I led a parish in a country town in Victoria from 2018-2023. I loved it. It was a growing tree-change town an hour from Melbourne off the Monash motorway in Gippsland. Originally a wealthy dairy farming and regional hub, it was experiencing something of an identity change as the dairy farmers sold off and as young families bought up plots of land, city professionals sought an alternative lifestyle on hobby farms and retirees downsized from city dwellings to country digs with large gardens and chickens. The parish was over a hundred years old and there were some amazing old saints in their 80’s who had been in the church since their infancy. The parish had an 8am prayer book service, a 9.45am contemporary family service and an occasional evening youth service. There was a smallish youth group (12 or so) and quite a large children’s ministry. During my time as Rector, we worked on our parish vision and a five-year strategy, we weathered the lockdown years and worked to build up the youth and children’s ministry.
I doubt there are any readers of this edition of EFAC Essentials who don’t recognise the immense challenges facing both urban and country churches. The lockdown years of the COVID pandemic were hard going for most churches, but especially so for Victorian Churches. But even before the pandemic, church attendance was declining throughout Australia. Changing cultural forces, the sins of the church revealed in the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in our institutions, opposition, disunity, and the slow pace of change in many of our churches have all contributed to falls in attendance, volunteers and in people willing to train for ministry. Yet there is hope! There is much hope. The country church I was leading had so many strengths and has a great future ahead of it. Below I offer six characteristics that I observed at the church or that I leant into as a leader that are suggestions regarding how country churches can flourish.
GOD MUST SHOW UP
God showed up in my country parish, but I make this point because as ministers we are truly dependent on God. We can do many things to make our churches grow, but we cannot succeed without God. We are dependent. Fortunately, we are encouraged by Scripture that our Lord loves the church and loves us. We need to remember this and let it guide us.
GOD’S PEOPLE MUST SHOW UP
We were blessed with a good core of regulars, including an awesome team of excellent musicians and cooks, and parents who were willing to teach Sunday school. It felt like a real partnership. A team. I did my utmost to make these people feel appreciated, with regular thank-yous and even engraved awards at our AGM. If you are blessed with volunteers, empower them. If you are blessed with teenagers, find jobs for them – we employed about 6 of our youth as casuals (as Sunday tech people and as cleaners). This helped us and gave them work experience and avoided them disappearing into casual work at the local fast-food joints on a Sunday.
YOU MUST HELP PEOPLE TO SEE GOD SHOWING UP
You may have heard about the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment at Harvard University in the 1990’s which demonstrated that we humans have a tendency to be blind to what we are not focusing on. Well, that hour on a Sunday morning is the hour to help people to refocus and to see God. Thomas Merton wrote in 1965
Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything — in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. You cannot be without God. It’s impossible. It’s simply impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.
Author Richard Beck reminds us that “God is everywhere, but we don’t see that. There is a pervasive spiritual disenchantment which affects Christians as much as nonbelievers ..and.. poses the single greatest threat to faith and the church in our post-Christian world.” (Beck, Richard. Hunting Magic Eels, Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.) It is easy to lose our ability to see God, and the job of the parish priest includes helping God’s people to recover their sight. We shared testimonies at church on a Sunday of how people were seeing God in their everyday lives. It was transformative, and helped people connect with each other too.
ENJOY GOOD RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER MINISTERS IN YOUR TOWN
I found my Anglican deanery in the city had felt like an obligation – we met and then rushed back into the traffic and all our commitments. But in a country town, the pace is a bit slower and our Christian minister’s network was a bunch of supportive colleagues across denominations that I looked forward to catching up with. We ran a Christmas eve service together in the local park, did an Easter outreach together, helped each other out with things like baptism pools and aged-care services, and laughed at the antics of church life (and people) together over breakfast once a month. I really appreciated the help and friendship of those other ministers.
BE DILIGENT AND ACCOUNTABLE IN YOUR SERMON PREP
Whilst it is true that a good crowd makes a good speech fly, it’s a bit chicken and egg really. Without a good sermon, the good crowd won’t keep coming back for more. It may seem like an odd strategy, but I used to tell myself that the Prime Minister might show up on Sunday and I’d better not be ashamed of what I’d prepared!
SERVE THOSE NEW PEOPLE IN TOWN
I don’t have any research to draw on, but it seemed to me that new people in a country town were a bit more open to an invite to church/seasonal services, or to a playgroup or youth group. Perhaps because they didn’t have a lot of friends yet or wanted to find connections for their kids. In country towns, the church can play an important role in those life transitions like early parenthood. In our town, the council couldn’t keep up with programs for early childhood in particular, so it was a great opportunity for us to connect and to serve our community. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “The Church is the Church only when it exists for others.”
Rev’d Tracy Lauersen, National Program Manager, Families & Culture of the Anglican Church of Australia