The Realities of Rural Church Planting

Anyone who has uprooted your family and moved into a closed rural community will understand what this post by Jeff Gauss is talking about.

During our recent trip to Florida I had the opportunity to listen to my wife, Heidi, as she described our church to other pastors, leaders and family. Her simple description really resonated with me and brought everything we’ve been thinking and talking about into focus. “We are a church for outsiders,“ she said over and over again.

Our community is probably a typical small midwestern town. If you were born and raised here, you are an insider. If you weren’t, you are an outsider. Over time you may establish relationship and trust as an outsider and be gradually allowed to penetrate the outer edges of the insider circle, but you will never truly be an insider.

Our family has been pretty warmly welcomed here in NW Pa, but then again I am sometimes rather dense to being “snubbed”. If you are going to snub me you have to be pretty blatant about it. Now that’s good for me and my family in some ways, but I always have to make sure that am not so oblivious to it that I am seen as insensitive. So, as far as I know, we haven’t been snubbed too much here.

It is true almost everyone around here is related in some way, so I know that we ARE NOT part of that and never will be. I also know that since we are disconnected or “outsiders” as Bro. Gauss says, that we are able to look past some of the family battles that have brewed… not that they don’t affect the church and what we are doing. It does. I’ve actually discontinued pursuit of using the dying Methodist church that has 5 or 6 members who are all 60 and older because of some of those past family issues with the people we are serving and the lady who runs that church (there is no pastor).

But you know, it’s NO DIFFERENT than what Jesus faced. He grew up in such a village.  He traveled to villages just like it and He was always happy to minister to the outsiders.   The bible ALWAYS says it better than me:

Matthew 9:12   12 But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.