Rural Church

Ross and Mary Nelson have been married for thirty years, and have four children whose ages range from 17 to 34. For many years they pastored a Lutheran church in Geneva, Illinois while at the same time caring for their son, now 25, who has Down's Syndrome. While in Geneva, however, they began attending conferences at the Evanston Vineyard, and eventually planted a Vineyard church in Elgin, Illinois in 1990. In 1995 they handed leadership of the church over to Tom and Jill Severson in order to move to the small, rural town of Tomahawk, Wisconsin. Both Ross and Mary had grown up there in large families, many of whom still lived there. They looked forward to reconnecting with extended family members, and thought they might open a B & B and enjoy a slower pace of life. In addition, Ross's family owned a grocery store in town, which would be an ideal place for their special needs son to be employed.

Things turned out a big differently, however. In May of 1997 they planted the Northwoods Vineyard in Tomahawk, population 3,700. The average attendance at the church is now 250—a ratio of church-to-town population many pastors would love to have! Ross and Mary are the Church Planting Coordinators in the Midwest Region for Wisconsin, and we spoke to them about the unique challenges and opportunities of planting churches in rural areas.

How did you end up planting a Vineyard as a Lutheran?

Ross: I did my M.Div. at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, where Mary and I received a lot of good discipleship in a charismatic Lutheran fellowship there.

Mary: After we started coming to the Evanston Vineyard, Steve Nicholson met with us for about a year, and along the way told us that we could not plant a Vineyard until we had been released with a blessing from our Lutheran church Geneva. That process took a year, but in the end they blessed us to go, and one year later they came for our first anniversary of the church plant and received a standing ovation from everyone for blessing us to go. It was a very precious thing.

You've recently begun doing more thinking about the unique practices involved in rural church planting.

Mary: Ross and I had noticed how much easier it was planting this second time around. We wondered, was it just that we'd learned everything the first time? Or were we in a better location for our gift mix? We are a pretty average couple. We don't have any remarkable gifts. But that is not necessary in a small town community. Small communities need to know—and they will find out—that you pay your bills on time, or what your kids are like. But if you don't mind being highly visible, you can be really successful. If you have integrity and honesty, the basic stuff of life really, you can go very, very far in a small town. People weren't impressed that Ross has a master's degree. It's great that he has it, and they don't mock it, but what's more valuable is character, though it's not about being perfect.

In an urban community, those things aren't always the first things that are looked for. It's organization skills, preaching ability, being catalytic. In a small town, what are the top things that you would look for in a potential planter that might be different from what you'd look for in an urban planter?

Mary: Hospitality - you have to let people in. Though that's especially true only for a season. When we first moved here we lived one block from the school, right on the main drag, for four years. Now we live on a lake and have privacy, which Ross needs. But for the first four years our curtains were open day and night, because people needed to see us. They needed to see how we played, what kind of car we drove. It can feel like you're being heavily scrutinized, but once you are in, you are in. After that, good preaching and good character are important.

How do you choose a town? Is there a difference between one small town and another?

Mary: Oh yes. There has to be movement in the town to consider a plant there. If it is a stagnant town with no change, I would not move there, because it's not the people that have been there forever that you are going to get. Certain families have always been in certain churches, and you really do not want to violate that in a small town. But if you get in a town that has some change and movement, that's different. Tomahawk has tourism and several Harley-Davidson plants, a really good school complex and a brand new hospital, plus Louisiana-Pacific Mills.

In the eighties a lot of people left for the suburbs, but in the nineties there was a "rural rebound" where professionals started saying, "I think I could take my computer and move to a lake and set up my own home business." So you see a lot of entrepreneurs coming this way, as well as doctors, including heart surgeons, burnt out from working in the large city nearby. They think, "This is where I've vacationed; now I want to live here." And they are very receptive to coming to church. There is something about a small town where the oldfashioned "maybe religion is okay, maybe give the church a try" still exists somewhat.

Ross: I look to see what kind of evangelical or charismatic churches are ministering there. In our role of helping potential planters choose a good target location, we've found that if the primary churches in town are mainline denominations, then there is a great need to plant a Vineyard there.

Are there other things that you think of when choosing a location?

Mary: I read a book by Tom Nebel called, Big Dreams in Small Places. He talks about the story of Wal-Mart, and how Wal-Mart never targeted metro cities to begin with because they knew it would be too difficult, so they started in small cities where they could come in and make an impact, where they knew the population could handle it. Then as their reputation—for better or for worse!—took hold they went into the metro areas.

We, on the other hand, takes a "Culver's approach". Culver's is a Wisconsin chain that sells freshly-made ice cream and hamburgers, sort of one-step-above McDonald's fast food. What we've realized is that if a community can support a Culver's, it can support a Vineyard. These businesses have professionals that they pay a fortune to get this demographic information—so why do all the homework again?

Now, if we have someone who is highly gifted and they have an MBA or master's degree, we could give them a college town. So, we do want to help fulfill Vineyard's vision of hitting the bigger cities, too, in addition to equipping planters who can can go into the smaller towns and do just fine.

Anything else about choosing targets?

Ross: If a potential town has primarily Roman Catholic and Lutheran influence, then the planter has to know how to connect with that way of thinking. In Tomahawk, for example, we do not use terms like "born again" or "saved". We talk a lot about people's spiritual journey and where they are at with God in their lives. So if the potential planter is going to plant in the upper Midwest, and they come from Roman Catholic or Lutheran background, that really helps. I tend to look for former Roman Catholics whose grandmothers were praying for them to become priests.

Walk me through the process. You've identified a church planter and spouse, they've done their training. What kind of things do they do in your church to train to do the same thing somewhere else?

Mary: They teach classes that we offer, like the SHAPES class, a class on finding your gifting. They are assistants in Alpha, or they work with Ross doing prayer training. They do as much as they possibly can be involved in a mentoring kind of situation.

How do they start gathering in a small town? Do you think it's different from how it would be in a city or suburb?

Ross: Find a job where there is high traffic of people. Grocery stores, Wal-Mart, a restaurant, tavern, school, hospital—someplace where at least a third of the people of the town might pass through on a given week. At work, watch for people with needs, like an elderly lady who looks like she is grieving over the loss of a spouse, or single parents who look frazzled, or fellow employees who are having a crisis or need to get married or need you to do a funeral for one of their family members. That kind of stuff.

Mary: It's crucial to be as public and seen as you can in the beginning. I don't want to scare people. It's not forever! Ross is such an introvert and needs privacy, and now he just doesn't have to be that public of a person. But at the beginning, it's crucial. If he found out that someone had just lost a spouse and they came into the grocery store, he'd touch them and say, "I'm so sorry to hear about your loss." And if they teared up a little, he would say, "Let me just bless you," and he would do it very gently, right in the store but very nonchalant. People liked that.

Ross: I also worked with the funeral home caring for families who had lost loved ones and didn't have a pastor. In that setting you get to preach to a lot of people who don't get to church on a Sunday morning.

Mary: Then I got involved in the school, letting people see who I was, who my kids were. It's huge to teachers that you care about your kids' education and you care about the teachers and aim to support them and take care of them. Here's this new Christian in town; are they going to cut down the schools, work against them, or build them up? Those are all huge things people watch. Once local teachers feeling certain that you are not weird— that's a big help.

Because teachers are figures of authority in a small town?

Mary: Absolutely. Also, whether it's fair or not, in a small town you need to catch a couple of big fish. For us, getting a white-collar Harley Davidson computer jock was big, as was a school counselor. Then a guy from the radio station started coming, and that was helpful. It was amazing—when Ross preached, the people didn't look at Ross. They looked at Mona the school counselor! They watched to see if she'd nod her head and seemed to be agreeing. We would think to ourselves, "Mona, just nod your head!" Then to have a doctor coming to the church—it all brought a sense of security, because they're such authority figures in town. But this meant that our greeters had to there healthy and self-confident enough to welcome a doctor without being intimidated, because if you get some of your people at the door stuttering when they see the doctor, he or she is not going to feel at home. For some reason, in a small town it can be tempting to accept the down-and-outer but feel insecure around a "big fish".

Did you realize that was strategic on the front end? Or did you realize it afterwards.

Mary: I knew that that was what we did not have in Elgin. We had a heart to love the poor, but we didn't have enough of the skills to bring in the really healthy families to help minister to those who were hurting and broken. So when we did that inventory, we knew that we needed to be confident that whomever God brought to us and not spiral into inferiority.

So there you are, you're gathering, God has graciously given you a couple of big fish. Then what? How does the church grow?

Ross: Get involved further in the community. I coached ice hockey and helped with football. Both of these webs of relationship were very important. Get involved in community events—the 4th of July parade, Dinner with Santa, whatever works for you. Attend high school sporting events.

Word of mouth is very effective in a small town. News travels fast. If I have a nucleus of people who attend who really like the church, I tell them to blab it all over the place. We have some great tavern stories, of people inviting their friends from the bar to our services.

Mary: Ross continued to tell his story, over and over again. Why did we move back to Tomahawk after twenty years? Over and over he talked about what the church is, what the Vineyard is. In our situation we had family members who came, and then they said to other people, "Come and see."

You also have to watch for boundaries. You are always going to have your floating charismatics who come from far away to check you out to see if your church is an option for them. One of the things we had decided, given how many people were coming from a Roman Catholic background, is that we would make safe boundaries in the church.

We all joke about the day when someone snuck in a whole box of tambourines. How could they have done that-we only had fifty people! Worship was going on and all of a sudden - Boom! Boom! Boom! I knew it was the day of "Who wins?", in which our authority and boundaries were being tested. Do we believe in what we're doing enough that we're willing to go back there and say, "You know what? Here are the criteria, and one of them is you can't shake your tambourines out in the audience."

Ross and I deliberately took on a very restrained, evangelical approach at the beginning, given who we were wanting to reach. In a small community if the first word that comes out is, "It's charismatic," that label will stay on you forever. You need to figure out how you want folks to describe you. People don't know what a Vineyard is in a rural community. That can be to your advantage. We needed folks to say, "It's lively, have a really good worship band, they pray for people—but I don't know that it's charismatic."

Reaching people in this second church plant was hugely important to us. We felt like we'd be given a second chance to learn how to reach people, and that became one of Ross' big burdens. He said, "I don't just want to do the Holy Spirit stuff but not reach lost people. We want to do both. We want to live in the tension." And we feel like God has really blessed that. At least fifty percent of the church attendance is from conversion growth.

Mary: I think Ross has a gift for being able to spot a leader "in the raw" and believe in them at a very early stage. Also, Ross started right from the beginning casting a vision for being a church that would plant churches. He said, "The Vineyard is a church-planting movement. We will be a part of that." The other thing we did was to put up a huge world map that takes up one whole wall, so all who come can see, every time they pass by, that the world is bigger than Tomahawk. Ross constantly said, "You guys, if you've never left Tomahawk, I want you to see that there is more."

He put dots on the map where he thought churches could be planted. We've moved them around some, but at this point Culver's has already determined it! Our folks are proud that a church in a town this little is planting all these churches. We live in Tomahawk and do our shopping for the big stuff in Wausau, and yet we've planted the Vineyard that's now in Wausau out of our church! Usually everything good comes the other direction!

Talk to me about what "healthy" looks like in a small church.

Mary: It has to be evaluated objectively from the outside. You have to let people in and look. We use NCD (Natural Church Development), and we do let the leadership team own the results from the NCD evaluation, and the follow-through on it. That way it isn't about Ross and Mary keeping this church afloat. They understand that if the score comes back that says small groups are a weak point, we all say "What do we need to do to make small groups healthy?"

Our leadership team is about 45 strong, which I consider large, and we do a lot of delegating. We have a wall that shows all the leaders and the ministries. We are hoping to launch a ministry for environmental concerns—that's a big issue in our area and what Tri Robinson is saying is very relevant to us.

You can't keep thinking "small town". People like what you bring from the big city—they just don't like you to tell them that's where you got it. They want to see great graphics. They love cards to pass out at Christmas and Easter that are really sharp; they don't want something outdated. They love good artwork.

What are the earmarks of someone who would be really brilliant at doing a rural church plant?

Ross: Someone who is able to know and adapt to the culture well, who knows the lingo, who knows the predominant lifestyles. In the upper Midwest, it helps to be someone who likes to hunt and fish, and who is comfortable going into taverns. Up here, the taverns function much more like English pubs than like a bar in a big city; they are major community gathering spots. You need to come off as one of the locals. It also really helps to follow the local and state sports teams - that's part of knowing the lingo. It's even better if you are a fan!

Mary: Integrity focused, focused on the unchurched, family-oriented, being content with a slow-paced environment. A city or suburbanbred church planter doesn't have to trade in high educational standards. Small towns often have incredible teachers. They are there because they want to be. Small towns are not all that happy about home-schooling pastors' families. For one thing, they need all the tax dollars they can get. For another, it is ‘read' as snobbishness or a superior attitude. So that's one thing I'd be very careful about, and this is from someone who home schooled at least some of my kids part of the time when we lived in the big city.