Since the early Middle Ages, market towns have grown and flourished to become hubs where produce grown in the countryside is gathered, sorted, and sold for the good of the towns and later cities.

Not just produce but people also began to trickle from the countryside to the towns, and on into urban environments. This makes rural to urban migration a reality, perhaps like small streams contributing to feed a river. But what if the streams are polluted? What chance then, does the river have as the confluence of streams occurs?

Produce needs to start life in a conducive environment so it can grow and thrive before nourishing those in cities where food cannot grow so readily. In a similar way, people can also grow and thrive in rural environments, before contributing to the life and culture of the cities they inhabit.

Perhaps then, rural towns and villages can be thought of as seed beds within which to nurture, grow and prepare people to serve, nourish and enrich the urban environments they may end up living within.

What distinguishes the small-town seed bed?

Life in a rural environment allows for an appreciation of creation. The seasons are distinctly seasonal, as life passes from the bright green and yellows of spring, through the ochre and tan hues of autumn, to bleak greys and browns of a mist-shrouded winter. It’s a place where children can see a lamb being born, catch the pungent whiff of a newly muck-spread field and need to watch out for snakes in the long grass. It’s a place where storms disrupt, snow is hard, spring is a blessed relief, winters are cold, and heating is hard to pay for. This though, is the theatre of God’s glory, a seed bed of a doctrine of creation.

Life in a small place allows for an appreciation of community. Everyone knows everyone and the generational connections stretch even the widest of family trees. People live close to each other, seeing each other all the time whether they want to or not, and people rely on and depend on each other. Not just a food bank, but also a charity providing free logs can hear about and help an isolated retiree sitting in a freezing room with no fuel to burn. When a new child is expected the town smiles. When someone dies, the town mourns. This is relational living; this is inter-dependent life, not independent living, and is perhaps the seed bed of the doctrine of the church community.

Finally, living outside of the city hubbub allows an appreciation of sacrifice because life in rural places can be uniquely costly. Not just the idyllic occurs in rural places. Poverty can abound because jobs can be limited. Inequality can abound because people who have land have power, and can use it both to bless, but also to withhold blessing. Fuel prices can cripple a business or an off-the-grid resident. Trips to the grocery store can take hours not minutes, sacrificing time and energy and fuel costs. Amazon one-hour deliveries just aren’t a reality. You want fast food? Food it may be, but fast it almost certainly won’t be. There are small sacrifices, and bigger sacrifices as the nearest hospital may be at least an hour away. Opportunities for young people and children are limited and there are not a hundred options for what to do on a Saturday morning. Sacrifices must be made. But is this a bad thing? Living in a small place where sacrifice can become a way of life can sometimes become a seed bed of the doctrine of salvation. After all, the sacrificial way of the life of Jesus Christ has made the way to true and eternal life possible for us, and it is into his way of life that we seek to grow.

The freshest and best produce grows in fertile seed beds. So as children are raised, as congregations are served and built up to be like Christ, there is a harvest of righteousness just waiting to be gathered.

This does mean that there is some frequent tending, pinching-out, pruning, training, and weeding to be done. While there is some truth to the phrase that it may take a village to raise a child, it is certainly the case that the whole church family is to play a part in tilling the seed beds of faith. It is as the elderly folk talk, and talk, the young can learn to listen. It is as the wise diagnose the dilemma, the doctrine, or the disease, that the simple can gain insight. It is as those who mourn pour forth their tears that those yet to grieve can learn to comfort, and to nurture their empathy. The list of opportunities is as varied as the circumstances of life.

These lessons are deep lessons, life lessons, discipleship lessons. And where better to learn these lessons than in the potting shed seed beds? The seed beds often provided by common grace in small town congregations can be built on intergenerational relationships, through trust, through sacrifice and through love, but they will not necessarily happen without deciding to engage in maturing disciples. To expect a healthy crop with no weeding, no feeding, no training, and no foresight, is to forget that while we do not give the growth, we can sow, tend, care and nurture.

The aim then of tilling these seed beds is not to gain glory at the giant vegetable competition, it is to faithfully nurture that which may appear small, like a mustard seed, so that it may grow, and in growing it may provide not just for the locale in which they are planted, but for the spaces and places they will one day put down their roots. Perhaps this is a call to begin intentional discipleship, to make space for conversation, to nurture that which we have, without wishing for that which we don’t; that Jesus-loving boys and girls, men and women, might grow to nourish the small towns, and consequently, the urban metropolises.

For those that can stay, or for those who might join a rural community, there is much gospel work to be done. And for those who may move on to the cities, like the market towns of a bygone age, let’s pray and hope that they richly nourish, sustain, bless and serve the cities and urban areas where they put down their roots.

But in order for this to happen, the seed beds need to be prepared, nurtured, tilled, fed and watered with the Word. What the cities need are the villages and rural areas to serve them faithfully.

For more information about Small Town Summits, including upcoming Summits, click here.