Small Church Big Opportunity

By Sam Peters

Small towns are wonderful places to live, work and worship. As more urban families discover that great quality, an ever increasing opportunity is emerging for local churches to reach out and share the love of Christ with the new neighbors. If you are pastor or leader that is truly concerned about making a big difference in the little community you live in, this book will help you discover a new mission field that is ripe for harvest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365060915

Sam Peters

Sam Peters is a rugby writer who has been credited with driving cultural change to the sport's attitude towards head injuries and concussion. In 2014 Sam was shortlisted as sports journalist of the year at the UK Press Gazette Awards and was runner-up as rugby writer of the year at the 2017 SJA Awards. Sam has written two books; Broadside with England cricketer Stuart Broad and The Row to Recovery.

Book preview

Small Church Big Opportunity

Small Church – Big Opportunity

Connecting to the Unchurched with One Excellent Mission

A guide for helping small town rural churches reach the least, the last and the lost of their community

For over thirty years I have served as a bi-vocational pastor.  Much of that time has been spent in small town/rural churches with less than 100 people in worship on Sunday.  Like many young pastors answering the call to serve the Lord in the pulpit I dreamed of one day pastoring a large congregation as a full-time senior pastor.  I would envision standing behind the sacred desk sharing the Word of God to masses of people and seeing thousands of lives transformed for the Kingdom of God.  As much as I prayed and longed for that opportunity, I’ve come to learn that God also calls pastors to serve smaller congregations in little out of the way places because of such is the Kingdom of God.  I’ve also come to learn that real life transformation happens one person at a time through one on one relationships built by trust and faith.  Small town/rural churches are wonderfully positioned to do exactly that.

In my three plus decades as a bi-vocational pastor I’d like to think that God has taught me a few things.  Often He has had to force me to learn those lessons.  What I hope to share with you here are a few of those lessons that specifically deal with reaching the unchurched in our small towns. – Pastor Sam Peters

Copyright © 2015 Sam Peters

All rights reserved

Published by Sampet Books

Wheelersburg, OH 45694

ISBN 978-1-365-06091-5

I wrote this book because of the passion I’ve developed for the small town and rural pastors and leaders that I’ve come to know who are courageously championing the cause of Christ with little resources, few volunteers and even fewer cheerleaders.  Our few loaves and fishes that are brought in faith are nourishing more souls than we think.  Keep doing what you’re doing; it is making an eternal difference.  This book is dedicated to all of you!

Special thanks to my friend Rev. William Goodall in collecting and compiling some of the data used for this book.  His help and insight were invaluable.

Introduction

For the past three years I have been working in the Shawnee Valley District of the West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church on revitalizing our smaller congregations to reach their communities more effectively.  For the past year I have been doing it with my co-coordinator Rev. Bill Goodall as part of the extended staff for the District.  My current church appointment was part of the pilot project called Refocus.  In what I call Refocus 1.0, six churches went through an 18 month process of collaborative work to learn together what was needed to breathe new life into our churches.  My church was the largest of the six with 42 in average attendance.  At the end of the 18 months our church had grown to an average worship attendance of 75.  Many of the new attendees had come from the unchurched families of our community.  To give you an understanding of that importance you need to know a little about South Webster, Ohio.  It is a small village located at a four way intersection in Southern Ohio.  We have one convenient store with a Subway inside.  We have one gas station, one pizza place, one caution light, one school campus, one Southern Baptist church, two Freewill Baptist churches, one Wesleyan church, one community church, and two United Methodist churches that are practically across the street from one another.  In a five mile radius of our church there are only 4,900 people.

To grow our church by about 75% in 18 months with those demographics was a really big deal.  It required some tough decisions about what we had always been doing.  That track was no longer in alignment with the gifts of our congregation.

In the summer most churches in our area do Vacation Bible School (VBS).  VBS is a great ministry so please don’t throw rocks at me for what I am about to say.  VBS in a small town is usually just a great way for parents to keep their kids busy all summer.  Usually every church is doing the same program and if you’re the last church to host VBS in the summer the good news is that the kids already know all the songs and all the hand motions.  Your VBS closing program will be the best of the summer because they’ve done it several times already at the other churches