For two days every June, Hutchinson, Kansas, transforms into “Smallville”—the fictional hometown of Superman—for the annual Smallville Comic Con. The city of 40,000, located three hours from the center of the contiguous U.S., becomes the center of the pop culture and comic book world on those days, welcoming over 5,000 visitors.
But there’s another notable day on the town’s local calendar: CrossPoint Day. That is when volunteers from the Hutchinson campus of CrossPoint Church go to Faris Elementary School, one of the poorest schools in the community, to deliver new shoes to each of the 350 students.
The partnership between the church and the school didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of years of faithful investment by CrossPoint in the school and in the community, proving their trustworthiness over time. But the story of CrossPoint is more than this meaningful outreach. It is emblematic of the unique challenges and opportunities pastors experience ministering in rural settings, and how developing networks of churches is benefiting everyone.
A Rural Renaissance
Anywhere from 46 million to 60 million (around 1 in 5) people live in rural communities of fewer than 50,000 people in the United States. Though these communities vary greatly in size and geographical location, they’re united in a shared mindset of “rurality” defined by such characteristics as high relationality, loyalty, ingenuity and interdependence. There’s an undeniable appeal to the natural beauty, calmness and tight-knit relationships of rural communities.
However, the small size of these areas also creates unique challenges for ministry. In his paper “Trends in Rural Church Planting,” Dallas Powell, church planting catalyst for the North American Mission Board (NAMB), identifies low resources, vocational identity and loneliness as three of the biggest challenges rural pastors face.
Andy Addis, who serves as volunteer rural strategist of the NAMB replant team, had these challenges in mind when he envisioned the multisite network of CrossPoint Churches that he has been the lead teaching and vision pastor of for the past 20 years.
CrossPoint began when Addis was called to revitalize a dying neighborhood church of 120 people in Hutchinson. Within the first year, the church had grown to 450, and they had to move to multiple services. He emphasizes that he didn’t do anything special or out of the ordinary. Instead, he quickly discovered what many rural pastors do: a profound hunger for a real gospel largely missing in rural America.
“There is a misunderstanding that rurality is ‘Mayberry,’ and that everybody here loves Jesus, and that they’re all nice people, and that church is just what everybody does over the weekend. That is not the way it is anymore,” Addis says. “Rural places are broken places. They’re lonely, they’re cast away, and they have every problem that you have in the city, but probably compounded because of where they are located.
“We don’t need a lot of felt-need [sermon series] out here,” he adds. “What we need is the gospel. The brightness of the gospel against the backdrop of the darkness of immorality just draws people like moths to a flame.”
As CrossPoint grew, a vision began to take shape of an interconnected network of churches that shared resources and a vision to reach rural communities across Kansas with the gospel. Today, 13 CrossPoint churches—some new plants, others replants—pepper the state, and many more use resources that the church develops.
“Most people have trouble with multisite because it’s a church with satellites. There’s a huge difference when you become a church of satellites, and it doesn’t matter if one’s a thousand [in attendance] and one’s 100 and one’s 10. Everybody’s got a voice at the table because we’re all pastors in this network,” Addis says. “We want [CrossPoint pastors] to see themselves as a community of equals.”
This rural multisite model provides advantages such as sermons broadcast from the Hutchinson location and centralized accounting that free up an estimated 250 cumulative hours per week for the pastors of the CrossPoint churches to do other forms of ministry.
“We are planting churches in small places, understanding that if they weren’t part of a network, they probably couldn’t thrive and survive,” Addis says. “We want to make sure that there are no places left untouched by the church, because we have a little mantra: Once you plant a church, anything can happen.”
All Together Now
Steve McVey is rural missions pastor of Lamont Wesleyan Church located in a tiny township two hours east of Hutchinson. Like Addis, he has a heart for networking rural pastors and providing support for planting gospel-centered churches in rural communities. So, he created Dirt Roads Network, a cooperative cohort of pastors in 17 states. They get together for regular Zoom calls and annual in-person meetings to encourage and equip one another in the task of planting churches.
“The average agrarian small-town pastor feels invisible. They feel invisible to their denomination. They feel invisible when they go to their denomination’s events,” McVey says. “We invite those frustrated, invisible pastors into a movement of rural missionaries. It does something to see other people that are facing [a] similar challenge.”
He draws inspiration for the network from the co-op model that’s already familiar to pastors in agrarian communities.
“[Co-ops] have common goals, but flat leadership. We’ve sort of stolen that model to say, let’s cooperatively plant churches because no one else is going to plant in the small towns that we see,” he says. “Every farmer knows that you have to sow in order to reap a harvest. So, you have to communicate this in a way that once [you] have a kingdom mindset, you’re sowing for the kingdom.”
This shared missionary mindset is the foundational idea that animates the Dirt Roads Network. The rural pastors in the network unite and strive to be “river” churches—as opposed to “lake” churches—aimed at multiplication and spreading the gospel to rural communities.
“We believe it’s really important for a person to have a sense of calling to the community [where] God has placed them,” McVey says. “It liberates us from thinking that the goal is to build a church. The goal isn’t to build a church. The goal is to transform the community that you are in with the gospel.”
More Than a Job
For the average full-time pastor, this sense of calling is pretty straightforward. There’s a freedom and clarity in being able to single-mindedly pursue being a pastor. That same concept of calling and vocational identity becomes more complicated when pastors, by choice or by necessity, work multiple jobs.
Jon Sanders is the founder of SmallTownBigChurch.com, co-host of the EntrePastors (a portmanteau of “entrepreneur” and “pastor”) podcast, and author of Rural Church RESCUE. He planted Rescue Church in Flandreau, South Dakota, a town that hovers around 2,300, and pastored it for several years as it grew to six locations. But he’s also a firefighter and EMT in Sioux Falls and a small-business entrepreneur. For a long time, Sanders struggled with the decision to work other jobs outside his pastoral calling.
“When I went into pastoral ministry years ago, I wish somebody would have told me that you’re not cheating on God or the calling he has on your life if you also do something else,” he says.
Sanders is one of a growing number of bi-vocational pastors in America at large, but particularly in rural communities. According to Lifeway Research half of all churches in America have fewer than 65 people in their church services. The National Congregations Study reports that an equivalent number of churches (54%) are led by a solo pastor or appointed leader. It takes an estimated 125–150 people regularly giving to support a building and a full-time pastor, so many of those churches are led by a pastor working an additional job to make ends meet—to say nothing of the circuit riders who pastor more than one church a week.
Kyle Bueermann, rural specialist for the replant team of NAMB and co-author of Replanting Rural Churches, prefers the term co-vocational to bi-vocational because he approaches his job as a volunteer firefighter with the same intentionality as he approaches his role as a pastor.
“It’s not I have to work my job so that I can do ministry. It’s I serve as a pastor at the church and then I serve in whatever my job is. And I see those two things as connected. Both of them are my ministry to this community,” he says. Even pastors who can make it on their church salary alone often choose to work other jobs for the added community engagement and outreach benefits.
“You’re able to be really involved in the lives of the people, not just in your church, but in many cases, if you plug into the community, you’ll become a community pastor,” Bueermann says. “And if something breaks in their life, you’re the one that they’re going to turn to as the local church pastor.”
Sharing the Load
With this co-vocational dynamic at play, it becomes all the more important for rural pastors to raise up volunteer leaders from within their churches.
“Agrarian pastors and small-town pastors do not have a healthy rest pattern, and they never get sabbaticals. It’s all on them,” McVey says. “Co-vocational pastors deserve co-vocational congregations that will step in and give them some rest.”
Co-vocational pastors might not be able to be present at every event or crisis, but if they have volunteer elders, deacons or even retirees stepping in for counseling or hospital visitations, for example, they can rest easy knowing that their flock is still being cared for.
Not only does a co-vocational pastor have more opportunities to meet and serve members of their community, but working other jobs can also be an essential outlet to reverse the high burnout rate and feelings of isolation for solo pastors in rural communities who are tempted to compare themselves to pastors in larger cities with more resources.
“It’s healthy to have an arena that you can just go take your pastor hat off, because so many of the metrics that we attach meaning to are quite honestly beyond our control as pastors,” Sanders says. “[We] look around and just go, I don’t measure up, and I feel insignificant because of the smallness of the place that I serve. What if God isn’t disappointed by the small number on the population sign that sits outside of your community? He loves every one of those souls. What if he actually brought you there to do something eternally significant?”
The Power of Showing Up
When rural pastors begin to look beyond the traditional church-growth metrics and change their scorecard to think in terms of community impact, the potential of the local church in a small town really blooms.
Bueermann says, “Especially in rural areas, what we can see are churches of 30 or 40 people that may never grow above that, but that can be really healthy and really make a deep impact on their community.”
He recalls a pastor of a prominent West Texas church with a global reach lamenting that when he walks through the sanctuary on Sundays, he doesn’t know everyone. On the other hand, “a pastor of 50 people not only knows everybody, but knows where they work and where their kids go to school and is able to be at their kids’ football and basketball games,” Bueermann says.
“It does not take a lot for a [rural] church to really stand out in their community and show up in a significant way that might not get nearly as noticed in a larger context where there’s so many other churches with so much more activity and more resources,” Sanders says. “I always challenge pastors in rural communities [that] you don’t have to be all things to all people, but find that thing or two things that your church can really do well and shine in.”
For Addis, the key to community impact is flipping from a scarcity mindset to a kingdom mindset and asking How has God already gifted us? What is he giving us?
“In a community like ours, you could look around and go, We’ve got a bunch of old people at church, and I’ve got no youth group. But [in reality] you already have a youth group. The [local] basketball coach [has] got 24 kids that are regularly coming to his practice, and he’s got a school full of people that listen to him,” Addis says. “So instead of saying, Get them to come to youth group, why don’t you become the biggest basketball fan that that school has ever seen?”
This kind of thinking inspired the Hutchinson campus of CrossPoint to begin reaching out to Faris Elementary School several years ago. The outreach efforts began with bringing meals to the teachers’ in-service meetings. For about a year, the church kept showing up, even hiring a massage therapist for the teachers’ lounge and purchasing school supplies. They knew they’d finally broken through when the principal brought all the teachers to a church service one Sunday as a thank you.
When CrossPoint had gained the trust of the principal, they asked what else they could do for the kids. He responded, “These are poor kids. They need shoes.” So the church brought in a shoe company to the classrooms to measure the kids’ feet and had them fill out cards with the kind of shoes they wanted. Then, church members would select a card and buy the shoes. The pastors thought it would take a month to get all the children accounted for, but the congregation was so excited, the cards didn’t last one service.
So, for the past several years, the last day of school before Christmas break at Faris Elementary has been dubbed CrossPoint Day. The church throws an unboxing party for the students. Imagine the joy of opening a pair of new Nikes when you’ve never had your own shoes.
“I can’t tell you what that’s done in the eyes of the community, teachers and family members,” Addis says. “If you love on the kids and the poorest school in your town, it’s an open door to doing [additional] ministry in whatever way you want.”
Rural Ministry Matters
In a culture that celebrates megachurch numbers, pastors in rural communities can feel left behind and insignificant. They can feel like they’re being spread too thin and that they’re expected to do too much with too little. But it’s telling that of all places that the Father could have sent the Messiah, he sent Jesus to small towns like Bethlehem and Nazareth. Much of Jesus’ earthly ministry was spent going from one little town to another.
“Jesus cares deeply about small towns and small communities and places that no one’s ever heard of before. Small towns matter. They matter to the kingdom of God. Rest in knowing that Jesus knows exactly where you are, that he has a plan for your church,” says Bueermann, adding, “He can do mighty things in small places for his glory if we will allow him to work through [our churches].”