From These Roots

"May Christ dwell in your hearts in faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love" 

(Ephesians 3:17).

People often ask me where I'm from?  That's a deep question as my wife, Eileen and I, like many in our generation, have been mobile and have lived and served in several communities.  Before moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan we've served churches in Fannettsburg, Harrisburg, and Erie Pennsylvania; Cooperstown and Montauk, New York; lived in Richmond, Virginia for seminary;  did internships in churches in Highpoint, North Carolina and Newport News, Virginia.  After college and before seminary, we spent three months in Campinas, Brazil learning Portuguese in preparation for two years in Porto Franco, Brazil at the edge of the Amazon rainforest.  I've learned that no matter where we've lived people want us to respect and love them for who they are.  And I 've learned to consolidate my answer to where I'm from to South Central Pennsylvania.  For Eileen, it's Paradise in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country of Lancaster County in Southeastern Pennsylvania.  We have been shaped by our experiences with people in all of these many places, but there is something powerful about one's childhood roots.  Good, bad and in between, they mark and shape us!

The Brackbill family farmhouse, circa 1857

Eileen and I just returned from visiting family and connecting with our roots in Pennsylvania.  We stayed at Eileen's grandparent's 100 acre farm, now owned and managed by three cousins-three of her 29 cousins.  Unlike Eileen and me, who have lived in multiple communities, her grandmother lived on this Lancaster County farm for 79 years, from 1908 when she was married at age 21 until just weeks before her death in 1987 at age 100.  We stayed at this farmhouse built in 1857 and slept in her grandmother's bedroom.  Walking on the old floor boards causes a song of pops and cracks and pops!  No sneaking around unheard in that house!  Her grandparents were Mennonite.  But when the bishop would not allow her grandfather, also teacher, to teach drama, they and their eleven children became Presbyterian. Eileen spent most Sunday afternoons of her childhood on this farm visiting with her extended family, which generated nine Presbyterian ministers, two Presbyterian church educators, two others who attended seminary, one a spiritual director!    

Nate Best with Lindsay Grosswendt

My son and his girlfriend, who live in New York City, joined us sharing some time at the farm.  It is an anchor for him as well, as we attended family picnics on the farm every summer.  When you grow up in multiple communities like him, such a rooted place provides an anchor in a sea of change and holds powerful meaning. We visited Eileen's sister and brother (who is battling cancer) and their spouses; my two brothers and sisters-in-law; and had lunch with a life long friend.

Fannett-Metal Class of '73

We made the trip  to Pennsylvania to attend my 45th high school class reunion.  I grew up two hours west of the Lancaster area in the first settled valley of the Appalachian mountains.  My family moved there six weeks after school started when I was in first grade, and left March of my senior year.  I lived with church friends then until I graduated.  This community is an hour west of Harrisburg, along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, between the twin tunnels of the Blue and Kittatinny Mountains and the Tuscarora Mountain tunnel.  The Fannett-Metal School District serves the Fannett and Metal Townships in Franklin County.  These two townships comprise a 24 mile long valley called Path Valley, named by the Tuscarora Indians, who used the valley as northeast/southwest route through the mountains.  As you go north it widens and splits into Path and Amberson Valleys and further north Burns and then Upper Horse Valleys, the latter named for the horses hidden there by residents of Chambersburg which was raided and burned during the Civil war.

Valley view from Spring Run House (Party Barn)

The "Valley," as those of us who have moved away call it, was once a community of small farms, just large enough to support a family with a dozen milk cows, a couple of hogs and some chickens.  As a child, I attended many public auctions at farms like this one, as a way of life was ending. Farmers were forced by milk companies to install bulk tanks requiring larger dairy herds and more land to support them.  Now the farms are either owned by the Amish, or run by two or three large farming operations.

My class of 1973 had 53 graduates.  Four have died.  Sixteen of us gathered at a lovely old barn restored and now used as a party barn for receptions and gatherings such as our reunion. Seeing one of the old barns repurposed was good for the soul. I hadn't been to a class reunion in 20 years, but we picked up right where we left off.  Ten of the sixteen of us who came, shared all twelve years together, first grade through high school.  Five of us also shared all those years together at the church where my dad served as pastor, and my mom served as a traditional pastor's spouse.  We were smart enough not to talk politics and for an evening celebrated in our shared roots!
In addition to school, we shared sunday school, junior choir, vbs, youth group. 

We visited my home church there and my parent's graves.  We saw the church's new memorial garden.  I knew half of the names listed on the memorial: my high school principal, who sent my parents a registered letter requiring me to get my long hair cut; his brother, the bus driver for the school soccer and basketball teams who got us to and from all our away games; his two sisters who were altos in the choir who welcomed me and other youth in the adult choir, long hair and all; and so many others.  

Upper Path Valley Presbyterian Church

The Upper Path Valley Presbyterian Church celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2016.  It was established in 1766.  I was confirmed there in 1966, it's bicentennial year.  The members of the church were of Scotch Irish descent.  I did not realize how much so until I was older.  The families names tell the story: the Bakers, Campbells, Hammonds, McGees, O'Donnells, Pipers, Shearers, Stewarts.  That valley was settled by their ancestors in the 1760's.  They were forced out of Scotland during "the Clearances" in the early 1700s when the clans were broken up by the English, and the Scottish Lairds (Lords) no longer needed the loyalty of their crofters (small tenant farmers) to rally to fight the clan's battles, and when the Lairds learned they could make more money raising sheep on the land, than renting to crofters.  Sound familiar?  These families immigrated first to Northern Ireland for a few years encouraged by the English to domesticate the Irish.  You can imagine how that went!  After a short time there, they immigrated to America, settling in the Appalachian Mountains which reminded them of the Scottish Highlands.  

All of this resonates with my Best family heritage.  The Bests immigrated to America from Armagh County, Northern Ireland some time before 1777 when my great, great, great grandfather James Best signed an oath of allegiance to the Revolution according to records at the Chester County Courthouse.  The family name Best in Scottish we have learned means "keeper of the beasts."  My grandfather managed other people's farms in Chester and Lancaster Counties.  My dad, the first in the family to get a college education, was ordained a Presbyterian minister, followed by my oldest brother and me.  The keeper of beasts fits!

John played basketball and soccer with Bob Baker

These are my roots.  My family and these church members happened to be Presbyterian.  Their faith, culture and history shaped my youth.  I have grown much since then with a liberal arts college education, then seminary, and a young adult mission experience in Brazil.  My faith is my own now.  None-the-less, I come from these roots.  Interestingly, some things never change.  What my classmate, Debbie, our high school yearbook editor, wrote of me then, "Nice guy, trumpeter, loves history" is pretty much what was said of me earlier this summer at my retirement celebration from the Presbytery.  "Nice guy."  And at the reunion, I won the history contest naming 7 of 8 things that happened in 1973.  Go figure!  

These are my roots and I've been blessed.  They are the people who loved and shaped me and who struggled at times.  They experienced economic shifts and forced immigration, faced endings of eras, and life's challenges including suffering still births, deaths of young their preschool sons and daughters, dealing with a gay son, brother, uncle.  Each of you have your own roots, different but just as powerful and meaningful to be remembered, honored and celebrated.  All mixed with blessings and trials, rootedness and mobility, loving relationships and relationships that try the soul, faith traditions and the lack thereof.  If you are like me, you have evolved and grown, taken the best of the traditions given to you and let go of the less helpful.  What resonates through it all is love and love runs deep, high and wide.  Love is what helps us adapt and endure!  

No matter what your experiences have been, whether you have known love or not so much, I invite you to sink your roots into the love of God in Jesus Christ which has no bounds.  I join the writer of Ephesians, praying "that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:18-19).  

In his book, "The Great Spiritual Migration," Brian McLaren describes how for the past 500 years the church has been focused on believing the right things.  McLaren envisions the church of the future focusing for the next 300 years instead on "the way of Jesus, namely, the way of love" (p.53). Whatever form the church of the future takes, he envisions it being "Schools of Love" (p.56) practicing what it means to be a loving community.  And that is exactly what I hold dear from my family and church roots, a love however imperfect practiced and made perfect in Christ.  

As churches everywhere kick off fall schedules, may we be schools of love, with our only program  learning and practicing the way of Jesus, which is love.