History is somewhat easier than commentary, and the closer your commentary is to the present day, the more fraught with peril your comments and asides can be. So bear with me patiently, I beg of you!
And let me briefly review: I’ve tried to show how our camp & conference program has deep roots in meeting certain pressing needs of the church, and of the members of churches. Meeting those needs was a big part of why camp & conference was so successful in terms of numbers of participants and also regarding the centrality of camp & conference in our state society life.
But those needs included serving the growing overseas missionary field, which itself fed the connectional life of the state and general church as a whole by speaking to a human need for a global connection, to sparking imagination and excitement through missionary visits back home; those needs included recruitment for Disciples-related colleges as they sought to grow and stabilize their place in the national educational landscape; those needs included helping rural and small town families have access to a summer retreat they often couldn’t afford otherwise, especially for their children; those needs included leadership training and youth development for Sunday school teachers and a rising generation of young adults for a role in the church life in a time of dramatic social change. Camp & conference programs met all of these needs quite well.
Then the mission field began to change, and missionaries became both fewer in number, and taking on a very different role in supporting and facilitating indigenous churches. Colleges sought a more secular status to recruit and admit a much wider diversity of incoming students, and were less and less interested in sectarian models of recruitment. Recreation especially after World War II became democratized, and leisure started to become redefined as places like Disneyland opened in 1954 and Walt Disney World in 1971, with theme parks and motels aiming at a broad consumer market. Leadership training for Christian education and youth activities was transformed by VHS tapes and CDs and online tools, even as curriculum became a marketplace of fierce competition with denominational loyalty less a factor for any and all traditions, let alone Disciples of Christ. In other words, many of the needs camps in general and Camp Christian in particular met were by 2000 no longer pressing needs, if indeed those former factors were seen as needs at all.
The IDEA of a connection between missions and camp & conference still existed, but the contents of that idea had been hollowed out, with little clarity about how we would re-fill, re-new, re-engage that connection for our congregations and the regional church.
Looking back at Disciples missions over the past two centuries, and at Ohio Disciples missions more recently, it has to be said that our Christian tradition has been less missional than most, and that has been largely by design. In developing our highly congregational and de-centered polity, co-operative missions long were a source of internal tension, leading to major splits. The last big split (following two earlier divisions) came in “chunks” between 1920 and 1968, and was felt as strongly in Ohio as anywhere else; only because of the personal influence of P.H. Welshimer in both the developing “independent Christian Churches” movement through the North American Christian Convention, but also choosing to serve as presiding officer of the Ohio Christian Missionary Society and leading figure in the state society until his death in 1957 – all this meant that Ohio avoided an open split sooner than some regions. However, the weight of that avoidance held back Ohio mission activity right up to Restructure. As a new minister here in the 1980s, I learned from older clergy that the barrier between cooperatives and independents, which in my birth state of Illinois had been clear and sharp and unbridgeable and in my home state of Indiana not much less so, had been a permeable barrier in Ohio. This was a two-edged sword. Young people could attend Cincinnati Bible College, but go on to serve at cooperative churches under the care of the state society; less often, but occasionally, state society ministers could speak at and even serve interims at independent-minded congregations. I can’t emphasize enough how unusual that was post-World War II in other regions, but in Ohio it was still true even after Restructure into the 1970s . . . elsewhere, it was very much a one-way barrier starting with the 1927 initial North American Christian Convention, and there was litigation around church departures and ministerial contracts in states like Iowa and Missouri that Ohio simply didn’t see.
This next could be a long footnote of its own, but I’m just going to say it and move on: that two-edged nature of our Welshimer-driven lack of open division? One sharp edge of it I firmly believe is why the Ohio Commission on Ministry process has woven into its DNA a more confrontative, interrogative model of asking prospective ministers to prove their place within our fellowship. I simply have never heard out of other regions stories about grown men pulling off to the side of the road to throw up after meeting with their commissions on ministry (and I’ve served on them in two other regions besides my dozen years on ours in Ohio), and I’ve heard variations on that kind of reaction from easily over a dozen men . . . and I’m talking preachers older than me, yes all of them men, but each in their own way describing the pressure and intensity of the process as it once was. I know two things are also true: the Commission on Ministry has worked to become more supportive and pastoral with their candidacy and standing process, and that ministerial candidates out of previously excluded groups starting with women and going on from there have shared how they did not feel supported by the process and attacked by the experience before their panel. So it’s a complex reality deserving of more time and space than I’m giving it – but I think it’s fair for me to say that in the past strongly, and even more recently to a degree, there’s a set of unspoken assumptions built into our Ohio approach to ministry that says “we need to be careful about just who we let into our churches,” and I tie that to the long period of our history where we tried to not have an open split, but the divisions between the independent and cooperative models were effectively those of two very contentious polities within one loose structure. I believe for many years the Commission saw itself as the place that kept the connectionalism such as we had it intact, and the last line of defense against the anti-s and separatists who would break it down. In truth, they weren’t far off the mark, but the heritage of challenge and confrontation remains.
What we have had as a shared missional emphasis in Ohio was and is camp & conference. This collaborative enterprise was eagerly embraced by most any congregation, and the closing worship on Friday night at CYF conference and Chi Rho camps long carried a strong missionary emphasis.
Our relationship with overseas missionaries in Ohio tended to be through “Living Link” missionary individuals, who would write and send back objects for display along with their stories to tell, visiting on their homeland tours to share their personal narratives of evangelism and transformation, about challenges faced and successes in changing lives. Mission giving was supported and regularly rejuvenated by these encounters, and many Ohio congregations still have a (now dusty) display case or shelf with a handful of native crafts or local artifacts sent “home” by these missionaries.
When the missionary emphasis turned to “fraternal workers” in the 1960s & 70s, as the indigenous Christian churches came into their own, the narrative changed, the appeals became less personal, the focus on causes and issues less compelling than the names and faces once associated with the concept “Disciples missions.” We still have “people in mission” -- https://www.globalministries.org/mission-coworkers/ -- but we struggle to make the same sorts of connections between the “people in the pews” and the global mission field. Global Ministries makes various efforts, but when you find a large number of the current blogs years out of date -- https://www.globalministries.org/mission_mission_personnel_blogs -- you see where the storytelling and connecting still has a long way to go. The political content of much of what is considered mission work today also creates tensions between the potential donors and supporters at home and the needs in the field.
At the same time all of this happened, we had the rise of the “para-church” ministries: World Vision, Bread for the World, Heifer International, Samaritan’s Purse, Compassion International, Habitat for Humanity. They have all the great websites (no, I won’t post the links!) and a gift for narrative in much of their work. The internet only enhanced their growing ability to reach past the mission boards and church bodies of any religious fellowship and go directly to the church membership . . . and they certainly have. As a local church minister, I can tell you that if I want to make an appeal for Habitat, I have to explain very little. If I am trying to make the case for Disciples missions, I have to . . . well, you’ve been reading this.
Our “Week of Compassion” relief program has tried better than most to capture this growing edge of mission interpretation - https://www.weekofcompassion.org/2021.html -- but the irony is that they are a thing unto themselves. Our Disciples Home Missions, Global Ministries, and regional ministries which are all highly dependent on Disciples Mission Fund (DMF) giving: they are all fiscally and organizationally separate from “Week of Compassion.” If we are to promote Disciples missions for the purposes of maintaining and developing DMF support, “Week of Compassion” is a parallel but separate track.
And specifically in Ohio: our missional emphases in the last few decades have been few, and not well understood or much advanced. On the Ohio Disciples Outreach (ODO) remittance forms and supportive materials which were the primary point of contact between local churches and the region from the 1980s through 2016, we listed a very small number of causes and accompanying percentages. New Church establishment, congregational transformation, ministerial relief, inner city/rural support, ecumenical – Ohio Council [of Churches], Camp Christian operations, Ohio Regional operations, and Cleveland Christian Home. CCH has become a more general program for youth service since 2004, and harder to explain in those compelling, personal terms we’ve been talking about, and aside from camp, the others are representative of those more general “causes” which are intrinsically harder to rally interest and energy around for development work than a personal, individual story.
I have to point out two tragic problems with the whole ODO system. First, it was a method of “skimming” DMF giving, in plain sight but little understood for what it was. If a church under the old system was giving $1,000 to DMF, but through the Ohio Region, they might well have thought that Ohio kept $400 while the general missions of the church received $600. In fact, the “genius” of ODO was that first the region’s “priorities” got $300 off the top (unless the congregation specifically requested otherwise). Then, the remaining $700 was divided 40%/60% as outright DMF. That system was ended by action of the Regional Church Council (RCC) on June 1, 2017. That creates more honesty and transparency, but it also means we currently have, in a practical sense, no regional “missions” other than Camp Christian. [That was entirely correct as 2018 ended & 2019 began. A 2021 note: we have in the last year or two seen the Regional Church Council slowly re-launching legacy committees and commissions, albeit with minimal or zero budget support . . . part of what I’m about here is a long but hopefully well-supported caution about going back to what we once did because we once did it.]
But in fact that simply was a public acknowledgement of what had silently been going on for some time. As readers of my “Notes” have heard repeatedly in various forms over the last eight months [this was initially said in early 2019], the regional accounts have been in such disorder since 2009 it is very hard to track specific accounts with any precision, largely because of the struggles of the regional treasurer to keep up with payments as deficits ballooned past his ability to juggle accounts. So we have not, as a region, paid out ODO allocations to the Cleveland Christian Home since 2009. Not a penny. 2008 was the last year, as best as I can tell, that the region gave anything to ecumenical agencies on a state or city level. Hocking Valley Parish got, oddly enough, exactly $8,000 a year from 2012 through 2016 (and exactly $10,000 for three years before that). Urban churches appear to have gotten nothing since 2007, but it depends on how some of the Hispanic church support is counted, between the now well-known chaos of New Church grants and other line item allocations.
And so on. The bottom line is that the ODO remittance forms were a well-intended falsehood, but an un-truth that I think we all had come to understand was false at base. “Causes” were used as the basis for appeals, but in fact there was little or no accountability in how the promises made to congregations in the form of those remittance blanks were fulfilled. And little evidence that anyone was checking. My first realization this was the case, while pursing other issues, was learning from the pastor of the Hocking Valley Parish in late 2017 that they were anxiously waiting on word of what, if anything, they would get “of our $8,000.” It had not even occurred to them that, if Hocking Valley Parish was getting a percentage of ODO/DMF giving, then with the wild fluctuations of overall DMF giving over the last decade, their amount received should have been changing, too. Without getting into details, an effort was mustered to buffer the loss of income, but they got only a few thousand from all quarters, with no promise of more in the future, at least from the Ohio Region.
Leaving us with the question for 2018 [as this was originally written, but plug in 2021 if you like], and beyond: what are Disciples missions from an Ohio perspective? Where are the activities and initiatives in which God is at work around us for which we might rightly ask our churches to help support? What is the Missio Dei for Ohio Disciples?
Clearly, we still have Camp Christian. Both as a ministry tool and a base of operations, Camp Christian is a mission hub already, and stands ready to continue as a central location from which Disciples of Christ shared mission can extend. Not simply as a camp & conference location, not only as a campus on which ministerial training & leadership development can take place, but as the actual physical setting for regional offices. Some would say this is a long time coming, but however you look at our years before, this [again, 2018 as first written] is the year in which we will place our de-facto cathedral, our worship and leadership and spiritual center at Camp Christian. I think there is much good that will come in mission support when our hub and our center are in alignment!
New church establishment, whether in likely locations or reaching out into underserved populations, has been our primary missional emphasis from even before our formal establishment in 1852 as the OCMS. It has always been foremost in our thinking and our aspirations, whether towards “every county seat” or just to advance our tradition’s insights on Christian life and community a little bit more widely across Ohio’s fabric. There are many reasons for unhappiness with the management and direction of new church plants in the recent past; it also has to be said that the evidence of the last century plus says pretty clearly to me that a hundred years ago, it’s not that starting new churches was done more carefully or even well, it was simply much easier to do so. This is NOT to say the work of a church planter ever was, let alone is, easy, but our strategies of a century or even a half century ago were much more like throwing spaghetti at a wall than anything else. Whatever stuck, stuck. Today, a simple grant-in-aid and a likely young person to receive it, and the vague promise of “help” when it comes time to buy a prospective plot of land to put up a building: let’s just say we’ve learned repeatedly since about 1990 that it is NOT that simple anymore. Our models in ministry and approaches to support of new church establishment will have to be entirely upended, and we already have some general church support in thinking through all of this. It will continue to be a focus of our mission support in Ohio one way or another.
And we have been part of outreach into hurting communities already, and even recently; the Delaware Project was a start in this direction, and we saw some success in that area – ironically, this is again a way that camp as a setting could again be a potentially powerful launching pad, not to replicate any one effort, but to build afresh on some solid foundations. Some of our work in existing churches, such as Hocking Valley Parish and in Cleveland may need and warrant our support if more openly and honestly handled – which we are starting to do. And the connection to the Cleveland Christian Home is already real and vital for many Ohio Disciples congregations; how to connect that ongoing work to regional missions is a potentially fruitful area of effort.
The relationship between missions and social justice is a longstanding debate in the field of missiology, and how or where the imperatives of the Gospel call us to protest or activism are always going to be contentious, even if we weren’t in a fragile state as a regional collaboration of churches. I will discuss this further in our next chapter.
Then there is that 1917 aside in Alanson Wilcox’s discussion of the mission work of the Ohio Society offices: “Every year churches are guided through serious problems of indebtedness or strife and scandal.” This is probably the most time intensive and personnel-centric part of state society work before 1968 and regional work since, and it’s the hardest to “sell” as a value.
But that’s my point about the former missionary-narrative focus of what we thought of as Disciples missions: a hundred years ago, the state and national/general staff spent much time on “serious problems of indebtedness or strife and scandal,” and then or even fifty years ago there were support staff on typewriters in offices making sure tickets were purchased and supplies shipped and inoculations arranged. Then or now, no one musters a fundraising appeal around typists at desks in front of filing cabinets. In earlier days or in coming years, we’re not going to highlight in print or online materials stuff like our utility costs or the ever-increasing insurance bill or paying pension dues for ministry staff. Those basic operating costs are always the bulk of the budget, but rarely the heart of the messaging.
We need to understand the importance of staff, of administrative personnel as part of the work of missions, even if they aren’t a sale point; if we’ve largely lost the high profile role of “the missionary” as the focus of our outreach offering campaigns, we have to figure out how to represent the whole in some well-chosen, personally relatable parts. I’m not saying Allen or Jennie wouldn’t make good poster children, but it’s not a wise model for us moving forward.
Missionaries, both the idea of them and their intermittent presence in our midst, captured the imagination and spiritual vision of Ohio Disciples, members in the pews and leaders at their local church board meetings. They filled a void in our hearts and minds which created immediate connections between the South Succotash Christian Church and “the ends of the earth” in a way that made Jesus real for the faithful. Missionaries helped us see not just our donations to shared missions, but our own local efforts to share the Gospel of God’s Good News back home as part of a globe-spanning tapestry of faith and work. A missionary visit and sermons wrapped around that exciting opportunity to hear directly about “Christ in the Congo” or wherever, to handle objects and artifacts from overseas, to shake the hand of someone who had been on the other side of the world and at no little hazard would soon go back . . . these events not only encouraged giving to the wider church, they tended to enliven the work of the local congregation as well, looking forward to the next time as we labored in our own vineyard for the time being.
Obviously, we can’t just “go back” to that model. Even small towns have people who’ve traveled around the world now, and TV plus the internet has taken everyone into exotic locations and shown us strange customs. And ministry partnerships just had to change, and for those former foreign missions, they were mostly changes for the better, for them. It’s our end we haven’t figured out how to redesign. How do we spark excitement around being a Christian in fellowship and shared service with other believers around the world, and to what end do we share from our local resources for some kind of wider work?
This is where I believe the future for Ohio Disciples missions begins again at Camp Christian, but it has to be about much more than camp. Yes, it is about the summer weeks of intentional Christian community that are developed there, and the closing Consecration service where vocation and calling can be understood as God’s gift to everyone is central. It also has something to do with that un-glamorous but essential regional office now located near where our spiritual heart has already long been placed – which can’t be the whole mission message, but it surely is a part of it. And there are missional projects and initiatives that begin on the camp property and have before and can again extend into the region around Magnetic Springs . . . which has always been an area waiting for a Disciples mission, whether towards Marysville or Delaware or even just over to Pharisburg. (Pharisburg REALLY looks like it needs something . . .)
I believe with Camp Christian as a starting point, there are other connections to which we can all feel a tie, at least second or at most third hand, just as we once did through “Living Link” missionaries. From one-time campers and counselors who are now about the work of social justice and advocacy, to clergy whose call to ministry was sparked at a campfire, to anyone who has walked those paths and crossed those bridges who have stories of witness and service from around the world which they can bring home to tell around the green chairs. We already have Hiram Farm, Cleveland Christian Home, Disciples Women, and Disciples Men bringing “home” the stories of their mission experiences in their own communities, congregational retreats where their own efforts in mission are recharged in gatherings away from the everyday world’s distractions.
Camp can be the heart of our renewed sense of Disciples mission, but it can’t be the whole body. It just has to keep the blood pumping, which is what a heart does. The biggest question is: what is the body which it renews and revives and refreshes?
Yes, yes, the pious answer is “the Body of Christ.” But when we today talk about the Body of Christ, to what or whom are we referring? If camp is the heartbeat of the body, and let’s even give our regional staff and leadership the great honor and terrible responsibility for being “the mind of Christ among” us, but who or where is the life of the body?
(Homework: look up I Corinthians 2:16 & Philippians 2:5 in dialogue with Romans 12:5 & I Corinthians 12:27…)