Small churches living well on the frontier

“It doesn’t get more marginal than the frontier,” the Rev. Catherine Neelly Burton, the latest guest on the “New Way” podcast, told host the Rev. Sara Hayden. Burton was speaking about the imagination and hope she witnesses among church members and commissioned ruling elders in rural Kansas.

“A lot of the imaginative work comes from the people themselves,” Burton told Hayden, a native Kansan, as she described the realities of church on the literal frontier. Burton described what sustainable ministry can look like in places called to sustain the rest of us. “This is where your food comes from,” Burton exclaimed.

According to the state of Kansas, if a county has fewer than six people per square mile, it’s considered a frontier county. These are the counties Burton serves in a newly created role of the Presbytery of Southern Kansas called the “Mission and Ministry Connector.” As of last January, 30 of the 46 churches within the presbytery were in rural or frontier areas. Only 12 of those had paid PC(USA) leadership.

Burton came to rural ministry only recently after serving a congregation in Wichita and has learned a few things about sustainable ministry from churches with 20 members in towns with populations in the hundreds.

The values that Hayden associates with her home state and the ones she sees reflected in Burton’s stories include “not making a big deal about yourself, humility, hard work, taking care of one another, but also minding your own business, always being willing to offer a helping hand, but not judging why that helping hand is needed.”

“The good news is that these people, they’re the ones with the imaginations,” Burton said, laughing. “They have said, ‘What do we need? And how do we make this work for us? We’re pretty capable people. If we can get the right training, then we can do a lot of this.’”

When a young retiree moved back to Chase (population 400), she recognized the need for children at Chase Community Church (membership: 13; 3% of the town’s population). She went door to door, but still no one showed up on Sunday, so she helped the church start an after-school program on Wednesdays with activities and a meal. Now they have 20 kids who regularly show.

A similar situation happened in Pratt, Kansas, where Pratt Presbyterian Church hosts a children’s ministry on Wednesdays for the children of the town. At Cherryvale First Presbyterian Church, the church hosts a dinner twice a month and serves anyone who wants to come. When Burton broke bread with that community, she felt it was a special grace for retired cafeteria workers from the elementary school living on fixed incomes to be served in such a way.

Fulfilling the baptismal vows to children or feeding the stranger are not the only ways Christians on the frontier get creative. They also organize how they provide for the proclamation of the Word, even if only a few can gather or train to lead.

Tribune Presbyterian Church hosts Bible study before worship on four lectionary texts. One member then takes the same study to the senior center and shares the Word of God with others later that week.

Fifteen years ago, a group in Western Kansas created a preaching pool and trained as lay preachers and in pastoral care so they would be able to serve the churches in their area. For some churches in Burton’s presbytery, it’s been 30 years since they had a pastor, and they don’t know what that model would look like anymore. Burton explained how certain programs in Kansas try to attract and sustain a health practitioner or a lawyer to serve these frontier and rural towns. Burton believes, based on the scarcity in those professions, that installing a “paid Christian” is a low priority in communities that have learned to minister to each other in areas whose economic realities don’t seem to change.

According to Burton, ordained clergy would still be welcomed, but the data isn’t showing that it is likely for a person with three years of seminary debt to accept a call to serve four rural churches and drive 200 miles on a Sunday for the presbytery minimum. Burton came to this realization for herself when she attended a CREDO conference sponsored by the PC(USA)’s Board of Pensions and was coached on retirement.

“You can’t retire just on your pension and Social Security; you have to have a 403(b), but that's not possible when you're living on the Presbyterian minimum,” said Burton. “It's just clarifying that these churches out here who think they can call pastors are in such an uphill battle; like, it’s just not fair because of our capitalist reality.”

Burton called the capitalism of PC(USA) compensation a “whole other layer of challenge of why people aren’t coming out here that we don't talk about, but it’s part of the church, and it’s not going to change at all.”

Other denominations, like the Church of Scotland, have addressed this discrepancy by designating areas of economic deprivation where the church will sustain a presence. The overall compensation system, which is centralized through the denomination, has been designed to reflect that investment, and there are currently 64 “priority areas” designated by the Church of Scotland.

Burton stated that it hasn’t changed over the 15 years when that pool of Kansan lay preachers has strongly served. “Those individuals are older now. The long-term trajectory is still the same for their churches,” said Burton, “but they’ve really lived well in that time.”

Burton finds hope in the witness of pastor-less churches that aligns with the Book of Order F-1.0202, part of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

“Christ calls the church into being, giving it all that is necessary for its mission in the world, for its sanctification and for its service to God. Christ is present with the church of both spirit and word. Christ alone rules, calls, teaches and uses the church as He wills.”

“I like to talk about that with churches,” said Burton, “because Christ has given the church everything it needs to be the church, and sometimes that includes a pastor, but sometimes it doesn’t.”

Burton hopes something will change in our approach to ministry on the frontier.

“If we don’t do something different, we’ll end up with two or three churches in the states out here,” said Burton, who said the churches might only be centered in cities like Topeka, Wichita and Kansas City. “That’s not the church I want to be part of.”

“We have an incarnational God. We should be out in these places. That’s part of what this is about,” Burton said. “And if we don’t have a presence anywhere except our bigger places, what kind of church is that?”

Listen to the two episodes of the “New Way” podcast with the Rev. Catherine Neelly Burton.