When in July 1999 I shifted from a pastorate in Belgrade, Montana, to one in Cincinnati, Ohio, the 1,700 miles hardly seem enough to account for the differences between the two worlds.
Has my ministry changed with the new setting? Yes. Some changes I expected, some I did not. The unexpected changes have been the easy ones. The changes I expected have been the more difficult.
Demographically the churches are not as different as one might expect. Belgrade doesn’t have a lot of Proctor & Gamble execs and Cincinnati isn’t long on cowboys, but the two churches have a comparable percentage of professional and blue-collar workers. Both churches enjoy a healthy generational spread with lots of babies, boomers, X-ers, seniors, and fine youth groups.
A full Sunday at the church in Belgrade ran about 250. A full Sunday at the church in Cincinnati runs about 500. The church budget in Cincinnati more than doubles the budget in Belgrade, and we employ more than twice the staff. This reflects the simple reality that Cincinnati is more prosperous than Belgrade (25 percent of the children of Montana live below the poverty level, and Montana vies every year with Mississippi and Alabama for lowest per capita income in the nation). Both churches belong to the thoroughly mainline American Baptist Churches. Each confesses a robust, inclusive, evangelical theology. Both churches worship twice on Sunday morning. Both churches adopted blended worship in the 1980’s.
My preaching has not changed at all. I preach extended series of expository sermons through whole books of the Bible.
The internal shifts
The truth is, when Debbie and I moved to Cincinnati, we felt like we had come home. We grew up in big cities and spent our teenage and college years in Southern California. Neither of us had ever dreamed or desired rural ministry. Nevertheless, following three years of seminary in Boston, God plunged us into 20 years of rural ministry. We started with a three-year assistantship at a church in a table fruit farm town in Central California. We wondered if we could survive in a town of 10,000 people, 45 minutes from a city of 250,000.
In 1983 we moved to a two-point parish in Western Montana. The atlas listed the towns as 500 and 300. The big city, 30 minutes away, boasted 25,000. The county had two stoplights and one flashing yellow. Nearly half our 17 years in Montana we shared a two-party telephone line. We will not forget that first cattle drive—a hundred head—through the town—50 feet from our front room window.
When Debbie shopped at the local grocery store, our five-year-old boy would point at men and say, “Mommy, look! A cowboy!” It didn’t take long before she decided that her babies were not going to grow up to be cowboys.
“Our children will not grow up saying ‘crik.’ The word is ‘creek,’ ” she told me. Actually our three kids grew up to be skiers and snowboarders and rock climbers and bridge-jumpers and all kinds of things we even haven’t heard about yet. But they have all done well in college, thanks to their mother’s tireless crusade against the whelming flood of bad grammar and chewing tobacco.
God blessed us in 20 years of ministry in rural America. But we love living in a city again. We live in a 70-year-old home in a heavily treed, older suburb of Cincinnati. In 15 minutes we can be pulling into the parking lot at Cynergy Field, hoping to see Ken Griffey, Jr. smack a homer for the Reds. The climate is much milder than Montana’s, and Debbie feels like she moved to flower garden heaven.
The church we serve in Cincinnati combines our two worlds. As a Baptist just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, plenty of our parishioners grew up on hard-scrabble farms and coal mining towns. Our background in rural ministry is an asset in Cincinnati.
Urban legends and Montana myths
Many presumed differences between rural life and city life are simply myths. Soccer moms rush around farm towns. Ranchers play the markets and figure their margins with the best business people in the country.
We think of rural America as more innocent, but scenic landscape does not make Montanans happier, more spiritual, or more peaceful. (The personal revival you experience on vacation wears off when you live there.)
Rural Montana is a violent place. When the Columbine tragedy occurred, an old native Montanan at a Bible study said: “You know, that kind of thing usually happens in small towns and the inner city.” True. School shootings have happened in places like Montana and the inner city for years. They don’t make national news.
When people watched “A River Runs Through It,” they only saw half the film—the pretty half. The other half was about the effects of violence, prejudice, alcoholism, gambling, and prostitution on Montana families. Both halves of the film were true, for the Montana of the 1920’s and to this day. The families I knew that moved to Montana to get their children away from the evils of the cities, were, to a one, disappointed.
Montana isn’t a worse place to live. It just isn’t a better place. We all want to believe that if we lived in a better place, we would be better people. It doesn’t work that way. Montana ranks second to Nevada in per capita suicides.
Montanans are terribly interesting people. Their extreme independence makes them difficult to figure, and their humor flows in sparklingly, unpredictable rivulets and sometimes just gushes.
One of the nicest Montana ladies I ever knew once told me: “You know, if you just agree with people right off, people will think you’re soft. They’ll think you don’t have a mind of your own.” Montanans hold a special place in their hearts for eccentrics. They silently admire Unabombers and Free Men.
A true Montanan is the best storyteller in the world. They do not tell you their feelings; they tell you their stories. Story telling is not passing time, it is the art of their emotional lives, so it is authentic and unaffected. In a pack of ranchers, carpenters, and mechanics sitting at a bar, or standing in line at a church potluck, Garrison Keillor would keep his mouth shut in awe. He would be well below average.
Cincinnatians aren’t as good at story telling because they don’t experience life as individuals. They experience life as a community effort, so properly speaking, they don’t experience themselves as having individual stories. People in Montana are better story tellers because they experience life as individuals who work and fight with one another to succeed as individuals. The delightful exception in Cincinnati: the Kentuckians!
Montanans are loving, loyal, hard-working, generous individuals who find it nearly impossible to accomplish anything that requires cooperation. Cincinnatians like working together. They like pooling resources to accomplish a goal for the community. Cincinnatians know deep down that they can’t get what they want in life alone, and they don’t want to enjoy the fruits of life alone. Montanans love to help one another succeed in their own, individual businesses. They help each other calf, brand, and hay.
Cincinnatians love to succeed together. They love companies. The ideal in Cincinnati is Proctor & Gamble. Is one life better than another? No. But Cincinnati is a more prosperous and stable place to live. Montana is a more interesting and exciting place.
Christians in Cincinnati disagree and bicker, but they want to agree on things. Christians in Montana disagree and bicker, but they don’t want to agree on things.
In Cincinnati, giving up one’s view on an issue for the good of the community is considered a noble thing to do. In Montana, giving up one’s view on an issue for the good of the community is considered a weak thing to do.
This appears to contradict the dogma that people who live in cities and suburbs are lonely and alienated and that rural folk are connected and community oriented. The truth is that rural America has lots of lonely, alienated people. The difference being that the lonely, alienated people in cities and suburbs wish they weren’t. The lonely, alienated people of Montana don’t expect much else from life. They live in a lonely, deserted place because they like it that way, or they don’t know any different.
For long, painful, historical reasons, Montanans do not trust leaders. For 100 years, Montana was primarily a mining economy. To imagine Montana’s economic history, think of one of those movies about coal mining towns where the coal mining company extracts huge profits from the ground, which go to a few owners and investors who live far away. The mining company neglects the safety of the miners. The company owns the town’s newspaper, the town’s politicians, and manipulates everything in town to its own profit.
Imagine such a company running an entire state. That pretty much describes Montana from the 1880’s through the 1970’s. The Anaconda Company in its various forms extracted billions of dollars worth of copper and heavy metals from the area of Butte, Montana, shipped the metal and the profits elsewhere, and left the state nothing but one of the largest Superfund clean-up sites in the United States.
So Montanans do not trust leaders. They do not trust the federal government; they do not trust state government; they do not trust county and city government; they do not trust school boards or church boards. They despise big business. They do not trust leaders born and raised in the state any more than they trust leaders who come in from the outside.
It never ceased to surprise me that being a pastor from Southern California was not a disadvantage to me in Montana. Pastors that grew up in Montana had the same problems I did. Though my leadership style is slow, steady, and patient, no level of success in ministry increased the trust level.
During our years in Montana, the churches we served built sanctuaries, fellowship halls, and renovated existing buildings. Attendance doubled, offerings tripled and in some cases quadrupled. Programs mushroomed. But the trust level never went up.
Love, fellowship, worship, learning, and prayer flourished. The people trusted me completely in preaching, teaching, calling, spiritual direction, funerals, and weddings. The trust level for leadership stayed the same: very, very low.
My Montana churches did not ask my opinion on matters of church policy. I participated in the discussions—but I often felt like they considered me an outsider without knowledge of the real issues and without the best interests of the church in mind. Every suggestion for a new ministry, especially if it involved money, was beaten with notched rods by committee after committee and then usually at a church meeting. Only if the idea held up under torture would it be ventured. By the time they approved things, you really didn’t want them anymore. They weren’t playing power games. They weren’t possessive. They weren’t broke. They were terrified.
Montanans believe that not trusting leaders is smart business. Cincinnatians believe that trusting leaders is good business. Montanans hate the memory of the Anaconda Company. Cincinnatians love Proctor & Gamble.
The church I serve in Cincinnati has had 8 pastors in 90 years, including interims. The church I served in Belgrade had 23 pastors in 60 years, including interims, and some interims were longer than the pastorates.
The unexpected change in my ministry from Belgrade to Cincinnati has been joyous. Adjusting to trust has not been burdensome. They call me “Pastor.” At first I didn’t like it. Then it occurred to me that they want me to be a leader, not just a chaplain. They ask me what I think about things. If we come to an impasse in a process, they ask me to decide. They want to hear about my vision for ministry. If they aren’t spending more on ministry than they have, they wonder if they are being faithful to God. They trust because they aren’t afraid of leadership.
The expected difficulty
The change I expected has been more difficult. The truth is, I loved pastoring in Montana because I am just as independent and just as stubborn as the average Montanan. I also have problems with authority figures. I won battles with tenacity. My quick tongue and little mean streak kept them slightly fearful. I produced. I led by hard-earned respect, not trust.
I pastored like the ranchers ranched. Alone. I called for help when I needed it and the help always came. But when the need was over, I went back to my preferred solitary mode.
The loneliness and the distance of Montana never bothered me. I’d travel 150 miles for a 20-minute hospital call, drive home, and get back to work.
A trial for my ministry at Belgrade occurred when we hired a full-time youth pastor. He did a great job, and we got along well. But I could hardly bear the increased bother level in the church building. Since I work alone, I’m not particularly good at discipling; I’m never sure how to tell people what I do. I communicate better in print than in person. If the primary requirement for writing is to like being alone, Montana is a paradise for writers; as it is for self-reliant, irascible pastors.
Here’s an irony: in Montana, since the people do not trust leaders, I worked intentionally and transparently to make decisions in large groups. But I conducted my pastoral work alone.
In Cincinnati, since the trust level is high, the people want me to make decisions. But they want to do ministry with me, together, in teams. This is difficult for me. Nevertheless, I have known for years that I needed to learn how to minister with people in teams, so the change has been good.
I warned the pastoral search committee about my ministry style, that I was independent to a fault and that working with a large staff and doing co-ministry with lay leaders was going to be difficult for me.
They said, “Ya, ya, we think you can learn how to do that.” Again, trust.
I have responded to their trust by developing prayer ministry teams. I make far fewer pastoral calls alone. I am enjoying staff meetings. I am learning how to cooperate with staff on events I used to perform alone, like marriages, baptisms, and new member classes. I’m adjusting to filling out forms. I’m learning to explain myself.
But I have not shed my spots. I didn’t hook my computer up to the office network. I have my own printer so I don’t have to walk to the secretary’s office to print something off. I do not use e-mail. I do not have a pager. I do not have a cell phone. I am hard to get a hold of. But my office is open for drop-in visits by parishioners. I still do Communion with shut-ins.
When I walked around the church campus and thanked the man who grooms the roses, he said that it was the first time a pastor had thanked him for his work. I team teach fourth and fifth graders in the Wednesday night program. I remember people’s names. I’m still the independent cuss I always was, but I’m learning how to cooperate.
I tried, but I couldn’t give up river baptisms. An 18-year habit doesn’t break easily.
So this summer the church in Cincinnati held its first-ever river baptism and church picnic. Naturally, the Kentuckians were thrilled from the start. The city folks wondered—but loved it. We even have a river nearby clean enough for the business. With its huge, overhanging sycamore trees, the river was as pretty a place for a baptism as anywhere in Montana.
That river, the Little Miami, flows into the Ohio River, which flows into the Mississippi River, where it meets up with water coming from Belgrade, Montana, by way of the Missouri River.
The truth is, Cincinnati and Belgrade are in the same watershed. And the Spirit is the same Spirit, and the Word is the same Word, and the love is the same love, and the pastor is, for better or for worse, pretty much the same pastor—still learning, still growing, still amazed at the wonder of ministry—still dependent on the Lord for every significant word I utter, whether using the form “creek” or “crik.”
This summer our church held its first-ever river baptism. The Kentuckians were thrilled.
David Hansen pastors Kenwood Baptist Church 8341 Kenwood Road Cincinnati OH 45236
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