by Lowell Bliss
My friend Chuck Redfern was a journeyman: a journeyman journalist, a journeyman pastor, a journeyman creation care advocate. He was good at it. Charles Redfern, Jr. passed away on August 23, 2020 from complications with cancer. He was 64 years old. This is a tribute to him, and a tribute to a lost but necessary perspective: the journeyman’s.
I first met Chuck at our Canada/US Regional Consulation on Creation Care and the Gospel, held at Gordon College in July 2015. Chuck later described this Lausanne/WEA conference as “a time warp:”
I was strolling through evangelicalism’s golden days—before intimidators laid their trip wires. There were lectures, of course (brainy academics and intellectuals give them in their sleep) with topics ranging from climate science to environmental missions to communication techniques to creation care’s theological underpinnings. And there was prayer. And singing. And laughter. And biblical exposition. And field trips to local wetlands and Singing Beach, where my wife [Andrea] and I once strolled during seminary study breaks. And I drove the two miles to Gordon Conwell and visited one of my favorite professors, Garth Rosell. He gave me a bear hug. It was all scented with God’s presence. I felt light and free, no longer weighed by the passive aggressiveness and inertia rampant in the feuding, self-destructive churches I shepherded.
A year later, Chuck and I shared a hotel room at a Sojourner’s Justice conference in DC. Chuck met me with a bear hug. Our time together walking to the Georgetown campus was scented with God’s presence. Chuck made me feel light and free as we headed into the sessions where we contemplated the injustices that we encountered in the evangelical church that we had both grown up in.
Back then, Chuck was still a contributor to Huffington Post, writing on matters of Faith and Society. I was impressed: “how in the world did you land that gig?” Chuck had actually begun in journalism. After graduating from Drew University in 1979, he worked first as a reporter for a Connecticut weekly and then later for a small Delaware daily. “I was happy to dump journalism,” he said, “after a year-long soul search in which I found that I was worshiping my career.” Even after his return to journalism, the Huffington Post kept him on only temporarily. “I haven’t heard a word from them,” he told me at one meeting, obviously disappointed. “They just stopped publishing what I sent them.” Journeymen press on though, and so Chuck shifted his labors to his own blogsite which is still archived and still insightful at https://charlesredfern.com. He called the blog “The Alternative Mainstream: Comments at Classical Christianity’s crossroads with society and junk religion.” Every once in a while, Chuck would write me about something I had posted on Facebook, and he would ask permission if he could use it. Chuck’s spade was sharper and dug deeper. When my ideas were filtered through his reflections and his words, they emerged better. You won’t find a definition of the word journeyman which doesn’t include the word “skilled.”
Chuck was also a journeyman as a pastor. He was ordained American Baptist and took his first church in Boston’s Allston-Brighton section, which was, in his words, “about a mile and a world away from Cambridge’s Harvard Square.” Chuck and Andrea’s only child, Caleb, was born during this time. When Chuck left Boston in 1996, he tried his hand at church planting in New Hampshire for a season, and then embarked on a ministry as what is called an “intentional interim pastor.” “My next church—an intentional interim pastorate nearer to New Hampshire’s coast—was a veritable delight. An intentional interim actively brings healing and resolution to conflicted congregations, but these people healed me. They were hilarious—and they fawned over our son, loved my wife’s cello, and tolerated my long sermons.” Chuck said that, after that first delightful experience, “I seemed fated to serve Hatfield-McCoy churches, so I learned all about toxic organizations and conflict management.” At this point in my imagination, I picture Chuck with an actual toolbox that he dragged around with him from church to church. He even tells us about his favorite tool: “My favorite organization was Peacemaker Ministries, founded in 1982 by Ken Sande, a Montana lawyer saddened by all the internecine church in-fighting.” I bother to mention this because it seems to me that journeymen are always aware of passing on their tools to the next generation of apprentices.
In the end, Chuck met a church that was a bridge-too-far, a particularly vicious place (my interpretation based on conversations) that chewed him up and spit him out right in the middle of a recession. Reactions to Chuck’s convictions about creation care had a lot to do with it.
I was on precarious footing as current events piqued my dormant political interests. A PBS special on climate change forced me to look at my son and say aloud, “Oh . . . my . . . God.” He faced a possible future of droughts and rising seas and widening deserts. My a-politicism wasn’t helping him. Then there was Barak [sic] Obama’s 2008 presidential run. I was impressed. He spoke to American voters as adults. And I didn’t help myself in my quick, ad-hoc comment before a sermon: “The Earth is heating up.” One influential member blasted me after the service for my “liberal” environmentalism and another berated the scientific consensus during a devotional at a general board meeting. I soon realized I was serving a congregation of climate-change deniers, with the consensus deemed left wing and, therefore, anti-Christian.
What does a journeyman do whose toolbox has summarily tossed out the door into the streets? I guess you gather your tools back up, dust them off, tuck them back in, and start walking. Chuck writes,
I asked myself the dreaded question as I muttered on my neighborhood walks: Am I being evicted from my spiritual home as well as my physical home? Am I really a bona fide evangelical? I fit nowhere: Not with Pentecostals (tried that), not with right-wing evangelicalism, not with so-called progressive Christianity (I visited some theologically liberal gatherings; they felt like spiritual dead zones). I loved the Vineyard, but the association hadn’t planted any churches in the Hartford area.
Chuck was welcomed back among the American Baptists and found two more kind churches as an intentional interim pastor. He was also welcomed into the creation care movement: “I felt light and free. . . I longed to be part of this movement. Perhaps I’d offer my oratory skills and serve as a spokesman.” Unfortunately, almost immediately, as he writes, “Cancer benched me.” This is similar to how he wrote about the last church he pastored,
Then calamity struck: My cancer revived with a vengeance. Surgeons sliced out a huge chunk of my tongue in August of 2015 and rebuilt it with skin from my left arm. The disease struck my entire mouth in January 2016. We beat it back with rugged chemotherapy, complimented by radiation, but then it spread to an area near my sternum and returned to my tongue. Radiation burned it away from my sternum and more chemotherapy jailed it on my tongue, but I was told my cancer was incurable. I now speak with a severe speech impediment and can only eat soft food.
What do you call a journalist without a workable tongue? A print journalist. Chuck kept up his blog when he could and published his book The Intimidation Factor: How Scare Tactics Smother American Evangelicalism (Wipf and Stock Resource Publications) in March of this year.
What do you call a creation care advocate with a cancerous tongue? A creation care advocate who carries his empathy for the planet in the very cell structure of his own body.
What do you call a preacher who doesn’t have use of his tongue? A preacher. (The tongue is never the most important muscle for a good preacher anyway.)
I’ll save a book review of The Intimidation Factor for a later blog post. Chuck’s autobiography is contained in Chapter One. The final section is biographical, in that he profiles evangelical leaders he has admired: Tim Keller, Ed Brown, and Steven Nicholson (a Vineyard pastor.) The intervening chapters also read like a biography: like the biography of modern evangelicalism. Nonetheless, I want to call the entire book “the biography of an apprenticeship” which Chuck the journeymen served, and which you and I have likely served as well.
A journeyman, by definition, is a skilled worker (usually in a craft or a building trade) who has successfully received an apprenticeship certification. They are allowed to work as employees, but they not self-employed. Many journeymen grow so adept in their craft as to become more masterful than the “master craftsmen” who employ them, but they still continue on till retirement or death as employees of another. One strange feature of the term is that it can be used as a compliment or a criticism, based on the context. Chuck spent his junior year of university at Oxford, but their dictionary repays him with the following definition: “journeyman: a worker or sports player who is reliable but not outstanding.” What are you talking about?! Chuck was outstanding; he was outstanding at reliability. He was outstanding at being a journeyman.
Furthermore, the word “journeyman” might suggest itinerant status, and Chuck’s own “journey” both through the Northeast and through evangelicalism’s most turbulent period would reinforce this understanding. But actually, the origin of the term is from the medieval trade guilds where the French word journée means “day.” Journeymen devoted themselves to the labors of the day, one day at time, whatever the job is at hand. The journeyman had earned the right to charge a fee for each day’s work. I thought of Chuck the last time I read the beginning of John, Chapter 9. I supposed I could demand an explanation from God why Chuck was struck with cancer just when he was finding his firmest footing, but I suspect Jesus will give me the same answer that he gave about the man born blind: “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (3,4). Jesus was a journeyman too.
Finally, my thoughts went to one last place as I was contemplating Chuck, creation care, and our “journeyman years” (as the old guilds reportedly called them.) I thought about Wes Jackson and his other master craftsmen and women at the Land Institute in Salina, KS. These scientists are seeking to solve the “10,000 year-old problem of agriculture” by growing “perennial food crops grown in polycultures” which are healthier for the soil and the planet than annual crops grown in monocultures. For all their Ph.Ds in Plant Genetics, and for all their multi-million dollar equipment, there is still no other work for Jackson and his colleagues except to get up in the morning, pull on their blue jeans, and walk out in the fields to tend to that year’s planting of grain, that year’s genetic shift to greater yields and more sustainable perenniality. Of all of Wes Jackson’s famous quotations, my favorite is: “'If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.” Chuck Redfern was a big thinker. He took a 24-hour period, and a 64-year lifespan, and tried to pack a millennium’s worth of meaning into them. I and those who knew him will miss him greatly. Thank God that Chuck passed on his tools.
Redfern quotations from: Charles Redfern, The Intimidation Factor (Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2020).