Jack in the pulpit

Warning: If you belong to a rural Christian community and you don’t heed the following advice, your leadership will go crazy and your community will likely decrease in size. Just joking. Sort of.

Rural leadership. Is it different from urban leadership? I believe it is. I have served as a leader in both urban and rural settings and quickly learned that handling the role within the differing demands of each one can mean the difference between success and failure.

Although not an exact science, rural Christian community leadership is different from leadership in urban settings because leading tends to be primarily focused around a singular role. That is, the sole principal or pastor operates as a generalist, or Jack-of-all-trades, as opposed to being part of an intentionally distributed senior leadership model in which uniquely tailored positions are crafted across a larger team.

What does that mean for the rural, Jack-of-all-trades leader? It means the leader deals with writing the board agenda, visiting the members, managing crises like internal anonymous death threats within the faith community (yep, that’s a real one), and organizational strategic planning, while also doing regular maintenance, such as repairing the lock on the church’s front door.

Practical steps

So what can you as a community member do if you belong to a rural community with such a leader? Whether in board meetings or over casual coffee, demand that you and others become fully aware of what your leader is doing and then work to take some of it off their plate! To start, that may be as easy as ensuring that your community conducts annual leader reviews as an exercise in Christlike care. If you are the rural leader, ensure that practices like annual reviews, confidential conversations with your board chair, and board in-camera sessions are part of your regular routine. Even better, hire people to fix the lock or conduct a formal strategic planning process.

This may all seem rather obvious and administrative, but it’s more than that. These things protect the relationship between the leader and their community. In turn, protecting leadership thus ensures the unity of the entire body. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s 2023 report emphasized protecting leadership to necessitate preserving the unity of rural faith communities to combat decline because “rural communities simply have fewer potential congregants. When outreach attracts swathes of people to church in larger communities, the results may look comparatively meagre in smaller, less densely populated communities. Robin Haensel, of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, in his research on ministry in sparsely populated rural communities in Canada, found that ‘economic forces have put pressure on agriculture, and as industrialization of farming methods have increased, many villages and towns began to slowly wither and die.’ This has had a direct impact on who is available to attend, let alone maintain, a local church.” (Significant Church: Understanding the Value of the Small Evangelical Church in Canada).

So do your leadership a favour. Protect them. Insist that they stick to their main thing. And support them by distributing the many, many other tasks that need to be done. There’s something about this that illustrates the “Priesthood of All Believers” but that is a theology paper too long for this column.