Category: Book Review

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A Loving Life: A Book (and a Life) that Small-Town Pastors Need

This article originally appeared at Small Town Summits Articles. I serve as the Content Manager for Small Town Summits Articles.

There are books, both in the Bible and on your shelf, that can sometimes take you by surprise. They are books that God uses to shake you up, to comfort you, to strengthen you, or to show you blind spots in your life or ministry. The book of Ruth and a book about Ruth, A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships by Paul E. Miller, both did that for me recently.

The book of Ruth has left our church, and me, changed. A Loving Life left me in tears as I read the last page, something that hadn’t happened to me in a long time.

I had planned to preach the book of Ruth for Advent this year, and about a month before I would begin preaching it, I was at a Small Town Summits Leadership Retreat. One of our co-founders, David Pinckney, recommended A Loving Life, a study of Ruth, and said that it was one of the best marriage books he had ever read that isn’t really a marriage book. Since I love studying the topic of marriage and was going to be preaching the book of Ruth soon, I ordered it that week. A month later, I ordered it for our Elders and Deacons to read and encouraged their wives to read it as well, and ordered another copy for our church library. It’s that good.

There was something about studying the book of Ruth at this season in our church’s life that was just exactly what we needed. Church members were encouraged to see God working in ordinary lives in a small town through ordinary means of kindness and hard work. There was a freshness to the gospel as we saw how God prepared the line of King David and ultimately the line of King Jesus to come through Ruth and Boaz. We marveled at the patience and mercy of God in bitter Naomi’s life as she thought she had returned to Bethlehem empty, but then experienced the fullness of God’s grace by the end of the book. And we were challenged and inspired by Ruth’s kindness and chesed love as she reflected the covenant steadfast love of Yahweh over and over and over again throughout the book.

A Loving Life helped me to process the book of Ruth in bite-size chapters that explain a small portion of the text, with robust application and illustration for today. Here are three reasons that the biblical lessons from A Loving Life are especially relevant to small-town pastors. 

Reminders that God Works Through the Small and the Ordinary

God’s providence is all over the book of Ruth and because of this, all over A Loving Life. It is impossible to read these books and feel that God is distant or uninvolved in small places and ordinary lives. Bethlehem was not Jerusalem—yet this is where this great drama that ultimately leans towards God’s plan of redemption in Christ takes place. Ruth went to work gleaning in a field to provide for her and Naomi while Naomi grieved—and through that ordinary act of work God provided food, a husband, a baby to continue the family line, and a place for Ruth and Boaz in the kingly line of Christ!

Small-town pastors need to often be reminded that God works through the small and the ordinary. We need to hear what Miller writes: “To love is to limit…Ironically, the experience of love, of narrowing your life, broadens and deepens your life….Love always involved a narrowing of the life, a selecting of imperfection. So God’s love for us lands. It landed in Bethlehem sometime in the fall or winter of 5/6 BC as a little Jewish boy. God’s love is so specific it boggles the mind.”[1]

Reminders that God Works To Humble Us and Then Exalt Us

In one of the most significant chapters in the book, “The Gospel Shape of Love,” Miller explains how God often brings resurrection through death to ourselves. He explains how we are not trapped in a pagan view of the world, a cycle of life and death. Rather, because of the gospel our lives literally move through a “J-curve” of life, death, and then resurrection.

This is not only about eternity, because many times this is how God works in our lives as followers of Jesus today. We are called to die to our dreams and desires to live for what God has called us to. For small-town pastors, this often means humbling ourselves to be content with a small, hidden place of service, knowing that God sees and knows and cares. When we don’t work to exalt ourselves but to exalt Jesus where he has sovereignly placed us to serve him, we are in exactly the place he wants us to be. As Miller describes this spiritual principle: “As we go downward into death, we are active: active in seeking humility, in taking the lower place, in mindless, hidden serving. This is the journey Jesus took…We can do death. But we can’t do resurrection. We can’t demand resurrection—we wait for it.”[2] In dying to ourselves, in exalting Jesus, he lifts us up, giving us contentment today, occasional vistas of his work through us today, and ultimately invaluable eternal reward in heaven.

Reminders that God Works Through People Committed to Love

Over and over again, we see Ruth absolutely committed to loving others, and in particular her mother-in-law Naomi, whose God she now serves wholeheartedly. By studying the life of Ruth, we are challenged to love others more like how God calls us to—whether that is through loving your spouse, your children, a widow, a foster child, that difficult church member, or the person in your small town who hates the presence of your church in the community. The kind of love Ruth displays again and again is a quiet pointer to the love of her greatest descendant, “…the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20b)

A Loving Life is one of those rare books that I felt I could have just dipped in highlighter. I hope that you will read it and be challenged and encouraged and changed. I hope that you will share it with your leaders so that you can all grow into excelling still more at living lives of love. I’ll let the very end of Miller’s book leave you with the last word:

Everything Ruth does—from walking through the gates ignored and unthanked to giving her newborn son to Naomi—is a function of her love for Naomi…You simply can’t beat love. You can’t out-humble it. You can’t suppress it, because you are always free to love no matter how someone treats you. If others are putting nails through your hands, you can forgive them. If someone is shouting curses at you, you can silently receive them. Love is irrepressible.

Faith and hope will one day pass away, but not love. Love is forever.[3]

[1] A Loving Life, p. 74.

[2] A Loving Life, p. 71.

[3] A Loving Life, p. 156.

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Why Small-Town Ministry Matters: A Review of “A Big Gospel in Small Places”

This article first appeared on the TMS Blog.

“Because God loves people everywhere, he calls his church to be present everywhere. Thus his church must be in places big and small in order to be the church.”

Stephen Witmer, ABig Gospel in Small Places

I grew up in a town of 350 people. There were no stop lights. There were no doctors. There was one convenience store and one gas station (which was really a farmer’s co-op). We once had relatives visit, and the next week my parents read in the “Prescott Party Line,” the column in the neighboring town’s paper, that last weekend the Counts family had relatives visit, “and a good time was had by all.” When my parents asked the columnist how she knew that, she explained, “I saw their car in your driveway all weekend.” Surely where we live affects our view of the world.

In-between my childhood and my current ministry, I have lived and ministered in large cities, including Los Angeles, as well as suburban contexts. I never expected that I would be a pastor in a town of 5,000 people. Small-town ministry has its own unique blessings and challenges. Many pastors like me who have been called to rural areas or small towns struggle sometimes because so much of the ministry advice we hear and even the books we read are written by big-name pastors in big-name cities. We can begin to wonder, does my ministry in my little corner of the world matter? Has God put me on the Junior Varsity team? Am I wasting my seminary education by pouring myself into a small community rather than a place with more people and greater influence?

As a small-town pastor, it is easy to get stuck looking at myself or comparing myself with others. A Big Gospel in Small Places, a book by co-founder of Small Town Summits and pastor Stephen Witmer, lifted my eyes from myself to Jesus. It gently raised my gaze from my small, self-centered dreams for myself and my church to see that in my small town, the fields are white for harvest. This book helped me to long for God to work in my small town in a big way, while needing it less (which is one of the main ideas of his book).

Strategic Isn’t Always What We Think

Witmer gives a strong apologetic for small-place ministry in the first three chapters of the book. He explains how even though the trend is for people to move towards cities, there are still billions of people—about half of the world’s population—who live in rural areas (5), and they all have souls (87). He points out that “the total population of American small towns alone is about thirty-three million people, which is more than the populations of Morocco, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Peru, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Mozambique, Ghana, North Korea, Yemen, Australia, Madagascar, Cameroon…(the list continues with more than a hundred other countries)” (27).

 In the second section of the book, Witmer explores some of the nuances of small-town ministry. What are some of the unique challenges and opportunities that small-town ministry presents? He explains how “Strategic isn’t always what we think” (chapter 5), “Small is usually better than we think” (chapter 6), and “Slow is often wiser than we think” (chapter 7). He urges us to appreciate all that we can about the particular small town we are serving in or that we may be called to because “we can’t serve what we don’t see” (29). He explains how pastoring in a small town can be an advantage for gospel ministry because often, “the smallness of our context gives us an outsized influence” (94).

To encourage small-place pastors that their size may actually be a help to push them to Christ, Witmer quotes the Puritan pastor Richard Sibbes in The Bruised Reed,

As a mother is tenderest to the…weakest child, so does Christ most mercifully incline to the weakest…The consciousness of the church’s weakness makes her willing to lean on her beloved, and to hide herself under his wing. (98-99).

A Big Gospel in Small Places is filled with a combination of quotes from the likes of Puritans and contemporary thought and statistics on ministry. There are many pastors in small places who need to be reminded that preaching a Bible-saturated, gospel-centered sermon to forty-five people matters. This book is oozing with that kind of encouragement.

Should I minister in a small town or larger place?

In the last three chapters of the book, Witmer provides a valuable resource not only for current small-place pastors, but also for those considering a ministry switch and for seminary students praying about where they might pastor. He pushes back against some of the common reasons given to prioritize urban ministry, all the while maintaining that one is not better than the other. Witmer is not anti-city. Rather, he is pro-gospel. But the current trend in our culture as well as evangelicalism is to prioritize the cities, and Witmer gives many reasons to reconsider this trend.

As believers who hold to the sufficiency of the Word, we often push back against pragmatism in our practice of ministry. But I wonder how often we have been influenced by our evangelical culture in thinking that we must minister in a place where we can potentially reach more people rather than seeing the harvest God may be preparing in the small places. Small-town ministry is not pragmatic, but it is beautiful in that it points to a God who proclaims that he sent his only Son to the world—which includes the billions in the cities, and it also includes the billions in the small towns.

May we be willing to say with Isaiah, “Here am I, send me!” if God
calls us to a place that looks less strategic than we had hoped.

May God’s passion for his glory spread in the small places, in the cities, in the suburbs, and everywhere as his servants faithfully serve wherever God sends them.

If you currently serve in ministry in a small town and are struggling to see value there, Witmer has a gentle challenge for you:

Will you pray boldly with faith for God to win many souls for his glory and simultaneously see your present situation as a glorious display of the character of God and the surpassing beauty of the gospel? Rather than gazing longingly at the big places where so much ministry seems to be happening, will you see all the ministry to be done right in front of you? Will you treasure the people in your small place and pour yourself out for them? Will you prepare eternal souls for eternity? (182)

Yes, ministry in forgotten communities still matters. Nathaniel was from Cana, a prosperous city in Galilee of about one thousand people. When he heard that Jesus was from Nazareth, an insignificant village of two to four hundred people (32), he asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathaniel and the rest of the world learned that the answer was yes.

Just as God sent Jesus to a small place for much of his life and ministry, he may now be sending Jesus to a small place through you.

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