Rural Church Crisis
How would you react if your church closed its doors? What if it your church was the same one that you’re parents had gone to and their parents before them?
It’s a situation that many small rural churches are facing: what to do when there’s just not enough money or interest to stay open?
A recent blog post from Youth Specialties addresses the issue (the comments section is particularly interesting) and today, GetReligion highlighted the exact same sobering story from Minnesota where a 118 year old church shut its doors:
Carol Porter, 63 and no word mincer, sits in her modest kitchen in Euclid, Minn., and recalls the day her 118-year-old church was burned to the ground. “I was baptized, confirmed and married there,” she reports. Her family had moved two lots down from Euclid’s First Presbyterian, so she was able to watch through the kitchen window a few years ago as fellow parishioners knocked down the church, buried its fixtures and then put a match to what remained, sending a thousand Sundays of memories up in smoke.
America’s rural congregations, thinned by age and a population drain that plagues much of farm country, have gotten too small and too poor to attract pastors. No pastor means no church.
When so many of your religious experiences are intertwined with a building and community, the loss of those can be hard to bear. That’s why ministries devoted to the life of the small town church like Village Missions are important. They reach out to a community that many would like to ignore.
This video from Village Mission shows the importance of churches in these communities during tragic circumstances and asks the question, “What would happen if this church had closed?”
