Pastoring Small Towns with Dignity and Hope

Ronnie Martin and Donnie Griggs, Pastoring Small Towns: Help and Hope for Those Ministering in Smaller Places. B&H Books, 2023. 192 pages.

I have never lived in a city. Don’t get me wrong, I love to visit cities. I love the energy of London and the food culture of New York City. I get a thrill out of Bangkok’s lights and Rome’s architecture. But I am most content when sitting on my porch, drinking my coffee, and nodding to my neighbors as they walk their dogs past my home in Bardstown, Kentucky, a town of 16,000 people.

Small towns sometimes leave you feeling exposed, but more often they leave you feeling known, and I love that.

I think people unfamiliar with small towns sometimes hold some misconceptions about what they’re like. Small towns are thought to lack diversity, intellect, and culture. They are slow-moving places because the people themselves are a little slow—slow to learn, slow to adapt, slow to pursue ambitions and aspirations. To many, small towns are merely idyllic places to drive through or fly over en route to the next city.

The reality is that people living in small towns deal with sin and suffering much like those in the big city. Sure, it may look a little different, but sin and suffering are just as present. And where resources are lacking in either, problems intensify. My small town boasts of a thriving downtown, a booming bourbon-fueled tourism sector, a rich food and arts scene, and a vibrant community that often gathers around high school football and basketball on the weekends. Yet underneath that beautiful exterior hides the same struggles you see in an urban community. Homelessness, addictions, abuse, domestic violence, racism, poverty, rising costs of living, and the impact of rapid population growth. Problems are many, which makes ministry complex.

Hope for Small-Town Pastors

This is why I am troubled by how few aspiring pastors there are who want to serve small-town churches. The need is great and opportunities abound. Fifty-five percent of SBC churches are in communities of less than 50,000 people.^{11 .} According to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Annual Church Profile report Yet so little is written for or by those serving in these communities. That is why I am always encouraged to discover books like Pastoring Small Towns by Ronnie Martin and Donnie Griggs.

Martin and Griggs are seasoned practitioners of small-town ministry, and their experience shows in their writing. They dignify small-town ministry, but at no point do they sugarcoat it. They present a raw appraisal of how hard life can be. The book was written during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd-related racial tensions, and the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign. The pressure of those years, particularly in small towns, rises to the surface in the book’s pages. There are some telling moments when one author vents about how the political ideology of his church members had impacted him.

Even still, joys are highlighted more than struggles, which is wonderfully reassuring. Martin and Griggs say up front that their goal is to offer help and hope for those ministering in small places. They certainly accomplish that. They point to the ministry of Jesus, who was often found in villages and fly-over towns like Nazareth and Galilee. They argue that ministry in a small town is just as important as in a big city, without demeaning the latter. Their writing style is disarmingly conversational. While reading, I could easily slip into thinking these brothers had joined me on my front porch for a refreshing chat about the joys and struggles of small-town ministry.

Help for Small-Town Pastors

In my estimation, Martin and Griggs offer a bit more hope than practical help. In each chapter, I found myself wanting them to provide more principles that I could apply to my pastorate in Bardstown. To be sure, they laid out the complexities of small-town ministries well, but they didn’t quite provide the amount of concrete, practical help I was after. I would love to learn more from these men about how they identify biblically qualified elders, how they train them, how they deal with matters of church discipline, where they have seen evangelistic fruit, how they develop robust expositional sermons when they lack time, and how they partner with other local churches.

Nevertheless, the book focuses a great deal, appropriately so, on bolstering the spiritual well-being and emotional fortitude of the small-town pastor. After all, the pastor in a small town often single-handedly visits the sick, comforts the grieving, conducts funerals, sits through counseling sessions, and organizes church activities. The emotional and physical toll on him can be massive. Martin and Griggs’ recommendations are worth remembering: have good friends, play the long game, bathe everything in prayer, set healthy boundaries, have realistic expectations, and build good teams. They rightly suggest that any pastor who practices these habits will have a greater chance of enduring small-town ministry, especially when prominent members in the church or the town rumor mill turn against you.

If you are ministering in a small town, read this book. It will remind you why you’re there, and like it did for me, it will give you hope to press on in the face of discouragement.