The Left Behind of Rural America

America’s rural share of the population has dropped from 95 percent in 1810 to 55 percent in 1910 to 20 percent in 2010. And there’s no turnaround in sight. It’s a fact that makes tens of millions of rural Americans defensive about their place in our national life. They feel under threat, according to Robert Wuthnow, professor of social sciences at Princeton University and author of a new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. A native of Kansas, Wuthnow has interviewed hundreds of rural Americans and found deep concern “that their way of life is eroding, shifting imperceptibly under the feet, and being discredited and attacked from the outside.”

You can imagine that this feeling pervades many rural churches as well. To discuss the significance of Wuthnow’s findings for church leaders, I reached out to Stephen Witmer, pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Stephen earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge and teaches New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He also helps lead Small Town Summits, which partners with The Gospel Coalition New England to serve rural churches and pastors.

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Witmer is a native of rural Maine, and we’ve bonded over our mutual appreciation for the overlooked places and, not coincidentally, the writing of Wendell Berry. In this conversation we discuss the moral obligations of rural communities, media influences, church dynamics, and more.

Related:

Going Small with a Big Gospel in New England (Stephen Witmer)
Remember the Rural: Does Modern Church Planting Overemphasize the City? (Michael Kruger)
Reviving the Dying Small-Town Church (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra)

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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.

Stephen Witmer (PhD, University of Cambridge) is pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Massachusetts and adjunct professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is a Council member of The Gospel Coalition and the co-founder of Small Town Summits, an organization that serves rural churches and pastors. He has written Eternity Changes Everything, the volume on Revelation in Crossway’s Knowing the Bible series, A Big Gospel in Small Places, and The Preacher’s Greek Companion to Hebrews. You can follow him on Twitter.