Converting people and place into projects is a risk in any ministry. We pastors see ourselves as results-driven professionals. We cast vision. We work toward goals. We count. That’s what I did. We think that useful ministry means getting results, and we become a cross between an organizational consultant and a church growth guru. It can happen anywhere: in the concrete jungle, along the emerald suburban lawns, or out in the sticks. But I suspect project-making is a special danger in rural places, because many of us operate out of a narrative of rural decline. 

Early in my pastorate, a woman stopped by our church in rural Washington State looking for moving boxes. I was happy to help her out. We had just arrived in town, so we had plenty of boxes. “Thanks, Pastor,” she said. “You saved my life.”

Perfect. Life-saving was just the sort of work I had gone west to do, and the life-saving I imagined mostly involved making myself useful and fixing things. I was hooked.

Training and circumstances set me up for a fixit ministry. Somewhere in the thick of my studies at Harvard Divinity School, I chose the lofty goal of making my education useful to the larger church. I imagined myself helping people tidy up their theology: a little nip and tuck to their hermeneutical presuppositions. Read the Didache and call me in the morning. The tiny, urban congregation my wife and I joined during graduate school made plenty of space for an eager student to exercise his gifts, and when I started to sense the first inklings of a call, the congregation encouraged me and sent me off. After completing ministry training at the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, we set out to serve a small, rural congregation in eastern Washington. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

There was plenty to do. Our rural community was not exactly the stuff of bucolic dreams. It had come into its own some 50 years earlier when the Grand Coulee Dam was completed, and water from the Columbia River made irrigation possible on a vast scale. Homesteaders arrived in waves, and the town became a melting pot of Hispanic and white cultures straddling a wide socioeconomic spectrum. We had gang problems and hunger problems and the 10,000 indignities of poverty. It was perfect, the kind of tumbledown place that matched my hankering to put my faith into practice and really live the gospel.

I launched into my ministry with relish, setting about trying to fix things at the church. I dragged a cardboard box into the congregational library and proceeded to clear the shelves of Christian romance novels and Left Behind books. I didn’t ask anyone. Zeal for my Father’s house consumed me, and I just did it. I made plans to get rid of the old hymnals, which in my mind featured a few rather questionable hymns. We didn’t sing from them, but no matter; they had to go. I proposed removing a few pews and replacing them with chairs. None of this went over well.

In the community, I convened a committee with a vision to revamp the Senior Center into a Senior and Youth Center. I got involved with a neighborhood development outfit. I walked around town with a grabber claw in one hand and a bag in the other, picking up trash.

My fixit spirit didn’t stop with the congregation and community. I wanted to fix people too. I wanted to take hold of people’s lives and do a little spiritual chiropractic. Crunch them into shape. Maybe if I could get that divorcing couple to sit down with me, or counsel the young man who was slipping into gang life, or incisively—yet gently—point out the doctrinal weak spots in the theology of those folks who rarely showed up in church, things would work out. All these people needed was for someone to apply a bit of spiritual elbow grease. And all I wanted was to save a few lives.

My Fixit Theology

I thought I had to engineer all the changes I wanted to see. But the deepest changes can’t be imposed from outside. They come about slowly, through the patient alchemy of the Holy Spirit.

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