Understanding The Challenges of Rural Ministry
The Battle for Personal Sustenance and Financial Growth
One of the most strenuously taxing, laboriously arduous, exhaustingly stressful and neck breaking challenge most village pastor’s face is the battle for personal sustenance and financial growth. Like any other new church plant, most village churches begin with some kind of external financing because they lack capacity to generate enough resources to support their day to day operations.
In order to build capacity and sustain the work in its initial stages, most denominations have developed different support mechanisms aimed at temporarily supplying or meeting the needs of the village pastor and his congregation over some kind of contractual period of time. This support may take the form of a grant, an endowment, a contribution, a gift, donation or allowance which is methodically dispersed among rural congregations and their pastors by the church’s regional, national or international treasury.
The funds usually cater for such things as paying rentals and utility bills for the village pastor’s house, his upkeep allowance or basic salary. It also extends to paying rentals for facilities used by the church as places of worship such as community recreation halls, privately owned buildings or classrooms. Important as it may be, the validity period of this imperative aspect of rural ministry varies across denominations and church affiliations.
For some, the support is permanent while others have rationalized it to cover only a few pioneering years. Usually, those with a permanent approach are pro-poor churches whose mandate generally includes a corporate approach to poverty reduction using deliberately well calculated efforts aimed at uplifting the living stands of standards of the poor. Traditional mainline churches fall under this margin with a few exceptions on autonomous churches.
On the other hand, some denominations believe that this form of support should not be permanent but for a short season so as to encourage the village pastor to work extremely hard and ensure that the church grows financially before he and his congregation is completely weaned. Propagators of this notion believe that no matter where a church has been planted or who its members are, a few years from inception is enough to grow that church financially and have it support its pastor and fund its own operations and projects.
They consider this approach as a sure way of accessing heavenly blessings and getting the poor out of poverty and argue that if the church will perpetually receive external support, its members will remain poor as the people funding their activities will collect the blessings which should have come to them. This is what has made most village pastors to prefer the prosperity gospel over other teachings of the Holy Scripture because their survival depends on it.
In addition to that, they further argue that permanent support makes village pastors lazy and cause them not to aspire for the growth and expansion of their churches. For some, they believe village pastors need no support and should henceforth accept whatever little they are given. They claim that every divine assignment has corresponding provision hence the call of God upon the village pastor is enough to attract resources and make him survive the harsh realities, unpleasant conditions and poor living standards that come with rural ministry. As such, they see prolonged support as nothing less than pampering a village pastor because if he is truly called then God must make provisions for his vision.
As a result, many denominations especially those which are semi-autonomous in nature think rationalizing is the best way to put the village pastor and his congregation in a place of discomfort in order to bring the best out of him because the idea behind missions support is not to create lasting comfort but to allow the village congregation to grow to levels where it could sustain its operations and take care of the financial needs of the local village pastor.
I for one don’t have any problem whatsoever with this concept. However, the time frame most denominations have put in place to support village congregations is to brief to achieve its intended purpose. The years required for many village churches to become stable, established and develop are more than the length of the support itself. From my observations, most churches terminate support without conducting a situational analysis in order to assess the capacity of the local church before weaning it thereby living the village pastor vulnerable.
Most denominations follow what their policies state without primarily paying particular attention to what the situation on the ground dictates. What they do not realize is that the Spiritual and mental disposition of the village pastor depends on the healthy functioning of his support system. It is for this reason that implementers of such support should be considerate, taking into account the uniqueness of circumstances surrounding the village pastor and his congregation before effecting anything.
In my view, it is an act of prejudice, discrimination or unfair treatment against the village pastor when a system is allowed to take effect while actively ignoring the village congregation’s lack of capacity, financial reserve or working capital needed to sustain its operations. The system should be tailored to favor the soldier on the battle field and not to unjustly underestimate the agonizing struggles associated with the battle
Imagine a doctor removing a patient from a life saving machine simply because the patient has exceeded the number of days required for him to improve and get out of danger. If the doctor wants to kill his patient, he should strictly follow his notes and unplug the machine. Unfortunately, that’s what many denominations are doing, they have been unplugging village congregations from their support systems purely because its time up. Many churches which could have grown are severely struggling and battling for their lives because they are no longer supported.
On the contrary, if the doctor wants to live by his calling of saving lives, if he is serious about saving a precious soul whose life now depends solely on his life saving machine to keep him from dying and prevent his family from experiencing pain and grief, then the doctor should keep his patient on the life support machine as long as it remains necessarily justifiable to do so even if his notes states otherwise.
This is how a kingdom minded denomination ought to respond to the system defying challenges of rural missions. The response should be kingdom driven, anchored on compassion and care towards the village missionary and just like the recovery process of patients in a coma varies, one village church can build capacity before the support period is over while another can be either on time or very late. However, that does not mean that the one who is late will never get there some day. Henceforth, the church should relearn to exercise patience, lenience and tolerance when dealing with issues of support for the village pastor and his congregation.
Besides, when a village congregation has been weaned “prematurely” before it realizes its full potential; it tends to have a lot of financial tensions. The pressure to look after the pastor, pay his salary and housing, settle his utility bills and other expenditures relating to the church drastically changes how members feel and respond to the ministry of their pastors.
Most members especially leaders become overly stressed and no longer consider their pastor a blessing but a burden they have to put up with. This hinders them from growing into spiritual maturity. The pastor himself loses his fervency in Spirit because he has too much to think and worry about. His prayer life goes down and his attention is torn between meeting the needs of his family and maintaining a sound relationship with God. If he is not careful, he ends up become carnal because his primary focus shifts from ministry to fighting for the survival of his household.
This explains why the ministry impact of most village pastors does not last longer. For many of them, their thrust in ministry does not exceed the period of their support. If anything, it dies with the support and depending on how the village pastor manages the crisis, he either bounces back, continue making an even greater impact after several years of struggling or he remains average and continue struggling through and through until their calling becomes questionable. For those who lack the courage to face their struggles, which can’t stand to see their wives and children languishing in scarcity and poverty, they just quit ministry and switch to something more rewarding and profitable.
In addition to that, members of such congregations tend to resent the teachings on giving because they feel that they are not being taught in good faith. Such messages are considered to be gimmicks the village pastor is now using to ensure that he generates more than enough to take care of his needs and those of his family. At this point, the church does not only find it easy to accumulate arrears on financial bills but also begins to struggle to grow Spiritual and Numerically.
In worst scenarios, some key members especially those with capacity to give or leaders who notice pain and anguish of the village pastor and feel the sufferings of his family will start missing church regularly with those in formal employment fighting for a transfer while others completely backslide or contemplate on joining other financially stable churches within the village.
This explains why certain individuals will choose to join a different church once they change location; it also explains why others refuse leadership appointments and opt to remain mere members. It also explains why certain village churches constantly loose potential members and why some have been experiencing stranded growth for many years. It also explains why certain people would be very committed in a certain place and suddenly take a low profile in another place. Sheep love still waters, not noisy troubled waters.
As part of the remedy to this daunting problem, I would like to propose a few things which can be used to strengthen the already existing systems in favor of the local missionary and his mission station.
To be continued…
