Footsteps and the birth of the idea.

Little River Footsteps Trip to Spain in the Mosque in Cordoba.  Photo by Mark Holm

Little River Footsteps Trip to Spain in the Alhambra, Granada, Spain.  Photo by Mark Holm

In the 1990s and 2000s, members of my church (Little River United Church of Christ in Annandale, VA) set out on pilgrimage trips every other year. They visited the Holy Land, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, the Dalmation Coast, Ireland, England, etc., seeing to walk "in the Footsteps" of whoever.

My husband and I went along with two of these: in 2004 to Italy, and in 2008 to Spain, just before I realized that I was called to ministry, and all our extra cash was going to pay for seminary for a while.

A couple years ago I was preaching and used something from my trip to Spain as a sermon illustration.   We were a couple years into the Narrative Lectionary, but I am pretty sure the sermon was touching on interfaith relations, which is what the 2008 trip focused on, and it hit me.   I'm so concerned about context, my community is really digging into context, and one context that I don't have, and that I have not explored is the physical context of the scriptures, especially the Holy Land.

So I emailed Brian Payne, friend extraordinare, and organizer of most of the Footsteps trips to that point.   And he sent them all to me, itineraries for all the locations above, for the Footsteps of Jesus, of Paul, of the Reformation in Germany, of the great church in Italy, of the Muslim period in Spain, of the Swiss Reformation, of the Congregationalists in the Netherlands and in England.

And they became the seed that started my plans.   Oh, yes, I've added many of my own touches (like the Jesus Trail, Subiaco Italy, Trent, and a stop in Strasbourg to study Anabaptists, which I live among) and I have left a lot out: Footsteps travelers visited more contemporary sites, like those associated with WWII, and a LOT of Art, while I'm more interested in pilgrimage, but I am grateful to those travelers, my friends, for the original idea, for sharing Italy and Spain trips with me, and just for modeling intrepid educational travel for me.