Rural soil still fertile for faith

Flyover Church: How Jesus’ Ministry in Rural Places Is Good News Everywhere by Brad Roth (Herald Press, 2024)

Though I live in a town of fewer than 2,500 people, I don’t consider my community rural. We’re not close enough to Portland, Ore., to be a suburb, but there’s also not a yawning expanse of land between us and the next towns over. Dundee has an agriculture-based economy, but our specialty crops are the wine grapes that lure tourists to our tasting rooms and luxury restaurants — a far cry from the corn fields and aging downtowns of Middle America that Brad Roth writes about in Flyover Church. 

And still, I found Roth’s work perspective-shifting in all the best ways, helping me to see my own community through new lenses — notably in how Dundee shares similar struggles with so many other small towns. Flyover Church provides insights about the rural places that city dwellers too often disregard because people believe a single story about them: That they are homogeneous in their populations and backwards in their thinking, stuck in the past and unworthy of attention. 

The very term “flyover” reflects this disregard: the idea that much of North America is best engaged from 35,000 feet, which means not really engaged at all. Roth challenges readers to engage, to consider the complexity of rural communities and the equally complex role churches play in their flourishing. 

He also argues, convincingly, that rural areas are thriving, that “Jesus is still creating something new and good” in rural spaces — and that this is good news we all should celebrate, if only we take the time to see the goodness unfurling. 

As someone who has dedicated his life’s work to ministering in rural churches, Roth understands this goodness well. Given the biases about rural communities, though, Roth says his calling has been questioned — not by him, necessarily, but by those who see small-town ministry as a stop on the way to bigger cities and better congregations. Roth rightfully claims this perspective is not compatible with Jesus’ work in the Gospels. 

There, Jesus ministers to small communities. He models being present to people on their own terms (and turf) without expecting them to be different than they are. “Showing up and staying put are the beginning points of rural ministry, not its sum,” Roth writes. “They’re the basic gifts of love that we give a people and a place, what make us available to Christ’s ministering action.”

Roth returns often to this idea of presence as love. A rooted presence helps ministers navigate the challenges rural churches face. Rather than pressing for something grander — more people, more programs, more community visibility — rural pastors may need to embrace the Jesuit principle of Magis (doing more in response to the love of Christ) and the Anabaptist idea of Gelassenheit (yieldedness to God in all things). Though these concepts might seem in conflict, Roth suggests rural churches benefit from ministers practicing both — responding to the challenges of their communities with Christ’s love and yielding to God’s purposes, even when expectations suggest a different action. 

Roth affords those living in small- town America a humanity often absent in what he calls “redneck safaris” — expeditions by outsiders who attempt to diagnose the ills of rural places as detached anthropologists before jetting back to the city. 

He says we need to challenge the ways rural stories have been told. Too often those stories have been about something less than abundant. Not all rural communities are in decline. Not all downtowns are crumbling. Not all churches have dwindled to a few stalwart gray-haired members. 

Stories of rural struggles can be useful, but Roth says we need to tell other stories, too, about the beauty to be found in these churches. In fact, the struggles themselves can “resolve into beauty.” 

Roth says Jesus’ death and resurrection represent good news for rural churches. The hope of the Christian faith is found in Jesus’ triumph over death: “If Christ’s body can shudder and breathe and live, then what else?” Christ’s love and presence can be manifest anywhere, by anyone.

Flyover Church affirms blooming where you are planted. Citing Jesus’ Parable of the Sower, Roth says the story isn’t about being the fertile soil onto which some seeds are cast. He reads the parable as a reminder to persist in growing where you land, whether among thorns or on rocky ground. He celebrates the possibilities of rural churches and people, whether they are scattered near the wheat fields of flyover country or somewhere else entirely, like the grape vines that surround my hometown.  

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