Before moving to Grove City, Pennsylvania, in 2016, Seulgi Byun was a bona fide cosmopolitan. The cities he has called home include London, Boston, Tokyo, Seoul, Melbourne, and Singapore. Grove City, on the other hand, sits 50 miles from the closest city and has a population of roughly 7,800. As Byun, an associate professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and scholar-in-residence at City Reformed Presbyterian Church, settled into life in his rural, agricultural community, he developed a vision for helping the college be a good neighbor to the churches in its rural context.
At Grove City College, Byun now directs the Project on Rural Ministry (PRM), a five-year endeavor funded by the Lilly Endowment Thriving in Ministry Initiative. PRM’s purpose, according to Byun, is to “understand the needs of these churches and their pastors and see what Grove City College can offer to them.”
PRM has researched the experiences and needs of rural pastors with the goal of providing resources that can help in their specific, varied contexts. They have developed cohorts of pastors whose regions are rural but experience very different needs. Currently 34 pastors participate in PRM cohorts.
The Agricultural Region includes farming communities stretching across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York from the Interstate 80 corridor in the south to Lake Erie in the north. The Rust Belt Region includes communities on the outskirts of urban centers in eastern Ohio, the northern panhandle of West Virginia, and southwestern Pennsylvania that face the social and economic challenges of deindustrialization. The Appalachian Region includes communities historically linked to natural resource-dependent industries in the mountains of southeastern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia.
As PRM interviewed pastors in each cohort, the team learned that each region had different challenges. PRM leverages the college’s resources to help these pastors more effectively reach their communities. Some churches are close enough that students can serve as interns and assist in ministry. The college students gain valuable experience, and they provide much-needed assistance to overextended pastors.
For students pursuing other fields of work, PRM offers them a chance to use their growing skills to serve in other ways. Students studying graphic design created websites, logos, and branding material for rural churches. An entrepreneurship class helped pastors learn how to better use social media. Education majors wrote children’s ministry curriculum. And a communications class surveyed the church community and did further research to better understand the region’s changing demographics, COVID’s impact on church attendance, and attitudes toward church attendance.
PRM also gives students a chance to listen and learn from rural pastors. For decades, Grove City College students have spent their weeklong spring break serving urban churches and neighborhoods; PRM has begun connecting student teams with local churches that need just as much help but lack the urban allure. Students provide assistance, to be sure, but Byun challenges them to listen and learn from the pastors they serve.
“In my capacity as a college professor, I am always asking, ‘How can Grove City College exist for its community? How can students live well in their rural context?'”
PRM also offers opportunities to train and encourage rural church leaders. Byun said that approximately 40% of rural pastors in the region are bivocational, so they need assistance from lay leaders to fulfill the church’s ministry. PRM helps pastors train those lay leaders, and it has begun offering an annual pastor’s conference. In 2021 PRM opened its conference to the public for the first time. Walt Mueller, Center for Parent/Youth Understanding president, was the keynote speaker.
There are 13 PCA churches in the rural counties that PRM focuses on serving. Two PCA pastors have enrolled in PRM cohorts.
Resource Rural with Big City Problems
Nate Keisel pastors Mosaic Church in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, a town of 9,000 that sits about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. In its heyday Jeannette had a thriving glass manufacturer that employed more than 1,500 people, but when the company ceased operation in 1983, legal wrangling and fraud prevented the industry from reviving in Jeannette.
Keisel describes the Jeannette he knows as being “resource rural.” Many problems that plague Jeannette also plague cities, but Jeannette lacks the resources to adequately address them. “We have big city problems without big city resources,” Keisel said.
Many churches in Jeannette attract people who represent Jeannette’s “old guard” – families who for generations depended on the glass industry for income and have stayed even as the industry has not. Mosaic Church, on the other hand, attracts Jeannette’s newer residents: African Americans experiencing crushing poverty.
One big problem that Keisel noticed in Jeannette is the poor educational system. Even students who appear to succeed in high school and move on to college discover in college that they are years behind their peers, Keisel said. While many Jeannette residents believe attracting new business to the area will solve the town’s woes, Keisel wants Jeannette’s residents to start their own businesses.
Byun introduced Keisel to the idea of PRM, and together they began to dream of how Grove City College students could help Keisel, Mosaic, and Jeannette. With two hours of drive time separating Grove City College from Mosaic, a weekly internship is not a feasible option. But Grove City College students have come to Jeannette for spring break service trips. The trips give them a chance to learn about cross-cultural, urban, and mercy ministry. Students in Jeannette start to build relationships with college students, making the idea of attending college seem more realistic.
“The problem with most of the kids here is they don’t go to college because they aren’t instilled with a belief that they can succeed,” he said. Keisel hopes that as children and teens from Jeannette get to know Grove City College students, those relationships can make the idea of attending college seem more realistic.
Keisel hopes PRM can one day provide students for summer internships too; the chance for students studying education, entrepreneurship, or business development to gain experience and college credit while helping an under-resourced community.
“There’s an opportunity for the needs here – job force, education, entrepreneurship needs – to be met by young, excited students who can learn,” Keisel said.
Rural Ministry in Appalachia
Dennis Bills knew his town was small, but he didn’t realize just how rural it was until he joined a PRM cohort. He’s one of West Virginia’s native sons who left for education and opportunities but followed the country road back home. By West Virginia standards, New Martinsville might not be so small, but with a population of 5,000, the town indeed meets the PRM threshold for rural.
Slowly, Bills has come to accept the “rural” designation. “I’m not in the middle of a holler where coal miners and farmers are your parishioners. I thought that was rural,” Bills said. “But even small-town churches surrounded by streets are considered rural.”
West Virginians are proud of how they’ve made a living on their natural resources, Bills said, including the coal that draws their people into the mine for 12-hour shifts and the natural gas deposits that have lured outsiders to the area in recent years. Bills takes a similar pride in being a small-town pastor, even if the job is not particularly popular.
Trinity Presbyterian Church is the only Reformed church within 100 miles. Members of Bills’ congregation drive 40-50 miles each Sunday for worship. The congregation is small, so Bills is bi-vocational, ministering at Trinity on weekends and working during the week for his family’s business in Ashland, Kentucky.
“We have to fend for ourselves, and there’s pride in that,” he said.
Like Jeannette, New Martinsville is too far away from Grove City College for students to regularly participate in the life of the church, but Bills has found fellowship with other pastors in his Appalachian cohort. When COVID forced churches to stop meeting in person, Bills applied for a mini-grant through PRM, which gave him funds to purchase a microphone and a few tech gadgets to improve the quality of his video sermons.
He also appreciates the blog ministry of PRM and reading the insights of other PRM pastors.
Now that the pandemic restrictions have eased, Bills is eager to find other ways he can participate in and learn from PRM. In the meantime, he’s recruiting West Virginia’s native sons to come home, work bi-vocationally, and pastor churches in their hometowns.
“We need our native sons to be workers who get to preach, not aspiring preachers who have to work. Raising and recruiting ministers will depend on finding native sons who are well established, educating them to meet our criteria within the state, and their being willing to have careers and incorporate the joy and benefit and privilege of pastoring on Sundays, weekends, and rest of the week,” he said.
PRM and the Future
Byun hopes that one day PRM will have a Center for Ministry that will be the umbrella over PRM and help the college stay networked with local pastors. Grove City College has included plans to expand PRM’s funding in its latest capital campaign.
He also hopes to increase the ways that Grove City College and its students can support and celebrate rural churches for their diversity and the important role they play in Gospel ministry.
As students learn from rural pastors, they have the chance to see that rural communities are not just highway exits they pass or dots they fly over on their way to bigger adventures; rural communities are diverse places where God is indeed at work.
For more information on PRM, visit ruralministry.org.