In this and the following two articles, I hope to give some direction on how to approach the literature addressed to rural church life. My counsel stems from hands-on familiarity with the new literature, and from information gleaned from a major research study of church life in the Upper Midwest/Northern Great Plains. Hopefully, I will p resent perspectives from the grass roots. These perspectives appear in some extensive and diverse conversations my research team had with pastors and lay people. These folk expressed concern about the future of rural communities and the churches that, as someone has suggested, are the souls of their communities. I detailed those conversation more extensively in a monograph I published entitled Crossing Boundaries -- Building Bridges.

This monograph takes a serious look at the 2,265 rural congregations representing ten denominations in Minnesota. This is a striking number of churches. These churches represent the vast number of clergy and lay persons who have a vision for their rural congregations and communities. They also represent small and medium sized and, yes, quite large congregations.

Finding ways to engage these folk in conversation about the future of the rural church and its ministry was an imposing task. We wanted to talk with people who represented the region. This required sampling techniques. We accomplished this with a successful random sample survey of laity and clergy from the congregations. In addition, we wanted face-to-face interviews and dialogue among rural people. We consulted over sixty clergy and lay church leaders in five states through another set of special questionnaires and personal interviews. Finally, we held two major consultations that involved another eighty people in face-to-face conversations about ministry and church life.

There were and are many reasons to engage in such conversations with rural church leaders. One is concerned about the future of rural churches. At the heart of this concern is the conviction that pastoral and lay leaders require new levels of support and attention both from denominations and theological schools. This is not to say rural churches and their pastors are needy and in trouble. In many ways, they share the problems of congregations in urban centers. Both are tenacious and viable expressions of Christian faith. The main point is this: rural churches express Christian witness and discipleship within a larger set of unique cultural factors that pose threats to rural life and community. The threats are what popular media and other thoughtful commentators term a rural crisis. This crisis includes threats to family farming, to the economic bases of small towns, to the land, to health care, to education. Human community is jeopardized. The rural church is central, not peripheral, to such challenge. Its ministry is in what one social critic calls "endangered spaces."

The problem in understanding any crisis lies in who defines it. A crisis is interpreted from the different points of view, interests, and social locations of those persons involved. The purpose of the research project was to allow people to define their own situations in their own terms. This yielded perspectives from the grass roots. It elicited, as well, a fresh set of voices to define the crisis and to challenge denominations, theological schools, and local congregations to reexamine how to envision the future of the church in rural America. The research and the ensuing discussions give rural church life the attention it warrants.

Of the many issues developed in these conversation, three seem pertinent for readers of The Clergy Journal. One revolves around a specific question posed regarding the future of the rural church: What are its leadership challenges and opportunities in a changing rural society and its churches? A second question gives attention to those factors that influence persons to either look for or accept a call or appointment as pastor in a rural setting: What support is available to help people identity a fulfilling career track in rural or small-town churches? The long-term institutional question is: how are rural churches to be staffed for effective and continuous pastoral leadership?

The final issue discusses patterns of lay leadership development within rural congregations. How does the context of the rural church speak to a particular understanding of leadership needs and approaches? A brief vision of the church in rural society sets the stage for discussion of career or vocational and leadership topics. Styles of pastoral and lay leadership, and models of congregational life are the complex product of peoples' sense of their self-identity and of what their organizations can do. People and their organizations blend into a wider culture. They are like their social and cultural contexts. But a vision is present, no matter how limited or expansive. The vision is the seed that allows the rural congregation to both fulfill and transcend itself.

Vision emerges out of what people believe is p05sible. We asked one group to define what they felt were the probable or most likely roles of the church in rural culture in the next ten years. The first of the top three roles (of seven defined) is faith gathering. We expected this role. Faithful people gather for worship, to celebrate the sacraments, and to be together in the many ways the Christian tradition is transmitted from generation to generation. The second is nurture or care. This includes those planned, and even unplanned, relationships in which the church shares in common life experiences. Leadership is caring in whatever form it takes within church and community. The final role is social gathering. The church not only provides meeting spaces in communities, but also claims to be a key location for face-to-face relationships in a town or village.

We also asked our group of laity and clergy what desirable role the churches should play in rural culture in the next ten years. Faith gathering and nurture or care remained first and second in importance. But the role of social gathering dropped to last place. The role of community building replaced it as role number three. Community building is described in terms of addressing the needs of the wider society, cooperation with other community groups, and willingness to address local and regional issues. This shift may well reflect that churches are shifting from their traditional social roles. People have more mobility to select from a variety of social groups. Transportation allows people access to other communities and places to meet their social needs.

This shift to community building confirms an emerging paradigm of how to be and to do church. The church's faith, its capacity to offer nurture and care is "in order to" serve the whole people of God. Loren Mead speaks of this paradigm as the reinvention of the congregation. Reinventing the congregation means that the congregation no longer sees itself as a place of retreat or withdrawal from its culture. Nor is it a simple reflection of its wider social world. Rather, the congregation sees a complexity, even an ambiguity in the relationship between church and society. Church and society mutually influence each other for the good of the whole people of God. It is the paradigm that will challenge leadership in rural communities in years to come. It is the paradigm one should seek, if not desire, to employ when reading and using the literature of church leadership and organization. Otherwise, one moves through the literature merely to see how to work with smallness or with bigness. Or one will seek technique and method for membership growth or financial security. At issue is how any recommended approach to church life fits the emerging leadership paradigm. That paradigm suggests a more flexible and expansive way to develop and empower leadership responsive to the whole people of God. My next two articles will suggest ways to focus on this responsive leadership.