CENTRE FOR RURAL MINISTRY FOCUS ON MISSION

BY REV IVOR MACDONALD

The Lord Jesus tells us that the fields of mission are ready for harvest. That is visibly the case in rural Scotland. The potential for a healthy gospel church in a rural setting to transform its community is enormous. The school roll may be small, but the church can often have most pupils enrol in the summer holiday club! Across our denomination we have small but vibrant congregations which have impacted their communities for good. In other places the local congregation just needs a little bit of help in order to thrive and release the gospel into their communities. We are blessed to have on the team of the Centre for Rural Ministry people who are passionate about our country districts being won for Christ. Please pray for us as we move into 2025.

In the coming year we will be bringing together rural church members for encouragement, vision building and resourcing in a rolling programme of regional conferences, with the Dingwall “In a Big Country” conference as the hub. Coming together in this kind of context-specific conference can be of inestimable value to Christians who in the nature of things are often isolated.

We will be working also at a congregational level to help God’s people in the rural church discern God’s purposes for them in their generation. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can be of great value in this regard. Already a number of congregations are in the diary for 2025. Typically, this will involve meeting with the eldership and then facilitating a congregational vision meeting to seek to be the kind of congregation that will glorify God in that context. Sometimes this will result in the production of a congregational development plan.

We are big fans of church partnership! In some larger churches people’s gifts lie unused whereas in many small rural congregations such gifts would be transformative. We would like to be a catalyst for many healthy gospel partnerships. Already the partnership between the High Free Church in Stornoway and Duirinish Free Church in Skye is looking like a healthy model.

We are hoping to hold a couple of events on Skye called The Gathering. This is aimed at providing young people with an opportunity not just to have fellowship in a rural setting but to talk in a very informal way about the nature of a call to serve the rural church.

Our Facebook page regularly posts articles — mostly from our own ministers and workers — on the nature of rural ministry. Many of us are “blind” to some of the distinctives of the modern-day rural context and we want to highlight these unique features. We will also be showcasing some of our most vibrant rural congregations to show the huge opportunity that there is for a healthy church to be transformative in these settings.

Whilst our work at the Centre for Rural Ministry is focussed on empowering existing rural churches, we do have a burden to see the church extend its reach into the vast swathes of Scotland that are out of reach of a healthy gospel church. 97 percent of the Scottish land area is classified as rural (i.e. containing settlements of under 3,000 people). That means that if you live in an area like Dumfries and Galloway or Aberdeenshire you could be many miles from a church that is faithful to the gospel. Combine that with the fact that the rural community is less mobile and there is a clear priority to reach these areas with the gospel. Should we not aim to have 17 percent (the proportion of Scotland’s population classified as rural) of our 30 by 30 church plants situated in these communities? That would be six rural church plants. There is a real opportunity here for some of our larger congregations to take the lead in planting village churches. •