Over 30 million people still live in rural areas.
When is time more than just seconds and minutes stuck end-to-end? If you’ve been around the Church for a while, you probably know the answer. As the Greeks and the authors of the Greek New Testament knew, there is time (chronos), and then there is time (kairos). The first gives us our English word chronology and basically describes the time we chart with clocks and calendars. Kairos time, on the other hand, carries the implication of time “especially fit for something.”
When it comes to rural ministry and small town church planting, we are living in a kairos moment that we in the Vineyard—and we as Christians in America—too often neglect at our own peril.
Regardless of what one thinks about our last presidential election cycle, virtually everyone admits that it illuminates a deeply polarized society. Geography stood as one of the most notable indicators of this divide. In the gear up for election day, it became increasingly obvious that rural and small town folks were residents of what Tish Harrison Warren had the courage to describe, in an August 2016 Christianity Today article, as “The America I Forgot.” Indeed, as commentators across the country demonstrated by their extreme confusion on election night, it was an America many people, from journalists to pollsters, seemed to have forgotten.
Trump’s victory further catalyzed a growing fascination among America’s urban elite (and not-so-elite) with an entire segment of America that they had never taken very seriously. Books like Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (2015) and J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016) became essential tour guides to a culture just as foreign to many Americans as another country. ...
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