Just Don't Call It 'Social Justice'

WHEN JONATHAN MCGUIRE leaves his driveway, he has a choice. Turn right, and the pastor of Rockaway Beach, Mo.’s Bridge of Faith Community Church will hit the state highway with a clean shot into the thriving tourist mecca of Branson. Turn left, and he’ll find himself in downtown Rockaway Beach, a community left behind in Branson’s tailwinds.

Early on, McGuire’s neighbors gave him some sardonic, not-quite-tongue-in-cheek advice. They told him: “Never turn left.” Turning left, says McGuire, means “you have to acknowledge that there’s a problem.”

And yet, despite the difficulties, McGuire and his congregation have turned left into the heart of the uncomfortable messiness of poverty, but also into the heart of their community.

They’re not alone. I went looking for congregations living a vision for biblical social justice along the unique contours of rural America. I spoke to leaders seeking a just and hopeful future for their communities and discovered stories of people who are building relationships, advocating for the common good, and agitating for culture change.

Mobilized by love of neighbor

The economic reality of rural America is diverse. Pockets of robust growth exist within driving distance of vibrant cities and gorgeous natural amenities. Yet many towns face profound challenges. They’re communities fractured by generational poverty, addiction, and—perhaps surprisingly in breadbasket regions—food insecurity.

In places like this, it’s often the rural church that takes on the role of change agent. Social justice runs deep in the scriptures, given voice by the Old Testament prophets, embodied in Jesus’ life, and lived out in the upside-down economics of the early church (see Micah 6:8; Luke 4:18; Acts 2:44-45). And yet, as Jordan Rasmussen with the Center for Rural Affairs (CFRA) in Lyons, Neb., explains, social justice “can be an off-putting term for rural residents.”

In part, the disconnect is a factor of the national political environment. Rasmussen describes how, in her advocacy work with CFRA, she’s found that rural people may vote and express approval for conservative candidates whose platforms include cutting the safety net. Yet, if you “go a layer down,” people desire to see their communities thrive, and that desire is often expressed in the language of faith. It’s love of neighbor that mobilizes rural folks, for instance, to “come to the legislature to testify about how [lack of] broadband is limiting their community’s ability to grow.”

If the way social justice commitments are described and encoded into political options plays out differently in the country than in urban or suburban areas, so too the mechanisms for change are differently inflected.

Take protest, for example. Protest can function as a potent prophetic lever in urban environments. Think of church leaders locking arms across Charlottesville, Va., in witness against racial injustice. Yet that type of protest often doesn’t work in rural communities—or at least, not in a straightforward way. Those in authority are not the other. The mayor and the sheriff live down the street. And there’s often not the same critical mass to lend protest its urgency and oomph. Ten people on the steps of the county courthouse doesn’t pack the same punch as thousands filling the National Mall. What’s more, street protest can be counterproductive, seen as tearing at the social fabric, as something indiscreet and indiscriminate that harms the precious us-ness of the rural community.

‘The industry in our community is meth’

When pastor Brenda Henson and her husband reopened a defunct Assemblies of God congregation in her hometown of Greenville, Mo. (population 485), she quickly discovered that she was in over her head.

“The ‘industry’ in our community is meth,” says Henson. Logging has slowed, and area factories have been shuttered for years. Yet she says God laid Isaiah 58 on her heart, and with the prophet’s passion to “loose the bonds of injustice ... and let the oppressed go free,” Henson discovered a calling to reach out to folks struggling with the legacy of generational poverty and addiction. “We have grown our church from people who have been in prison, people who have been on drugs,” says Henson. “God has changed my heart and opened my heart.”

The budding congregation went from Friday evening youth meals and game nights to building a gym. They then decided to remodel an old hardware store and launch a coffee shop they call Jonah’s Java. When people began donating household items and clothes, some women in the church had a vision for a thrift store. “You won’t have to do a thing,” they optimistically told Henson. Over time, receipts from the thrift store grew to fund around half of the church’s budget. The thrift store expanded and added a food bank, and Jonah’s Java branched out to launch Jonah’s Journey, a Narcotics Anonymous group whose impact was recognized by the county courts and approved for fulfilling probation requirements.

Around 50 people gather for worship on Sunday morning, but Wednesday night is where the action is. Henson’s congregation hosts a youth group after school, followed by a meal for the youth, gym time, and a youth worship service. At 7 p.m., there’s another meal for the Jonah’s Journey crowd, followed by their NA meeting.

Author and pastor Samuel Wells writes that “poverty is not primarily about money. It is about having no idea what to do and/or having no one with whom to do it.” In other words: Poverty is about lack of imagination and community. Henson has discovered something similar. At the heart of the congregation’s diverse outreach in the community lies a ministry of relationship building. Henson is a connector, reaching out to children through the school district, folks coming out of jail, and individuals dealing with addiction. “We just try to be available if someone in the community needs help,” says Henson.

Henson is far from done with her work. She dreams of creating classes for people to learn trades and job skills. “We know that we’ve only scratched the surface,” says Henson. “There are people in those hills, down those gravel roads, that need Jesus. That is our heart’s desire: to reach people that have no hope and show them that there is hope.”

Three bags of food

McGuire, the Southern Baptist pastor of Bridge of Faith Community Church, has taken a similar approach to ministry, starting a coffee shop, thrift store, and Wednesday evening youth ministry that draws more than 200 kids, many of them bused in by the church. McGuire has set his sights on changing the economic dynamics of the community. “Our goal is to try to create jobs,” he says, because it’s impossible to preach against selling drugs in the nearby tourist economy without finding alternative sources of income. The congregation has purchased an old resort that they call “The Village.” With the help of mission trip volunteers and locals, they’ve been gutting the cabins with an eye to remodeling them as space for business incubation.

Food insecurity is a major issue in Rockaway Beach. There is no grocery store within walking distance. The congregation has responded by starting a community garden. They recently purchased a greenhouse where they plan to grow lettuce and other leafy vegetables for the Branson tourist market, but also to supply their local food pantry.

McGuire’s congregation has been a catalyst for change within the wider community—one initially unwelcome by some, particularly in local government, because of the congregation’s opposition to riverboat gambling. They’ve operated not unlike the way the prophet Jeremiah imagined when he told the exiles in Babylon to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile” (29:7).

Perhaps the Bible suggests two models of community ministry: one modeled by Jeremiah and the other by Nehemiah. Congregations such as McGuire’s operate on the Jeremiah model, working from within the community, but as a subset with a distinct identity. In other rural areas, the church plays a role more like that of Nehemiah, “committed ... to the common good,” sharing a common culture and common faith with the wider community (Nehemiah 2:18). These are places where European immigrant communities arrived en masse. Whole communities with a shared faith migrated together—for instance, Mennonites from the Russian colonies or Lutherans from Scandinavia. They built churches as they’d been in the “old country” and organized schools and townships around them. The boundaries of the rural town matched the boundaries of the parish.

Breen Sipes, a Lutheran pastor serving a three-church parish in south central Nebraska, says that without Lutherans “there would be no social services here.” Her congregations are active in addressing local issues such as food insecurity through a backpack program that sends food home with hungry children. But Lutherans also played a key role in laying the foundations of the local culture of care, for instance by establishing nursing homes. Folks in Sipes’ congregations own the common good in a unique way, and they’re willing to dig deep to support it. “Even when they’re nervous about themselves, they’re always pointing to someone else who needs help,” says Sipes. “Individual church budgets may have suffered because of low crop prices, but the mission work piece has not lost funding.”

Leaders in both models, in their very different contexts, see themselves as empowering others to work for the common good.

McGuire tells the story of a woman who asked for some help from the food pantry. “Why don’t you go look in your cabinets,” he told her. “Find the items you haven’t eaten, bring those down, and we’ll trade.” The woman showed up a short time later with three bags of food to donate. It turned out to be an inspired move, a lightbulb moment that catalyzed the woman’s own agency, involving her as a volunteer who would go on to serve others.

Sow hope, start a laundromat

Chip Sanders’ church had to undergo a paradigm shift. Like most congregations, the small church in the Ozarks of central Missouri measured its success by how many people showed up on a Sunday morning. With Sanders’ help, the congregation began to get a feel for mission in the community. It started with putting clothes on people’s backs.

Iberia is a blue-collar town of about 700 that specializes in cattle, turkey, and hog farming. Generational poverty and addiction mar the face of the community. Sanders describes how his congregation formed a partnership with the local school to help meet student needs. When school officials encounter a situation that prevents a student from succeeding, they call the church. Sanders’ congregation works to meet the need, always anonymously.

At some point, the church realized that many of the requests had to do with clean clothes: socks, underwear, a fresh shirt for an interview, even a suit for prom. It turned out that many people didn’t have a washing machine or dryer, and there wasn’t a laundromat within 20 miles—a significant obstacle to folks on limited income. Sanders talks about kids coming to school in dirty clothes, essentially using them until they wear out. That discovery required a leap of middle-class imagination across the poverty line.

The church has responded by laying the groundwork for a laundromat, which will operate on a conventional pay model with the congregation assisting those who can’t afford it. Recognizing the need for a laundromat was one step on the congregation’s journey of seeing its ministry as directed primarily outside the walls of the church building. “Even if that doesn’t make for explosive growth on Sunday morning,” Sanders says, “it’s more about loving people and reaching people that nobody wants to reach.”

But Sanders doesn’t just want to see his congregation meet needs in the community. He’s much more ambitious. Sanders wants nothing less than wholesale culture change.

Sanders explains that he longs to “expand the vision that people have of the world” so that they can see possibilities, make changes, and succeed. “If you grow up thinking that Iberia is all that there is, then your view of the world is pretty small.” He has no magic technique to make this happen. You “meet people one-on-one, build relationships with them, and show them that someone cares for them and is not judging them or looking down on them.”

Changing culture requires changing hearts. Bobby Kennedy gave his celebrated “Ripple of Hope” speech on a visit to apartheid-mangled South Africa in 1966. In it, Kennedy spoke of the power of standing up for our ideals, how doing so “sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

It’s gospel language, whether or not Kennedy intended it as such. God draws our faintest acts of hope into God’s eschatological vision of resurrection. Each act holds the possibility of nudging systems, igniting change. It starts with our own transformation, our personal cultural shift as we commit to the “God of hope” who brings us to “abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). Our inner hope ripples outward into the world.

Gregory Mastey, a priest serving a rural parish in the Catholic diocese of St. Cloud, Minn., says that hope shapes the “spirit of the farmer and rural people. They keep going no matter what.”

While some parishes have a dedicated point person for working with folks in need, Mastey prefers to be on the front lines, in direct contact with those coming to the parish for help. He speaks in terms of solidarity, pairing financial assistance with spiritual counsel. Mastey’s parish lies deep in dairy country, and many farmers find themselves caught between the rock and a hard place of high input costs and low milk prices. “How do we get them out of this place of despair,” he asks, “by showing them a gesture of love?”

Mastey is hopeful for the communities he serves. There may be less people in his parish now, he explains, but those who are there are deeply committed. They’re folks “who want their [way of] life to go on.”

The state of rural communities has become a justice issue, one which the church approaches out of her commitment to Christ, drawing from her deepest reserves of faith, hope, and love. We need all three, but perhaps right now we especially need hope. Christian hope, however disheveled, is always ultimately about being alive to the future that abounds in God. Hope is what gives us the courage to stand with God’s people at the rural margins—and wherever else God’s Spirit calls us.