November 21, 2005
Be Where You Are
or
Learning To Love The Local
We United Methodists like to brag that we have more churches than
the US has post offices. That means that we have many churches in very
small places. American Protestantism has been and, to a remarkable
degree continues to be a rural and small town phenomenon. For many
United Methodist pastors the great challenge of the pastoral ministry is
the challenge of life spent outside the big city and the sprawling
metropolis.
Life amid the rural, the local, and the provincial can be a
challenge. I recall the bishop who told me that, when asked, two-thirds
of his pastors indicated that they wished to serve churches either in
suburban or urban communities. Yet the bishop’s diocese was two thirds
rural. “That means the majority of pastors will be unhappy for the
majority of their ministry.”
Life spent on the margins, far from the “madding,” or innovating,
crowd, not much to look forward to in that.
Except, perhaps for us preachers.
Preachers must not only worry over the biblical text, carefully
exegeting and interpreting scripture, we must also know people and
examine life. Being placed out on the margins, in some country
crossroads may be positively providential for preachers.
My friend Doris Betts, writer of some fine, even Christian fiction,
can’t imagine writing from any better vantage point than her farm in
Pittsboro. One day, commuting to teach at the University of North
Carolina, she came upon an overturned chicken truck. Chickens, who had
never known freedom, were hopping free, perching along the roadside.
Some had met their end in the crash. Others were being scooped up,
purloined by passersby who had stopped, not to help the frantic farmer
chase chickens but to help themselves to a free hen. Doris says it was
quite a sight. She went home and began work on her Souls Raised From The
Dead.
I recall Eudora Welty, as Methodist as Doris is Presbyterian, when
asked, “Why don’t you move to New York where you can be in the middle of
the literary scene? Responding by pickup up a Jackson, Mississippi
newspaper. “Man Kills Wife After Sunday School” read the headline.
“Now where I am to get material like that in New York?” she asked.
Ponder the predominance of good writers in small towns and ask, Why?
It is perhaps because a writer must know human nature at close range, not
in general, put in particular, one life at a time, not in the abstract
but in the concrete? In the big city, ones observation is limited to
those few people with whom one comes into contact at work. In the rural
community, everybody knows everybody, everybody knows everything about
everybody.
I encountered much more diversity (i.e. really strange, exotic
people) in a town of eight thousand than in a city of two hundred
thousand. In the village, you can’t get away from anybody. You must
live with, get your car fixed by, your teeth cleaned by, these people
even if many of them are not to your liking. In such necessity is grace.
Don’t expect good novels out of Chicago or San Francisco. Life is
too distracting, numbing, and people too evasive. Opportunities for
subterfuge are too great!
Perhaps we might say the same for good sermons, but I won’t. For
now I’ll just say that, from what I read, most of the really good
stories, and most of the most stunning insights about people derive from
life in Buies’ Creek, Level Swamp, and Farmville, or for that matter
Bethlehem and Nazareth.
Years ago I recall a novelist telling us, “Nothing bad ever happens
to a writer.” By this she meant that anything, even life in a
one-stop-light town, provides grist for a writer’s imagination. A weird
person becomes somebody for most people to avoid. For a writer, the same
person is called “material for my next novel.”
Go ahead. Live in and maybe even love where Providence has placed
you. Be thankful and count your blessings. Nothing bad, even Clinton,
South Carolina, has ever happened to the observant preacher.
Besides, the way I read the gospel, it appears that God has this
thing for small towns. When something divinely good happens, it tends to
happen first in Nazareth.
Wishing you a blessed Thanksgiving – wherever you are,
William H. Willimon
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Bishop Willimon invites you to visit the Bishop’s Message Discussion
Board to continue the conversation whenever something that appears in
these messages grabs your attention and calls for response.
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(C) 2005 North Alabama Conference
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