Nathaniel Hillmer

Well, it’s the morning after. And if you’re someone who understands progressivism to be the cancer that it is, your head is pounding. Both chambers were flipped. That’s extremely rare. And while we’ve seen losses like this in the House before, the losses in the Senate are truly historic. This is arguably one of the worst midterms ever. It’s certainly the worst in the last 20 years. It’s terrible. But I’m not dooming. Instead, I’m going to keep working on what I’ve been working on for the last seven years and prepare the best I can for whatever’s coming, which might rightly be called preparing for the worst. So what have I been working on? The philosophy behind it I simply call biblical localism, by which I mean giving priority to the people and place God has put right in front of you. I have a sort of 80-20 rule. I try to put 80% of my time, money, effort, and thought into my locality. For me, that means I’m most interested, after my own household, in Batavia Township, Clermont County, and the immediate region around it. As you grow in influence and power, your reach will sometimes extend far beyond that. But for most of us, it rarely goes beyond our county. That’s the place that touches our lives most and where our actions can have the greatest consequences. Hence, that’s why you give it the most attention. I want to add that this doesn’t mean you don’t care about what’s going on elsewhere. You can care. You can be aware. To some degree, you should, simply because communities are connected to other communities, counties to states, and states to other states. But you want to avoid falling into the trap of spending all your time talking about what’s happening elsewhere while taking no action in the world right in front of you. That’s what I mean by biblical localism. And that’s how I organize my life. Even the 20% of my energy I spend elsewhere is usually directly tied to enriching my locality. Now, to the particulars of the project. When I was studying the early Reformation, the development of these city-states during a time of political and religious turmoil really stuck out to me. Places like Geneva and Strasbourg became refuges. I believed something like that would probably be needed again, given the failure of evangelicalism and the growing political instability in America. I originally had these thoughts before 2016. I started calling them sanctuary cities, in the sense that they provided sanctuary for people who were Protestants and looking for a place to build a life while things broke down. The problem is that the term “sanctuary city” is loaded with modern baggage. Sometimes I refer to them as fortress cities. I think they are that, and should be that. But that makes it more of a military idea than I was going for. I’ve heard some people recently refer to them as boroughs. It’s okay, but still odd. Whatever you want to call it, I wanted to find a place that already had some of these features and labor to make it into a sanctuary of sanity, a fortress of peace, a burrow of life. So I started looking for communities in the Ohio Valley that met certain criteria. One was being close to a major economy that could provide diversity in work and amenities that kept commerce possible and strong, things like an airport, major highways, etc. It was pretty simple to settle on Cincinnati because it’s where we’re from, and it met those basic requirements. But I didn’t want to be right in the thick of it. I wanted us to be able to have real influence within five years and growing influence afterward. Sometimes this is called finding a worthwhile, winnable hill. So I looked at all the counties surrounding Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located. Clermont County stood out. One reason I was drawn there was its very small, undervalued county seat in the village of Batavia. Only about 3,000 people in a county of a quarter million. I noticed that property values were still quite affordable, and it was just an underutilized place. I thought we could come in and really make a difference. We had a plan, and we could stretch our dollar further here than in most places. My goal was to first plant a church, start businesses, and then support Christian education options. Once that was moving, I wanted to start some sort of regional church-planting network that would reproduce those efforts throughout the region. Then, as church communities, we could work together on various ecclesiastical projects, share resources, and hopefully, in time, see regional transformation. So that’s what I’ve been working on. We planted East River Church in 2020. We support the planting of two other churches: Silver City Church in Sterling, Kentucky, and Little Miami Fellowship in Xenia, Ohio. By God’s grace and providence, I was able to bring Maddox Transformer to the township. We opened a shop, bought three buildings on Main Street that we’re rehabbing for our new offices, and now have about 70 employees, with plans to hire more. My associate pastor, John Weis, started Clermont Christian School. While it had a slow start, things are really beginning to pick up. We’ve had members of our church get directly involved in local politics, and people like me who are indirectly involved, mostly through business. We’ve also had a lot of solid people move here from across the states, bringing their gifts to bless our county and seeing the county bless them in return. And I hope, in time, this place will grow into a Christian stronghold where everyone benefits from our salt and light. I said earlier that my work outside my locality is usually tied back to it. What a lot of people didn’t know was that all the travel you saw me doing a couple of years ago was me going to trade shows and applying myself as hard as I could to my work at Maddox. I wanted to see the company do well, but I also wanted to be able to persuade them to invest in Clermont County if the door ever opened. And when it did, by God’s grace and their favor, I was able to help make that happen. Even right now, I’m writing this as I walk the streets of Richmond, Virginia, because I’m here for an intensive at Grimké Seminary. The reason I said yes to this opportunity to serve as a professor here is, first, that I really respect what they’re accomplishing. I think it’s awesome. But I’m also part of the lecturing coming through the Carey Center, which focuses on church planting. And it’s my hope that some of these men will adopt my way of thinking and approach. Perhaps some of them will even want to come to the Ohio Valley and join in what we’re doing. So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m putting the place in front of me first and trying to build something that will help us weather the storms that appear to be in our future. Will it allow us to weather all storms? Of course not. But it will allow us to weather many, and maybe build something that really turns the tide for Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Don’t lose heart. Don’t blackpill. Dig in. Build up. Keep going.

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