Publication Date: May 1, 2010 | Series: Ministry in the Small Membership Church
Dizzying changes have taken place in American religious life in the last half century. Yet in spite of that fact, taking a snapshot of a “typical” Christian church in America would reveal a surprising number of small-to-mid-sized congregations, rooted in a local neighborhood or community, tied to a specific denomination, where most of the members know each others’ names, and hence are blessed (and cursed) with being the church together.
In this clear-eyed, humorous appraisal, Jason Byassee contends that the “church around the corner” occupies a particular place in the divine economy, that it is especially capable of forming us in the virtues, perspectives, and habits that make up the Christian life. Not that he romanticizes these churches, however. Having been a rural, small membership church pastor, Byassee knows too well the particular vices and temptations to which they are subject. But he also knows the particular graces they’ve been given, graces like the “prayer ladies,” those pillars of the congregation who, “when one told you she was praying for you it meant something. When one hugged you, you remembered all week. When one cooked for you the casserole tasted like love. And when you were around them you were in the presence of Jesus.”
Anyone who serves, or belongs to, a “church around the corner” will find their ministry strengthened by this enlivening, inspiring book.
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Jason Byassee is Director of the Center for Theology, Writing, and the Media, and Executive Director of Leadership Education at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. He is a frequent contributor to the Christian Century magazine, at which he formerly served as editor.
This is a wonderful book. I had to stop reading frequently to indulge a memory of my own time as the pastor of a small church. I wish I had read this book before I started! I especially appreciated how the book is an arguement for the small church--that it's in precisely these kinds of churches that God is displaying what salvation looks like. It's beautifully written, and funny. For seminary grads about to embark on pastoring a small church for the first time, for seasoned pastors, and for lay people who want a better look at what their pastor's life looks like, I highly recommend this book.
A very enjoyable and insightful read, in the same genre as Richard Lischer's Open Secrets. A pastoral book about the Incarnation - how God comes to us in the flesh and blood. The God Jason found in his pastoral life did not come through the vague and general, but through the peculiar life of a particular small church. As a pastor, I know how crazy a local church can be. And yet, as Jason shows, the small church, for all its idiosyncrasies and down-right weirdness, can also be a means of grace.
Loved the humor, that made it fun to read. Also appreciated the "realness" of it. It was not all about "bigger is better" but more about the way most of us really live and the kind of church we really want to go to.
Jason Byasee has opened the window wide and let us take a good look inside the small church. He throws open the window and we see real people and their pastor navigating the Christian journey together: living in faith, hope, and love, dealing with conflict, getting along, not getting along, following Jesus, forgiving, failing, rejoicing, trying to figure out what it means to be Church, sharing in the sacraments, and actually learning from one another. It is that last theme of the book that sparkles for me. Many of us in ministry were trained in theological schools with certain convictions about the church. When we finish school those convictions and our own theological convictions can and do clash with our parishoners. It is something of a culture shock for some when we start serving churches and realize they are not the academy! Churches teach us. We teach them. We learn together. Love grows. We are all changed. No one told me I'd meet so many wonderful Christian people as a pastor. Jason Byasee has too and they appear in this wonderful book. Those interested in ministry as a vocation or know someone who is should read this book. It would also be a great book for a college or theological school course that introduces the practice of ministry. Highly recommended.
Jason Byassee minces no words when it comes to his appreciation for the small church. It, he says, "is...God's primary way of saving people" (p. 4). That is a strong statement from an author who earns his living as part of church academia (he is the Executive Director of Leadership Education and Director of the Center for Theology, Writing and Media at Duke Divinity School). But Byassee is not speaking as a detached theoretician. He speaks from personal experience with small congregations that continually surprised him with their lived-out Christian communities. Byassee asserts that the leadership culture of the United Methodist Church puts undue pressure on small congregations to behave as and become like larger congregations. Lost in this push for bigness is the importance of community, in which individuals learn by immersion the soul-shaping tasks of loving and forgiving and helping their neighbors. While he acknowledges the faults of his tiny congregation, he is far more critical of large, service-oriented churches in which the pastor likely does not know the names of many of his or her members. In The Gifts of the Small Church, Byassee relates a series of vignettes that cross spiritual meditation with local color. His experiences with the people of Zebulon County, NC, range from poignant to hilarious, and sometimes both at once. When Byassee tells about characters like Bob (the blue-collar conservative who challenged his pastor's mainline preacherly leanings), he does so with sincere admiration. Rarely does he sit in judgment on the people from Zebulon County. More often, he relates how he learned to see himself differently because of their graciousness toward him.... The "gifts" Byassee recounts from his small-church experience cause him to question many of his assumptions some facets of his theological education. One clear example is his treatment of his people's love for guns. Although the party-line for well-educated liberals tells him he should denounce firearms out of hands, he comes to appreciate and respect how people like Bill--who showed him a small arsenal from his collection--used them for sport and for hunting, with no violent intentions whatsoever. In this and many other settings, Byassee works not to present himself as above the people of Zebulon County, but as a stranger among them. The most obvious weakness of Gifts may be the author's struggle with perspective. Although his love for the small church is evident, he is writing a memoir--a reflection on a people he no longer lives among. His current setting allows him greater freedom to process his encounters theologically, but it also puts him at some distance from the characters in the story. With only limited exceptions, though, Byassee navigates this tricky terrain admirably. Perhaps the best testament to Byassee's skill in delivering his message is William Willimon's "Afterword." After developing an affection for Zebulon County and its residence over the course of the book, it is jolting to hear Willimon--a self-proclaimed church bureaucrat--speak almost derisively of small churches, dismissing them as petty drains on a mother church that subsidizes them. While Willimon lauds Byassee's perspective as Christ-like, he stops well short of adopting that perspective himself. This final challenge to Byassee's work is only appropriate, however. Most of the lessons he relates come to him through confrontation which, although often gentle, would still keep pastors with bigger egos from understanding the gifts they'd been given. The Gifts of the Small Church makes for a broad audience. Those who inhabit small churches themselves will recognize many of the elements, from family rivalries to casserole brigades. Pastors and members of larger churches will find Byassee engaging and compassionate, and might even come to a greater appreciation themselves of what smaller congregations have to offer.Read more ›
At the risk of sounding too cynical or even too pompous, I must admit that Byassee's book showed a very arrogant young pastor who was more flippant than reverent, more concerned with his future than the real future of the church, and one who is readily able to know it all. I found his characterizations of Southerners deep as anything from Neil Young's songs. Further, I question his purpose of being a pastor, his `calling', and whether or not he can actually teach us anything about the small church. Further, I see a failed pastorate which left people where they were in bad theology without real leadership except in political causes and even that was poorly done. YET (and while I know that it is not exactly academic to capitalize all the letters in a word for emphasize sake, I will any way) I found in this book someone who appreciated the practical theology of the small church and found himself well grounded in humiliation and a deep respect for the things he had only previously, erroneously, assumed. In Byassee's book there is the rich beauty of the local, Southern Church, much like a quilt added to by generations of quilters, which calls us to a better, simpler theology. In this, Byassee accomplishes a great deal and gives us a real gift.
The book serves more as a self-actualizing biography about a know-it-all pastor, theologian, and seminarian who is depressed, needs more money and seeks a calling (p47, although I'm unsure if this is not just a Methodist term that I am unfamiliar with) but meets the gifts that he needs to grow in a small congregation (although admittedly, his numbers were not what I would call small). He is convinced of his own knowledge, and yet, he meets people that would forget him the moment he opened his mouth to express such knowledge.... They wanted the Christ of faith more than the historical Jesus (or Moses and such). Or, his lack of understanding about the Southerner and his gun. His left-leaning, liberal ways were challenged because he left the ivory tower where he studied the people and began to serve them. He met the crises that he had read about and didn't do it as well as books might have suggested. The gift of the small church to him - and thus to us - is that it informed him more of ministry than any seminary could have. Yes, he is a Phd and well accomplished. Yet, this rarely helped him out. He had to rely on people, on traditions, on other things.
The small church, especially in the United Methodist Church it seems, is not going away anytime soon. It is in these small churches where we find the difficulty of strange theologies, more conservative ideologies, and heterodoxies which prohibit a more ecumenical Body of Christ as well as serves to disrupt soundness of theological advancement. Granted, it might have served to distract from his overall purpose, but several times, he comments about the difference between seminary education and the education received at the small church. I have to wonder if he might have developed this line of reasoning more succinctly in such a way as to call attention first to the fact that it is seminary students usually thrown into these small churches and that very little, theologically, happens because these students are just getting their feet wet, so to speak. Frankly, it bothers me some of the -isms which Byassee wrote about (notably, racism (which, frankly, he didn't present a good case for) and conservatism, which he seemingly chalked up to simply being in the South) was really never even attempted to be corrected. A pastor, at least as I understand pastors, are not merely program directors or family counselors, but theological leaders who must move even the most theologically backward congregations forward.
This is an excellent book for any mid-sized to small church in any part of the country, really. There are regional prejudices, more than just what is expected in the South, as well as differing ideologies, more so than just the conservatives. In reading Byassee, I found that he conservatively clung to his theological and ideological liberalism. At least in some portions of it, he found that it simply didn't work - or worked opposite than what idealism would intend. There is something to be said about these small churches, and Byassee says it well. He shows that there is a life there not commonly understood by those who are in the larger congregations. There is a theological life, a communal life, and very much a Eucharistic sharing of the body of Christ (which Byassee pointedly shows as he writes about the deaths which encapsulates first his wife's pastorate and then his) in these small churches which is lost, many times, in larger congregations where only small groups such as Sunday School classes really know if you are missing for a time. His auto-biographical journey is not really, or merely, about himself, but about the people who live daily, known only to each other and to God (and sometimes, it feels like it is in that order), in these small churches.Read more ›
