Early on in my first church in Washington State, I had the jarring experience of civic organizations wondering if they could borrow our congregation’s sermon time for a public health presentation.  Washington is a highly secular state, so maybe it should have been no surprise that those nice, civic-minded folks didn’t understand what we were doing in there on Sunday morning.  (To be fair, as a newbie pastor, I might not have always been clear on what we were doing either).  The church sure resembled a civic gathering.  It had meetings and minutes and officers. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then can we please talk about tobacco cessation?

In rural communities, the line between the civil and ecclesial sometimes blurs.  It’s not that rural areas are necessarily more religious.  In their 2024 book, The Rural Voter, Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea document how “rates of church attendance are lower in rural America than they are elsewhere.”  (p.256-257).  But in rural communities, congregations serve as anchor institutions.  They’re often key providers of food aid, base camps for disaster recovery, and networks of community know-how.  

Yet while rural congregations may behave like other civic organizations, they have a different telos (end or purpose) from civic organizations, and even when they’re engaged in activities that tend to the common good, that unique telos orients and fires the church’s vision.  

When civic organizations and churches seek to partner for the common good in rural communities, they approach their work from different frameworks of understanding.  One is a secular vision aimed at earthly happiness.  The second is an eschatological vision that understands the church to be on pilgrimage toward eternal blessedness.  Understanding these two frameworks can help civic and ecclesial leaders work together more fruitfully. 

Happiness and the Political Art

The ancient philosopher Aristotle may be the granddaddy of the first framework.  In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle spoke of “happiness” as the highest good toward which the “political art” bends (Book 1; ch.7, ch.1).  This vision of happiness “ordains what sciences there must be in cities” and “legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from…with the result that this would be the human good” (Book 1; ch.1).  

We can fill in the blank on what leads to happiness and the human good in rural communities, though no doubt it’s going to sound a lot like what makes people happy everywhere: access to healthcare, thriving schools, green spaces, economic opportunities, high speed internet.  A coffee shop is nice.  And while we might include beautiful funerals and well-tended cemeteries in our vision of the human good, this aristotelean vision can’t reach for eternity.  Its telos belongs to this life.  We work toward this vision through organizing, launching non-profits or businesses, running for office, or other forms of education and public advocacy.  It’s measurable and achievable.  This is the guiding framework of most secular, civic organizations.  It deploys the political art of the possible to work toward human happiness.

Blessedness: Pilgrimage toward Christ

The church operates under a second framework.  Some 800 years after Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo became the patron saint of this vision with his magnum opus The City of God.  Part defense of the Christian faith after the sack of Rome, part political philosophy, part theological grab bag, Augustine poured out a lot of words to sketch an understanding of the church that was both in the world but not entirely of it.  

Underlying much of Augustine’s work is a response to the pagan criticism of the day that the church had undermined the stability and glory of Rome by disdaining worship of the old Roman pantheon.  Augustine writes to show that, on the contrary, the church actually did some earthly good (for example: shielding people who took refuge in church buildings during the sack—book 1; ch.1).  Even so, Augustine argued that the church should not be measured by how well it achieves those earthly goods.  Augustine points out that it’s possible to be surrounded by good earthly things but not have a good and upright heart, critiquing those who “are more disgusted by a bad house than by a bad life, as if man’s highest good was to have all his possessions good—except himself” (Book 3, ch.1).  

In other words: the church’s telos lies beyond this world.  It is eschatological, ordered toward something more than material progress and happiness.  The church aims for the cultivation of a good heart, and ultimately for eternity with Jesus Christ.  Wrote Augustine: “the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes” (Book 15, ch.1).  Augustine was mirroring the language of the Epistle to the Hebrews which says “Here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (13:14).  

The word all three writers—Aristotle, Augustine, and Hebrews—use for “city” is polis, which does sometimes mean “city” (as in a built up metro area) but can also mean “a people” (see Acts 18:10).  This is particularly important for how we understand the church.  The church is a polis—a people, not any one city on the map—with its own genius and destiny.  The goods of the church have civic and temporal implications, but the church’s telos is ordered to the divine and eternal.

All of which is to say that the church is not a civic organization in the same way that the Lions or Chamber of Commerce are.  The church may run a school lunch program or host ESL classes or talk about tobacco cessation, but civic partnerships always fall within its broader vision of being on pilgrimage toward Christ.  Civic engagement is one aspect of the church’s work—one that’s formational for its members and key to its proclamation of God’s love, but never the totality of its mission and identity.

I see a couple of lessons for partnerships between civic organizations and churches:

For civic organizations: Lean on what churches can provide best.  They have space.  They are often composed of some of the most-connected, most idealistic people in the community.  You might be able to snag a few volunteers.  Churches often want to partner, but will also resist the instrumentalization of their Sunday gatherings for civic ends.

For churches: Avoid making the same mistake in reverse, instrumentalizing civic interactions for church-growth ends.  While working for the good of the whole community has an evangelistic dimension in that it proclaims the gospel in deed, we can get tripped up if we expect a one-to-one correspondence.  It’s easy to imagine that if your congregation connects to the school, some teachers will show up on Sunday morning.  Maybe or maybe not.  Understand whatever you offer as an act of love: a gift to the community.

There’s plenty of work to do, from whatever angle we approach the challenges faced by rural communities.  God has placed all of us here with purpose.  As the apostle Paul put it: “Whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all” (Galatians 6:10).  

Onward!

Thanks to Allen Stanton for giving input on a draft of this essay.

This post originally appeared on the Town Square Collaborative Substack.

Learn more about the work of the Town Square Collaborative.