for a model here. If covenant has any meaning at all, then God is giving to us more than we are being asked to give: how are we faithfully expecting and anticipating God’s participation in this covenant?
The unique training issue for us as Ohio Disciples is the near-universal phenomena of "Nominating Committees," which in many congregations are statutorily required to exclude key leadership (pastors, even elders as a whole) and are deeply shaped by secular models of "slot filling" along the lines of Kiwanis, Lions, and Eastern Star. Christian leadership needs to focus on identifying spiritual gifts, from administration (Rom. 12:8) to hospitality (Rom. 12:13) to persistence (II Tim. 4:2), and the ministry of linking, of re-membering the Body of Christ together with where their vocation, their calling can be fulfilled. My favorite quote as to this profound theological truth is Fredrick Buechner’s: "God’s calling is where your heart’s desire and the world’s deepest need intersect."
This also has everything to do with burnout as both a clergy and laity phenomena. I have a near heretical belief that burnout has almost nothing to do with how much/how hard you work, and everything to do with whether or not you have a sense of calling about your work, with the consequent ability to be spiritually fed by right use of the gifts God gives you. You can burn out on one small task or in a 30 hour a week job if it feels at odds with where and who you are called to be, or if you cannot be filled faster than you are being emptied by the work.
Elected, appointed, or employed staff of the church (in any manifestation) need to have gifts identified in line with the call to be extended. Job descriptions help, but they don’t replace a whole lotta prayer and discernment versus slot filling, whether for the diaconate locally or for regional president and pastor. And the discernment goes both ways, toward what we call someone to do, as well as illumining whether an individual is the one gifted to fulfill the call, even when the search has gone on a long, long time.
By the same token, if the responsibility/authority balance is out of skew ("You are held entirely accountable for how this turns out, and we give you precisely no influence in how the task will be done") then whether extravert or intuitive, introvert or sensing, the person in the role will be drained while the structure blocks the hidden sources of renewal, the involvements that can fill one even as the demands tax you to your limits. God’s gifts are promised to those involved in the work of the vineyard, but we can stop their delivery at the garden gate; for our leaders in congregation, region, and general life, we often do just that, and then wonder why the ideal person for a job staggers away some time later looking dazed and weary.
3. Regional elders. Well, recent developments have outstripped suggestions here, and save me some space; but let’s make sure this isn’t seen as simply a cost savings measure for the short term – this is a good idea even if we had tons o’ cash and staff to spare. We need to be visible, be present, be embodied, and be teaching and preaching as the region in the congregations, and for most of our folk, that rarely happens. For implementation, see items 1 and 2.
4. Who’s Afraid of WWW Woolf? Again, we’re already seeing some movement on this front with the ministers’ mailing, but under the auspices of "cost savings." Nope, this is just plain a good idea; it is, in fact, the iceberg tip of a good idea. We need further conversation and communication about what the Restoration Christianity theology and ethos in Ohio means for our day, and in our day that means a) e-mail lists, message boards, and weblogs, b) on-line publicity and registration for events and programs, c) teleconference and internet connectivity for regional staff and contract workers (see items 3 & 5), and d) distance learning for things like items 1 & 2. Until recently, it appeared that faxes were about the only technology we had adopted since 1975.
This point is not about efficiency only, but one about increased communication on intentional, structured grounds to explore what contemporary Disciple theology says about the questions that nag at us, and to share the results of that conversation. As the general office discovered through the discussion boards at disciples.org, there are many challenges to doing this, but the problem is that someone has to be willing to shape the discussion – it doesn’t just happen. A discussion board left to its own devices is not pure democracy, but becomes total anarchy in a matter of months. A managed, moderated discussion (see http://www.marriagedebate.com/mdblog.php for one example) can move in constructive directions fairly steadily, but someone has to be willing to take on the teaching office, on-line just as in a circle of folding chairs.
5. Staffing and Portfolios. Along with technology, new approaches towards organizational strategy and institutional affiliation indicate that a more dispersed approach to staffing should be deployed. This may include a new look at what makes for an ideal location, or even the best configuration is for the regional office, as well. Rented space, contracted work, and more effective use of volunteer help are more and more common in congregational life and with new church starts – should the region be able to model and teach by example on this, as well? Fellowship ministries (women’s, men’s, youth and young adult), special initiatives (see items 1 through 4, for instance), and other programmatic administrative responsibilities could be assigned to volunteer or short-term paid individuals who have the identified gifts for a particular task and who can embody calling in their context. We already do this with three camps, but some still see that as "what we have to do because we don’t have enough staff." Affirming and supporting that kind of regional ministry as a positive option instead of "a second best that we’re settling for" opens the door to further application of the principle of "a pilgrim people."
We will always need full-time, set-apart, called individuals to serve the regional office; but "until someone can articulate a clear, strong vision for the regional manifestation of the Christian church, it will be difficult to support these regional positions." A gifted, talented lay member of our congregation here in Hebron said that in response to "how many regional staff do we really need;" which is another way of saying: first, we have to explain to people why we need one. Then, later, we start to extrapolate from that how many the region needs. That’s what my wife says, anyhow.
Part Four – A Conclusion
The Prince of This World governs number.
The singular is the hidden God’s dominion,
The Lord of rescues and exception’s Father
Who from the start inhabited my errors.
One against the multiplication table.
Particular, free from the general.
Without hands or eyes yet real.
Who is, every day, though unrevealed.
One And Many
Czeslaw Milosz
One place where covenant still feels real, where it never really went away, among both conservative and liberal Disciples’ congregations and even in the midst of some of our independent kin as well as with ecumenical partners, is at the communion table. We come to be made one, and where God has promised to be present, the signs of God’s presence are made manifest. God’s love is embodied in the beloved community assembled around the joyful feast, whether in the form of fish food and thimbles of grape-like juice (symbolizing our too often frugal parceling out of good news?), or through a hearty loaf and rich red wine. One bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing, which we bless. . .
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope
Zechariah 9:12
We have some great strengths in our Stone-Campbell tradition, in this branch of the Restoration Movement. The central rock on which we stand is a broken loaf of bread and a cup of crushed grapes, which by eating and drinking as Jesus asked "in remembrance of me" makes of us a whole, as the living Body of Christ. Our times of communion together as Buckeye Disciples have seen us through many times of brokenness and season of fracturing. I wonder if there aren’t more occasions, when we are about the task of re-membering the divided and drained body, when we could have communion together? Do we do that often enough, at regional board and commission meetings, at other gatherings whether district assemblies or work group rallies? And when we have communion before starting a shared task, we create a circumstance for reflection and conversation on the meaning of what we’re doing.
All things are possible at the table of remembrance and re-membering, even Widow McGillicutty speaking warmly to Mrs. Wilson and her rambunctious brood in the pew behind her. Even Elder Morris to the pierced teen can show acceptance and welcome when sharing the loaf and cup; the grim relax their jawlines and the hopeless take heart, while the weak become strong and the mighty unbend, even if only just a bit.
Everything we do in reforming the Christian Church in Ohio should be measured against the yardstick of the communion table, and we should say so as we’re doing it. Can we say such and such an action is in harmony with our practice of the Lord’s Table? How does this decision fit into the example of the Last Supper? In a church body with little affection for theological benchmarks, the communion table is one standard that everyone can agree on.
But just as we shouldn’t unconsciously appropriate random elements of other faith traditions (signs of the cross over the elements, presence lamps in the "sanctuary") without understanding the whole into which they fit, we shouldn’t imagine that our trials are ours in isolation, either. In the Catholic Church, where theology and ecclesiology is quite different from our own, the task of modern missions asks many of the same questions of Jesus’ friends, however they may live out that relationship. Quoting Amy Welborn on "open book," her weblog: "People are just so tired of institutional conversations. They are so tired of programs and mission statements and policies and long processes that stifle the Spirit. They are tired of layers put by institutions between them and God. The Church is an institution, and its purpose is not to obscure, but to enlighten, to give people not only guidance, but a place, a moment in time in which they know the presence of Jesus - healing, forgiving, binding, nourishing, loving. It is not that complicated. . . . There is nothing to re-invent. There is merely the ancient charge, the commission of Jesus to heed and put into action." (http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/)
You, by reading this, have shown – embodied, even – your interest in the reformation and restoration of a community of believers who see weekly communion, lay leadership, and belief preceding repentance leading to baptism, as crucial means towards having a personal relationship with God, as the Way of Christ into deeper fellowship and lasting meaning for today and into forever. Thank you for your interest and commitment, and know that our prayers and reflections together are part of that movement towards perfect communion that is God’s purpose in creation. We are not alone, we should be unafraid, and Jesus has indeed prayed "that they may all be one." (John 17:21)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time . . .
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one
Little Gidding
T.S. Eliot
Being Buckeye Disciples post 3
(the Part 2 is in the original 15 page .doc)
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.
(the Part 2 is in the original 15 page .doc)
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.
Being Buckeye Disciples pt. 2
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.
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.
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