Volunteers from a small North Carolina church feed their neighbors each week with a hot meal and companionship in an outsize effort to the community.
The outsize economic impact of rural churches on their communities calls for a renewed vision of their importance, according to a two-year study in North Carolina.
Leaders of a community development corporation believe that even struggling congregations can survive and thrive if members take stock of their assets and put them to use as resources for their communities.
Small churches learn to evaluate their growth by impact rather than attendance.
The congregation organized a campaign to distribute signs with #2069 — representing the number of opioid deaths in Massachusetts last year. This simple strategy has had a powerful impact on people struggling with the epidemic.
Many rural communities face decline. The church has a unique ability to stand in the hard realities and still preach hope, writes a rural pastor.
A pastor in rural North Carolina has developed a farming and beekeeping operation that improves the health of local residents while training a new generation.
In declining rural communities, churches are some of the few viable institutions. They can use this position to help strengthen the wider community, writes the rural church fellow at the Institute for Emerging Issues.
At Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Haw River, NC, numbers don’t matter, as the small rural church becomes a model of a kind of community outreach that many larger churches can only dream of.