Small town pastors are doing big things for God’s Kingdom.
I recently introduced my daughter to the 2006 Pixar movie Cars. Sorry, if I’m ruining the movie for anyone, but it has been out since 2006, so tough. The movie follows a race car named Lightning McQueen who ends up stranded in a small town off Route 66 called Radiator Springs. It wasn’t until I was watching the movie, for what seemed like the thousandth time, that I noticed the great work Pixar put into showing how society sees these towns and how special these rural towns once were and can still be today.
The town of Radiator Springs represents the state of many rural towns today - on the verge of being a forgotten ghost town. Once a booming stop along a famous highway that connected the east to the west, now very little traffic drives through these towns due to new interstates that bypass the town or big industries moving out to larger, more central, cities.
The main character in the movie, while stuck in the small town performing community service, spends half the movie complaining about his talents being wasted working in the town, while neglecting to see the importance of doing anything to transform or restore the small, rural community.
I believe this has been the attitude of many pursuing vocational ministry. We treat rural areas like a place to get gas as we drive through, rather than a place to call home. Growing up outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, I spent most of my life church planting in smaller rural communities with my family. I can remember driving the old Route 66 highway between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, passing through run-down forgotten downtowns where people use to gather, seeing collapsing houses that once brought life into the community, and stopping at the few remaining gas stations that have survived generations of change.
While spending time living and ministering in these communities, I had the privilege of seeing how new churches, passionate about demonstrating and proclaiming the gospel, could breathe life back into a community and restore the hearts of those calling rural towns home. Read More
Related Articles:
Remembering the Rural: Do Modern Church Plants Focus too Much on the City?
Does Jeremiah 29 call us to seek the welfare of the city?
The Arrogance of the Urban
The Arrogance of the Urban: Part 2
Rural Ministry is Not Second Rate
No comments:
Post a Comment