Town and country

Being a townie in almost every respect (I love the country - for a couple of days) I find it hard to understand how people work as pastors in the rural sector. And plainly a lot of other people do, as a post from the blog site, Out of Ur, indicates.
The piece is written by Collin Hansen, and notes that Time magazine has recently checked out the state of rural churches, and their lack of pastors: stating the obvious, in fact. Hansen takes a good look at the difficulties involved: the fact that most pastors are trained in urban settings, that they earn more in urban settings, that the rural churches often can't afford even the minimum salary to pay a pastor. And then there's the fact that in a rural setting your parish may extend over an area vastly larger than any urban one, meaning a lot of driving, long days, and...getting lost regularly, at least in the early days.
But rural people need Christ as much as urban people.
This post is well worth checking out, and, as is usually the case, the comments that follow are equally worth noting, including the young pastor who claims that rural people are stuck in their ways and don't want to change.

Institutional Christianity

Highly institutional consumer Christianity…reduces ministry to a predictable machine where the right input results in the desired output, and then invites religious consumers to engage the test-engineered institution for their spiritual nourishment. It is also the assumption behind a good number of the ministry books, conferences, and resources we produce every year. But I don’t believe the Spirit of God is laying dormant waiting for the institutional church to compose the right BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) so he can be unleashed the way a pagan god is conjured by an incantation. God is a person, not a force. And his Spirit does not empower programs or inhabit institutions but people who were created in God’s image to be the vessels of his glory.

from...They Love the Church but Not the Institution by Skye Jethani, a two-part essay on Out of Ur, a blog presented by Leadership Journal.