Clark Karsner - Combining a Passion for Aviation with a Passion for God

 

Perhaps your students think that only pastors, Sunday School teachers, and missionaries are responsible to tell people about God, but this is not a biblical opinion. According to the New Testament, the Christian message can be shared by anyone. It does not take a pastor, a nun, or a member of the clergy. The Christian message does not need to be shared using a pulpit, a sermon or an evangelistic campaign or television broadcast.

Harry Clark Karsner’s life is an example of a person who combined his passion for aviation with his passion for God. He learned to fly a little Piper Cub single-engine plane in 1934, the year after he graduated from Monterrey High School in Owen County, Kentucky. A year later he earned his commercial pilot’s license. Within less than five years, he was teaching aviation. He taught in President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Pilot Training Program and, during World War Two, he was an Army Air Corps flight instructor. After the war, he built an airstrip and a hangar on his farm in Owen County. He erected a large sign on the side of the hangar that was visible from Highway 27. It said: “Christ is the answer”. After meeting evangelist Louis Arnold, Karsner collaborated with him to broadcast the Christian message from the skies over northern Kentucky, southern Indiana, and southern Ohio starting in 1948. This required figuring out how to mount large amplifiers from an Aeronica Champion plane, recording five-minute sermons preached by Pastor Arnold and hymns sung by Mrs. Karsner, and putting aside the time to fly in what everyone called the Gospel Plane. In 1959, Karsner was named the Kentucky State Aeronautics Commissioner. At the May 26, 2012 ceremony when a highway marker about the Karsner Air Field was installed on Highway 27, Bonnie Riddle said that Karsner “brought aviation to Owen County and the Gospel message to mankind.”

Can your students think of other lay people who combine a passion for God with another skill or career path? Do they find Karsner’s life inspiring? How?

The fifth book in the FKCC Book Club series of easy-reader chapter books about famous Kentucky Christians, Great Idea – the Story of H. Clark Karsner, by Lesley Barker PhD., will be available soon on Amazon along with the other books in the series. These books are great additions to any church or classroom library.

The Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project Walking Trail and Eye Spy Game will be free and open to the public at 616 Clintonville Road, Paris KY 40361. The Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting Ceremony will take place on Sunday, July 25, 2021 at six o’clock in the evening. We invite you to come and to plan to return often with your students.

 

Exploring the issue of freedom with youth and children

 

Have you ever explored the issue of freedom with your church’s youth and children? This week’s famous Kentucky Christian may be a way for you to open the conversation.

Peter Durrett was an enslaved, biracial man, whose father was his first owner. He believed the Christian message and received it into his heart during the First Great Awakening in Virginia. He became a Baptist exhorter when he was twenty-five. He never was ordained because the white church officials prevented it. But his enslaved condition did not stop him from following his calling as a pastor.

Peter Durrett and his wife, Dinah Durrett, came to Kentucky in 1781 with the Traveling Church. Peter and Captain William Ellis were the guides for this group of some 500 Baptists who emigrated from Virginia. Peter and Ellis had been to Kentucky before. They knew the way through the mountains, and they had planted crops in Kentucky. They also helped build Grant’s Station. Both Durretts were enslaved to Pastor Joseph Craig, one of the leaders of the Traveling Church. They were never emancipated but they were able to hire themselves out to prominent people. Peter was the first African American to preach a sermon in Kentucky. He and his wife started the first African American church in Kentucky, the third in the nation.

Do your students think that they would be willing to do what Peter Durrett did especially if they knew they would always have to be a slave? What do your students think they would do if their freedom was taken away? Why? Would their faith be something they would be willing to share if they understood that they would be imprisoned for talking about?

 

 

 

A Youth Group Discussion on Perseverance based on Martha Cross' Life in Liberia

 

This week’s famous Kentucky Christian is Martha Cross. Her story may trigger conversations in your youth groups and children’s church about perseverance.

Martha Cross emigrated to Liberia with her husband, Alexander, and their seven-year-old son, James, in 1853. They were the first missionaries to Africa sent from Kentucky by the Disciples of Christ. Theirs was an interesting story. Alexander was an enslaved barber. Both Martha and James were free people of color. They attended the Ninth Street Christian Church in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The church decided to purchase Alexander and to fund the family’s expenses to join the Kentucky Colonialization Society. This obliged them to leave the United States. The church paid for their passage on the ship, Banshee, as well as for the cost of a piece of land and their expenses for the first year. Unfortunately, both Alexander and James died soon after arriving in Africa due to a tropical disease. Martha stayed. Eventually she married another missionary.

Ask your students how they think Martha Cross must have felt after sailing across the ocean to a land she did not know to start a new life for herself and her family. Then ask how they think she may have felt after both her husband and her son died. She knew some people who had been passengers with her on the Banshee but she was left grieving and alone. What would your students have chosen to do? Would they have stayed in Liberia or would they have tried to return to Kentucky? Why? If they had been listening to her praying, what do they think she would be telling God? How do people keep going when it seems like life is against them to steal their future, hope and destiny?

By Lesley Barker ©2021

Women of God (from Kentucky) on the American Frontier

 

This week’s featured famous Kentucky Christian introduces the ideas of commitment, achievement and recognition. When your youth group or children’s church learns about Sister Mary Rhodes perhaps they can be led to think about what people whose lives were set apart for Christian service have achieved even when their circumstances appear to have been hard. Perhaps the students can be helped to understand that recognition and rewards for what they do may not come in their lifetime but that that prospect does not, for a Christian who believes in eternal life, diminish either the value of their work or the size of their reward.

Sister Mary Rhodes was a famous Kentucky Christian. She came to Kentucky in 1811 where she started teaching children who had no other access to a school. Soon she was joined by two other women and the school grew into a boarding school. The women and the school were Roman Catholic. The women decided to devote themselves to teaching and to God. They became the first American order of Catholic nuns. Mary Rhodes was the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Loretto for ten years. She must have been a skillful leader because by 1822, the order had grown from three to 160 nuns. By then, the order had spread to nine different locations where nuns from Kentucky were educating children. By the middle of the twentieth century there were 70 communities of Loretto nuns in the United States[1].

These nuns as well as women from other Catholic sisterhoods were vital to the spread of education and to the introduction of Christianity among the Native American tribes in the nineteenth century American west[2]. They were undaunted by the challenges they had to face perhaps because they were confident that they had fully given their lives in the service of Jesus Christ. Some historians think that the nuns who lived and worked on the American frontier are great examples of how women can challenge gender norms with a creativity and finesse that gets big things done[3]. Perhaps a lot of people did not know about their work during their life-times but the impact of what they were able to achieve is still producing results two hundred years later.

By Lesley Barker©2021

 

 

 

---

[1] https://www.lorettocommunity.org/about/history/

 

[2] Ann M. Butler, “Nuns on the Frontier”. New York Times. 2012. ONLINE at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/opinion/nuns-on-the-frontier.html. ACCESSED 1/14/2021

 

[3] Erin Blakemore. “How Frontier Nuns Challenged Gender Norms” in JStor Daily. 2018. ONLINE at https://daily.jstor.org/how-frontier-nuns-challenged-gender-norms/. ACCESSED 1/14/2021