I lived in a rural town on the Oregon coast early in my ministry. I was not married at the time and it did not take long before I realized that a good wife was not going to be found there. In this small town young people had two options: stay in town and get a job in the lumber mill or in the forest (jobs that were increasingly going away), or move into the I-5 corridor (or even further) and start a life or get an education but never come back again. I did make some friends with some 'young' people in the community, but never found a single dateable female. Sure, they were there, but none were really my type. If they stayed, they really wanted to stay there and live that kind of lifestyle, one that was not really for me. Any girls who came out of that area that I would have wanted to date left at an age far too young far before I arrived.
Years later I am happily married with a wonderful wife whom I did not find in Oregon, and now live and preach with a church on the edge of the Bible belt, but I continue to see history repeating itself. Today in my email inbox I got a notice about a church workshop put on not from where I live. It's being done by a large, LARGE church that is in the center of the Bible belt, and they have decided to come here and teach us how to do church better. I know that their intentions are good and right. They are prosperous spiritually and numerically, and we are not. They are trying to help be a blessing, and we need to honor that. But here's the thing: church here is not, and likely will not ever be, the same here as it is there, in part because they have all the most talented and gifted people who once grew up here. Like the Babylonians taking the best and brightest of the Jewish young men into their service, our 'best and brightest' now are firmly ensconced in the Bible belt.
Think about it. Like my time in Oregon, there are two types of young people in the church. One kind stays and lives and rarely moves far from home. They get no greater training from our church colleges and ministries and so, while they might have some gifts, they do not really have them developed in a professional manner. They might well serve and teach here, and even do well (and I know of a few who do so), but how much more gifted could they have been had they had the right kind of training? The other kind goes off to college (often a Christian college) looking for a bright new world, and they rarely ever come back. I see it again and again: we are sending our best and brightest and most gifted away to be even better than what they are now, but then they stay in or around the place where they went. Rather than come back and be a spiritual force in a small pond, they would rather stay in the large pond where it seems to be more safe spiritually.
I can't say that I really blame them. It's easier to be a part of a large church in an area in which more people come reside in your spiritual comfort zone and have been trained in much the same way. In these large churches, you aren't asked do as much, and perhaps you can even become more of a specialist. For those who stay, who live their lives in small churches that are in a less 'spiritual' culture, there's little time to really get good at one particular thing because you get asked to do so many different things. Even for those who stay in this area many tend to concentrate at a few of shrinking number of larger churches. There they have more youth programs, more diversified kinds of ministries and people than we have in our little churches. Again, I can't blame them for doing what they think is right for their families. But while large churches have many people with more developed gifts, smaller churches struggle to find those who are strong in spiritual gifts and have had some training to develop them.
Or here's a further example about preachers, something I know a lot about. Many of these larger congregations have numerous retired preachers (either those who were full-time or vocational) sitting in their pews. Many of these have moved to these large congregations after retiring: perhaps they are to be closer to their kids, or because they need to be in a town with better health care. Or perhaps many of them are just tired of having to lead. They've been leading and serving all their lives, working in churches in which they were one of the few with a college education or especially ministerial training. And now they are just tired of it. Sundays are now much easier for them. They don't have to preach two sermons and a class. Maybe they deserve some rest, but I'm guessing that even within an hours drive of where they attend there are literally dozens of little churches dying for somebody with their skill sets and gifts. But now that the preachers have become concentrated in the large church, they no longer have any interest in helping.
So when this large church decides to come up and tell us how to do better, maybe their plan will be to send back our young people, or to train people to go and work with small churches as much as possible where we are. Doing that will be the best blessing they can give to us.
