‘This article was originally published by the Journal of Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary and is re-printed here with permission.’
At a 2019 conference for rural pastors, Ron Klassen, director of the Rural Home Missionary Association for nearly three decades, remarked from the podium that he had never before seen the blossoming of interest in small-town and rural ministry that he’d witnessed in the previous two years. He’s not alone; many of us have noticed this same trend. Particularly since the 2016 American presidential election, national secular media has focused fresh attention on rural areas. More to the point, there’s been a marked increase in the number of Christian conferences, networks, ministries, articles, and books focused on small-town ministry. In the past few years, while leading Small Town Summits in New England, writing a book on small-town ministry,[i] and speaking at a number of gatherings devoted to the subject, I’ve had opportunities to dialogue with and learn from rural ministry leaders around the country and the world. I can testify from these experiences and interactions that there’s a fresh excitement about what God is doing in small places.
Even beyond a generally increased excitement, I’m seeing a clearer recognition that small-town ministry isn’t a default option, a thing someone does because they couldn’t find a church elsewhere. Rather, it’s a calling from God. My sense is that, in the past, for many ministers in small places, there hasn’t been much of a vocational identity attached to their small-town ministry. Many thousands of small-town pastors have served faithfully, but haven’t considered the unique opportunities and obstacles, the particular triumphs and travails, of their rural ministry. In other words, they’ve thought of themselves as pastors but not specifically as small-town/rural pastors. Consequently, they’ve not connected deeply with other small-town pastors in order to consider best practices in small-town ministry. They’ve not fully appreciated the particular strengths of the country church, remote location, and small community to which God has called them. They’ve not felt the joy and camaraderie of sharing in a vital ministry with gifted and motivated gospel partners around the world. Instead, they’ve felt largely overlooked, isolated, and forgotten in the Christian ministry world. A significant step forward over the past few years has been an increased self-awareness and vocational identity for many small-town pastors. When a new organization such as the Acts 29 Rural Collective emerges (as it did in 2018), with a view toward planting rural churches around the world, those who are already planting churches in such places, and those considering doing so, can more easily appreciate the uniqueness, significance, and value of what they’re doing. They can more greatly benefit from the fellowship and togetherness that urban planters and city pastors have already enjoyed for many years. And they can better feel the enormity and importance of the task before them.
Although the Christian ministry spotlight still shines mainly on cities and suburbs, the renewed attention to small places is encouraging for those of us who devote our lives to ministering in them. But it immediately raises some questions. Is this merely cultural curiosity following the 2016 presidential election, or could it be something more? What might be done to sustain and strengthen this attention so that it matures into a lasting and fruitful ministry focus? How can small-place ministers appropriately develop a unique vocational identity without giving way to pride or to unnecessarily and unhelpfully separating themselves off from ministers who serve in other contexts? These questions require those of us in small places to look ahead and give some thought to the future of small places and small-place ministry. My aim here is to suggest five directions we ought to be looking in hopes that small-place ministry will go deep and last long.
1. Look down (sink theological roots, deepen our understanding of culture)
For a ministry focus to endure and bear fruit, it must be grounded in the Bible and conversant with culture. This means that one of the most important tasks for those currently doing small-town/rural ministry is to think theologically about it, sinking roots deep down into rich biblical and theological soil. We can learn much from our urban brothers and sisters in this regard. In Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City, Tim Keller claims that the key to Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s success wasn’t its programs or strategy, but rather its theological vision. Keller describes theological vision as a ‘middle space’ between doctrine and practice – a ‘space where we reflect deeply on our theology and our culture to understand how both of them can shape our ministry.’ This theological vision promotes unity among the many urban churches within the Redeemer City to City network.
If the current interest in small-town ministry is to mature into something of lasting value, small-town and rural ministers must develop a robust theological vision for their ministry, rooting it in the character of God and the nature of his gospel. Formulating a theological vision for small-town ministry also requires increasing our fluency in local small-town/rural cultures, recognizing where the gospel alternately challenges and affirms them. This development of a small-town/rural theological vision is the main burden of my book A Big Gospel in Small Places, and yet my book only begins this crucial task, inviting others to join in and develop it further. In the book, I sketch out some basic gospel contours that provide those who love rural places and people permission and encouragement to see such places and people – in contrast to the ways in which our broader culture often perceives them – as valuable, significant, and worthy of a lifetime of devoted ministry. My hope is that the task of reflecting fruitfully both on the Bible and on local culture in order to formulate a rural theological vision will be taken up by many more rural pastors and ministry leaders. Theological vision will both source and stabilize our daily life and ministry, providing motivation and perseverance. It will give us a reason to listen to our communities – and something to say to them.
In addition to formulating a positive theological vision for small-place ministry, one of the necessary tasks in our day is to clear the ground by addressing the many arguments advanced by urban leaders for prioritizing city ministry. I think this is one of the most important contributions of A Big Gospel in Small Places, the final chapter of which provides an extended interaction with, and critique of, what I call the ‘urban apologetic literature’ (including writings by Tim Keller, Stephen Um, Jon Dennis, and others). I do not aim to prioritize rural ministry in place of urban or suburban ministry, but rather to argue that all are necessary, and none should be prioritized over the other. In order to pursue this case, I engage biblically, theologically, and strategically with the urban apologetic literature. My chapter is the first extended critique of the urban apologetic literature of which I’m aware, and I very much hope there will be more work done in this area. In particular, I draw on Thomas Robinson’s important 2017 book, Who Were the First Christians? Dismantling the Urban Thesis,[ii] a book which will richly reward further study and interaction. Robinson offers probing, sometimes devastating, critiques of the Urban Thesis, a common understanding of early Christianity promoted by Rodney Stark, Wayne Meeks, and other scholars, according to which early Christianity in its first three centuries was an almost exclusively urban religion. Much of the urban apologetic literature of Tim Keller and others is built on this scholarly understanding of early Christianity (particularly the work of Rodney Stark). So, it’s a significant development to see a scholar of Thomas Robinson’s stature raising fundamental questions about this urban-centric view and opening up fresh avenues for research. Robinson’s work has received positive reviews from other scholars. Intriguingly, one reviewer notes that, ‘There is a current trend in missionary and church planting strategy to emphasise [sic] the need to focus on urban areas. While this book does not undercut all of the reasoning behind those strategies, it does suggest that any appeal to the early church in those strategies needs to be reconsidered and heavily qualified.’[iii] As New Testament scholars and historians of early Christianity explore some of the fresh avenues Robinson’s research has opened up, their work will hopefully also impact popular writing about ministry strategy and ministry location, tempering the insistent call for strongly prioritizing urban ministry – a call that has unfortunately nearly blinded a generation of young pastors and church planters to the possibility of work in more rural, less cutting-edge communities.
A positive rural theological vision will be constructed not only through careful work in the biblical materials, but through rural ministers and laypeople attending closely to their local rural cultures and growing in their understanding of the needs and possibilities of rural life and ministry. They will ask: ‘Of what are people in my small town most proud? Of what are they most fearful? How has my community constructed a local identity? What are the local idols of my town and region?’ I spoke recently with a small-town New Hampshire pastor who was prayerfully considering how best to shepherd those in his congregation with strongly libertarian instincts and a resolve to not be told what to do by the government or anyone else. “Live Free or Die” is the official motto of New Hampshire, and it can easily become an idol that trumps allegiance to the gospel.
A rural theological vision will often be a local theological vision, engaging with local values and local idols. But those in rural ministry will also be closely attuned to the ways in which national events reflect and reveal large-scale rural realities that hold true around the country. The 2020 presidential election will almost certainly highlight (and perhaps exacerbate) a rural-urban political divide, as did the last presidential election cycle in 2016.[iv]
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought great tragedy and loss to many, has mapped onto the urban/rural realities of the United States in fascinating ways, highlighting features of the relationship between cities and the countryside that have been present all along but perhaps weren’t as obvious to some. For example, because cities are densely clustered masses of human beings, they often experience lots of things first (including cultural trends and ideas). Rather predictably, coronavirus hit cities first, but of course it didn’t stay there. The very real threat and reality of coronavirus moving to, and crippling, rural areas has highlighted the often-overlooked needs of the countryside. Rural populations are particularly at risk from coronavirus because they tend to be older and in worse health than city dwellers. In addition to being higher in multiple risk factors, many rural residents are underserved in terms of public health and medical infrastructure, including hospitals. Though these concerns have been reported in the national media, the major news coverage concerning coronavirus has predictably focused on cities and metro areas, which often receive far more attention than small places. But the threat of coronavirus crippling rural areas has also offered a fresh reminder of just how important these places are to the entire country, particularly as meat-processing plants have been affected and agricultural supply chains have been disrupted.[v] Of course, there’s a political edge to all this as well, with the urban/rural political differences coming to the fore in the way individuals are thinking through the issue and the ways in which state governors are approaching the crisis. Many rural governors have pushed to open up more quickly than the blue states on the coasts.
As rural ministry thinkers and practitioners ‘look down’ by plumbing deep theological truths and by understanding local rural cultures (as well as rural culture at a larger scale), we’ll develop a compelling theological vision for how the gospel both affirms and challenges the places in which we live and minister. This theological vision is crucial as we look ahead to the future of rural ministry and as we seek to invite and include new ministers in this work.
2. Look back (learn from those who have been doing this work for a long time)
One common, regrettable error of those who start new organizations, ministries, and churches is assuming that no one has ever done it quite right (or at all) before – thereby implicitly boosting the importance and urgency of their own new ministry. This ungracious posture reduces our ability to learn from those who have been doing the work faithfully and fruitfully for a long time.
Though the recent increased attention toward small-town ministry is a new development, small-town ministry itself is of course not new at all! For as long as the church has been the church, there have been gifted pastors and leaders laboring fruitfully in forgotten locales. We ought to dust off the obscure biographies of these obscure individuals and read them for our pleasure and profit (of course, most small-place pastors never had a biography of their lives written – but some did). I have found and benefited from numerous such biographies. One of my favorites is Music at Midnight, by John Drury, a masterful biography of the famous English poet and pastor George Herbert.[vi] Not only did Herbert serve as a village pastor; he also wrote a manual for pastors called The Country Parson. Though this manual is little-known or read today, it has had a massive influence on many generations of ministers since the 1600s, and I’ve suggested elsewhere that a careful reading of it will be fruitful for small-town pastors today.[vii]
It’s also important and helpful for those of us who minister in America to learn from those in other countries who have devoted substantial thought to the unique realities of rural places and rural ministry. I’m thinking particularly of the Church of England. In 1990, The Archbishops’ Commission on Rural Areas (ACORA) presented a report called Faith in the Countryside[viii] to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. ACORA’s mandate was ‘1. To examine the effects on economic, environmental and social change on the rural community; 2. To describe the changing nature of the Church in the countryside; 3. To examine the theological factors which bear upon the mission and ministry of the Church in rural areas; 4. In the light of the above, to make recommendations for consideration and action.’ The Commission’s 400-page report, which was more than two years in the making, is impressively researched and very thorough, and concludes with 47 Principal Recommendations. Encouragingly, the report begins with a chapter of theological reflections, seeking to ground the project in a Christian theology of creation and personhood. I’m not aware of any American organization or institution that has devoted such substantial effort and funding to considering the needs and opportunities of rural places and rural ministry. And the British continued their leadership in this area by convening a major conference in 2010, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Faith in the Countryside report. More than two hundred academics, church leaders, and local clergy participated in the 2010 Faith and the Future of the Countryside Conference, and a number of the papers presented there were subsequently collected in the 2012 volume Faith and the Future of the Countryside.[ix] Again, this book repays interaction. We have much to learn from our British friends.
Not only have there been many generations of rural pastors, there have long been faithful ministries to support and resource them. Two long-standing North American ministries for which I’m particularly grateful are the Rural Home Missionary Association (RHMA) and Village Missions. Begun in 1942, RHMA plants, supports, and resources thousands of small-town/rural churches and pastors all over the United States through conferences, courses, and printed materials. Village Missions was founded in 1948 and sends full-time missionaries to rural churches and communities across North America (it currently supports about 230 missionaries).[x] Both ministries have amassed much hard-won wisdom about God-honoring rural ministry. It’s important to learn from them and from many others who have long been doing this work.
3. Look around (establish new ministries, networks, and institutional partnerships)
I’m encouraged by the recent increase of Christian ministries and networks focused on rural areas, among them Small Town Jesus, the Vineyard’s Small Town USA project, the Small Town Big Jesus Network, the Back 40 Network, the Acts 29 Rural Collective, and Small Town Summits. Among the common challenges of rural ministry are a sense of isolation and a lack of support, and these networks (and others like them) can be particularly helpful in resourcing small-place pastors and encouraging fruitful partnerships among them.
In my work with Small Town Summits, a regional ministry focused on connecting and serving rural laypeople and ministers in the six New England states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, I’ve discovered just how meaningful it is for often-overlooked small-town churches and pastors to have gatherings designed specifically for them. Our Summits meet in small churches, in small towns, and are led by small-town pastors. This means that they are highly contextualized and adept at speaking to issues that participants care deeply about. The Summits are hosted in, and focused upon, particular states or regions, which increases the likelihood of ongoing connection and partnership long after the Summit is over. There is great fruit in this regionally-specific, highly-local approach. But I’ve also seen the benefit of connecting online with rural/small-town pastors from around the world. Through the ministries of Small Town Jesus and the Acts 29 Rural Collective, I’ve benefited from conversations with small-town ministry friends and partners in Wales, Northern Ireland, England, Australia, Guatemala, and elsewhere. Though there are of course differences in ministry emphasis and approach because of our differing locations, I’m often impressed by the significant overlap in our respective rural contexts.
Another exciting development is the possibility of small-town/rural churches partnering together financially and relationally to plant churches. Urban churches have done this effectively for many years. Because small-town churches often lack the resources necessary (on their own) to send out church planters and planting teams, the possibility of cooperating with other like-minded rural churches to plant more rural churches together is particularly promising. This is already beginning to happen in various parts of the country. Also important is considering how urban and suburban churches might contribute to this work of planting rural churches by using their resources (dollars, personnel, knowledge and experience) in order to work together with small-town churches for kingdom advance.
In my view, it’s particularly significant that several Christian colleges and seminaries have recently begun to focus on resourcing rural/small-town pastors. This current issue of The Journal, from Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, is one such example. The Rural Matters Institute of the Billy Graham Center, at Wheaton College, is active in regularly gathering and resourcing rural pastors and ministry leaders. Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary hosted a sold-out Small Town Summit in 2019 for rural pastors from across New England. The Project on Rural Ministry, based in rural western Pennsylvania, is well-funded and led by members of the faculty and administration of Grove City College. It’s committed to investing deeply in a small group of pastors over the course of five years, and the program’s close connection with the college allows faculty resources and expertise to flow toward addressing the challenges of rural ministry. Such cooperative efforts with established institutions are full of promise.
4. Look outward (publish on small-town ministry)
Just a few years ago, when I searched for helpful resources on small-place ministry, I found only a smattering of articles and a few books (not all of them any longer in print at the time). One of the most encouraging developments of the years since then has been an increasing number of thoughtful, practical, pastoral writings on the importance and practice of small-town/rural ministry. Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, and other websites and publications have featured numerous articles. Small Town Summits now features STS Articles, a steadily-growing collection of articles written by small-town pastors for small-town pastors across a range of subjects that are highly relevant for those engaged in rural ministry.[xi] Donnie Griggs’ 2016 Small Town Jesus is a popular book-length treatment. Brad Roth’s 2017 God’s Country (Herald Press) and Glenn Daman’s 2018 The Forgotten Church (Moody Press) both won Christianity Today Awards of Merit. Winn Collier’s 2017 fictional work Love Big, Be Well (Eerdmans) is also a significant contribution. Major publishers have generally been wary of publishing books on small-town ministry – after all, they’re typically written by small-town ministers, who usually lack name-recognition and sell fewer books. It’s encouraging to see some major Christian publishers now willing to publish on the subject anyway.
Well-written, culturally-engaged, biblically-rich works on small-place ministry will do much to deepen and promote a small-place ministry focus. They will build deeper theological vision for this work. They will speak to the need for small-town churches to be on mission in their communities.[xii] They will seek to tell the stories of those who are gladly devoting their lives and ministries to small places, in hopes that these stories will inspire, motivate, and inform current and future small-place ministers. They will also address practical concerns and questions, such as the various models for funding ministry in remote areas that struggle to afford it. The Village Missions model of pastor-as-missionary is one viable model; others include bi-vocational (or tri-vocational) pastoring; small churches forming parishes to support clergy; lay-led congregations; or like-minded churches partnering together to provide financial support. Publishing on these and many other rural topics will help those already in the rural ministry trenches and will continue to form the vocational identity of small-town pastors.
5. Look local (be more excited by your small-town ministry than by talking about it)
I believe there’s a real need for all the things I’ve mentioned. Rural ministry books and articles ought to be written, and small-town ministry gatherings ought to be hosted. But in my view, the single best way to ensure that the present interest in small-town ministry goes deep and lasts long is for small-town ministers to keep their eyes fixed mainly on their own town and church, faithfully and fruitfully doing the humble, hidden work of ministry. To the degree that rural pastors grow more excited and energized by talking about small-town ministry than by actually doing it, this new ministry focus will lose its way. We ought to recommit ourselves to staying local – to pouring our best thought and ministry effort into our own small place, and to raising up, through personal relationships and intensive discipleship, others who will do it with (and after) us.
In The Country Parson, George Herbert suggested that a rural minister should ‘diligently and strictly’ weigh any invitations from outside his parish, since his parish is ‘all his joy and thought.’[xiii] Herbert also advised that rural ministers should ‘carry their eyes ever open, and fix them on their [parish], and not on their [professional advancement].’[xiv] That’s important advice for every pastor to hear and heed. Herbert envisioned pastors whose gaze was riveted on their own people and place, whose joy came mainly from doing ministry, not from encouraging others to do ministry. May we be such pastors.
Small-town ministry will advance through the devoted, full-hearted ministry of small-town lay-people and pastors – those who are giving their very best to the work before them. The 19th-century Scottish pastor William H. Burns was one such man, laboring faithfully in the obscure Scottish parish of Dun. ‘He preached the word; dispensed the sacred supper; warned the careless; comforted the sorrowing; baptized little children; blessed the union of young and loving hearts; visited the sick, the dying; buried the dead; pressed the hand, and whispered words of peace into the ear of mourners; carried to the poor widow and friendless orphan the charity of the Church and his own…’ and he did these things ‘for twenty successive years day by day.’[xv] According to his son (and biographer) Islay Burns, in the ministry of William H. Burns ‘there is much…for the records of the sky, but nothing, or next to nothing, for the noisy annals of time.’ The important observation for our purposes here is that W.H. Burns fully devoted himself to his ministry, obscure though it was. One humorous incident from early in his ministry at Dun increased his commitment. It was a stormy Sunday, and few of his congregation made it to church. Having carefully prepared a full sermon, he decided, upon seeing the smallness of the congregation, to save his prepared sermon for the following week. In its place, he read the allotted chapter of the Bible and make various extemporaneous comments on it. At some point in this impromptu sermon, he glanced into the balcony and saw an important and respected person – a man under whom he himself had previously studied. His former teacher had been in the neighborhood and had dropped in unannounced in order to hear his former pupil preaching. In years after that, Burns often said that he decided from that time onward ‘never to preach a rainy day sermon again’! Years later, while ministering in the small parish of Kilsyth (less than 5000 people), Burns experienced a remarkable revival. But his pastoral work was devoted and earnest and excellent regardless of the external results.
I believe that God will mature and deepen the present interest in small-place ministry into something of lasting significance as those who serve in tiny, little-known communities look down, back, around, outward, and local. As we look in these directions, let’s look ahead with joy to what God will do in the forgotten places of the world. He knows, remembers, and treasures every single one.
[i] Stephen Witmer, A Big Gospel in Small Places: Why Ministry in Forgotten Communities Matters. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019.
[ii] For my review of Robinson’s work, see Stephen Witmer, Bulletin for Biblical Research 28 (2018): 149-151.
[iii] David Evans, Colloquium 50, no. 2 (2018): 160-163.
[iv] Cf. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (2018). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
[v] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/politics/republican-governors-stay-at-home-coronavirus/index.html
[vi] John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. UK: Penguin Books, 2103.
[vii] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/country-parson-george-herbert/
[viii] Faith in the Countryside: A Report Presented to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Worthing, West Sussex: Churchman Publishing, 1990.
[ix] Alan Smith and Jill Hopkinson, Eds. Faith and the Future of the Countryside: Pastoral and Theological Perspectives on Rural Sustainability. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2012.
[x] See https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/reviving-the-dying-small-town-church/
[xi] https://www.smalltownsummits.com/articles
[xii] See the helpful book and study guide by Aaron Morrow, Small Town Mission: A Guide for Mission-Driven Communities. GCD Books, 2016.
[xiii] George Herbert, The Country Parson. Ed. John N. Wall, Jr. New York: Paulist Press, 1981, page 78.
[xiv] Ibid, page 93.
[xv] Islay Burns, The Pastor of Kilsyth: The Life and Times of W.H. Burns. Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2019, 44.
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Stephen Witmer
Stephen Witmer is the lead pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Pepperell, MA. He's a graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and the University of Cambridge, and serves on the steering committee of the Gospel Coalition New England. He is the author of “A Big Gospel in Small Places.” He and his wife Emma have two sons and one daughter.