Last year I attended a breakout session on church planting. When the speaker was asked about where people should plant churches, he was more honest than most. He said, quite simply, that you should plant in a suburban setting, because it’s the most bang for your buck. Conservative, evangelical, reformed churches have a very small footprint, and we can only pursue so many opportunities. As such, we should pursue the opportunities that make the most difference for the least effort.
This is sound, sensible advice for someone looking to maximize impact and minimize costs. It also means the church is abandoning the people most aligned with it.
Everyone knows rural areas are more conservative than urban or suburban areas. Everyone knows they are more Christian than suburban or urban areas. That means, of course, that we should focus on the places where the battle is really roaring – the cities and the suburbs. Right?
Wrong.
I have not been involved in rural ministry very long, but I was shocked at the state of the church in rural areas when I first arrived. My expectation was that, even though the total population was much lower, I would find small churches dotted here and there, populated with sincere, steady, practicing Christians who had kept the faith despite the urban culture turning away in droves. These churches would be echoes of the past, where people still attended every week, worshiped with several generations of their families, and anchored the communities in which they had operated for decades, if not hundreds of years.
I could not have been more naive. There are still such churches and such folks, and they are some of the best, most solid Christians you will find in any community anywhere. But they are decidedly the minority.
What I discovered was that all those little country churches are empty, with very few exceptions. Don’t get me wrong, every little town has a smattering of choices (Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Baptist, non-denom, etc….), but the congregations are virtually all either dead or dying. They know it too. Younger generations have not taken up the torch, and even older generations have a very loose attachment to the church.
Aside from anecdotal proofs, let’s look at the numbers in my own area.1
Hamilton County is the county where the city of Cincinnati is, at least the downtown area. The adherence rate for Christian denominations is 59.8. That means that 59.8% of the total population of Cincinnati “adheres” to one church or another, even if they are not formally members of such churches. 3 out of every 5 people is pretty good, especially since the overall adherence rate for Christian denominations in Ohio is 44.7%. We can count ourselves blessed to have such a comparatively Christian city near us.
If we accept the common narrative (that cities are secular hell-holes, the suburbs more religious, and the country still more religious), we would expect that surrounding counties to be even better. But that’s not what we see. Clermont County, where I grew up, has an adherence rate of 36.6. Other suburbs of Cincinnati (Butler, 39.5; Warren, 51.8) fare somewhat better, but Clermont was always the rural-leaning suburb, so we should expect them to be leading. But perhaps they’re the exception to the rule.
If we continue out toward the country, we come to Brown County – the first proper rural county out to the east of the city. We hope that the trend might reverse itself, but it only accelerates. The adherence rate drops to 28.6.
Continuing through, we come to Adams County, which is the site of Foothills Reformed Church, our church plant. Out here, it undeniably the country – wide open spaces, low population density, lots of agriculture, etc…. Our largest town, West Union, has a population of 3,000 people. The adherence rate is a miserly 19.7, meaning that only 1 in 5 people are attached to any church.
This is not what we are being told.
We can try to run away from these numbers a couple ways:
We might suggest that the polling is just awful out in these rural counties. Small, rural churches are not known for being responsive to bureaucracies, either denominational or governmental, but I can tell you with great confidence that I have been in these churches, and the numbers on ARDA are extraordinarily inflated. According to ARDA, there are 239 adherents to the PCUSA in Adams County. I have been in almost all of the PCUSA churches in Adams County, and that number is a pipe dream. They might have that many names on their rolls, but there aren’t even quarter of that number in the pews on a good Sunday. If the numbers are off, it is because they are comically high.
Additionally, these numbers are from 2020. Covid has eviscerated many churches since then, and they are even emptier than they were before.
We might say that the churches in the cities and suburbs are much less conservative and orthodox than the churches in the rural areas, and there is probably some truth to this. In Adams County, there are plenty of Holiness or Revivalist churches which are conservative, but virtually all of them are charismatic. All of the old line denominational churches are trending liberal, precisely as their urban and suburban counterparts, if at a slightly slower pace. Female pastors and officers are the norm, and to question this is to label oneself a bigot. If history is any guide, as long as women are leading the church, the slide into more and more compromise is inevitable. Even many of the charismatic leaning, otherwise conservative churches are warm to women in positions of authority and leadership, or at the very least, unwilling to be confrontational about the issue.
The conclusion is unavoidable. The rural Christian community is collapsing, and at a startling rate. The part of our country we took for granted as being unassailably conservative and Christian is literally falling as we speak. Despite this, all the advice, all the money, all the effort, all the best men are being poured not into rural areas, but into the cities and the suburbs. I do not mean this in relative terms – I mean that virtually none of these resources make it out to the country.
At the moment, rural spaces are some of the last sane places in our nation, where something like the vestiges of a culturally dominant Christianity linger, where dignity, reserve, and honor still mean something, where men are expected to be strong, where women are expected to be beautiful, where people expect you to spank your children, and where neighbors actually know each other. For all their problems, they are still human spaces, producing some of the only people who still know how to live like people.
That all said, the soul has been removed and only the husk remains. The rural church, from which all these virtues sprang, is not healthy. If churches and denominations from the rich cities and suburbs are not willing to put their time, money, and quality men into building strong, stable, biblical institutions in rural areas, these areas will fall, if they have not already. We will lose the only cultural check we have against the relentless slide into secularism, and if you think the world is nuts right now, imagine what it will be like when the brakes are off and you have nowhere to run.
- All the adherence numbers in this article are extracted from the ARDA database, based on data from 2020. https://www.thearda.com/us-religion/census/congregational-membership ↩︎
