How deep is the rural-urban divide?

I grew up as a farm kid who helped milk cows and feed chickens before catching the bus to school. It was on the farm that I learned many of the core values that still drive my work in the city, such as no waste, work hard, care for creation. In my parenting years I often wished for the integration of job and family that characterized rural life as I knew it – perhaps I wouldn’t wish for that today. In my work, issues such as poverty, domestic violence, child work and access to information look different in a rural or urban context, but they are equally important for every person.

On a societal level, I sometimes wonder how deep the rural-urban divide is. How much focus should it have in our work in God’s world? I see how it is often exploited to foster polarization and power struggles in church and society. That gives me pause to ask questions.

Agency and context

The divide has real-life impacts. My sister-in-law on a farm in southwest Minnesota, for example, can not use her gifts for ministry as I do. She has gifts I don’t have. I can develop mine. She cannot use hers, simply because of where she lives. “Rural churches are more traditional,” she sighs, “and that won’t change.” But is it really the rural factor? Or have certain ideas about women become so entrenched that they function as idols and get in the way of how God calls each person to be God’s agent in God’s world?

Context matters for ministry. I advocate strongly for greater attention to different contexts. It matters whether a church is rural or urban. That does not mean accepting the status quo as unchangeable or using context as a cover for injustice, which is easy to do in either setting. Community and covenant relationships may seem tighter in rural contexts than in cities; but, when they act as barriers to the full exercise of one’s God-given agency or as shields against naming injustice, it may be time to ask harder questions. In urban contexts, the drive for individual success that often ignores community impacts seems mirror opposite to rural contexts but it is similar in its injustice. In both settings, it often seems easier to talk about justice in Africa than to examine our tangled lives under a microscope and dissect what is good and not good for God’s world.

Bridging the divide

Our current reality is that rural areas and cities in Canada need to complement each other and work together to mitigate the impacts of climate change, such as sudden storms and changing food production. Our Indigenous relations remind us of our interdependence on this land. If we make care for all God’s creation a top priority, churches across Canada could build bridges instead of deepening the rural-urban divides.