Breaking the Rural Rules

Rural America is in the middle of a massive drought — a spiritual drought caused by a lack of vision, attitude, and leadership. The fields might be flourishing and green, but when it comes to the state of the Church, it is a dusty, dry land. Do rural churches have the leadership quotient to take them to the next level? The answer is usually no. In fact, that’s been the answer for so long that few people even ask the question anymore. If salary, buildings, budgets, and perks aren’t available to draw great leadership into your community, what do you do then? Give in to the urge to settle? Yeah, that’s what you do. Just give up. You can’t do anything about it anyway. Lack of leadership has always been a problem in rural churches. We are always getting the leftovers anyway, the hand-me-down pastors that nobody else wants anymore. So we might as well get used to hand-me-down churches.

It’s time to break that rule about the rurals. No, let’s do better than that: let’s shatter it. Brand New Church had no paid positions for three and a half years. Cindy and I were paid enough to get by, but other than that, we didn’t have any paid staff until I hired an eight-dollar-an-hour secretary part-time to answer the phone. During that time, God caused amazing growth by providing amazing leadership for our body. But one more time, He worked in obscurity; He defied conventional wisdom and did something new.

When I was interviewing at a church in Oklahoma, the leadership gave three requirements for any potential candidate: (1) seminary education, (2) five years of ministry experience, and (3) must be married. I didn’t even question it at the time because that’s the way everybody always does it. It later dawned on me that Jesus couldn’t get a job at that church! He would have flunked every single requirement.

When we give in to thinking like that, we give in to the urge to settle. Let’s break that rule by looking at the Principles, the Plan, and the Power of developing thriving leadership in the rural church . . . or any church for that matter.

The Principles of Leadership

1. A leader is anyone who resists the urge to settle. That means leadership comes in packages of potential that take on many different shapes and sizes. Anyone who resists complacency has the potential for leadership.

2. Leadership is born out of life change. Leaders emerge when someone’s life is transformed on the inside, not when you bring in a hired gun from the outside. Therefore, leadership is not professional, it’s personal.

3. Your best leaders are sitting in your pews. Listen carefully to that one, because I’m not saying that you can “get by” with the leaders in your congregation; I’m saying that they are your best leaders. Just because you can’t pay for somebody doesn’t mean you’re getting second best.

I have hired staff from the outside, but they have not worked for us here. When you are working rural, you can’t just bring somebody in who has worked in a big church and expect him to adapt to a rural community. Also, most church staff members do not want to work hard. Ministry breeds laziness and too much specificity. At Brand New Church you have to be able to do it all. If you play the guitar, great, but we need you to clean toilets today and mow tomorrow. If you can teach, great; we need you to help wax the floors and set up the youth room next week.

It all goes back to vision.

Clearly articulated and passionately proclaimed vision causes leadership to rise up within the ranks and calls more soldiers to the cause. You can’t buy that. The people you attract with money are little more than ministry mercenaries. What you need are people who will give their lives for the vision no matter what it costs.

Listen, if you aren’t casting vision, the only ones who will want to serve with you are those who are interested in maintaining control of the status quo. Besides that, everybody in the congregation will assume that you can handle it on your own, and that you should handle everything on your own, because you’re the one getting paid to do it. They’ll just become consumers and participants and never step up to lead. That is why another Sunday school class or another Bible study is sometimes (but not always) a detriment because we are just feeding them again instead of equipping them to serve.

If you don’t have vision, you will not attract leaders at any price. Let there be no doubt that the vision of the leader becomes the vision of the church. A church that has vision will see leadership emerge from within as long as:

_ the pastor is willing to delegate;

_ teams are structured around a mission; and

_ staff is designated according to clear biblical principles.

All of this has its roots in the commitment by the church’s leadership to grow congregants rather than a congregation. This is one of the most important principles in rural church mission. We build people, not organizations. If we build organizations, we will end up with buildings and programs that serve only themselves. As you start growing congregants, all of a sudden all these things you never thought you would have start to appear. Congregant after congregant begins to fill the leadership void

— that is, if you have a plan.

This article was adapted from the book Transforming Church in Rural America by Shannon O'Dell.