In the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher, filmmaker Craig Foster offers us a vivid account of a human undergoing a process of recovering from the depredations of overly managed, hyper productive modernity under the tutelage of a tiny octopus. Foster lives on the ocean, in the western cape of South Africa. After burning out in…

We had a video call with the three pastors whose books were featured in this symposium on the rural church. Our conversation highlighted themes that arose in the series, things like: misconceptions of rural society, the nature of abiding, success in ministry, and the gifts that the rural church can offer to the wider church….

Well, this is a very encouraging development for small-town ministry and for all who long to enliven, enrichen, and extend it through reflection and discussion about its theology and praxis. When did you last see a book on rural ministry (let alone two books on rural ministry) receiving extended critique from top-notch practitioners and scholars?…

Right off the bat, let me acknowledge that Stephen’s book was immensely helpful to me as I reflected on, and revisited, many past experiences I had as I was being forged in the fires of rural Kenya. In addition, his book currently holds the distinction of being the most “marked up book” on my shelf….

Stephen Witmer’s first paragraph in A Big Gospel in Small Places underscores the seriousness of the agenda at hand, as he seeks “to address a massive reality and urgent need” regarding the small-town church (p. 5). His argument: the gospel is not only the message for small towns, it is also the motivation for going…

Sometime toward the end of my tenure at our little rural church in eastern Washington, a neighbor offered to take me on a tour north of town. There was nothing much to see, just some sagebrush and weeds near the interstate overpass. I leaned into the wind while he kicked around at a row of…

Ministry in urban areas has been heavily prioritized in recent years. Partly in response to this, Stephen Witmer’s A Big Gospel in Small Places: Why Ministry in Forgotten Communities Matters provides a theological framework for ministry in smaller/rural areas. Witmer doesn’t suggest that such ministry is more important than urban or suburban ministry, or that…

I deeply appreciate Koch’s and Cotherman’s and Witmer’s generous and generative probing questions. I will share that they didn’t touch on what I consider the greatest weaknesses of God’s Country (I’ll keep those to myself!). I was struck that each of them raised the substantial question that comes up around abiding: How do we weigh…

It’s ironic that love is the only theological virtue missing in the subtitle of Brad Roth’s book God’s Country: Faith, Hope, and the Future of the Rural Church, because God’s Country is fundamentally a book about love (and, crucially, as we’ll see, not just human love). At one level, you might say the book is…

On the eve of the Civil War, American poet Walt Whitman published a second edition of his defining work, Leaves of Grass. In the edited and expanded 1860 volume, Whitman included a new, eleven-line poem entitled “I Hear America Singing,” that highlights the “song” sung by of a cross section of Americans at their daily…

On a Saturday evening at the end of July, I found myself preaching at a congregation so rural that Google Maps couldn’t tell me how to get there. This small white-framed church was part of a tri-point parish. They were currently without a pastor and were at the mercy of other pastors nearby to fill…

“And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for…