A Tale of Two Churches

by Lance Finley, CGGC Executive Director with Jacob Clagg, Director of Communications

One-hundred and fifty years ago, the small, rural, vibrant communities of Podunk and Skunk Hollow were promising places for a new congregation. Podunk had a post office, school, general store and a thriving rural community sustained by many families with ties to agriculture. Similarly, Skunk Hollow was a thriving rural community with blacksmith shops, a post office, and general stores. A group of Jesus followers felt a burden to establish a new church in these small towns which, until that point, had no church presence.

In the early years, the communities of Podunk and Skunk Hollow were surrounded by hundreds of people within a two to three-mile radius of each community. Furthermore, the local economies were supported and bolstered by the numerous small family farms, often consisting of 50 to 100 acres each. The churches were doing the Lord’s work, serving their respective to communities by spreading the Gospel, offering a communal space to worship, and shepherding people through the ups and downs of their lives.

Both congregations have faced many of the same challenges. Their once thriving communities began to decline with the trajectory of the small family farm in the United States. Over time, those farms became larger, and the families became smaller and fewer. While the areas are still agricultural even to this day, instead of dozens of families farming the land, several thousand acres may be farmed by one family or even corporate farming operations. Most of the houses that once speckled the landscape were long ago abandoned or bought out to make room for more productive land. Where the villages of Podunk and Skunk Hollow would have had several hundred folks living in and around the villages, today it’s more like twenty or thirty folks scattered across the same area. In each village there remains a handful of small homes, but there are no longer any post offices, stores, or schools. As the buildings were vacated and their foundations crumbled, as the homes were sold, condemned, and tilled under the earth, and as even the schools consolidated or closed, Podunk and Skunk Hollow remained. In some cases, the churches outlasted even the people they were ministering to. Several years ago Podunk made the painful decision to close, as the body had shrunk down to just a couple of remaining members. On the other hand, today there still remains a functioning congregation in Skunk Hollow.

Both communities are quite rural, at least five to ten miles outside of any decent sized community of a few thousand in population. They’re both remote - several miles off any state highway or major thoroughfare. They both experienced the decline of rural America and diminished local populations. They both experienced the loss of their younger generations as their teenagers and young adults left the area to seek employment and establish their lives. They both experienced the decline of their once thriving small communities as the stores were shuttered, shops where closed, and the local schools consolidated. So why does one congregation exist today, and one does not when their contexts were so similar to one another?

Twenty-five years ago, the people of Skunk Hollow made a decision that would change the course of history for the congregation. Being painfully aware of all the dynamics of living in a small, dying, rural community, the congregation decided to try something different. Skunk Hollow was about ten miles outside of the area’s local small town, Pleasantville. They were more and more aware that people from Pleasantville weren’t going to make the trip out to Skunk Hollow, no matter how nice of a congregation it might be. Their pastor floated a wild idea. “What if we were to offer a church service in Pleasantville. We’ll rent a space in town, set up for Sunday worship, and go to where the people are. If the people won’t come out here in the sticks to us, maybe we could go to reach them? We’ll keep holding our normal services in Skunk Hollow and keep gathering as we always have but we’ll send a small group of us to start something new and see how it goes.”

The folks at Skunk Hollow were willing to give it a try if it meant they had a chance to reach people for Jesus. Months of planning ensued. There were a lot of details that had to be managed: a truck and a trailer for hauling equipment back and forth, the purchase of sound equipment and portable nursery supplies, and the lease agreement with the Pleasantville school for a Sunday morning meeting place. After months of planning and preparation, the good folks at Skunk Hollow gathered at the old church building for their normal 9:00 a.m. worship service and then a team of those faithful folks headed to Pleasantville to help host the 11:00 a.m. service at the Pleasantville school a few miles away. To their delight, people came. People who would not come to Skunk Hollow (or maybe didn’t even know where Skunk Hollow was for that matter), were willing to come to a worship service held at the local town school.

Over time, more people came to the gathering at the Pleasantville school. People came to Christ and were discipled to follow Jesus. Marriages were restored, and people found freedom from the chains of addiction. Men and women were raised up and sent out to serve in ministry elsewhere. Eventually, the gathering at Pleasantville exceeded the number of people gathering in Skunk Hollow, so much so that they outgrew the school facility and purchased and redeemed an old nightclub to give them space to continue to reach people in Pleasantville. Today there continues to be a worshipping community in Skunk Hollow and Pleasantville.

The churches of Podunk and Skunk Hollow are fictional places. While the construction is a fabrication, the story represents a composite sketch of numerous real churches and their experiences. Jesus used parables that are almost universally understood as fictional stories, but we also deeply resonate with the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son because they draw from real world wisdom and lived experience. Although the above story clearly isn’t scripture, what can we take away from this parable? What can we glean from Podunk and Skunk Hollow? Why did one congregation catch a vision for new possibilities and another fade away?

The answers aren’t always clear or easy. There are a host of factors, some that are known and some which remain unknown. Why did one congregation see the possibilities that existed ten miles away and decide to take a risk while the other congregation stayed on the course of a slow and eventual demise? Was it the grip of tradition or preference? Was it an unwillingness to take risks? Was it a lack of love for the people nearby? Was it simply a matter of good or poor leadership? Such questions are hard to discern from a distance and we’re wise to avoid jumping to conclusions that prescribe simplistic formulas for “success.” While fictional places, there are a lot of places like Podunk and Skunk Hollow across the CGGC and there are examples of similar stories in some of our congregations.

What are you doing in your congregation to help others engage in Holy Spirit-inspired imagination? Do you need to take some of your leaders on a field trip to a nearby neighborhood or community and ask some questions: What could we do here that might make a difference in these folks’ lives and be a sign and instrument of the kingdom of God? How could we bring Good News to these people who won’t make the journey out to our gathering place? What is broken here that God wants to restore and redeem and how could we play a role in that? What could we do to plant the church here (the language is important and intentional – we’re long beyond the luxury of just establishing worship services) in a way that would bear witness to Jesus? Your local church doesn’t have to follow the path of the brothers and sisters at Podunk! We serve an amazingly imaginative God and He’s inviting us to join Him in His mission to make all things new!