In the intervening years since our journey, I recount three particular kindness stories most often. One involves the most inspirational quote, “confuse who is giving and who is receiving,” delivered by the director of the community meals program in Leadville, Colorado. One involves the inspirational initiative taken by a ten year old boy in Lamar, Indiana, after seeing his first homeless person. The third was the cause for a turnaround in membership at the United Methodist Church in Sinking Spring, Ohio, our next stop after staying with Jim and Beverly MacKenzie.
The population of Sinking Spring is about 200 people. The active membership of the church had been in the teens, mirroring the attrition of denominational churches we encountered across the country. Then Greg Seamen became their supply pastor..
Ordained ministers have been declining along with membership for denominational churches. To overcome the shortage some denominations train “supply pastors,” who receive enough training to serve a small parish and usually do so part time, while also employed elsewhere. Pastor Greg worked for GE full time along with his “part time” ministerial duties.
In short order Greg’s leadership doubled the attendance at Sinking Spring UMC with such innovations as a special service with guitar music that appealed to a younger audience. Yet this did not satisfy Greg. He kept mulling over: “What is wrong with MY ministry? What is wrong with MY ministry?”, until he concluded that the ministry really belonged to God..
Unlike many denominational churches attempting to widen their appeal, Sinking Spring UMC benefited from having just one simple mission statement. The church existed to serve others as Christ called them to do. Greg concluded that how best to serve others was not his call to make, but rather the call of individual members drawing from their unique experiences.
Greg shared an example of how this mission worked. A hairdresser approached Greg about providing free haircuts before school started. In the back of his mind Greg scoffed at providing free haircuts in comparison to issues of hunger and homelessness, but his new approach to ministry meant supporting efforts of kindness regardless of how trivial they seemed to him.
They implemented the hairdresser’s plan and needed to call in an additional hairdresser. Even then they had to give out coupons for later because they could not meet the demand for haircuts. They received feedback for how valuable free haircuts were, particularly to cash strapped families whose daughters would be getting their senior pictures taken.
As a result of their focused mission on grassroots kindness the membership of the UMC increased tenfold, to around 175 members, in a town of 200. People from neighboring towns joined the church. Catholics converted and joined. Atheists remained atheists but joined. Sinking Spring became the greatest community success story of our journey, because of the solitary mission statement that focused on kindness, along with the grassroots approach that encouraged and facilitated people to rely on their own ideas and experiences to be kind.
On our hike into Sinking Spring we stopped at the Serpent Mound, the largest Native American created mound in the country. The head of the serpent aligns with the winter solstice and the curves in the mound correspond to different points of the lunar calendar. Our previous host Jim MacKenzie belonged to Friends of Serpent Mound and came out to see us off one last time. We also met Byron Guy there, supervisor for the Old Man’s Cave section of the Buckeye Trail and now the Ohio Coordinator for the ADT.
As we neared Sinking Spring we were hailed from the doorstep of a large farmhouse by Steve Wolfe, who shouted: “Hooray! Another man with short britches and a long beard!” He asked us to come in and help celebrate his mother Mary’s 92nd birthday, along with four of her nieces and nephews. Apparently word travels fast in a town of 200 and they knew we were coming. We followed Steve inside and joined in the singing of “Happy Birthday” and eating pumpkin pie.
While at Sinking Spring we stayed one night at the church and a couple nights at the home of Dwight and Betty Crum (and Betty’s mother Frieda). News again traveled fast as Betty knew about our visit with Mary Wolfe, down to the detail of joining the family for pumpkin pie. We stayed with the Crums while Ky went to have dinner with Diana, a friend she recently met. This led to us being in different places when the tornado warning swept through, a warning we first had when the sky turned bright orange that morning.
This was the same series of tornadoes that destroyed the Henryville High School and diner across the street that we visited two weeks earlier. We felt fairly safe in the basement with our hosts, but Ky had a little more harrowing experience. Being more used to tornadoes than us New Englanders, Diana still insisted on taking Ky out to a restaurant for dinner. Ky had visions of destruction, but Diana calmly responded that the restaurant had a basement that they could go into if need be.
After Sinking Spring, Ky slackpacked us as we hiked towards and away from Waverly, with a residential retirement community serving as our base camp. This came about through Ky contacting the Pike County Visitor Bureau in Waverly, where Sharon Munson became enthused about our endeavor and hooked us up with Bristol Village. They provided us our own vacant apartment to stay in and an invitation to use their community pool and hot tub. During our few days of cold weather hiking around Waverly, we were satisfied to just sit in front of our apartment’s fireplace.
We attended a potluck at Bristol Village, where I presented a slideshow of our journey. I figured this was not the audience for preaching about community and kindness and instead gave more of a travelog about our hike. My belief continues to be that younger audiences benefit most from talks about community and kindness.
I interviewed folks at the Pike County Visitor Bureau about their various nonprofits whose combined missions were to address hunger, homelessness, emergency services and keeping people in their homes. The nonprofits networked in a manner similar to the ministerial alliances we had been encountering. They reported a growing need over the past five years, an echo of what we learned in Pueblo, St. Louis, Marion and other places.
Pike County was the poorest county in Ohio in 2012, the year we came through. With our walk across the country occurring near the end of a recession, we discovered the hardest hit counties across the land were the poorest already. A corporate tactic in the face of recession is to consolidate, with the consolidation tending to concentrate resources and labor in areas already better off.
This reflects an unfortunate reality of our corporate system. Over the past few decades bankruptcies for small businesses have increased with more stringent bankruptcy laws, though large corporations receive large bailouts. Curbing government spending under the guise of fiscal conservatism or balancing the budget focuses on items that do not affect corporations, while the military-industrial complex consumes more than half the federal budget. Increased spending for comparatively small social programs draws concern for inflation, while increased spending for the military or large bailouts do not trigger the charge of inflation.
This boondoggle corporate system that disadvantages the worst off at the worst times might cause despair, or at least disgust, but then I am reminded of Sinking Spring. Reliance on the local community not only provides relief for those most in need, such reliance also provides an ounce of prevention by shifting dependence away from a corporate system. While the Grand Towers of the country languish as their corporate sugar daddies downsize and/or locate elsewhere, towns like Syracuse, Kansas retain their resiliency through diversification and incentivizing smaller businesses to succeed.
