Name: https://www.youtube.com/embed/qVE26Ujyz80?feature=oembed
Uploaded: 2013-12-16T00:00:00-05:00
Description: Watch the full 10-minute video to hear these men discuss church planting, the need for patience, how Wilson ended up in Vermont, and more.

Laboring away in their little non-strategic locales, rural Christians reach few influencers and probably do not impress Jesus. Bless their heart.

Though never put so baldly, some of today’s “in the city for the city” rhetoric might at times give the impression that rural ministry is a bit second-class. In a new roundtable video, Collin Hansen sits down with Stephen Um and Jared Wilson to discuss the realities and peculiarities of ministry in rural, suburban, and urban areas.

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“Since our world is becoming more urban, there is an undeniably strategic need for healthy gospel churches in cities,” observes Um, pastor of Citylife Presbyterian Church in Boston and co-author of Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church [interview]. Nevertheless, he insists, just because cities matter does not mean they matter more.

If reaching cultural “influencers” made for automatically superior ministry, what would that say about our Savior? As Wilson, pastor of Middletown Springs Community Church in rural Vermont, notes, “Jesus went for the scrubs, the left-behinds.”

“Not only is the world is becoming more urban, but rural areas are becoming less Christian,” adds Hansen, editorial director for The Gospel Coalition. Nostalgic notions, then, of a moral middle America—“God’s country”—are misguided and naïve.

Watch the full 10-minute video to hear these men discuss church planting, the need for patience, how Wilson ended up in Vermont, and more.

Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.

Jared C. Wilson is the director of content strategy for Midwestern Seminary, managing editor of For The Church, and author of more than 10 books, including Gospel Wakefulness, The Pastor’s Justification, The Prodigal Church, and The Gospel According to Satan. You can follow him on Twitter.

Stephen Um (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is senior pastor of Citylife Presbyterian Church in Boston, Massachusetts, and the president and executive director of The Center for Gospel Culture. He is the author of Micah for You: Acting Justly, Loving Mercy. He and his wife, Kathleen, have three children.