It’s Fall in New England. Which means many out-of-towners pass through our small towns to witness trees aflame with color. The natural beauty and geography and location of New England have all contributed to the preservation of its small communities. The area is beautiful and mostly rural.
Ministers of the gospel who know and love these small towns know the unique challenges facing their communities. They also feel deeply the personal challenges of ministering in unknown and seemingly insignificant places. Compounding the difficulty (and the opportunity!) is the fact that the northeastern United States is consistently the most post-Christian area of the country. In Barna’s latest poll, the top 8 most post-Christian cities in the U.S. are in the Northeast, with Springfield, MA topping the list.
Most who read the poll won’t think about the countless rural communities that comprise the balance of central and western Massachusetts, but they are every bit as post-Christian as Springfield.
Needless to say, ministry in the areas surrounding central and western Massachusetts can be both challenging and discouraging. It is easy to look across social media to churches that have parking teams bigger than the audience you preached to on Sunday and wonder if your ministry matters. If your life matters. If you’re making a big enough impact in the kingdom of God.
And that’s one of the reasons why Small Town Summits exists. We want to encourage pastors and lay leaders around the gospel, letting God himself determine the content and the value of our ministries. We have hosted past summits in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and a New England-wide summit at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary with this aim. Lord willing, we will host summits in Rhode Island and Connecticut in 2020, with a view to more summits in each New England state in the years to come.
On October 19, in partnership with the Moody Center, Small Town Summits hosted over 80 pastors and church leaders in Northfield, MA to cultivate a theological vision for ministry in central and western Massachusetts’s post-Christian small towns. Attendees came from multiple denominations and, as one pastor in his late 70’s gladly noted, multiple generations. There were men and women, pastors and Sunday school leaders. There was a pastor and a church planter both from Worcester, MA (population 185,000) and 6 members from a church in Ashley Falls, MA (pop. 834 - yes, they brought almost 1% of their town!). Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut were represented as well. All were gathered around one Christ and one gospel for the sake of his glory in the small places and churches we love.
The gospel-rich plenary sessions titled A Big Gospel in Small Places, The Church as Mission, and Joy in Small Places were all followed by interactive Q&A sessions that contributed to the summit’s collaborative atmosphere. These events are called “summits” because the intent is that pastors and lay leaders not only come and listen and be ministered to, but they also participate and contribute with questions and ideas and prayer for one another.
Interactive breakout sessions in the afternoon focused on how the gospel practically shapes ministry methods and mindsets in small places. Workshop topics included women’s discipleship, church planting, helping hurting people, the pastor as public theologian, and battling discouragement and discontentment in ministry, each with a view to application tailored to our small-town contexts.
Revaluation and Humble, Contented Joy
The gospel demonstrates that God’s ways and his thoughts are vastly different and higher than our own, and that theme surfaced throughout the summit. Unlike Jesus, we naturally judge things by what our eyes can see, so we value what is big and fast and seems strategic (Isaiah 11:3).
While still celebrating urban ministries and the way Jesus is building his church in cities, Small Town Summits co-founder Stephen Witmer exhorted us to revalue small places and our small-place ministries and to re-evaluate our measures for meaningful ministry. If we look at Jesus’ ministry and the gospel from God’s perspective, we’ll find that the rural church matters immensely to God, and that he often chooses what seems small, slow, and non-strategic in the eyes of men. After all, Jesus chose to be born in a manger, to grow up in a small town and in a poor family, and to rescue a sinful world who hated him by dying for it. Jesus’ seemingly slow and small and non-strategic ways are gloriously higher than ours, and truly he sees our small towns and our ministries “not as man sees” (1 Sam. 16:7). A revaluation of small-place ministry doesn’t change the value of the ministry; it changes us. We begin to value what seems small and insignificant to us the same way that God values it, and we recognize the significance of serving the Master faithfully wherever and however he calls us to serve.
I especially appreciated a spontaneous anecdote from Witmer during a Q&A session. He told a story of his father, who also served as a small-town pastor in rural Maine. One Sunday morning, he battled a snow storm to arrive at their church’s gathering. The only other people at the building that morning were two ladies who braved the elements in snow shoes. Stephen’s dad faithfully preached and conducted the service as usual. I couldn’t help but think in that moment that not only do we not know how God used that Sunday morning in those ladies’ lives, and in Mr. Witmer’s life, but we also have no conception of how pleasing that morning was to God as he ministered and they all worshiped in small and unseen ways.
This humble submission to serving Jesus joyfully wherever he calls us is at the heart of these summits. There’s a call to patient endurance while serving with a contented joy. To also pray and ask God to move in big and fast and powerful ways. To be content with small wins while pursuing, to borrow from Eugene Peterson, “a long obedience in the same direction.” As Witmer said Saturday, we should want revival and growth and ministry fruitfulness more, but need it less. Fullness of joy in Jesus needs no supplement from ministry success, however we define it. The other co-founder of Small Town Summits, David Pinckney, reminded us in his session that all pastors and ministry leaders are prone to make a mess of things by relying on ourselves or ministering for ourselves. Yet in spite of us, Jesus’ promise to build his church stands. If Jesus calls you to a small place, it’s because he desires and intends to build his church there. Our responsibility is to serve him humbly and faithfully wherever he stations us, until he changes our assignment or calls us home.
The Call to Stay and Go
The messages and breakout sessions of the summit also held in tension the need to stay put and the call to go. Some will be called to stay and lay down their entire lives in their town. Others will heed the call to uproot their lives to take the gospel to communities without it. If small-town churches matter to God and are significant to him, they are not springboards toward bigger and better ministry opportunities. They are worthy of our life’s work and love and effort. And every town, no matter how small, needs a church bearing witness to the risen Christ.
Witmer speaks of his church having a “hundred-year vision” for reaching his small town of Pepperell, MA. Small-town ministry in New England can require that kind of patience and willingness to stay for the long haul. Pinckney, who pastors in Concord, New Hampshire, relayed his burden that there are 60 towns of over 1,000 people in New Hampshire that have no evangelical witness. It’s going to take humble servants willing to go and willing to stay in those small towns until, as Pinckney says, “the best news in all the world becomes the best news in [those towns].”
It has been encouraging to hear the stories of how God has already begun to use Saturday’s summit. One young pastor had moved on in his heart from his small town to focus on a different mission field. After Saturday, he’s praying about planting a church where he lives in central Massachusetts. One pastor came away from the summit asking himself afresh, “If our church ceased to exist, would our town notice or care?” He has a renewed vision for leading his church to be a loving and conspicuous blessing to their town. One young believer saw how many pastors have needs and can get discouraged just like him, and he’s choosing to take his eyes off of his circumstances and has already asked each of his elders how he can be praying for them. The pastors group that meets in my town has decided to read and discuss Stephen Witmer’s A Big Gospel in Small Places (a book every summit attendee received), so that we can foster the discussions and encouragement that grew out of the summit. Praise God for how he is using these summits, and for how he’s making himself known in big and small places in New England.
Small & Slow; Seen & Significant
D.L. Moody once said, “There are many of us that are willing to do great things for the Lord, but few of us are willing to do little things.” Maybe we undervalue little things and little places, not only because we don’t want to be little or have little impact, but because our perspective is wrong. On Saturday, the God who sees “not as man sees” invited us, as he is inviting you now, to see the small places and small churches through a gospel lens. Not all that is small is good, but neither is bigger intrinsically better or more meaningful. The little thing God may be calling you to is probably bigger and more significant than you think it is.
May God grant us a holy discontentment that longs for him to move in miraculous, reviving power, coupled with a contentment to labor diligently where he’s placed us or where he’s sending us. May you hear and heed his summons to go to the small places, if that’s where the Master is calling you, and may you serve at your small post with humble joy for as long as he grants you to do so.
Your heavenly Father sees you. He is sovereign over the depth and the breadth of your ministry. He is working all things according to his good pleasure, and he loves you and the small town he’s called you to serve. May you be steadfast and immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord (wherever he calls you, in whatever that work is), knowing that in the Lord your labor (no matter how big or small) is not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58).
Ben Whittinghill
Ben Whittinghill is the lead pastor of Rivertown Church in Brattleboro, VT. He’s a graduate of the University of Georgia and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and serves on the leadership team of Vermont Church Planting. He and his wife Kayla have five sons and one daughter.
