Ron Klassen is the director of the Rural Church Missionary Association. His experience over decades has brought an understanding of small churches this is invaluable. Ron talks of approaches small churches need to take, and of the theology small church leaders need to develop.
“Statistics show up to even 75% of new grads who are looking for pastorates will find themselves in smaller communities and churches.”
“Rural Home Missionary Association: Our mission is to plant and strengthen churches in small towns. We have a staff of church planters here. In recent months, even years, we’ve actually started some new initiatives in the area of church planting, recognizing that we need to kind of reinforce that part of our ministry. We have a number of church strengthening ministries, which would include sending a missionary pastor to a church that for who knows what reasons churches for a variety of reasons, find themselves in the need of an outside organization coming alongside them for a while helping to get back on their feet again. . . . We host small town pastors conferences, we host seminars that are tailored for Town and Country ministry. We host what we called our TACT classes, Town and Country training. These are seminary classes, we are in partnerships with a number of seminaries, we offer this specialized contextualized training for all those new grads that are likely to find themselves in smaller communities and smaller churches. And one of our most recent undertakings has been to lead a small town and rural pastors doctor of ministry cohort which we’re doing in partnership with Dallas Seminary.”
“I simply did not realize that rural, is cross cultural, and that even going from big church to small church, you’re dealing with two different church cultures. And I think it’s really important for us to to understand that there are those cultural differences. . . . contextualization is a drum that we beat over and over and over again. . . in urban places, I think churches probably put a lot more emphasis on things like programs, and buildings and vision statements. If you ask a big church person, well, what do you appreciate about your church? Well, they’ll talk about the three different services that they have the recent building program that they went through a wonderful youth ministry that happens on, you know, Sunday night, whatever. Rural church and small church people don’t usually tend to talk that way. No, you ask them what they appreciate. And they’ll talk about the relationships in their church. They’ll talk about how their pastor knows them by name, yeah. And how when they’re in the hospital, their pastor comes and visits them. So that relational orientation, I think, is just really key.”
“The pastor kind of leads the way with a relational orientation in his ministry. And I think that if we as pastors have healthy relationships with our people, that makes our preaching more effective. I think they will listen to our preaching, even if our preaching maybe isn’t, you know, the kind of preaching that maybe a big pastor is able to do. And let’s face it, most of us can’t preach like most big church pastors, we just don’t have that ability. But I would suggest that our preaching can have every bit as much impact. If we have a healthy relational orientation with our congregation, they will want to listen to us as preachers, it means they’ll follow us as leaders and in our churches. If we don’t have that healthy relational orientation, we might have great ideas, we might have great leadership skills. But we may look behind us and not see anybody’s following us yet.”
“And I think if there are situations where counsel advice is needed, again, we may not have tremendous counseling skills. But if we have a healthy relational dynamic with the people in our congregation, we will be able to help them through all kinds of issues of life that they might be facing. So I think that’s the primary difference if you’re in a big church, you don’t expect the pastor probably even the know your name. Yeah. He pops out on Sunday morning he preaches and, but he doesn’t really shepherd people in the same way that you can.”
“I think another quality is just simply the adaptability. I think of the Apostle Paul saying that he became a Jew and he was with Jews, he became a Gentile when he was with Gentiles. So it’s not an attempt to make people become like me. But it’s actually me recognizing that I need to work at becoming like the people that God is wanting me to serve and minister to.”
“I will say that what has helped me maybe more than anything else, and ministry to small places, and small churches, is developing a robust, small theology. . . . I borrow that phrase from a fella by the name of David Ray, he wrote years ago, a book on or actually two or three books on small church ministry. Basically, what I’m talking about is a theology for ministry in smaller places. And you know, the Bible has a lot to say about small. . . I think if we devote our lives to developing a small theology that will take us a long way in rural and small church ministry.”