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Let’s reframe vitality

Phillip Blackburn offers two tips for thinking about church vitality in rural settings.

Photo by Sveta Fedarava on Unsplash

Let’s talk about counting. If that’s not a hook to get you to continue reading, I don’t know what is. We Presbyterians like to count things, and counting is important. Our annual reports chart our worship attendance, annual giving, education participation, and racial/ethnic composition among other things. These numbers provide a snapshot of a congregation’s life. What they also do is, explicitly or implicitly, define vitality. More in worship = vital. Less in worship = not as vital.

I wonder if it might be helpful to reframe counting, particularly when it comes to the rural church. To give you an idea of what I mean, let me offer a brief anecdote. There is a church in Arkansas that I have worked with that has around 25 people in worship on a given Sunday. By any metric, that’s not a ton of people, and like most Presbyterian churches, they once had more. However, what happens to our perspective when we zoom out a bit and look at their town? When we do this, the number changes a bit. This congregation is in a town of 2,700 people. This means on any given Sunday, they have around 1% of their population in worship. If a church in a small city of 90,000 people had 1% of the population in worship on a Sunday, that congregation would be seen as wildly successful.

For the rural church in particular, worship attendance and church participation cannot be separated from the demographic realities of the community in which they exist. A number that might seem small, or perhaps even borderline unviable in an annual report, changes when contextualized. Does this contextualization change how we view the vitality of a rural church? Does it impact our understanding of their place in their community or in a presbytery? Perhaps it ought to do so.

Many rural places have experienced a significant population decline over the past 20 years. A decline represented not only by empty pews in a church but also by empty lockers in a high school and empty storefronts on Main Street. While those institutions wane in vitality or cease to exist altogether, rural churches remain. Their persistent presence only increases the impact they might have on a community.

In addition to contextualizing the numbers we collect each year, I think it might be helpful to count not only the heads in worship but the impact a church has on its community. Here is an exercise for you. Get your session together, or perhaps even your entire worshipping congregation, and ask them to get out their cell phones. Next, ask them to name 3 people they have in their contacts who have a significant stake in their town or community, and write those names on a whiteboard. Then look at the list. I suspect you’d have quite the group of local people: bank executives, teachers, librarians, municipal leadership, small business owners, and many more. This list is your social capital in the community. These are the people who can grow your understanding of the community and also the people your congregation can serve.

Taking the list above as an example, let’s consider our current moment in America. I bet the local librarian might have some things to say about what they are experiencing today. I also suspect they could use words or gestures of support and encouragement. The church member who knows the librarian can easily talk to them to learn more. Then, reporting back to the church, a plan can be devised to show support to the library staff. Perhaps your church decides they will make food for the library staff this month. There is no expectation in this gift. There is no motive to do anything other than serve a group of people with whom some of you already have an existing relationship.

At the next session meeting, a report can be given about that effort. What food was served? Who prepared it? How much did the church spend to do this? How many people were served? Now we are counting something completely different. Now our numbers reflect our role in the community; our gospel commitment to love neighbor. Now our focus is not solely on our budget or our worship attendance but instead on how we have proactively engaged our community through relationships that already existed.

The rural church is uniquely positioned to do ministry in this way. The impact of a worshipping body of 25 in a community of 2,700 can be remarkable. As long as our congregations meet and worship, as long as they study and pray as a body, they have the ability to do good work in the world. No, church does not look like it did 20 years ago, nor do our communities. But that’s ok. That means the numbers which define us do not look the same as they did either. In this spirit, let’s keep counting and see what our new numbers reveal.

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