Once, there was a rural church with a changeable letterboard sign that never changed.  It had black slats and slide-in letter tiles behind a glass door, but the glass was locked, and the man with the key had gone elsewhere and held onto the key—along with a nostalgic vision of the church’s past.

That locked letterboard might be a parable of too many of our rural churches: someone holding on to a past locked behind glass.  In this season of resurrection, we’re reminded that we are not locked in to the memory of what was.  God has made us Easter people, and this means we can approach the future with curiosity and openness and hope.

The past is a beautiful and beguiling country.  Those were the days, golden in the setting sun.  There were choirs and caroling and the slow rumble of a baby boom.  It was a time Before, when the mill was still humming and the kids hadn’t moved away and we could accept unironically the newly-merged Denomination’s rosy projections.  The church installed a sign out front to guide in visitors.

Then things changed.  The nation wandered away from religious participation, with the Mainlines slaloming down the decline curve ahead.  As Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge put it in their book The Great Dechurching: “More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined” (p.5).  

Add to this the choppy population shifts experienced by rural communities in which some rural places have grown in the last decades—sometimes being absorbed into larger metro areas—while others have undergone significant decline.  Even in rural counties where population drops were more gradual, a lowering tide sinks all boats.  

Take McPherson County, Kansas, where I live—arguably an economic bright spot, with plentiful work in manufacturing, agriculture, and petroleum refining, as well as great schools, medical facilities, and several small colleges.  And yet in the years 2020-2025, the population dropped by 131 residents.  In five years, we lost enough people to fill a congregation.  Compare to a place like Nashville, Tennessee, surging by 86 people/day in 2023.  Nashville could populate a new church every day.  No wonder some folks want to lock the past behind glass and hang on to it.

In the face of shifting population headwinds and church decline, it can be tempting to search for a villain.  Where did we go wrong?  Poor leadership?  Wayward theology?  Brute circumstance?  There are always plenty of contenders for the role of bad guy.  But however a declining rural church got to where it is, pining for the past doesn’t help.  In fact, nostalgia can be a kind of idolatry, and like all idolatry, it diminishes us and suffocates future possibilities. 

But we don’t have to hang onto what was.  

The gospel stories of Jesus’ resurrection show us how to release nostalgia for the past and step into a wide open hope for the future.  Mary, weeping outside the tomb, realizes that she has seen the risen Lord.  Jesus tells her “Do not hold on to me” (John 20:17).  (Matthew adds that the women “took hold of his feet”–28:9).  Perhaps Jesus intuits that Mary will want to hang onto the good that was, resume the life of the peripatetic disciple.  But the resurrection has changed everything.  A new imagination is required for this Easter future.  As Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon write in their book Resident Aliens, the “people of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow” (p.60).

Here are three ways the resurrection invites rural pastors and leaders to defeat nostalgia and walk with their congregations into the future.

Practice Curiosity.  It’s easy to get locked into antiquated narratives about our community and ourselves.  Years ago, I published a table showing how many of my network’s churches had declined even while their rural communities had grown.  I got pushback.  People were committed to the narrative that their town had shrunk, when in reality what they had experienced was a decline in our people.  New folks had moved to town, but they didn’t share our culture and history.  They worshiped elsewhere or not at all.  Practicing curiosity about what’s really going on and who’s really in the neighborhood is the first step in imagining a new future.  

Be Open.  The resurrection means that the horizons of this world extend beyond what we can ever ask or imagine.  Jesus is alive and at work in surprising ways.  We have everything we need to try something new, enter into fresh spaces, and reach out to new people.  There’s more good will and possibilities than we might realize.  Relatively few people are highly antagonistic to church or have left because they’re actively deconstructing their faith.  One insight detailed in The Great Dechurching is that many Christians stopped going to church because life happened.  They moved or had a child or experienced some other shift that disrupted their pattern of attending church.  The authors write that “Many dechurched evangelicals simply need a friend to invite them to church” (p.28).  Be open to the people God places in your path.

Look forward in Hope.  Christ is alive and goes before us!  God was faithful in the past, but our best days are not in the past.  Jesus holds our future and the future of the church.  So do not be afraid.  Step outside.  Try something new.  Strike up a conversation over a plate of brownies with the new neighbors.  

“I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” Jesus told Mary (John 20:17).  The One who loves us most has ascended to the place of wisdom and power at the right hand of our Father God.  What more could we ask for?   We can crack open the glass, change the sign, and step out confidently into His future for us!

This post originally appeared on the Town Square Collaborative Substack.

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