How a Rural Context Affects the Shape of

Field Education on the Prairies

Keynote Panel Presentation

Association of Theological Field Educators Biennial Convention

Jan 19, 2005, Toronto, ON Delta Chelsea Hotel

Also published in the

Journal of Supervision and Training in Ministry,

vol 25, 2005, 116-121.

Cam Harder

 At our seminary in Saskatoon, SK, about 80% of our graduates are called into small rural parishes. As the communities around them depopulate, getting stripped of their services and institutions, the congregations tend to hunker down in a survival mode They watch their young people leaving and not coming back. They see their schools and hospitals being shut down, regionalized There is a kind of corporate grief that sets in. They are constantly having to say good bye, to let go. It's like getting flesh-eating disease, watching your body parts being amputated, finger by finger, limb by limb. They often feel hopeless--trapped by fate on a down escalator that can only end in the dark hole of extinction. Some feel abandoned by God--as if God joined the exodus to the cities and left them behind. There is often a corporate sense of shame; the community feels wounded, weak, not quite publicly presentable anymore. It stifles their energy for mission and traps them under a blanket of communal depression.

These congregations need hope, renewed self-esteem, and a set of skills for rebuilding their communities. Our grads need specialized tools for understanding these rural contexts and for catalyzing change.

I've felt that our traditional field education hasn't really given either our rural congregations or our students what they've needed. In the past an intern was often a cheap way to supply a congregation that could no longer afford a full-time pastor. For the congregation the intern was both a visible step toward closure and an attempt to stave it off a little longer. For interns it was often a confusing, frustrating time of wrestling with what seemed to be unsolvable problems and a deadly inertia, with only an off-site supervisor for help.

Looking for some answers, I spent my sabbatical year traveling across Canada, the U.S. India and Great Britain, visiting seminaries, rural institutes and NGO's. I wanted to find training methods that would both equip our students for rural ministry and help to revitalize rural congregations in the process.

I can't say that I've found a magic solution. But I've found a tool that is very promising. I've used it fruitfully in a pilot project with one of my interns. The tool is community-based participatory research. You're probably familiar with its development out of the work of Paulo Friere. Friere was a Latin American educator. He saw that communities began to pull out of poverty and oppression when they changed the source of their self-image. Most of the time, communities came to know themselves through the eyes of educated elites. Much the way that women have come to see themselves through the eyes of men. The sources of knowledge, the textbooks, tend to be written by people who don't share the people's oppression and in fact often contribute to it. The knowledge they gain from such elites tends to reinforce their sense of themselves as a people without resources, reliant on others, helpless and hopeless.

Friere suggested that the job of a teacher is to help communities learn how to research themselves, to see themselves through their own eyes.

This is how it worked in my pilot project. A parish consisting of 4 small rural churches contacted us for help with a congregational survey. They wanted to know where their members had all gone and was there any chance of getting them back. I said that I would train a student to work with them. But I asked if they would take the student on as an intern. That way the student could live with them and really get to know them And the student could also help them learn how to gather that information for themselves. They agreed and we worked together to raise funding for the internship.

Of the interns that volunteered we purposely chose one who was an urbanite, with no experience in rural life or ministry. I gave the intern a reading course in research methods before we began. It mostly focused on methods of interviewing and processing data from interviews. As I'm doing this again now, I'm focusing much more on training the intern in group facilitation methods--especially appreciative inquiry and asset-mapping--and action planning--how to equip leaders to take what they learn about themselves and use it to bring healthy change.

The intern worked with a group of parish leaders to set up a series of interviews. These were intended to help sharpen the focus of the study. There was an underlying anxiety among the members that the motive out of which congregational leaders were undertaking this study was to dredge up reasons for closing down the churches. People were interviewed at the center and the margins of the congregations and their responses collated by the parish councils. What came out of those interviews were lots of expressions of frustration. Young people were being excluded. Older people felt that worship was not connected to their economic realities. There was a sense of lost purpose.

The self perception that emerged was pretty negative. It was obvious that the congregations saw themselves as problem places--problems with youth, problems with attendance, problems with commitment.

So the intern organized a series of focus groups within each of the congregations and instead of asking "what's wrong?" he asked "what's right?" The questions come out of the work of David Cooperrider. They're called "appreciative inquiry." Cooperrider's assumption is that organizations change in the direction of their most frequently asked questions. Positive questions create positive change. Negative questions generate blaming and discouragement.

So the intern asked the focus group questions like these: "What has been the highlight of your experience with this congregation? What are some of the things we do well? What have we done in the past that has really worked with youth? What do people really turn out for and why? What are 3 wishes that we have for this congregation?"

It was amazing to see the energy that developed in that parish. There was a dramatic rise in self-esteem as they listened to each other's stories and discovered that they did some things very well. It was a way of removing shame and restoring honour to the congregations.

The intern worked with a group to collate responses. This time inter-congregational focus groups were held. The people were asked "what resources do you have personally that we could bring to our future together?" The resources they were told to look for included personal experience, skills, hobbies, personality traits, congregational groups, things people owned, community connections, and so on.

Out of those gatherings came a growing sense that this was not a poor, dying parish but one that was rich in history, people and resources. The job was to pull them together in creative ways. Essentially, the intern used a tool called "asset-mapping." Luther Snow has a good book just out on this for congregations from the Alban Institute. Called "The Power of Asset-Mapping: How Your Congregation Can Act on Its Gifts."

The internship finished while the parish was developing action plans. But the people had the process well in hand, and knew how to go back and repeat steps if they needed to. And they have moved forward in ministry with new vitality.

In the semester following internship it has been delightful to see the intern's growth in maturity and perceptiveness. In class this urbanite constantly asks questions that provoke us to think about things from a rural perspective. And his insight into congregational dynamics is keener than most. Which definitely wasn't the case before internship.

I believe that using community participatory research projects as part of our field ed has several advantages:

First, it teaches students that the source of expert knowledge is primarily in the people, not in the seminary library. They learn to come to their context with a listening, inquisitive stance, not with a bunch of answers.

Second, it gives students a set of tools with which they can enter a variety of contexts and discover the unique characteristics of each one. They don't have to depend on broad generalizations.

Third, it teaches students how to be equippers rather than expert performers.

Fourth, it helps congregations become learning communities. Instead of depending on the pastor to tell them who they are, the student gives them the same tools he or she was given--so they can research themselves and their community. And instead of extracting information from a community, as research projects often do, it leaves the community richer, more aware of its own gifts, better equipped to understand itself.

Finally, it helps to raise the hope, self-esteem and faith of rural congregations. They discover that they have unexpected resources, that God is still at work in their midst, that the future isn't a black hole.

There are challenges, however. Projects have to be shaped to the intern's capabilities. The project we began with was probably too large and should have been trimmed to fit better within a year's internship. Also supervisors need to be on board with the theory and process of community participatory research. We help them do this in a team-building retreat just before internship begins. If a supervisor simply wants an intern to learn how to do things the way their congregation does them, there may be some friction. Also, although it is oriented toward positive responses, this sort of research may generate feedback about the supervisor's ministry with which he or she may not be too comfortable. The intern must be careful not to get involved in evaluations of the supervisor's ministry with congregational members.

What I appreciate about this training tool is that it fits well with several key theological convictions that are native to rural communities:

One is that knowing is a matter of relationships, not data transfer. In rural communities information is always weighed according to one's relationship with the informant. How much can I trust what this person says? Why are they telling it to me? What's safe to talk about with this person, what's not? Who else are they connected to that may be the source of their information? And so on? To know anything in rural communities, one must know people, face to face.

That's very much the way that "knowing" is understood in the Bible. We read that Adam knew Eve and she bore a son. I'm pretty sure that Adam's knowing had nothing to do with reading Eve's curriculum vitae. It was a relational knowing. And a very fleshly knowing.

Which brings us to the matter of knowing God. At the bottom of all our seminary training is this hope that somehow our students will meet God. That's the meaning of "theology" right? The study of God. But looking at our curricula students might easily get the idea that to know God is to know texts. That we know God by studying God's curriculum vitae, so to speak. Yet that very curriculum vitae tells us that God is incarnate--that to meet God we have to get to know real people. That's the doctrine of the incarnation.

The doctrinal descriptions in our dogmatics texts are really meant to point us to the meeting place with God. They show us where others have found God, they give us some idea of what we might expect, though surprises are common. They function as God's curriculum vitae or as the syllabi for our theology course. But they are not the course itself. The real study of God, the knowing God, happens in the community.

And that's the second theological conviction inherent to rural communities. You can never know a person in isolation from others. Rural people's self-image is constructed out of relationships. They may live with the same people their whole lives and come to see themselves and others' through the community's eyes. That's why shame is such a powerful dynamic. To lose the respect of the community is to become invisible--to lose oneself. And to gain their respect, to gain honour, is to find oneself.

The Bible tells us that God's self is also determined in community. Our doctrine of the trinity points to the experience of the early church. At the Jordan they came to know Jesus through the Father's eyes: "this is my beloved son." In Jesus' ministry of healing and teaching they came to know the Father as one who heals and restores and accepts. Through the Father and Son they received the gift of the Spirit who makes all things new. They discovered that God is community.

And that brings me to the third and last theological conviction of our rural communities--that it is building community, not growing large congregations that is the church's mission in rural communities. It reflects the vision in Revelation--that in the end, when all is said and done, the point of salvation is that all the nations live together, with the natural world, in a beautiful, dynamic community. Salvation, forgiveness of sins, the sacraments, even the Church are not ends in themselves, but the Church's gift to the world to help build a preview of that community. God's mission in the world is to reproduce that divine communal life.

I discovered in our internship project that the great thing about community participatory research is that whether or not some earth-shaking action plan comes out of it , the very doing of the research--the getting to know each other--builds community. That's what it's all about--from a rural point of view anyway.