Ministries
Growth and decline challenge rural
ministry
By DAVID ANDREWS
The nature of the traditional
American division between urban and rural is changing, and so is the nature of
rural ministry.
First the statistics.
According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate,
slightly more than a third of all Catholic parishes are in areas designated
non-metropolitan by the U.S. Census. These are areas having a central place of
fewer than 50,000 persons or an urban center of fewer than 100,000 persons.
While parish size is probably the most apparent difference, urban
and rural parishes also differ in many other respects. The average rural parish
has 387 households, three Masses a weekend. Eighty-four percent have a resident
pastor (compared to 94 percent urban). Thirteen percent identify themselves as
Latino. More than one in four small parishes lack a resident pastor. Some 17
percent of all parishes are administered by non-resident pastors or entrusted
to someone other than a priest.
The Midwest is the area having the highest percentage of
non-resident pastors with 28 percent. Six percent of all parishes for which a
non-resident pastor is not available are entrusted to women religious. The
South is more likely to have parishes entrusted to women religious, more than
10 percent of all rural areas. The West has the highest percentage of parishes
entrusted to a layperson or team. About a tenth of parishes in the West with no
resident pastor are entrusted to laypersons other than vowed religious
(Catholicism USA, A Portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States
by Bryan T. Froehle and Mary L. Gautier).
Size and location add to rural ministry’s distinction from
urban and suburban ministry.
A ministry in flux
Research shows that rural parishes are both in the process of
growth and decline. Fr. Thomas Graner of the Fargo, N.D., diocese pastors in
three small parishes. He is the rural life director for his diocese. In his
review of parish situations in some rural areas he recommends that the church
develop a ministry of hospice for some parishes.
Not all parishes will survive the depopulation that is going on in
rural areas, and he recommends that we not give false hope but provide a loving
ministry acknowledging loss and grief. A film, “Delafield,” documents
the closing of a rural Minnesota Lutheran parish. It marks the
congregation’s acknowledgement that it should close. There is a
sensitively developed ritual and series of storytelling sessions that
accompanies the closing.
On the other hand, research shows that some rural parishes are
growing. Urban and suburban sprawl have brought newcomers into formerly
isolated parishes, and the newcomers have different values and expectations for
parish life. Former recreation areas have now become retirement communities
year round, adding to the challenges of parochial leadership. In some rural
parishes, ethnic changes have taken place. What once were homogeneous Anglo
parishes have in some instances, almost overnight, become largely Latino
parishes. Such growth and change requires new adaptations from diocesan
leadership.
Some dioceses have been seriously engaged in pastoral planning,
which includes an appreciation of the significance of locality for planning
processes.
The small rural parish and the large urban parish differ from each
other in how the life of faith is lived out. The sense of community, the
capacity for organized ministries, the identity of the parish with the local
town differ from one location to another. There may be a tendency for rural
parishes to compare themselves to urban parishes or suburban parishes.
Sometimes those comparisons are unfair because they assume the larger parish as
the model for all parishes.
The fact is that rural and small town parishes have their own
social dynamics, and those dynamics have a theological relevance. We need to
appreciate that social location is an element in the concrete realization of
the life of the church. Rural parishes are different from urban parishes, and
that difference should be appreciated in pastoral plans.
Keeping the church active
The good news is that the difference often is appreciated. The
Cincinnati archdiocese engaged in pastoral planning in the 1990s and worked
with urban and rural pastoral leaders with the Office of Planning and Research.
In Idaho the pastoral plan took shape over a lengthy period, and every attempt
was made to keep the small rural churches intact even if some alteration was
made changing the status of the church from parish to mission and mission to
chapel.
The Charleston, S.C., diocese held a synod in the 1990s to focus
the efforts of the entire diocese; rural parishes had their own distinctive
involvement. Faith communities in the diocese were in many instances growing
due to population influx. A widely dispersed rural sector was challenged to
keep pace with the diocesan planning processes, but it did through consistent
outreach from diocesan offices.
Similar pastoral attentiveness marked the efforts of the Portland,
Maine, diocese in its efforts to include many small rural parishes in its
process of pastoral planning. As a result of these ongoing efforts, it was
concluded that the smaller, rural parishes undertook parish planning in a more
comprehensive and enthusiastic manner than some of the urban parishes.
All of these efforts at pastoral planning indicate that the rural
church is working as other sectors of the church are working to deal with
continuing declines in the availability of clergy to lead them. Rather than see
that as only a problem, creative solutions are being identified and developed.
One hopeful result is the cluster model, which links parishes in shared
operations such as financial management, religious education and parish
development but continues their availability to serve a particular specific
region.
There is a great challenge then to keep the church active and
alive in rural areas. Rural areas suffering from population decline need to
find ways to sensitively minister to a lessened community, sometimes where
there had been 100 years of dedicated parish participation.
Rural parishes are exploring new models of leadership through
clustering, shared ministries, new forms of leadership. Many dioceses are
including a specialized attention to the rural character of some of their
parishes. The examples above from Ohio, South Carolina, Idaho and Maine
demonstrate this careful pastoral concern. Economically some rural areas are
growing with the establishment of new retirement communities or recreation
communities.
In the same pews
Other rural areas are suffering decline from machine-intensive
mountaintop removal in Appalachia or poultry or livestock confinement
operations in Texas, North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and Iowa. In these
instances where economic decline is taking place, the parishes can be
challenged to speak to environmental degradation and economic injustice.
That can be harder when persons from different sides of the issues
sit in the same pews on Sunday. Nonetheless, in season and out of season,
Catholic social and environmental teaching can be a balm to everyone.
Throughout the United States, from the Northeast to the South, from the
Northwest to the Midwest, bishops and regional groups of bishops have spoken
out on issues such as the growth of so-called “factory farms” and
their impact on local areas. Here are a few:
• The Pennsylvania Catholic Conference on Oct. 18,
2001, issued this statement: “The Pennsylvania Catholic Conference is
mindful of the fact that agriculture is the No. 1 industry in the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania. … And we know of rural communities that have been
devastated by a declining farm economy and, due to the loss of family farms,
the new threat of factory farms, which can hurt their environment and the
well-being of communities.”
• In 2001, the Catholic bishops of Nebraska issued a
pastoral letter, “Economic Hardships Affecting Rural Life,” stating:
“We are concerned about the state of production agriculture, but even more
we are concerned about the future of a cherished way of life. That is what is
at stake in the struggle to save and sustain family-based, owner-operated farms
and ranches. These institutions are being severely tested by the trend toward
corporate farming and ranching, which creates excessive concern about
efficiency and market control and leaves little room for independent producers;
by the shift from small and moderate sized, family-based production to
industrial scale, ‘factory-like’ production systems; by the increase
in concentrated ownership; and by vertical integration of production,
processing, marketing and retailing. All these factors have contributed to the
diminishment of open and competitive grain and livestock markets.”
• The bishops of the Boston province, in a pastoral
letter titled “And God Saw That It Was Good,” issued on Oct. 4, 2000,
wrote: “Businesses controlled from afar by persons who do not know the
local circumstances can more easily be tempted to introduce environmentally
hazardous practices such as large-scaled confined animal feeding
operations.”
These economic issues face rural parishioners across the country.
In some instances parish members have taken the lead in organizing opposition
to these operations, invoking the words of bishops such as those found
above.
With active faith, grace
Rural ministry in the United States is facing challenges of growth
and decline, issues of economic and environmental justice. Increasingly, even
in the midst of such change, there is the conviction of people in the pews that
with an active faith comes the grace to meet the challenges around them.
Drought, flood, environmental, economic and social struggles are being faced by
parishioners. Pastoral planning efforts are being developed by diocesan
leaders. In each case, rural ministry continues to place its own agenda and
face on the character of the church.
Rural faith communities have been involved for a long time in food
assistance, agricultural policy and in environmental concerns. There is a new
energy around sustainable development, spirituality, food, farm, nutrition,
environmental policy that can be identified in parish and local faith community
activities in the encouragement of local food systems within parishes:
• St. Joan of Arc parish in Minneapolis established a
community garden in partnership with a community-supported agriculture (CSA)
farm that provides seedlings, compost and support to area residents who wish to
garden.
• At Edgemont Solar Greenhouse in Dayton, Ohio, a
Marianist Catholic brother developed a 125-plot community garden in a public
housing development, which now includes three large solar greenhouses, employs
three full-time and up to 20 part-time assistants providing fresh vegetables,
bedding plants and house plants.
• Genesis Farm in Blairstown, N.J., a 140-acre
ecological learning and resource center owned by the Dominican Sisters of
Caldwell, N.J., educates people about the environment and their relationship to
the earth by providing courses in natural foods cooking, environmental
education and permaculture (the growing of perennial food crops in place of
landscape-type plants), and sponsorship of a community-supported biodynamic
garden.
• Michaela Farm, run by the Sisters of St. Francis of
Oldenburg, Ind., a 300-acre organic farm, includes diversified organic garden,
greenhouse, beehives, demonstration gardens, and nut and fruit tree orchard.
Its CSA program is expected to serve close to 200 households a year.
• The White Violet Center for Eco-Justice was
established by the Sisters of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind. On
1,200 acres this center fosters a way of living that recognizes the
interdependence of all creation and includes a Community-Supported Agriculture
garden and greenhouse on two acres, seven acres of antique-apple orchards and
berry patches, beehives, and fleece-producing alpacas whose fleece the sisters
spin for yarn and fiber.
• At Heartland Farm and Spirituality Center in Pawnee
Rock, Kan., an intentional ecumenical Christian community of men, women, and
youth -- religious and lay -- work for an interdependent healing of the earth
and care of persons sponsored by the Dominican Sisters of Great Bend. The
center is located on an 80-acre site, the development of which is based on
ecological principles and permacultural design, including an organic garden.
The community, 75 percent self-supporting, raises organic chickens and has a
20-family community-supported agriculture program.
• At the Sisters Hill Farm, in Bronx, N.Y., the
Sisters of Charity established a CSA project as a way of caring for the land in
a sustainable way. Local shareholders pick up their vegetables at the farm
weekly, and produce is delivered to the motherhouse in the Bronx for New York
City shareholders. Among the project’s goals are to share 25 percent of
the harvest with people who are poor and to help restore the lost connection
between people and agriculture by providing an opportunity for members to be
directly connected to how their food is grown.
Rural ministry is charting new directions even in the midst of
shifting church demographics and difficult trends of decline in some regions.
New pastoral planning processes, new rural economic and demographic realities,
efforts to face decline and growth and to address issues of their regions
demonstrate that rural ministry is among the creative sources for the
church’s pastoral engagement.
Br. David Andrews is executive director of the National
Catholic Rural Life Conference, based in Des Moines, Iowa.
National Catholic Reporter, September 20,
2002
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