If Herbert’s vision is to live on and capture the hearts of some in a new generation, it will likely be, in part, through the work of gifted writers. Brad Roth’s recent God’s Country(2017) provides a biblically informed, culturally aware, and deeply compelling understanding of rural ministry. There are also biographical stories that capture the beauty and brokenness of those who live in small places and the hardship, joy, and dignity of long-term ministry among them.

Nearly four centuries ago, in The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life, George Herbert imagined the rural pastor as a shepherd, standing on a hill, considering his flock during those brief moments when he wasn’t actively serving them. It’s an apt image. Throughout his famous guide to rural ministry, Herbert urges country pastors to consider their particular place and people, to “carry their eyes ever open, and fix them on their charge” rather than on professional advancement. Before writing the book, Herbert himself had left behind high-profile positions as the public orator of Cambridge University and a member of Parliament to become the priest of a small, rural parish 75 miles from London, where he served (humbly and well, by all accounts) for the remainder of his short life.

Underlying Herbert’s Country Parson is his conviction that there is dignity and value in rural ministry, that while ministry in small places has plenty of attendant difficulties, such a calling is worth a lifetime of care and devotion. It’s a view found in a variety of later writings, including J. C. Ryle’s biographical sketches of the 17th-century English rural ministers William Grimshaw and John Berridge (1885), and fictional works such as Georges Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), Bo Giertz’s The Hammer of God (1941) [article], Conrad Richter’s A Simple Honorable Man (1962), and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead(2004).

And it’s a view that has fallen on hard times in 21st-century American Christian culture. The finest seminary graduates are usually expected to go to the cities, and many aspiring pastors don’t even consider the possibility of a long-term call to a small place (though they may see it as a stepping stone to something better). Of course, as Wendell Berry has rightly said, “Not all ministers should be country ministers, just as not all people should be country people.” But if you believe—as Berry and I do—that some ministers should be highly trained, fully committed, long-term country ministers, then the loss of Herbert’s vision of rural ministry as a high and worthy calling, not merely a second-best option, is a great tragedy.

If Herbert’s vision is to live on and capture the hearts of some in a new generation, it will likely be, in part, through the work of gifted writers. Brad Roth’s recent God’s Country(2017) provides a biblically informed, culturally aware, and deeply compelling understanding of rural ministry. There are also biographical stories that capture the beauty and brokenness of those who live in small places (e.g., Rod Dreher’s The Little Way of Ruthie Leming) and the hardship, joy, and dignity of long-term ministry among them (e.g., D. A. Carson’s Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor).

But there’s also an important place for continuing the tradition of compelling fictional accounts of rural life and ministry. Though Berry, more than any other recent writer, has opened a window into the complexities and possibilities of rural life through his Port William novels, he has never presented a compelling fictional vision of rural ministry(perhaps because, by his own account, he has never known a pastor to stay long-term). Marilynne Robinson is the contemporary novelist who has most richly imagined and incarnated the modern country parson. Her fictional Iowa pastor John Ames is one who stayed, and preached, and loved his people, rather than leaving. His life and ministry express the dignity and value of a long-term pastoral call to a small place.

New Fictional Rural Pastor

Winn Collier has now provided, in the person of Jonas McAnn, another compelling fictional rural pastor (one who claims that John Ames may be his favorite fictional clergy!). Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church is an epistolary novel consisting of 32 letters, most of them written by McAnn to his small-town congregation in Granby, Virginia, over the course of seven years (2008 to 2015). The letters begin near the time of his first contact with the pastoral search committee and extend to his farewell on the eve of an imminent sabbatical. They probe the nature of love, friendship, church life, and Christian ministry, particularly the possibilities and perils of small-town life and ministry.

The first letter, written by the pastoral search committee of Granby Presbyterian Church to prospective pastors, articulates a core question felt deeply by many rural churches:

We’d like to know if you’re going to use us. . . . Is our church going to be your opportunity to finally enact that one flaming vision you’ve had in your crosshairs ever since seminary, that one strategic model that will finally get this church-thing straight? Or might we hope that our church could be a place where you’d settle in with us and love alongside us, cry with us and curse the darkness with us, and remind us how much God’s crazy about us? In other words, the question we want answered is very simple: Do you actually want to be our pastor? (5–6)

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