Missionary Renegade: Alban Weekly "Community Engagement and the Rural Church" by the Rev. Allen T. Stanton for Monday, November 2, 2015

Monday, November 2, 2015

Alban Weekly "Community Engagement and the Rural Church" by the Rev. Allen T. Stanton for Monday, November 2, 2015

Alban Weekly "Community Engagement and the Rural Church" by the Rev. Allen T. Stanton for Monday, November 2, 2015

"Community Engagement and the Rural Church" by the Rev. Allen T. Stanton

Volunteers chopping wood

Volunteers from Cullowhee United Methodist Church collect and chop firewood and deliver it to homes across the community.

Photos courtesy of Cullowhee UMC

In declining rural communities, churches are some of the few viable institutions. They can use this position to help strengthen the wider community, writes the rural church fellow at the Institute for Emerging Issues.

In conversations with people across North Carolina, I’ve noticed that people speak about rural communities in one of two ways.

The first is in idyllic terms, with rural communities romanticized as relaxed, simple and honest places. The second often comes from a place of pity: rural life is seen only as a world of lagging economies, failing school systems and poor access to health care.

The truth is, our rural communities do face deep challenges. In my job as the rural church fellow at the Institute for Emerging Issues at North Carolina State University, I spend most of my workweek driving from rural community to rural community, and it’s not hard to spot the many problems. Our rural communities are in decline, young adults are moving away, and rural economies and demographics are in a state of transition.

But it is also true that these same communities are places with deep and bountiful assets. I work with churches to increase civic engagement in their communities. I’ve found that if we can tap the right people for the conversation and identify the unique gifts of these communities, then innovative solutions have a way of popping up.

As a member of the clergy, I believe that one of the biggest assets of rural communities is the church. Despite the issues that rural churches -- and the rest of mainline Protestantism -- face, they are some of the only viable institutions in these communities.

More importantly, they are trusted institutions. According to the North Carolina Civic Health Index, people in North Carolina are more likely to volunteer in the church than in other organizations. Churches are places where people from across job sectors, with varying backgrounds and opinions, all come together for the common purpose of serving Christ.

This presents an amazing opportunity for the rural church to engage and strengthen the wider community, which in turn strengthens the church.

One example I’ve encountered is Cullowhee United Methodist Church. It sits on the side of a mountain in Jackson County, where 20 percent of the 40,000 people live in poverty. Though it likely will never be a megachurch, Cullowhee UMC is viable, with two morning services and an average worship attendance of just over 260.

Read about another exciting rural ministry in North Carolina.

The Rev. David Reeves, the senior pastor, is not one to dole out leadership advice. In one of my earliest conversations with him, I asked what made Cullowhee such a good church. With a grin, he said, “I don’t know. You just sort of have to show up. Just be there and listen.”

So I did. And I’d like to share what I saw and heard that make this congregation a model for leadership.

The church notices the world around it. I believe the unique strength of Cullowhee UMC comes from its commitment to the wider community.

In just about every description of a program, I read the same introduction: “We noticed that …” These programs, ranging from ESL classes to peer networks for at-risk youth, were not designed just to give people something to do but rather to respond to a need in the community. And the church first had to notice what the needs are.

Girl with firewood in her arms

The church starts small. Community engagement does not have to be complicated, flashy or expensive. Some of the programs with the most impact start as simple efforts to engage a specific issue.

Part of Cullowhee’s strength is its proximity to Western Carolina University. The church has cultivated a relationship with the university, hosting the Wesley Foundation, providing a place for college students to volunteer and make Cullowhee UMC their church home.

Another simple effort is providing firewood to people who need heat. The congregation collects and chops firewood and delivers it to homes across the community. These small actions ripple outward: a warmer home offers a better night’s sleep, which provides the possibility of better performance in school or on the job.

The church fosters an attitude of community outreach. The Rev. Julia Trantham, the deacon associate minister of education and spiritual development at Cullowhee UMC, explains: “We draw people into the church by including them in some important work that makes a difference. No one comes in asking for a Bible study. They want to know how they can help first.” The Bible studies, she added, come later.

This isn’t just an attitude in the leadership, however. At a meeting I attended with three lay members, Reeves posed the question, “How do we make the church more welcoming?”

The initial answers were as expected: follow up when people visit; make sure to welcome people at worship. But then the conversation took a turn I was not expecting. One layperson said, “We also need to be caring about the whole community. We can’t just be concerned with how we are on Sunday mornings.” The church, these members insisted, should be a place where people in the community can find resources when they face a difficult situation.

The result of this attitude is a culture of engagement. Trantham estimates that in the course of a year, the church’s programs have almost 300 volunteers. Most volunteers are from the church, but others are introduced to the church through volunteering. Community outreach becomes evangelism and spiritual formation, a way of understanding the theology expressed on Sunday mornings.

Strong, vital churches are not just churches with high attendance numbers and lots of programs. Vital churches are churches that take their incarnational mission seriously. Bearing witness to the transformative work of Christ in their own lives, they seek to be the transformational presence in the community around them. They point to the reality of the kingdom of God at hand, and actively work to make it known.

Our rural churches are uniquely positioned to be leaders in their communities. They are trusted institutions that can play a pivotal role in the development of their culture and society.

When we take that charge seriously, I suspect that we will see a more viable -- and a more vital -- model of church emerge, with new efforts continuously engaging the enormous challenges in our community and shaping the world in the name of Christ.

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Monday, November 2, 2015

Carol Howard Merritt moves away from the handwringing over the future of the church toward a discovery of what ministry in, with, and by a new generation might look like. What does the substance of hope look like right now? What does hope look like when it is framed in a new generation? Motivated by these questions, Merritt writes Reframing Hope with the understanding that we are not creating from nothing the vital ministry of the next generation. Instead, we are working through what we have, sorting out the best parts, acknowledging and healing from the worst, and reframing it all.
Buy the book »

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November 12 at 2:30 p.m. EDT
As the political season comes into full swing, this highly relevant session will address the following questions:
What are churches permitted to do -- and prohibited from doing -- in the political realm under current federal tax law?
What about the "gray" areas, such as endorsements made by a pastor in an individual capacity, sermons that feature the moral issues highlighted in current political campaigns, or the distribution of voter guides?
How do so many churches seem to "get away" with violating the law?
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Ideas that Impact: Rural Church Ministry
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"I'm Excited to See the Potential in the Rural Church" by Peter Doddema

horse fields in eastern Kentucky

Bigstock/alexeys

A bivocational Episcopal priest in eastern Kentucky shares his joy at being part of a changing church.

It’s a clear morning in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. Mist is rising over the rolling hills and limestone fences. Horses graze on the dewy grass, briefly raising their heads as I drive down the narrow blacktop road.

No matter how long I live here, I give thanks each day for the stunning natural beauty that surrounds me.

Today I’m doubly blessed, because my destination lies two hours east. I’ll drive from the hills of the Bluegrass into the valleys and green mountains of Appalachia.

On the way, I’ll cross 500-million-year-old river gorges, swing around hairpin mountain turns, race down steep inclines and creep back up behind loaded logging trucks.

I’m a bivocational priest, and my work takes me all over the eastern half of Kentucky.

When my family and I came here in 2011, we had no idea what to expect. We were from the Midwest and were used to big skies, open landscapes and churches large enough to support full-time ministers.

What we found here was lush country, loving, welcoming people, and a network of small, vital but struggling congregations.

The church that called us -- St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harrodsburg -- was typical. Yes, they could pay a small salary plus benefits, but only for two years. They had a little money in the bank, but the congregation was aging, membership was declining, and unless something radical happened, the situation was unsustainable.

Something radical did happen. In four years, we’ve gone from about 30 people on a Sunday to about 70. We’ve doubled the size of the congregation, and we’ve doubled the amount of energy, passion and tangible resources.

This took a lot of prayer, a generous measure of God’s grace (that indefinable working of the Spirit that makes the unimaginable into reality), a lot of community outreach (“Yes, we’re here and we genuinely care about you -- you should check us out!”) and a church that actually wants to grow.

Many congregations say they want to grow, but growth involves a lot of change, and that can make people so nervous that they give up.

When I first arrived here and mentioned the church, people would say, “That place? I thought it was an old, empty building.” Now they often say, “St. Philip’s? Yeah, I’ve heard about it. There’s a lot of great stuff going on there!”

I’m excited about this, but beyond that, I’m excited to see similar potential lying all across eastern Kentucky. Our story is not the only one.

Two years ago (in the middle of all the work at St. Philip’s), my bishop approached me about taking a temporary job on his staff.

Our diocese has a network of about a dozen churches like St. Philip’s, and since 2008, we have administered a program to bring these congregations and their leaders together for intensive, ongoing training, mentoring and resource sharing. The bishop asked me to be interim director.

This gave me the opportunity to step outside my church’s doors and see what was happening in other congregations. I visited churches and met with the strong, dedicated leaders (lay and ordained) who were doing God’s work in their communities every day.

I worked with seminaries to recruit graduates to serve churches with vacant pulpits. Above all, I was filled with joy by the possibilities: what was happening at St. Philip’s had the potential to happen in other churches and communities as well.

The Spirit was (is) active and alive across our area!

Eventually, the interim position ended, and when it did, my bishop asked me to become the finance assistant for our diocese’s camp and conference center. Situated on some 800 acres of beautiful forestland in Appalachia, the year-round facility has been in operation for more than a century.

Today, the challenges facing it mirror the challenges facing our churches: how to be relevant in a rapidly changing world and how to be fiscally solvent in a time of limited resources.

The camp has done a wonderful job of nurturing children and youth and helping them connect with God in stunningly beautiful nature.

But today we are called both to continue this work and to go beyond -- to turn the camp outward and engage with the surrounding community, to listen to what God is doing on the mountain and engage with it.

We’ve just begun this work, and there is a lot to do. Sometimes it seems overwhelming. But in the midst of all our activity, there are clear indicators that God is at work, and constant reminders to do what can be done and allow God to do the rest. We don’t have to be the solution, just to participate in it.

My travels around eastern Kentucky in my roles of priest and finance assistant show me that the church, as always, is experiencing significant change.

But those travels also clearly show me that the church is consciously cultivating a wonderful capacity to listen, tremendous flexibility and solid resiliency.

Whether large or small, congregations and institutions are hearing the new call of the Spirit, listening to their neighbors and engaging in today’s work. A quiet but powerful renaissance (or revival, as some of my colleagues would say) is happening. It’s my joy to be in the midst of it!

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"Nazareth" by Jeremy Troxler

Don’t underestimate the possibilities of small, rural churches. After all, Jesus’ hometown was an insignificant agricultural village, says Jeremy Troxler.

Editor's Note: This sermon was preached May 21, 2007, at the Thriving Rural Communities Aldersgate Gathering at Duke Divinity School.

Jeremy Troxler will preach during Renewing the Church, Duke Divinity School's 2013 Convocation & Pastors' School, Oct. 14-15. Register online

John 1:43 The next day, having decided to leave for the Galil, Yeshua found Philip and said, “Follow me!” 44 Philip was from Beit-Tzaidah, the town where Andrew and Kefa lived. 45 Philip found Natan’el and told him, “We’ve found the one that Moshe wrote about in the Torah, also the Prophets — it’s Yeshua Ben-Yosef from Natzeret!” 46 Natan’el answered him, “Natzeret? Can anything good come from there?” “Come and see,” Philip said to him. 47 Yeshua saw Natan’el coming toward him and remarked about him, “Here’s a true son of Isra’el — nothing false in him!” 48 Natan’el said to him, “How do you know me?” Yeshua answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” 49 Natan’el said, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Isra’el!” 50 Yeshua answered him, “you believe all this just because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than that!”

Luke 4:16 Now when he went to Natzeret, where he had been brought up, on Shabbat he went to the synagogue as usual. He stood up to read, 17 and he was given the scroll of the prophet Yesha‘yahu. Unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written,

18 “The Spirit of Adonai is upon me;

therefore he has anointed me

to announce Good News to the poor;

he has sent me to proclaim freedom for the imprisoned

and renewed sight for the blind,

to release those who have been crushed,

19 to proclaim a year of the favor of Adonai.”[Luke 4:19 Isaiah 61:1–2; 58:6]

20 After closing the scroll and returning it to the shammash, he sat down; and the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 He started to speak to them: “Today, as you heard it read, this passage of the Tanakh was fulfilled!” 22 Everyone was speaking well of him and marvelling that such appealing words were coming from his mouth. They were even asking, “Can this be Yosef’s son?”

23 Then Yeshua said to them, “No doubt you will quote to me this proverb — ‘“Doctor, cure yourself!” We’ve heard about all the things that have been going on over in K’far-Nachum; now do them here in your home town!’ 24 Yes!” he said, “I tell you that no prophet is accepted in his home town. 25 It’s true, I’m telling you — when Eliyahu was in Isra’el, and the sky was sealed off for three-and-a-half years, so that all the Land suffered a severe famine, there were many widows; 26 but Eliyahu was sent to none of them, only to a widow in Tzarfat in the land of Tzidon. 27 Also there were many people with tzara‘at in Isra’el during the time of the prophet Elisha; but not one of them was healed, only Na‘aman the Syrian.”

28 On hearing this, everyone in the synagogue was filled with fury. 29 They rose up, drove him out of town and dragged him to the edge of the cliff on which their town was built, intending to throw him off. 30 But he walked right through the middle of the crowd and went away.

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth? . . .

‘Come and see.’”

Jesus finds Philip, so then Philip goes and finds Nathaniel to tell Nathaniel that he has found Jesus, forgetting exactly who found whom in the first place.

(We do that sometimes.)

“Nathaniel,” Philip says, “we’ve found him, we’ve found the one, the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote, the Savior, and, are you ready for this, it’s Jesus, son of Joseph from . . . Nazareth.”

And Nathaniel looks at Philip as if Philip has just told him that really, the Chicago Cubs are really, actually going to win the World Series this year.

“Nazareth? Can anything good come out of Nazareth, much less the Savior of the world?”

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

I did some reading about Nazareth. It didn’t take long, because we don’t know much at all about Nazareth in Jesus’ day. Nazareth is barely, if ever, mentioned in first century documents outside of Scripture. The little we do know is largely speculative and wholly unremarkable. Apparently scholarship suggests that Nazareth was a small community of anywhere between 500 and 2000 people: likely just about the size to qualify for funding from the Duke Endowment’s Rural Church Division. Nazareth was likely located not far from a major East-West trade route that ran from Egypt to Asia called the Via Maris: picture it as one of the small communities you see exit signs for off that major trade route from East to West that we call I-40. Specifically, Nazareth was situated in the hill country of Galilee, a region of fishing and farming that was also known in Scripture for its distinctive regional accent and for having a large population of Gentiles, a high number of immigrants, foreigners, resident aliens.

Archaeological evidence also shows that Nazareth may have sat somewhat in the shadow of the nearby city of Sepphoris, which was being rebuilt as a regional capital around the time of Jesus. Sepphoris was the place where the action was. Sepphoris was the place with the multiplex cinema- or at least Roman theater. Sepphoris was the place where the young people went off to work and find jobs. Nazareth . . . well, apparently nothing much happens around Nazareth. Nothing to make the news. They apparently don’t even have a sign on the edge of town that says, “Welcome to Nazareth, home of . . .” and then the name of some small-time celebrity or state champion high school basketball team.

Even the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary describes Nazareth as, quote, “an insignificant agricultural village.” Of course, it would probably say the same thing about Brown Summit, where I grew up, and about most of the rural communities represented in the Thriving Rural Communities program.

So when Philip says we’ve found the Messiah and he’s from . . . well, the insignificant agricultural village of Nazareth, Nathaniel can only say, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Maybe Nathaniel said that not only because of Nazareth’s seeming insignificance, but maybe Nazareth also had something of a reputation. After all, Jesus didn’t always have the easiest time in Nazareth. Mark says that Jesus could do few healings in Nazareth, because of the residents’ unbelief and lack of faith. Matthew suggests the people of Nazareth won’t listen to Jesus because they still just think of him as the carpenter’s son, Mary’s boy. Or we think back for a minute to Jesus’ first sermon in front of the home folks, that we read about in Luke 4. Remember how Jesus returns to the synagogue in Nazareth to preach homecoming, and he stands up to read and chooses the scroll from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, the let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And then Jesus sits down to teach, and tells them, “Today, now, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing: here, in Nazareth.”

At first everybody is proud of him, amazed at his gracious words. They pat each other on the back and say to themselves, “Get a load of Joseph’s kid; maybe something good’s going to come out of Nazareth after all for a change.”

But Jesus’ homecoming sermon doesn’t go too well after that: it’s amazing how much things can change in the course of one sermon. Jesus knows his people so well that he knows what message they most need to hear, and he loves them so much he is willing to preach it. He’s said he was anointed to release captives and open the eyes of the blind, so that is what he will do.

Jesus is aware that the people of Nazareth are clamoring for him do the same kind of healings and miraculous cures there as he has done elsewhere. And they probably think that since Jesus is from Nazareth, and that they are his own people, that they’ll receive preferential treatment: after all, they’re from Israel, and believe they are more important than those Gentiles living across the border.

“Doubtless you will quote to me the proverb, ‘Physician, cure thyself,” Jesus says. (Not a bad proverb in reference to the clergy health initiative, by the way: ‘Physician, cure thyself.’ “Minister to the body of Christ, minister to thy body.”). But what Jesus is referring to is the fact that the people of Nazareth believe Jesus the physician should heal his own people first: them. But Jesus opens the eyes of their blind provincialism and tries to set them free from their captivity to racism by reminding them that God’s love extends beyond them, that it was to an immigrant widow whom God sent Elijah, and not a widow in Israel, and that out of all of the lepers in Israel, Elisha only cleansed the foreigner Naaman.

At which point the congregation offers to take Jesus cliff diving without the water to soften the landing.

Those of us who’ve grown up in Nazareth know that it has its challenges. We’ve seen some of the violence that simmers beneath the surface of civility, the willingness the draw hard lines between insider and outsider, the family identities that can crush true expression of self, the thinly veiled prejudice propped up with a Proverb. Jesus has had to rescue some of us from that. And it’s not the last time a congregation in a rural community would try to run a preacher out of town who dared to preach the truth of God’s word.

Hearing those stories about Nazareth, you can understand why maybe Nathaniel might have heard enough about the village to ask skeptically, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

And yet the amazing thing is, Nathaniel is about to discover that something beautifully, wonderfully, salvifically good did out of Nazareth. Jesus came out of Nazareth. It was in Nazareth that Jesus was raised. It was in Nazareth that he likely attended synagogue and recited Torah and learned the words of Scripture. It was in Nazareth that Scripture says Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature and in divine and human favor.” And as Lawrence Wood reminds us, all the rest of his life, Jesus would carry the name of his home community with him: on the lips of crowds, demons, and angels, he would be called, Jesus of Nazareth.

There is a sense in which the greatest gift the world has ever received, Jesus, was the gift of a rural community.

The Thriving Rural Communities Initiative has, at its heart, God’s love for Nazareth, and for those rural communities that Nazareth is a symbol of. It is an initiative that believes that those communities still have great gifts to give to the world and to the church.

For some people, Nazareth and communities like it are just exits on the highway, undeveloped land, the boondocks, pretty pastorals on the way to somewhere else, or even just a field ed placement or a first appointment.

But God loves Nazareth. As it is. And as it will be. And God cares about the suffering of Nazareth.

Nazareth and the rural communities it represents have gone through a time of great change and suffering over the past 60 years. When I was a pre-medical student, I learned that whenever a baby or small child fails to grow or mature in the proper way, a doctor formally diagnoses the condition as “Failure to Thrive.” Usually the condition happens because of bad eating habits, a lack of economic resources, poor parenting practices, emotional stress, or the presence of a genetic defect.

Many rural communities and churches have failed to thrive for some or all of the above reasons. Rural Communities have been the ones who have borne the changes of industrialized agriculture, and as family farms have disappeared, rural communities have suffered for our insatiable appetite for cheap and highly processed food. Bad eating habits. Rural Communities and small towns have born much of the brunt of globalization’s impact, as mills have closed, jobs have been lost, and the textile industry has all but disappeared in North Carolina. Rural school systems, with their smaller local tax base, often have less funding available for schools than their urban and suburban counterparts. Lack of economic resources. Rural Communities have been at the front-lines of the difficult issue of how to welcome the sojourner or foreigner in our midst. Rural counties have struggled with plagues of poverty and hunger; and many in rural areas have tried to address their spiritual emptiness with methamphetamine instead of Methodism. Rural leaders, including rural church leaders, have often lacked courage or proved ill-equipped in facing these challenges in a visionary way. Lack of resources, emotional stresses, innate problems, poor parenting. And a recent newspaper article showed that a disproportionate number of the military casualties and human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been borne by the people of rural America.

God loves and cares for these communities, and calls upon Christ’s church to respond to these challenges creative and faithful ways, so that they can thrive in the abundant life of Christ, and be what they were created to be.

And yet for all of the current struggles, and for all of the real challenges facing our churches in rural areas today, Thriving Rural Communities also believes Nazareth, as it once did, still has great gifts to give the world: gifts of genuine human community, true appreciation for the Creation, a rich storehouse of practical skills and wisdom, a beautiful image of what Christ’s church can be.

Nazareth can still offer Christ to the world.

Nathaniel asked Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

And do you remember what Philip said? “Come and see.”

To a world and a church that wonders, sometimes skeptically, sometimes hopefully, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?,” we hope to say, “Come and see.”

I believe that the church of Christ is meant to be a preview of the future, a kind of prequel to the kingdom of God, that shows people now what the heavenly life will be like when Christ’s new world comes. We are a kind of visual aid for the kingdom, because people have to see it before they can believe it, and they have to believe it before they can be it.

It is my hope that God will use Thriving Rural Communities to be a preview of renewal in the rural church. I hope that the pastors and students and churches who are a part of this initiative will allow people to see a new future, and seeing that future, to believe in it, and believing in that future, to one day be that future, by the grace of God.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? “Come and see.”

Come and see Solid Rock and Sandy Plains and Cedar Grove. Come and see Friendship and Hayesville and Tyro and Fairview. Come and see Disciple Bible Studies’ Prison outreach, where the captives are set free and prison staff are ministered to. Come and see Courage to Serve, where pastors draw upon their communion with each other to lead others to communion with Christ. Come and see students whose lives have been changed by their ministries with country people. Come and see pastors who realize that rural churches are places where the risen Christ is transforming lives and where they can live out a deeply fulfilling vocation.

Come and see the gifts of rural areas.

Or, in those moments when you doubt that anything good can come out of rural communities, come to the cross, come and see there the sign above the head of the crucified Savior of the World, the sign that proclaims him the King of the Jews and be reminded that the sign begins, “Jesus OF NAZARETH . . .”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

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"The Small Church" by Steve Willis

Quite often I drive by the Peaks Presbyterian Church on my way to hike through the Blue Ridge Mountains. The little white clapboard church sits in a beautiful setting, looking up to Sharp Top and Flat Top Mountains of the Peaks of Otter, among the highest elevations in Virginia. This congregation has always been a small country church since it was founded in 1761. It has survived the Revolutionary War, the trauma of our nation’s Civil War, the Great War to end all wars, the Second World War, Vietnam, the culture wars of the sixties, and now continues its ministry today. The Peaks Church’s beginnings hearken back to a time that had a quite different understanding of church and pastoral leadership.

During the period when the Peaks Church came into existence, stability was the norm for ministers, who most often pastored the same church their entire ministerial life. A study of Congregationalist ministers who graduated from Yale College during this era shows the difference between then and now. Robert W. Lynn and James W. Fraser, church analysts, who in 1977 contributed to one of the first books written specifically about the small church, summarize the differences:

The eighteenth-century New England Congregationalists did not view the successful pastor as one who changed churches. That 7 percent with more than two pastorates consisted of the “ne’er to do wells.” The situation was precisely the reverse of today, that is, Congregational pastors of that time looked upon themselves as holding identical offices with identical problems. There were no essential spiritual distinctions between the minister who labored in a small Connecticut hamlet and the pastor of the prominent church in New Haven or Boston.1

Until the late nineteenth-century, the small church had been the normative model for congregations in any context: city, town, or country. Not until the construction of public mass-transit systems in major urban areas had the large church, as we now know it, been a possibility. Tony Pappas, American Baptist Area Minister in Massachusetts and small-church advocate, describes it this way:

So for the first time in human history, thousands of people could get to a one- or two-hour event and get home for lunch! So large churches, big steeples, big pulpits, Old Firsts came into being. As we think of them today, large churches have only been around for a little over a century–only 5% of the history of our faith.2

The large church’s development in major urban centers also coincided with the growing American industrial economy. The prototype for the megachurch was the famous Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn, New York, which built an unmatched membership of two thousand people. The business entrepreneurs John Tasker Howard and Henry Chandler Bowen were the businessmen behind the congregation’s formation. Spiritual as well as financial incentives provided the impetus for building supersized churches. Debby Applegate describes this dynamic in her biography of Plymouth Church’s first pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, who came to New York in 1847:

On a practical level, a popular church was an excellent investment. It was exempt from taxes, its revenues were regular, it was unlikely to chisel or default, and it brought up the real estate values of the neighborhood, creating more opportunities for wise investors to make money. The church paid the owners rent or a mortgage with a profitable interest rate, and they could make extra money by hiring out the building for speeches, concerts, meetings, and other entertainments during the week.3

But before parishioners could travel by car, train, or Beecher boats to church on Sunday, churches had been small. The normative model for the vast majority of church history has been the small church, and the percentages show that this is still true today.

Of course, today is not the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and much has changed, including changes both welcome and lamentable. If we consider the church’s position in the larger culture and the influence and power of the mainline Protestant church on society, things today more closely resemble 1761 than 1950. By this I mean that denominational Christianity has found itself in the periphery of the dominant American culture. Even our central-culture churches have found themselves at a new periphery. We have experienced a loss of social influence and status in the culture and a loss of resources. As much of a shock as it is to our system, we know that the church’s position in any culture ebbs and flows. We have little control over whether we are flowing or whether we are ebbing.

Today there is knowledge to explore that comes from healthy, sustainable, rural churches. We need to start thinking the other way around about where we are in the culture and what place we inhabit. Mainline Protestantism has grown comfortable and accustomed to the center, but we need to relearn gifts and skills from the periphery. Our social location is changing–really, it has already dramatically changed. So our learning needs to change as well.

I wish and pray for a time in the church that values and grows from the insight, experience, resources, and stories of all our diverse and varied ministries. A more in-depth collaboration among and learning from both central- and peripheral-church ways of being will provide needed perspectives and skills for living into an ever-changing future. Sharing our diverse voices and gifts can help us all remember that it is the sovereign, gracious God of Jesus Christ who is the center of our life together.

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1. Robert W. Lynn and James W. Fraser, “Images of the Small Church in American History,” in Small Churches Are Beautiful, ed. Jackson W. Carroll (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 7 – 8.

2. Anthony C. Pappas, Vital Ministry in the Small-Membership Church: Healthy Esteem (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 2002), 10.

3. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday Broadway, 2006), 202. ---------------------

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