The first time I preached in a rural congregation, things didn’t go as planned.  I was a young student at the Mennonite seminary invited to do pulpit supply at a local Presbyterian church.  When a retired pastor in the congregation asked me where I came from and I gave my earnest reply, he said, “Well, now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”  I think he was joking.  But in what was either karma or confirmation, I accidentally backed into his sports car after church.  

Despite those not entirely auspicious beginnings, I kept at it.  I’ve been preaching in rural congregations my whole career—in Washington, Peru, and Kansas, beneath cottonwoods in a cherry orchard, with guinea pigs scampering under my feet as we sat in a circle high in the Andes, and in sanctuaries surrounded by waves of wheat.  Along the way, I’ve become convinced that rural preaching is crafted and contextual.  

Rural preaching is crafted.  Doing the careful reading, study, and prayerful pouring over the Bible is an act of profound devotion to God.  But it’s also an act of devotion for the people we’re preaching to.  I’m convinced you can’t preach without some love for the congregation and sympathy for their lives.  “We are not peddlers of God’s word,” the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians.  “In Christ we speak as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence” (2 Cor. 2:17).  Through us, God is offering something to these people in this place.  That requires craft.  We do our part when we deliver God’s word with directness and intelligence.  That last piece might be a fist-in-the-air stand against all who would equate sophistication with urbanity and dismiss rural people—like Karl Marx and his “idiocy of rural life.”  While it’s true that anybody, anywhere can lob a sermon over their congregation’s heads, in rural congregations the greater risk is a kind of outside expert talking down to in the guise of folksiness.  In my experience, rural people want a sermon that chimes with the smartness and truth of the gospel.  When I do the work, I dig into context and quote church fathers and search the Scripture to make connections.  I tell stories and reach for my best thoughtfulness.  That kind of preaching is a craft, and rural people are hungry for it and deserve it.  Crafted rural preaching is an act of love for rural people and places.

Rural preaching is contextual.  It’s the word of God for the people of God.  The for is key.  God meets us where we’re at in Christ his Word who “put on flesh and lived among us,” and that miracle ought to get repeated every week (John 1:14).  The uninitiated might imagine that rural preaching is just regular preaching with agricultural metaphors thrown in.  I’ve heard some truly terrible agricultural metaphors, too often involving cattle castration.  But the reality is that most rural people are not farmers.  Rural church is not cowboy church.  And anyway, agriculture is not one thing.  Row crops on the Great Plains is not fruit in eastern Washington State is not rice in Arkansas.  Not everybody has cattle needing castration.

True contextual rural preaching means proclaiming the word with an attentiveness to people’s lives in rural places.  It’s preaching that knows the liturgical calendar and also the calendar of a place—yes: planting and harvest, but so too the heartbeat of the school and the cycles of local manufacturing and the rhythm of community celebrations.  Sometimes, that kind of contextuality will be dramatic, like when a pastor colleague’s town and church building were wiped out in a tornado and he preached to his storm-shocked congregation out on the lawn.  Most of the time, it’s simply recognizing that rural identity is shaped by the unique contours of place and moored to a sense of peoplehood.  Friendships and family ties go way back, rooted in the deep soil of the church cemetery.  The contextual rural preacher honors place and people and—better yet—lives among those people in that place.

All of this is to say that rural preaching is lived out loud.  It doesn’t drift in the vague air of “the public” or “the city.”  Rural sermons are immediate and firm.  What you preach from the pulpit had better line up with how you act in the parking lot—especially if that means a humble pie admission that you may have bumped into somebody’s Mustang.

This post original appeared on the Town Square Collaborative Substack.

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