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A UMNS Report
By David Briggs*
7:00 A.M. EST Feb. 8, 2011 | BOWBELLS, N.D. (UMNS)
Rural communities such as Donnybrook, N.D., struggle to survive amid the
closings of schools and businesses. A UMNS photo by Jan Snider.
View in Photo Gallery
The fields of wheat and flax stand higher than they normally would on
this mid-September day. Anxious farmers who sweated through an arid
summer now pray for two solid days of sun to dry out their crops so they
can be harvested.
John Redmer, still able at age 90 to do a full day’s work on the
combine, barely notices the raw wind laced with rain coming across the
prairies and through a graveyard on the outskirts of town.
“Gee whiz, I know almost everyone here,” he remarks.
He points to the stone markers of his grandparents, all four part of
the original homesteaders who built the town near the Canadian border.
With a sweep of his hand, he identifies friends and family members, some
who died of drowning or disease at an early age and others who lived to
make Main Street a community beacon on Saturday night and fill the
churches on Sunday morning.
But Main Street, along with the churches built around it, is dying in
towns like Bowbells and thousands of similar rural communities across
the United States. While the harvests grow ever greater due to
technological advances, the laborers are fewer as machines do more of
the work and small family farms give way to corporate farms.
And The United Methodist Church, which developed on the backs and
souls of these Christians and still has an estimated 20,000 rural
churches today—representing more than six in 10 of the denomination’s
congregations—faces the challenge of how it will continue to minister to
some of its most faithful members.
Many rural church leaders fear the denomination has decided to
forsake them in favor of larger churches in growing suburbs. A survey of
more than 1,000 rural congregations reveals concerns that national
agencies ignore smaller churches, that district superintendents often
assign them their least experienced clergy and that their churches will
be the first to be sacrificed in a time of declining resources.
But to understand the rural church, vitality must be measured by more
than numbers, rural church members say. Vitality also is written in the
stories of people who endured lifetimes of hardship to build and
maintain the faith. And it is proclaimed by their ancestors and their
neighbors who need the church more than ever in a time when it has
become one of the last vestiges of hope in many communities.
Robert and Faye Sundin praise God at Bowbells United
Methodist Church. Behind them are Dean and Sally Verstrate.
A UMNS photo by Jan Snider.
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Reviving the kingdom in the rural church means being able to honor both the living and the dead.
Steadfast faith
Leaving the small ranch home that belonged to his grandfather,
Russell Bott drives his pickup truck several miles to cover the 1,000
acres he farms.
Traveling over the rolling hills of grass and grain, Bott says he
encounters God each day: “This is all what the good Lord made, just as
it is.”
What has changed is the economics of farming. As he drives along,
Bott points out clumps of cottonwood and oak and elm trees, wind breaks
that are all that remains of what used to be small family farms.
Decades ago, a farmer could make a living on 320 acres. Today, it
takes at least 1,000 acres, and some farms are 10,000 acres or more.
Small farms where large families once worked and took up a whole pew on
Sunday have been replaced by corporate farms where itinerant laborers
are hired.
The farm crisis and the steady exodus of businesses and jobs and
young people to the cities and suburbs are taking an increasing toll.
While the U.S. population steadily grows, half of the nation‘s 2,050
non-metropolitan counties lost population from 1998 to 2008, the
government reports.
Congregants gather outside of the Methodist Episcopal Church in
Gladstone, N.D., in this circa 1933 photo. A UMNS photo courtesy of the
Archives of the Dakotas Conference of the
United Methodist Church.
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Once, United Methodist circuit riders and lay leaders followed
homesteaders into nearly every small village in the United States.
Today, that same energy is devoted to standing alongside their
communities in a struggle for both survival and revival.
In a United Methodist Rural Fellowship Survey earlier this year, only
21 percent of ministry leaders spoke positively about the health of
their community. And less than four in 10 had positive comments about
the health of their congregation. The national survey of 946 rural
ministry leaders was administered by United Methodist Communications.
“People in small towns have lost so much. They’ve lost the things
that made them burgeoning communities. … Their children in many cases
have gone away. There’s so much loss,” says the Rev. Kathy Hammond,
pastor of the United Methodist churches in Bowbells, Kenmare and
Donnybrook. “And yet they hang on to that faith.”
Continued on page two
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