"NHF History-A Relational Cosmology"

The Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
May 18, 2008
Northern Hills Fellowship

Reading Pie with Spirits ~ Rev. Mary Wellemeyer

This is the very pumpkin pie
my grandmother made - almost.
She was a modern woman who knew how to follow recipes.
Receipts, she called them,
because they had been received.
She had a rule for pie crust that was constant
until, from time to time, it changed.
I have that rule, in turn, and it has moved on,
just a bit, from where she left it.
This is my special shared moment with her,
departed a quarter century.
As I work, I am all ages of myself,
and the thought of my tall son comes to join us, though he hardly knew her.
He makes pies with wild abandon, sculpting them from material and artistry.
He has received pie somehow at the level of soul.
The three of us make pie together,
preheating the oven,
cutting butter into flour, adding water, flouring a board, rolling the crust.
To honor her, I follow the recipe.
To honor him, I change just one thing.
To honor myself, I take my time and smile.

Sermon NHF History - A Relational Cosmology Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

Northern Hills Fellowship has a history worth celebrating! As Minister I must help the congregation prepare for the future. Therefore, the first thing I did was to look at the church’s history. Looking back to go forward may seem counterintuitive, but it is important to claim our past, to share our stories and learn from them; to hold up what is important and helpful for our future. To build on our history we acknowledge both the good and the bad; we talk about unresolved griefs and conflicts and we move on.
It was over a year ago when I first started learning about Northern Hills Fellowship during the Ministerial Search process. Since then I’ve talked with many of you, with former ministers, and people in the community; I’ve looked through the church’s filing cabinets and computer. For the last several weeks, people have shared stories about NHF’s past and posted them on our History Wall. I am happy to report that in all my investigations I have found no skeleton in a closet, no secret scandals. This is a relatively healthy church which has much going for it and a church which is willing to learn and grow from its mistakes. The NHF story contains much that is worthwhile. Over the decades since the Fellowship’s first services in 1961, hundreds of people have found life sustaining community here. There is a richness of spirit in our stories which leads me to conclude the future of Northern Hills Fellowship is bright.
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I initiated the history wall project so more people could engage with NHF’s history. On the newsprint I stuck colored paper placing major events in their proper order, and along the bottom I put the names of paid staff who have served here. All that was just to give some structure. Chronology and minister’s names are not the most interesting thing. Reading about events in history doesn’t always give a good sense of how they figure into the congregation’s consciousness. I wanted to get at some of the feelings behind the stories. For several weeks people have viewed the history wall, talked about it, and added descriptions of events that were important to them. Each story that went on the wall was written by an individual, but the interesting thing is they were never just personal stories about that individual. They all talked about other people.

Look across this sanctuary, and you see an assortment of folks. Each of us has a lifeline which stretches back in time. We are individuals for sure, but we are also people who have connections with each other. The presence of each of you enriches this worship service, a common event in the history of our lives. When we come together for worship and fellowship, we can sense the broadness of the communal experience. So too does the church have a timeline. Each of our individual lifelines connects to the church’s timeline at a number of points depending on how long we have been here. Usually, the points that make it into the official church history are events for which most of the members had significant emotional involvement. At those events, the long vertical timeline widens into a horizontal place that many people remember. For example, several people have told me how wonderful the congregation felt about the marriage ceremony of Corky Bonekamp and Susan Petry in 2003. We are still grieving Susan’s loss last year, but we will be forever grateful to her and Corky for making Northern Hills so proud as it stood up in its community and declared its support for them and their same-sex marriage. We need to keep alive stories of significant events – those horizontal places in the time line – because they help define the community. These events are significant to the entire community – even to the newer members who weren’t there back then.

As a newer member of the community I really need to feel at home here, where I live now. It is hard to have a sense of home unless I feel a connection with my predecessors here. That’s one reason I have paid particular attention to stories about former Northern Hills ministers and why I invited three of them to be part of our Installation Service. I wanted to know what it was like for Rev. Sharon Dittmar in her year as Interim Minister here. It was helpful to me to understand how the congregation reacted when she was asked to stay on but couldn’t. The Fellowship experienced strong growth during the period when the Rev. Gary James was minister and his wife Julie Martin was Director of Religious Education. I wonder, was it his Friday night movies or her support for parents that enabled growth? It was interesting to hear how my sermons strike some of you who experienced his. I have asked former staff and current members why they think the Fellowship grew to pastoral church size and then shrunk again. I will continue to seek answers from the stories of my forerunners. This is not a task for me alone, we are all the spiritual descendents of those who have dwelled in this place before us. For our spiritual wholeness, we must find a way to inhabit the history of the place we live. Newer members must find ways to connect to events and to older members who formed the Fellowship. A good way to start this would be for older and newer members to sit down and spend a half hour 1-on-1 just to get to know each other.

People added events to the History Wall because they still have feelings about them. Some stories simply recalled fun events. One from 1969 or 70 was when “we had a paper airplane and kite flying contest for young and old with prizes for everyone. In the same timeframe they made a movie of kids and adults up in a tree in the side yard called “The Tree People.” The author says, “It was really corny but lots of laughs,” and asks us to remember that “A Fellowship that plays together stays together!” June Schlipf told of several times when members came together to create art, costumes and fun activities. She tells of how our “Caring Quilt was created by many skillful hands. Some embroidered or appliquéd, some made designs for others to carry out. Some simply left their handprints or signatures. This began a tender tradition thru which the Northern Hills community expresses sympathy to someone who needs it by loaning her or him the Caring Quilt for awhile.

People went beyond the mere description of what happened to portray the effect on them and the congregation. One told of having an “intensely spiritual experience” while walking the Labyrinth along with several people in the drizzle and carrying her infant in the “Slow Walk for Peace” in 1998. Others told of just having fun out there. Ask Dave Beato how he feels about traversing the labyrinth on his mower. There were stories of how some of the things we enjoy today got their start. Betsy Anderson documented the beginning of the Coming of Age program in 1991; she is justly proud of how much it has benefited the young folks of Northern Hills, and we saw the most recent evidence of that a couple of Sundays ago.

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The stories of Northern Hills’ beginnings and formative events compose our creation narrative, if you will. Another name for a creation narrative is a cosmology. The purpose of a cosmology is to give people perspective to interpret and make their own meaning as they relate to the physical, social and cultural world around them. When interpreting NHF’s history it is important to make the stories and lessons we learned along the way comprehensible for today’s members to help us create paradigms for our own time. Cosmologies tell not only of creation; they tell also how the creation made the world better than it was before. Our NHF narrative contains descriptions of how we look at life, our philosophy or philosophies of the nature of reality, and our vision of a just social order. The story of how NHF honored Leslie Edwards grandfather, the Rev. W. H. G. Carter, to help right an old wrong, and participated in the reconciliation with his family is infused with the yearnings for better racial relations in our city. I am honored to retell this story to everyone who visits Northern Hills. I hold this up as an example of what we can do to bring about social justice in our time.

The stories I hear are not all accomplishments to celebrate. The congregation has long been dissatisfied that membership, after having reached a peak in the late 90s, declined over the next several years. Progress is not always onward and upward. For the last few years Rev. Morris Hudgins was here, there were efforts to turn things around, but the shrinkage continued. When I talked with him, he told me of his disappointment at being unable to grow the church. It seems in the last year or two NHF’s membership has stopped declining and is now turning back up a bit. We now have another hill to climb.

We who live amongst the seven hills of Cincinnati know about climbing. Some of them are as steep as you’ll see anywhere. I learned something about steep hills when I hiked in the Appalachian Mountains. I find the uphill portions of the trail to be unbelievably hard sometimes. After climbing steeply for several hundred feet and thinking this is all I can do, sometimes the trail goes up another several hundred feet. There are places so steep that the trail couldn’t go straight up; it has to cut along at an angle to the pitch of the mountainside. In order to get up some of the ridges, the trail has to zig-zag back and forth across the side of the slope. These zigs and zags are called switchbacks. When I was a beginning hiker, every time I came to a switch back, I would groan. Switchbacks were visible evidence, proof that this was a steep climb, a reminder, I complained to myself, that I really was working too hard. “Who built this trail?” I would think, “Couldn’t they have chosen a less arduous route?”

The decline in numbers must have felt like that to some of you. Growth of the Fellowship since 1961 has been a long climb which has included some reversals along the way. I can see why you might not be so happy to see a switchback on the trail. As I put more miles on my hiking boots, I came to appreciate switchbacks. Now when I see one, I think, “I’m glad for this switchback, it kept me from walking straight up a very steep slope. When I come to one, I smile and say, “Thank goodness for switchbacks!” My attitude of gratitude gives me a mental boost as I continue my climb.

I believe NHF has learned some important lessons from the switchbacks. We have a long climb to get back to the numbers we had 10 years ago, but we are on the right trail to get there. We now have a great set of volunteer leaders, and an excellent paid staff if I do say so myself, and we are all committed to cooperation and growth. We have set a priority on making NHF intentionally child friendly and supportive of parents. That’s the combination that made NHF grow last time, and it will again.

Now I’m not claiming that some cosmic trail builder has already decided where we are going. But I am saying that we can benefit from our switchbacks. Progress comes both thru building on triumphs and by avoiding mistakes. At each juncture in NHF’s growth something has been learned and a vista has been seen. From where I stand, NHF’s narrative points to a bright future.

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For the history wall, I did some homework, put some facts on the wall, and you added stories. The main goal of this exercise was to get us to talk with each other through our history. Each of us brings our own personal history and perspectives on life with us into this church. No one of us has all of the truth. But somehow we must come to shared truths, truths that work in our intimate circles, in our institutions and with the wider world. In order to come to a communal truth, we must enter into dialogue with each other.

Each of us here today will have a different experience of this service. Some of you will agree with what I said; others will disagree. Most of you won’t hear everything I said; some of you will hear something I didn’t say. This was true back in history, too. The people who lived thru the same event in our church’s history experienced it differently back then, and remember it differently now. So, it is impossible to write one definitive story that describes exactly what happened, just the facts. I hear you wondering, “He doesn’t base everything on facts? What kind of engineer can he have been?” “One who collected a lot of data in my time,” I answer, “but one who learned that it’s how people feel about the facts, how they interpret them, that really matters.”

Feelings were what mattered in 1993 when Jackie Koenig was diagnosed with cancer and a whole group showed up at church on the day of her surgery just to be together. NHF provided a place to share feelings again in 2003 when the church was open for people to pray at the start of the war. A new member felt supported in 1996 at the Halloween Party when Rev. Don Bisset got wrapped up in toilet paper like a mummy, and all the kids got a prize. Parents and children were welcomed, everyone had a good time, and several of those parents are still here today. In order to foster more of those kinds of experiences, the Committee on Ministry is beginning a process for creating a covenant of Beloved Community. We hope to help our congregational relationships remain respectful and feel supportive to all of us.

The goal of meaning-making dialogue is not to determine who is right or most intelligent. It is not to give one person or one version of the truth power over others. We should not take this kind of power over others, or give others this kind of power over us. We can learn much from others, but we should not make other’s stories and points of view definitive for our own lives. Each of us needs our own way to make sense of creation; we need our own cosmology. And we must be able to revise our cosmology any time the way we view creation changes.
Through dialogue we come to a living truth, a relational truth. This kind of truth is a truth of engagement, not an explanation of how things really are.” Diana Eck writes, “Dialogue does not mean that we will agree, but only that we will understand more clearly and that we will begin to replace ignorance, stereotype, even prejudice, with relationship. Dialogue is the language of mutuality, not of power.”

Dialoging about our stories gives people a chance to create relational truth. The goal is taking meaning from our history that will create a stronger bond of relationship in our community. That kind of truth forming can strengthen Northern Hills. We need to have more congregational discussions so we can build on the lessons of the long range planning process while Rev. Hudgins was here. We need to tell about the discussions held in the cottage meetings two years ago as part of the ministerial search process so we can better fulfill the desires expressed by members then. We collected stories in the Startup Workshop last September to capture the essence of our Fellowship as I began my ministry here. We need to continue to tell our stories to each other, to form a communal history we can build on, and to create a relational cosmology.

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During our history project we have acknowledged the Fellowship’s significant accomplishments as well as some of its difficulties. We salute both the agonies and the ecstasies of yesterday. It is fitting to look back, to cherish our past, to remind everyone of all we have accomplished. Just think of all the worship services that have been put on since they began in 1961! A graph of our membership growth would not plot as a straight line constantly going up, but that is not a totally bad thing. Switchbacks give us a chance to catch our breath before resuming our climb. We are ready to look forward, remembering the lessons of our history, and to ask some new friends to join us and add their truths to our story.

Ibid. 499.
Eck, Diana. Encountering God, from Bozeman to Banaras, Beacon Press (Boston: 1993).