Leadership Journal

When in July 1999 I shifted from a pastorate in Belgrade, Montana, to one in Cincinnati, Ohio, the 1,700 miles hardly seem enough to account for the differences between the two worlds.

Has my ministry changed with the new setting? Yes. Some changes I expected, some I did not. The unexpected changes have been the easy ones. The changes I expected have been the more difficult.

Demographically the churches are not as different as one might expect. Belgrade doesn't have a lot of Proctor & Gamble execs and Cincinnati isn't long on cowboys, but the two churches have a comparable percentage of professional and blue-collar workers. Both churches enjoy a healthy generational spread with lots of babies, boomers, X-ers, seniors, and fine youth groups.

A full Sunday at the church in Belgrade ran about 250. A full Sunday at the church in Cincinnati runs about 500. The church budget in Cincinnati more than doubles the budget in Belgrade, and we employ more than twice the staff. This reflects the simple reality that Cincinnati is more prosperous than Belgrade (25 percent of the children of Montana live below the poverty level, and Montana vies every year with Mississippi and Alabama for lowest per capita income in the nation). Both churches belong to the thoroughly mainline American Baptist Churches. Each confesses a robust, inclusive, evangelical theology. Both churches worship twice on Sunday morning. Both churches adopted blended worship in the 1980's.

My preaching has not changed at all. I preach extended series of expository sermons through whole books of the Bible.

The truth is, when Debbie and I moved to Cincinnati, we felt like we had come home. We grew up in big cities and spent our teenage and college years in Southern California. Neither of us had ever dreamed or desired rural ministry. Nevertheless, following three years of seminary in Boston, God plunged us into 20 years of rural ministry. We started with a three-year assistantship at a church in a table fruit farm town in Central California. We wondered if we could survive in a town of 10,000 people, 45 minutes from a city of 250,000.

In 1983 we moved to a two-point parish in Western Montana. The atlas listed the towns as 500 and 300. The big city, 30 minutes away, boasted 25,000. The county had two stoplights and one flashing yellow. Nearly half our 17 years in Montana we shared a two-party telephone line. We will not forget that first cattle drive—a hundred head—through the town—50 feet from our front room window.

When Debbie shopped at the local grocery store, our five-year-old boy would point at men and say, "Mommy, look! A cowboy!" It didn't take long before she decided that her babies were not going to grow up to be cowboys.

"Our children will not grow up saying 'crik.' The word is 'creek,' " she told me. Actually our three kids grew up to be skiers and snowboarders and rock climbers and bridge-jumpers and all kinds of things we even haven't heard about yet. But ...