Practicing Care in Rural Congregations and Communities

Jeanne Hoeft, L. Shannon Jung

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800699543
• eBook ISBN: 9781451438512
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

1

The Wisdom and Challenge of Rural Care

1

Care Shaped by Place

Janice and Tom Anderson were sitting at the table with other friends at the church picnic. These people had known each other at least a good part of their lives. Most went to high school together; a few went off to college but returned afterward to the town they grew up in. They knew each other’s parents, siblings, and cousins, and the related stories. Tonight the group is sharing stories about the fate of their young adult children and the fate of their own lives given the directions their young adult children seemed to be headed.

Tom was particularly agitated with their son’s announcement that he was not planning to come back “home” after graduation. Over the school break Michael announced to the family that he did not want to come home and work the family farm. Instead he planned to get a master’s degree in business and try to get a job with a big firm somewhere.

Tom was recounting to his friends the hard work that he and his father and his father’s father had put into this land and about the sacrifices they had made to make it even possible for Michael to go to college. He recounted the story of his great-grandfather staking out his land and how important the land is to the future of the family. He recalled the struggles his family and many others in town faced during the farm crisis of the 1980s. They were some of the few that were able to hold on. He would hate to see the land fall out of the family’s hands. All the while Tom was talking, the others at the table were nodding affirmatively, reliving the familiar story that they and their families shared with Tom and Janice.

*****

Care is happening at this table, and it is happening in the context of Christian friendship. Their care for one another is shaped by the love and concern grown out of a shared history, a building of trust, a sense of interdependence and participation in a community of faith, whether they can articulate it or not. When Steven, the pastor, joins the table he participates in this circle of care, but as the pastor he will also bring something different to the table. He brings the authority and training of the pastoral office, and he may also bring, by virtue of the office combined with trusting relationship and vital faith, the possibility of building on the care that is already taking place in a way that facilitates more healing and transformation. Others may well make the same move, but our focus is on how the pastor can be intentional about seeing this conversation as an opportunity to not only support Tom and Janice and their friends, but to encourage healing change within each of them and their family and to broaden that care to include the community in a way that moves toward God’s hope for the world.

Specifically this chapter looks at how healing and transformative care can be shaped by place. The care that is happening in the event described above is being shaped by place—the table, the church, the town, the land—whether anyone realizes it or not. This bit of practical wisdom, that place matters, is something that rural and small-town people remind us to attend to. People in rural communities are often particularly attuned to place, to what it means to be located there and not somewhere else, to what it means to develop in relationship to a place. There is a heightened awareness of where they are and why they are there, whether or not their attachment is positive. In part, this awareness is a result of not being located at the center of power, in metropolitan areas. As discussed in the introduction, this book’s major claim is that place matters in the sense that it matters where care is being practiced as much as how and with whom.

This chapter looks at how place, and the meanings people attach to it, shapes persons and what that means for care in the context of Christian faith. A discussion of “place” as something that includes more than the coordinates on a map leads to thinking about the particular kind of place in the scene above, a Midwestern farming community. Next, this chapter looks at how persons construct identities in relation to place and considers what it means to be God’s creatures in terms of our need for “home” and personal relationships with the earth. Finally, the chapter suggests possibilities for practicing care shaped by place with specific reference to the situation that opens the chapter. How could the conversation at the picnic table actually be a step toward more healing and justice for the families, congregation, and community represented there?

Place in Rural Contexts

Healing care in Chimaltenango, Guatemala is different from care in New York City, which is different from care in Stanley, North Dakota. Transformative care, even when practiced by the same people, is done differently when it takes place in a church building, a hospital, or a soup kitchen. It looks different, sounds different, smells different, and feels different. This seems obvious when stated so simply, but in what ways does the “where” of care matter? How can the people of the church influence more intentionally the impact of place on care in ways that foster the richer life that Jesus imagined for us all? Why does moving from one place to another make such a difference, while moving between another two places hardly seems different at all? How does a conversation at a picnic table in a Midwestern farming community present an opportunity for a particular kind of care?

The most common understanding of place is that it is space turned into something with meaning. Persons make a home “my place” by bringing in things that they like or have significance. When open space is given a name it becomes a place. One geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, says that if space is “that which allows movement, then place is pause.”^[1] Place marks investment of time, energy, resources, and self. Place makes the abstract of space something that matters, something one will act to protect, and something one will grieve if lost.

There are several layers to place-making. Place involves first, a physical location that can be marked on a map, identified by the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Built places might move from one coordinate to another but they are nevertheless located at each moment in a specific location. Maps represent human interpretations of the land and political boundary-making; thus places always develop in the web of human social relationships. Places develop in power struggles over naming, owning, and control of resources, both human and natural. Within any place there is a constant interaction of multiple interpretations of what it means to be in that place and what kind of place it is. Geographer Tim Cresswell reminds us to think about the way power is functioning in these interpretations.^[2] To refer to place is to participate in power that is exercised through cultural norms, discourse, institutions, and practices. An analysis of power dynamics will ask the question: Who benefits from this interpretation of reality? Who benefits from doing things this way? An analysis of the workings of power will also ask: What is being left out? What are alternative ways to think about something? What is not being said? Who is excluded from the picture or story being told as it is? The narratives of place told by people in rural communities are told from particular vantage points that are also shaped by larger cultural discourses.

Stories about place are always told at multiple levels all at once. British geographer Keith Halfacree suggests a threefold approach to thinking about the many aspects of a place.^[3] First is the “formal representation” of that place in the dominant discourse. How are rural places and small towns referred to by those in power? How are they portrayed in media, literature, and political rhetoric? Second are the references residents make to themselves and their living places. What does it mean to the residents to live where they do? How do they both internalize and resist the way they are represented by others? People develop relationships with places, emotional attachments that form their sense of who they are. Cultures develop when people share a common area. Places become imbued with meaning and a kind of subjectivity. Think about how often someone says something like “this place speaks to me” or “this place is just begging for . . . ,” and many people speak as if places call them to be, as in “this is where I belong.” Cresswell describes place as a “field of care.”^[4] In other words, places define what matters, where energy and resources are invested. To speak about place is to speak about a complex interrelatedness between earth, built structures, and human relationships.

A third aspect of a place is the actual day-to-day lives of the people living there. How is the place structured and what do people actually do there? How are the narratives of meaning intersecting with the workings of economic, political, and individual agency to shape the work and relational life of people living in the community?

A contextual approach to care will see Janice, Tom, and Michael’s situation as one manifestation of the currents of power, practice, and meaning in the culture at large, and not simply as one family’s interpersonal struggles. For instance, we will find that young adults leaving small towns and rural areas in the Heartland is a major issue for the region, not just this family. The tensions related to the out-migration are strongly influenced by the economic and political changes in agriculture in this country. To care for this family will mean giving attention to both the particular relational dynamics between these family members and to the interconnections between this family and their particular place. One aspect of this place is what it represents in the cultural imagination of the United States and what is at stake for the country in keeping that image alive.

The Family Farm as Icon

Care for the Andersons and others in this town requires that the pastoral caregiver understand the layers of meaning that “Midwestern farming community” holds in the broader culture. Acres of rolling fields, the barn and farmhouse, a few cows, the garden, a swing hanging from a tree limb, and a hardworking, honest, and trustworthy farmer (of European descent) with his wife and children. The small-town center with a post office, store, café, school, church, doctor’s office where everyone knows each other and cares for one another—this is the image that most of us in the United States conjure up when we hear “Midwestern farming community.” It is the picture in children’s storybooks and in U.S. American paintings, like American Gothic. For those in the U.S. tied to European immigrants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this picture represents the core of who we are as a nation and what we are about as a people. Though very few people in the United States still earn a livelihood via farming, this image is a powerful symbol of one aspect of our history, and like all symbols it reveals and obscures much. It reveals, for instance, our values of hard work, self-sufficiency, neighborhood ties, and the importance of land. It obscures the politics of land acquisition, the economics of low-wage laborers, the struggle over farming policies, and inequalities based on gender, race, ethnicity, and other social identities. It obscures the reality that while perhaps many long for what the symbol represents, very few want to actually live that life. In many ways, as a culture we are tied more to the symbol than we are committed to the real people of rural agricultural communities and their small towns.

People have a high respect for rural life, but they do not want to live in the remote areas of the Great Plains, or the Heartland, as it is often called. Perhaps what we want is the symbol, the dream, the ideal, but not the reality. In 2001 the Kellogg Foundation interviewed thousands of people in urban, suburban, and rural settings about their perceptions of rural America. People in all three settings held an interesting set of dichotomous perceptions:

[R]ural life represents traditional American values, but is behind the times; rural life is more relaxed and slower than city life, but harder and more grueling; rural life is friendly, but intolerant of outsiders and difference; and rural life is richer in community life, but epitomized by individuals struggling independently to make ends meet. Rural America offers a particular quality of life including serenity and aesthetic surroundings, and yet it is plagued by lack of opportunities, including access to cultural activities.^[5]

In two items rural persons rated themselves significantly higher than their urban and suburban counterparts rated them. Rural people rated their level of sophistication and their level of tolerance much higher than others rated them. Rural folks also were more likely to see themselves as having stronger families than urban/suburban residents. Each population reported that rural life is needed to “preserve that which defines America,” and the “family farm epitomizes the best of American life.”^[6]

The Kellogg report found that most U.S. Americans think that rural life is agriculturally based, set in beautiful landscapes of pastures, livestock, and crop rows, whose residents value religion, self-reliance, and community. While this is not an accurate picture of rural America as a whole (less than 10 percent of rural residents make their living via farming) it comes closest to reality in the rural Heartland. Certainly a pastor coming into a Midwestern farming community will want to be aware of the assumptions about what that life actually entails and check her own emotional responses to this iconic image. The pastor might also want to keep in mind the depth of this image ingrained into the community itself. To what extent do they see themselves as fitting this image and/or feel pressure to maintain this way of life for the sake of the whole country? How do they live with the dichotomies identified in the Kellogg report? Sometimes the strong need to maintain an image results in minimizing or excluding from consciousness some aspects of actual life on the farm or in the rural Midwest that do not quite fit the image. Most people from urban and suburban areas have little to no knowledge of the business of agriculture or the day-to-day life on the farm. A pastor will want to wonder about how members of the community acknowledge the discrepancies between what they do and what people think they do. Transformation toward healing and justice requires attention to the excluded or denied aspects of the pictures we create and the stories we tell.

In order to offer meaningful pastoral care, a newcomer pastor to a farming community like the one the Andersons live in will want to gain some knowledge about farming and agriculture in general and in particular about farming in that area. A pastor who has experience with farm life will want to make sure not to generalize too much from that experience. K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Wisdom and Challenge of Rural Care
• Healing and Transformative Care in Rural Contexts
• Bibliography
• Index