Northern Farmer

Well its Saturday evening and the end of the week is much different than the beginning of this past week. Our feed supply is much more secure, the weather has broken and its nice outside, and generally all is well as far as I know. Both farm trucks weren’t running this past week, but they’re running now! Things are getting back to normal around here! Fixed those pickups ourselves and they should be good for a bit. The three quarter ton flatbed truck will be getting a new transmission, clutch, gas tank, and a whole bunch of other stuff over the next few weeks. But first we gotta butcher our last two hogs and get em cut up. That’s because we gotta cut them up here and as soon as we’re done with that we clean up the area where we did that job and move the pickup in there for major surgery. Just another thing we do ourselves around here. We don’t do all our own mechanic work but try and do as much as possible.

Tomorrow’s church of course and the weather sounds good for heading out that way! They’re talking ice on Monday but we’ll just have to see how that shapes up when it happens. Don’t pay to worry about it now. Gotta meeting after church so we’ll be staying there the better part of the day, but that’s OK with me. Keeps me out of trouble! Over on Herrick Kimball’s blog, the Deliberate Agrarian he wrote about the importance of finding a small country church. And let me tell you, that caught my eye! So a little bit ago I was searching the words, farmer preacher on the internet and was surprised with what I came up with. Years ago it was a very common thing to be a farmer and a preacher. In fact it was the majority in many denominations. An interesting search to say the least. But then again years ago there just wasn’t enough money to be paying someone full time. Much of rural America ran with hardly any money at all. Sometimes just enough to pay the taxes on the land which wasn’t a whole lot. And sometimes folks couldn’t even pay that! But those old rural churches were something else, a society all in themselves. Where the young children knew all the old people, and the old people knew all the youngsters by name. There wasn’t the cold separation that is in the large churches. Everyone knew each other, and everyone lent a helping hand when a helping hand was needed.

I believe with all my heart that this can and does happen today in the smaller churches, I know it happens here! I will say that when a person is in this situation their whole life takes a big turn for the better. You know, when a person is in a smaller church where everyone knows each other its just like a close family. This isn’t knocking the big churches, just dwelling on the small rural churches, which is one of my favorite subjects. I know anything I say could be debated by anyone, but I tell you I love a small rural church. And with a small rural church comes responsibilities that are harder to get in larger churches. Because in the smaller church you almost have to be involved to make it work. Pretty much everyone steps up to the plate to pitch in with some job. Its difficult to be a pew warmer in those small churches.

And even the children get involved with whatever needs getting involved in. And that teaches responsibility in many areas that they’d normally never get. In the small rural church the members many times have to step in even in the most important jobs. I should rephrase that because all the jobs are important. But you know what I mean. As many readers know, this is a passion for me, the old fashioned rural church. And today they can be just as they were in yesteryear. I don’t mean dressing up and trying to act like they were a hundred years ago, I’m talking just living that small rural way. Helping out where help is needed. Not demanding pay for every little thing. Paid ministry is very important, but most jobs can be done and done well by the congregation for nothing. I sometimes think about this, in America we think to be in ministry means getting paid. But that is not the case at all. It has nothing to do with pay, it has everything to do with God. As for our own family, I could never imagine getting paid for doing what we do as far as the church goes. Again, I’m not talking full time ministry here, just us folks that are a part of the church.

I really wish that the readers of this blog could have been in our little rural church a few weeks ago, well how about the whole month of December as far as that goes! A little church out in a small town of 140 folks and that place was so full of God that it could barely contain it. And I hope it don’t contain it, just explode it out into the surrounding countryside! There was powerful preaching, many healings, some rather dramatic ones too! Last evening I was in a different town than our church’s town and a lady came up to me and asked when we were going to have healing services again. The reason being that a lady from that town just showed up at our healing services and got healed and now shes spreading it around that town. And people hear and wonder. And then they ask! I was dwelling on that last evening once I got home. When God moves and healings take place because people’s faith allows Him to move others start to wake up and take notice. Hope spreads to the sick in neighboring areas when they hear what’s going on in a little Bible believing church in a forgotten town. But isn’t that how God moves? Things happen in places that man places very little importance on, like a small town church in a town the other towns all joke about.

But God’s ways ain’t our ways! And if He wants to move in a small town church instead of some crystal cathedral that’s His business! All I know is out here there’s folks that love God so much that they’re whole life revolves around it. That’ll come night after night to church in a cold Minnesota winter and praise God. Some of the locals just laugh off “them holy rollers”, but they’re wondering when they hear of signs and wonders coming as of late. Of healings that are impossible in the hands of man. Lord, I’m thinking this could be a move of God that I never dreamed I’d witness in this day and age! This sure does remind me of the Gospels, of all the miracles happening out in the countryside away from the established religion in the big city. The regular folks hearing of things happening and getting curious and wanting to see what’s happening. Yes, the small rural church has an important place in the big picture. And I do believe it might turn this world upside down!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.