7 Evangelistic Tools I used in a Rural Community
I became the pastor of a small rural church in St. Jacob, Illinois in 2013. We had 6 members and 7 in attendance. When we added my family at the time, we averaged 9 the first month. My wife and I pushed a stroller and went house to house that year, praying for someone to get saved. I knew that revitalizing a church of 7 meant it must grow numerically. All spiritual thinking aside, if the church remained in her current size, then it would also mean that there would be little to no spiritual growth. After the first 3 months of trying to revitalize this church, I was already discouraged and nearly defeated. I had a sending church that loved me, but my pastor never visited me and only encouraged me to be just like him when he did this same type of ministry in the 1980s. Not having a background in bible college meant that I had no network and no ministry friends. The ones that called me friend, I soon realized weren’t. Their encouragement was lacking, my ministry was null, and I was a little home sick. The congregation that I inherited was tired, some of them had been with this small church plant from 1996 and had watched many pastors come and go with little to no improvement in reaching this community. Their ages at the time were late 50s and up. I don’t blame them for my discouragement in the early days. I moved there for them: to love them, encourage them, and build a self-sustaining church with them. On a Thursday in June 2014, I was alone in the building. I went to the front of the stage and knelt on my knees and prayed with a broken heart. I was learning in those early days that if the church was going to grow it would take God and a miracle. And I was confident that I would witness it. So here is a list of things I learned that worked in growing a church in the middle of nowhere.
Everything works a little bit
1. Front Door Evangelism
Because of the environment of the church that I grew up in, in the early days, all I knew to do was to go door to door. I tried various types of approaches. First, all I had to use were business cards I had ordered from vista print. Knocking on every door and asking how I could pray for them and asking what their relationship with Christ looked like. After the first few months of that, a friend who wanted to help and be a blessing, made and ordered for me oversized postcard tracts. It had our logo, a small introduction to our ministry, a picture of me, and a five point outline of how to be saved. In the first year I had used 2,500 of those. After that, I had made several different styles of near the same thing. Our door-to-door ministry continued weekly for 5 years when we made a switch to monthly. This caused us to repeat some houses 5 times in 7 years with a grand total of 150,000 tracts placed on doors in rural America.
2. New Move-Ins
In my second year, I discovered a company that you could buy a list of new move ins for a substantial amount of money, from the perspective of a small church replant. I would mail an envelope with an invitation and a gift to the new addresses in a 40-mile radius. However, I soon found out by angry phone calls that people were feeling like I had stolen their identity in order to learn their very new address. Others had lived there for many years and fell behind on bills and would update their payment option and unknowingly I would send a note that said, “Welcome to the area!”. Needless to say, the new move ins strategy did not have a positive outcome.
3. Inserting the Gospel
In our area, we had a local newspaper that was delivered for free to 4 towns for a total of 15,000 papers. I went to their office and asked about inserting an advertisement in the newspaper. They charged a penny a paper and instructed me on what week would have the least number of inserts to gain us the most exposure. We would print 5,000 a month and deliver them to the printing factory for more than 5 years. We would advertise our Christmas services, or Benevolence ministry, Easter services, Fall festivals, and anything else I could think of.
4. Parking Lot Tracts
In our area, there were 3 public “park and ride” lots. They were for our county’s buses that would take you to a station to catch a bus or train into St. Louis. Including all three lots there were roughly 100 vehicles. Every month or so I would walk the lots placing a tract or church invitation on the vehicles. Because I always got frustrated with getting in my car, realizing something was under my windshield wiper, getting out of the car, retrieving this advertisement or ticket, getting back in my car, and then continuing with my routine, I would place our card on the driver’s side window, slightly sliding the card in the side window track. Sometimes my efforts were washed out from rain.
5. Highway Marketing
Our church was located on a highway that was posted at 55mph and the locals drove 70mph. In the early days we used three metal fence posts to support two sheets of plywood that mounted two 4’X8’ banners. The plywood was a second addition after the wind destroyed a couple sets of banners. Later we mounted two wooden posts and supported the plywood off the ground for mowing and aesthetics. Every month or two we would replace and market our banners, door-to-door tracts, newspaper inserts, and parking lot ads to all match our season or sermon series so when people in our community drove by, they would associate all of our other advertisements and hopefully one day attend.
6. Frequent Flyer
In our area of four towns, places to eat were pretty few and far between compared to most average suburbs and cities unless you drove up to the interstate in a neighboring community where there was an Arby’s and a McDonalds. I would visit Loomy’s which had the greatest fried chicken, Park View Inn which had a few cockroaches behind the electrical outlet and a $5 lunch special that included cake, The Lucky Rooster Pub which had a patty and cheese called a Pony Shoe, Huddle House that was in the Walmart parking lot which was a cleaner version of Waffle House, and the Highland Diner that had your average small town 1950’s feel. There were other restaurants that opened later for dinner, but these were the ones I became a regular at. I would frequently visit them and try to remember the waitresses’ names. I would ask about their families and pray with them from time to time.
7. Bus Ministry
In my first few days as pastor, a church gave us a 1993 dodge van. I wanted to start a bus ministry, but quickly realized that you need people who are limited on their transportation to pick up and bring to church. That is one need that we really didn’t have in our area. So, the Bus Ministry was just moving the van from parking spot to parking spot trying to keep the battery from going dead.
One last thing that I learned in small rural church revitalization is that being in a community that isn’t growing means you must change the minds of the people who already live there. That is much harder when there are only three churches per community (Catholic, United Methodist, and United Church of Christ) for the last 100 hundred years. I watched God work, I watched a few come to Christ, I watch a church grow. In 2020 I resigned a self-supporting church that was able to call a full-time pastor that loves them and is continuing the work in a rural American community.
Joshua Hargis @ Elyria Baptist Church, Elyria Ohio