Guest commentary by Steve Willis
A Sunday in May earned a new liturgical designation. Instead of the Sixth Sunday of Easter, it is now designated the Sunday that Zoom collapsed and left many of us church leaders unable to connect with our people.
While I am grateful for this technology and find myself frustrated when it fails, Sundays with tech difficulties offer us a reality check. Our months-old confidence that technology was now the “new” key to the future of doing church has come up short. That technological confidence, however, is much older than just a few months. I remember hearing it when I was in seminary before the birth of the interwebs. Yep, I’m an old guy, but not too overly luddite. Like many churches, my session is meeting via Zoom and it is a tremendous help right now.
The fascination with technology as the new thing to solve ancient church problems is hardly anything new. Consider author Edward Bellamy’s future vision for the church:
There are some who still prefer to hear sermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our musical performances, is not in public, but delivered rather in acoustically secured chambers connected by wire with subscriber’s homes. If you prefer to go to a church, I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don’t believe that you are likely to hear anywhere a better discourse than you will at home. I see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to preach this morning and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences reaching 150,000.
Edward Bellamy’s fictional book “Looking Backward” was written in 1887 and was as popular as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” This very old assumption that technology is the key for better living is rarely questioned in dominant culture America. But there are different more marginal communities who have proven that this is merely an assumption. I imagine that Bellamy would be shocked that the kind of small rural church that has been my usual place of service is still around. Would you be shocked to know that 48% of PC(USA) churches are still rural in 2020?
My concern for this article is not primarily about technology at all. My concern is that a pandemic’s enforced stillness seems to be producing among us more anxious reaction than any opportunity for genuine reflection. We will squander a once-in-a-generation opportunity if we continue to react to the moment and fail to reflect upon what is important for the church to be sustainable in a world more fragile than we ever imagined. Sustainability is the question posed by the pandemic. Sustainability is the issue not only for institutions like the church, but also for institutions of education, government, economy and healthcare. As fragile as our economy has been revealed to be, we cannot simply entrust our larger church institutions to the fragilities of the market.
If we paused long enough for reflection, we might find time to uncover the great untold story in American denominational Protestantism — which is the resilient, tenacious sustainability of rural church. It is a story never heard because the rural church does not have enough money to buy a microphone loud enough to compete in the market of amplified voices.
As historic Protestant denominations have continued to decline in numbers, resources and influence, the surprising reality is that the rural church continues to persist. It just keeps on keeping on. As I mentioned, half of our congregations self-designate themselves rural. We are a growing proportion of the church, despite remarkable financial, economic and demographic losses to our regions. Many of these congregations were chartered before or during the onset of industrialization and the Civil War when 80% of America was part of an agrarian farming population. The massive shift in population from rural to urban settings reoriented American life and continues, despite small but steady streams of movement back to rural communities. Today less than 1% of Americans are involved in farming, and yet half of our churches are still rural. They have been left behind, forgotten and discounted again and again. Yet they persist. This sustainability is an incredible accomplishment that defies all the odds.
Perhaps you will need a dominant culture church leader to confirm the story that I am telling. Will Willimon wrote a surprising afterword for Jason Byassee’s book, “The Gifts of the Small Church.” He makes this insightful and unbelievably rare statement:
Small congregations have proved themselves to be doggedly resilient. They are the fastest growing segment, in sheer numbers of congregations, in all of United Methodism. Though our seminary-trained preachers have become too expensive to serve them, and though most of our clergy avoid them like the plague, and though most of our new Christians come in through our larger congregations, there is no indication that the plethora of small churches will go away. When the denomination with all its creaking machinery has passed into oblivion … the good country folk that Byassee describes in this book will still be there next Sunday.
Rural churches have developed skills for sustainability. This uniquely personal, familial, intergenerational, creation-integrated and village-centered embodiment of church possesses tools that suit the challenges of our anxious situation. I would claim that they have had unique skills for living even before the coronavirus appeared on the scene. But right now, the rest of the church might have time and space enough to hear about a different way of doing church. Wouldn’t you like to be able to produce your own food and share it? Isn’t the capacity to care for multiple generations of family in proximity looking pretty important right now? Does a small enough scale with a modest enough budget – that is not dependent on government rescue or never-ending growth in the Dow Jones – now appear wise in this new light?
Let’s take a breather from diverting our anxiety with Zoom and Google Meet for just a few moments during a global pandemic. It’s okay. This is a time to breathe deeply. Let’s ask the question about what kind of church we want to be for us and for our grandchildren. Just note that we might need to broaden the circle of conversation to find the tools and skills for that future church.
Finally, the uniquely bare simplicity of the rural church continues to serve as witness that faith, hope and love – especially love – are always more than enough.
STEVE WILLIS lives in the beautiful little town of Bedford, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He is the author of “Imagining the Small Church: Celebrating a Simpler Path.”
