Minister of Loneliness

ONE SUNDAY MORNING at a small church in rural North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, a congregant discovered a snake slithering under the pews. Without interrupting the sermon, he picked up the snake and took it out of the sanctuary. When the service ended, the pastor, Brandon Wrencher, heard about what happened.

He laughed.

“We’re not snake handlers—up the street is a Pentecostal church,” said Wrencher. “They do not tell you these things in seminary. I did not prepare.”

There were a lot of things in Todd, N.C., for which Wrencher was not prepared. The unincorporated community of several hundred people sits about 30 miles from the Virginia state line and 20 from the Tennessee border, just outside the Cherokee National Forest. Todd boasts a couple of churches, a bakery, a closed-down general store, and zero stoplights. Wrencher estimates that half the population is over 50.

Social poverty

When Wrencher, his wife, and their children moved to Todd in 2013, the minister had to install a personal cell phone tower on his property so his family could get service at home. But more significant to Wrencher, who had previously worked at a predominantly African-American church, was the loneliness of his new ministry. That included both his own loneliness as one of the few African Americans in Todd and the widespread loneliness he discovered in the community.

“I knew it was all white. I knew it was rural,” said Wrencher. “I knew this church had started this intentional community and was trying to do revitalization work in the community and the church. I didn’t know anything beyond that.”

Todd’s problems quickly hit him. A once-vibrant timber industry was no more. The community was suffering from hunger and land neglect. But most devastating was what Wrencher called “social poverty.”

“There is just the kind of isolation that goes beyond the desire for serenity and solace,” said Wrencher, whose ministry also involved leading a local community development organization known as Blackburn Community Outreach. “Definitely people know each other somewhat, but there are too many examples of folks who are completely lonely. When problems happen in the community, there is no movement or social fabric already there to address them.”

For those already suffering from this isolation, the changing demographics of the area around Todd suggest their situation will only grow more complicated. For years, most northwest North Carolina residents were born and raised there. But today, out-of-towners flock to Todd to take advantage of the area’s access to hiking, kayaking, hayrides, and apple picking. (In 2012, U.S. News and World Report named neighboring Boone one of the “10 Best Affordable Mountain Towns for Retirement.”) The influx of newcomers—often better educated and better able to take advantage of the cheap real estate prices—have complicated the strong sense of community that Todd and other small towns in the area pride themselves on.

Porch talk

There is “a divide” between lifelong residents and those who have a second home here, said Martha Enzmann, a 20-year resident of Todd and a close friend of Wrencher.

“People who are just coming out tend to reach out to each other and then band together,” said Enzmann. “People who have been born and raised here tend to not do that quite as much. They already have their relationships in place. They are a little slower to reach out to newcomers except to invite them to church.”

This self-imposed segregation only compounds isolation, especially for older people whose loved ones have moved away, said Wrencher.

“There are too many examples of folks who experience neglect, who are completely alone,” he said. One of those was an elderly white man who often asked how Wrencher and his family were adjusting.

“He would ask me questions like, ‘How are they accepting you over there?’” said Wrencher. “I’m sure he was trying to say more than what he was saying, at least that’s how I read him. We wouldn’t make it an explicitly racial conversation. But I would be honest with him. I would say, ‘It’s hard for my family and me.’”

Usually Wrencher shied away from opening up about the racial challenges, sharing instead about his financial burdens. During one conversation, Wrencher mentioned he was on his way to the grocery store. The man told Wrencher to follow him off the porch into his house.

When they walked into the kitchen, the man reached down and grabbed something, recalled Wrencher.

“He handed me $20,” said Wrencher. “This doesn’t feel like a big deal, but this is a man no one ever visits. I learned later that his diet consisted of eating saltine crackers and peppermints—so he was malnourished and neglected. He probably rarely saw children besides my son. But there was a kind of bond around our Christian identity ... that was really beautiful.”

For his part, “Brandon will go out of his way to approach places that other members of the congregation may have avoided,” said Enzmann in 2016. “He attends funerals of someone he might not know, but they live right up the road. He spends a lot of time doing pastoral care and paying attention to people’s needs. It’s very important to him.”

No outlets

But those bonds across generational and cultural divides were scarcer than Wrencher wished. Though he and his family had a handful of allies, they often felt exhausted by the lack of a larger black community who could relate to and empathize with their experience.

“It’s definitely lonely. The good thing is that I have my family, but they are lonely too,” said Wrencher. “It’s lonely simply because of the demographics, but there’s also no institution to turn to, to raise our voices. There’s no black churches. There’s the NAACP—but it’s all white people in it.”

About a year after his arrival in Todd, Wrencher began reaching out to other black people after realizing that others across his and neighboring counties were having similar experiences to those of his family.

“There are no outlets for black cultural expression,” said Wrencher. “There are no hair salons, no barber shops, no places that sell products for black hair. Historically black churches and black salons end up being huge institutions for black support and care.”

In 2014, Wrencher began holding vigils for black people killed by the police. After hosting a follow-up march at Appalachian State University in 2016 to protest the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C., Wrencher hoped that the group he was helping to form, drawing together black people regionally, might be willing to embrace activism, an area in which he felt gifted. When he spoke with me during this organizing, Wrencher shared excitement about where they might be headed. But as time wore on, he and his wife soon realized that this was not where the group’s energy lay.

“They’re at a place of needing a lot of fellowship and support of one another,” said Wrencher in 2017. “It’s not that they’re not capable of doing the work of dismantling systems of oppression in the community, but they’re weary and lonely and have been taking a lot of blows and dealing with a lot of internalized oppression.”

This realization—that many in the local black community were on a different page from Wrencher and his wife—was one of several indicators that prompted him to begin to look for different work.

“Certain kinds of issues”

Over the course of his family’s four years in Todd, the number of older congregants dwindled—many passed away, but others left. Wrencher suspected it was because he’s black.

“In our age folks are too polite to talk racist,” said Wrencher. Instead, he noted that many who departed offered “dog whistle” excuses, telling him he “preached too political” or that he got “too angry” around “certain kinds of issues.” He later found out that some attendees held a private meeting where race had explicitly been mentioned as a reason why people were leaving.

At the same time, however, the church also began attracting a number of new congregants, leading to relationships that sustained Wrencher in his work.

“I have thought about what if these new people in the community weren’t coming to the church. Would I have had the capacity to still reach out to these homebound members, many of whom I didn’t have a deep relationship with because they weren’t around on a regular basis?” said Wrencher. “And I’m not sure I would have felt comfortable opening up to them around my own deep wounds related to racial injustice and racial loneliness. I probably would have been averse to reaching out to them.”

Yet even these new relationships could only buoy the family so far. The church hosted a worship service remembering Philando Castile, the Minneapolis man shot in his car by a police officer. A staff member leading the service suggested the church ought to be lamenting African Americans’ hurt and pain, most recently sparked by Castile’s death.

“We can have signs in the mountains saying that ‘The mountains are a little piece of heaven,’ but for our African- American brothers and sisters, this doesn’t feel like heaven right now,” Wrencher recalls him saying.

Several congregants left the church that night and never returned.

While that alone was painful for Wrencher, “the silence that we experienced amongst the community was probably more hurtful than anything else.”

“It really took a year to say with more compassion and empathy, ‘These people who did not have our backs, who did not reciprocate with love and empathy when we opened up about our own wounds, what was happening with them was that they didn’t know any better.’ It wasn’t a situation of malice or interpersonal racism. They are victims of the racial injustice and separation that exists in our country, especially in rural communities. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a way to have a conversation with them about how they are victims too, that they lived out the negative parts of their victimhood. I hate that. It doesn’t hurt any less, but at least it’s helping to humanize them and have some distant compassion for them.”

Looking back

In 2017, Wrencher and his family relocated to Greensboro, the third most populated city in North Carolina and a two-hour drive from Todd. There, Wrencher has helped launch the Good Neighbor Movement (GNM), “an inclusive, multiethnic, people-of-color-led network of house churches called ‘city villages.’” GNM seeks to be a place where social justice can be practiced consistently and communally and models itself on hush harbors—clandestine communities where enslaved Africans would gather to practice their faith and organize for abolition—and base ecclesial communities, where poor people in Latin America came together to study the Bible, forming the basis of what later became liberation theology.

GNM draws on Wrencher’s proudest accomplishment in Todd: growing their intentional community and engaging the surrounding neighborhood, which in turn catalyzed revitalization of the congregation at large and the local community.

Rural communities are “inherently isolating places” and tough places for anyone to do ministry, said Wrencher. But there are steps to take that can help. Denominations should be familiar with the stories and cultural contexts of rural communities so that they can better match ministers with their environments, Wrencher suggested. Further, churches should look to partner with organizations that will help them build cross-cultural partnerships and relationships.

“We can’t forget that there are people who are lonely, hungry, dying, and aging. We need do whatever it takes to reach out to those folks,” he said.