A word about rural churches

8 comments

1. That’s quite a list, indeed. You might be interested to know that Quimper UUF is located in Port Townsend, quite a large-ish non-suburban but not really rural area of population on the Olympic Peninsula of WA.

   Two much more rural congregations here in WA would be mine (UUC of Whidbey Island, membership about 90, shooting for a 100) and the Vashon Island Unitarian Fellowship (about 80), plus possibly Skagit UUF, in Mt. Vernon (not sure of size but smaller than UUCWI).

   Hope this helps, Scott. I’m not sure what your parameters are.

2. Outlaw’s Bridge Universalist Church in NC is in the community of Outlaw’s Bridge, The church and parsonage are 2 of the 4 or 5 buildings in town (mailing address is Seven Springs NC, which I consider rural).

3. Definitions depend up on area size and social integration, based on commuting patterns. Which is why islands show up so much. For this reason . . . .

   Port Townsend is the largest town in Jefferson county, but still under 10,000 in population. So I suspect, as it is a growing area, to become a micropolitan area of its own in the next few years.

   Whidbey Island has already past that point, but Vashon Island — to my mind — deserves to be called rural because it lacks a bridge to the rest of decidedly metropolitan King County.

   Outlaw’s Bridge is a part of the Goldsboro, N.C. metropolitan area.

4. The interesting thing about Whidbey, which you couldn’t know if you haven’t been here, is that there are three distinct micro-areas: the south end, which reaches from Clinton to Greenbank and is primarily made up of retired folk, artists, and political liberals, the central area, which is prairie and farmland (both agricultural and marine-based), and the north end with its Navy base, big box stores, and conservative political climate. My congregation is on the south end but we draw from all over the island, which is 55 miles long.
   I think what you’re doing is really fascinating, Scott. Keep it up.

5. So wonderful to read about rural churches. I was ordained by one, too–Champlain Valley–and served another church that doesn’t make this list because it’s in the big small town of Rutland, VT, population 17,000, but serves a largely rural population.

   Champlain Valley stands out to me as a model of a successful church planting. Small group of dedicated laypeople, got very part-time consulting ministers early on, hired an intern as its first full-time minister (immediately afterwards, purely coincidentally, the Dept. of Ministry cracked down on off-site supervision of interns–if they’d done so earlier, CVUUS wouldn’t have had this experience), and called an extension minister who served there for 11 years. It was one of the last congregations to use the Extension Ministry program.

   I think nurturing the above congregations–that is, those among them that wish to grow and be vibrant, even if they don’t imagine ever being large or even mid-size–makes much more sense than most of the approaches to growth the UUA has tried in the past several years.

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7. You missed a big bunch of us in the Mountain Desert District. There are rural churches (both established and emerging) in:

   Taos, NM (Unitarian Congregation of Taos)
   Alamosa, CO
   Pagosa Springs, CO
   Las Vegas, NM
   Farmington, NM

   and more in Montana, Colorado, NM, Wyoming. Check in with Nancy Bowen, MDD DE. In fact, if you survey UUA Staff, you can catch them all.

   Good Hunting.

8. @Anne. Look again, Alamosa and Pagosah are on the list.

   Taos is a micropolitan area; Farmington rates as metropolitan.

   Las Vegas, N.M. doesn’t appear in the UUA list, a minimum requirement for this work, but it would be with the micropolitans.

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