Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

Recovering Christian Stewardship from Secular Fundraising 49
The Suburban and Rural Experience
For congregationalists, the issue of urban repopulation has a
limited effect, since the viability of any given congregation is selfdependent.
Many congregationalist, evangelical and nondenominational
community Churches are “destination churches;”
that is to say, people come to them to satisfy a particular need,
whether it be the preaching, a particular ministry, expression or
understanding of confessional beliefs, or some other feature which
fulfils their individual spirituality. But for the mainline, historic
Churches—and particularly those with a more centralized or
episcopal governance—there is a mutual, even symbiotic,
interdependence between individual communities of faith. When
one part of the Church gets out of balance, it affects the others,
sometimes disproportionately so. For suburban and rural parishes,
the imbalance is often experienced in terms of access to resources
that are not always financial in nature.
Primarily due to geographical considerations, suburban and
rural parishes are less likely to have ongoing and meaningful
personal experiences of their bishops, or diocesan/presbytery staff,
and are therefore unintentionally formed, in even the slightest ways,
towards congregationalism. Such tendencies are supported by the
strong sense of individualism and rugged self-reliance that have
necessarily characterized rural communities in both Canada and the
United States. But more than this, when many suburban and rural
parishes view themselves as being at the short end of the stick in
terms enjoying the pool of leadership, expertise, and financial
resources at the disposal of the wider Church, it is no surprise that
they should come to believe their relationship with the
diocese/presbytery to be essentially economic in nature,
experienced primarily as a fiscal arrangement based upon transfer
payments to “downtown.”
This dynamic of alienation serves only to reinforce a
reductionist view of stewardship as merely financial—a genteel