What Are People For?

Wendell Berry is an inspiring thinker and has a profound gift for connecting the spiritual with the everyday world we live in. What Are People For? is a book of essays that begin with a few poems and then the first part of the book (which I skipped most of) deals with authors that he respects and enjoys. I didn't know any of the authors so I proceeded to Pt. 2. This section has some wonderfully thought-provoking essays on "Why I Will Not Buy a Computer", "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine", "The Pleasures of Eating", and the most convicting for me, "God and the Country."

I really connected with God and the Country since I grew up in a farming community of about 2500 people. I felt bad for the country church, and I felt ever more horrible for what I did to the country church. Let me give you a quote from Berry first:

"The second manifestation I want to speak of is the practice, again common in the churches of my experience, of using the rural ministry as a training ground for young ministers and as a means of subsidizing their education. No church official, apparently, sees any logical, much less any spiritual, problem in sending young people to minister to country churches before they have, according to their institutional superiors, become eligible to be ministers. These student ministers invariably leave the rural congregations that have sponsored or endured their educations as soon as possible once they have their diplomas in hand. The denominational hierarchies, then, evidently regard country places in exactly the same way as “the economy” does: as sources of economic power to be exploited for theadvantage of “better” places. The country people will be used to educate ministers for the benefit of city people (in wealthier churches) who, obviously, are thought more deserving of educated ministers. This, I am well aware, is mainly the fault of the church organizations; is is not a charge that can be made to stick to any young minister in particular: not all ministers should be country ministers, just as not all people should be country people. And yet is is a fact that in the more than fifty years that I have known my own rural community, many student ministers have been “called” to serve in its churches, but not one has ever been “called to stay. The message that country people get from their churches, then, is the same message they get from “the economy”: that, as country people, they do not matter much and do not deserve much consideration. And this inexcapably imposes an economin caluation on spiritual things. According to the modern church, as one of my Christian friends said to me, “The soul of the plowboy ain’t owrth as much as the soul of the delivery boy.” Pg. 96, 97

The last few years of college a few friends and I did what was termed "pulpit supply" meaning that we preached at little country churches around Illinois where they could not afford to have full time ministers any longer mainly because their attendance had declined to a point of almost closing. Some of these churches had 50 people, some had 4 (not kidding). While I gained valuable experience in these country churches and have some great stories, I do not feel that I valued these people as worthwile humans beings who had spiritual needs and were just as important as anyone else in the world. I regret the ease at which I took the task of preaching simply because, "it was a small country church". This might not have come out in tangible ways and I don't think anyone in these congregations would ever have said that about me, but I still felt it and saw it in the way I prepared, the disregard and non-chalance for which I treated it. Why wouldn't I prepare the same preaching for 10 that I would 1,000? Aren't people still people no matter how many of them there are?

I write all this out of conviction but I also say this to wonder if there is a better way. I've got to say that the people I met in these small churches were some of the most loving, supportive people on earth. They would and smile through 10 bad Dustin sermons and tell me it was the greatest sermon they had ever heard. Those moments were indispensable to me as a preacher and have helped form me as the preacher I am today. I wish I would have given them more.