Small Towns

“Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness” (Matthew 9:35 NRSV).

When it comes to small towns, the Christian witness, at least as recorded in Scripture, seems to overturn the common wisdom. Everyone knows that small towns are “a good place to raise children,” which is often a reason people give for wanting to live in them. Cities, on the other hand, are widely thought to be dens of iniquity. As the writer Ambrose Bierce once stated, tongue in cheek, “You can’t stop the wicked from going to Chicago by killing them.”

And yet the Christian vision of heaven is a city. Daniel speaks of Jerusalem as the city that bears God’s name (Daniel 9:18-19) and in Psalm 122, when we “go to the house of the Lord,” it is Jerusalem we enter. Much of the Revelation to John of Patmos that draws the Bible to a close is devoted to a detailed description of the kingdom of God as a city, the New Jerusalem.

What does this mean? That God’s ways are not our own, to be sure, and also that God has the power to transform even cities, which in our world are so often icons of human misery, into a paradise in which all our tears are wiped away. I also wonder if the vision of heaven as a city lets those of us in small towns know that the desire to use our towns as an escape from the problems of people in cities is an unholy thing, one that is ultimately self-defeating. People who flee the inner city for the suburbs soon find that they have taken the social problems of the city with them; if they flee the suburbs for small towns, the same thing happens. A city’s grace, and its burden, is that it is open to humanity in all its diversity. Maybe God is trying to tell us that there is no escape from people whose color, faith, values and lifestyle are not our own. No paradise on earth, no secure and perfect place, but we can begin to build the kingdom here by standing our ground, and trying to get along with people wherever we are.

Small towns represent many of the best things about America, the day-to-day honesty, trust and concern for the common good that seem at risk in the larger society. I treasure the luxury of not having to lock my doors and windows, of being known by the people I do business with and also of knowing them. When I shop downtown at the grocery store or the drugstore, the clerks are not impersonal workers in the “service economy,” but my friends and neighbors.

In my small town, at least, there is no “bad neighborhood,” a fact my city-dwelling teenaged niece found difficult to comprehend, when she was visiting and we told her that there was no place where it would be unsafe for her to jog. While there is a group of newer, more expensive homes on the west edge of town, most neighborhoods are mixed in terms of income and housing, and this has a stabilizing effect. It also blurs class distinctions, which I find appealing. My immediate neighbors are a retired trucker, a policeman, an attorney, a construction worker, a nurse (see Neighborhood).

At its best, small-town life encourages a sense of community, the humble recognition that as mortals, as ordinary human beings, we have many needs and desires in common. At their worst, small towns turn this healthy commonality into a straitjacket of conformity. If the idol of “this is the way we’ve always done it” comes to prevail in small-town institutions, people with a different way, a fresh and possibly valuable new vision to offer, either leave or conform on the surface, while harboring bitterness within.

As Carol Bly notes in her provocative book Letters from the Country, “There is enormous pressure to conform and serve” in small towns. Often this leads to a frantic level of activity. When there are a few people and much community service to be done, people can become overwhelmed, and the danger of burnout is as real as in fast-paced city life. As small-town people grow older, they often come to resent what Bly terms “the loss of selfhood which has taken place over all the years of community activity.” They may take to making resentful remarks about the younger generation at the women’s Bible study or grow unwilling to take on the duties that had seemed to give them pleasure: organizing a funeral luncheon, serving as treasurer for the deacons, reading a Scripture passage during worship.

In my own book Dakota, I explore the dilemma of trying to discuss our weaknesses as well as our strengths realistically in a small town, where, “if a discouraging word is ever heard, it is not for public consumption.” Our tendency, in small towns, to “make nice,” can make a casualty of the truth. Jesus tells us that the truth will set us free, but in the small town that bit of gospel wisdom can get submerged in the desire to get along, to just get by.

The Gospels point to one of the worst problems that small towns have, which is to recognize, value and nurture the true gifts of the people in their midst. Gossip is irresistible, adding spice to our everyday lives, which in a small town often unfold in quiet ways. But gossip can also be our enemy. Because we watch a family over several generations, we often pigeonhole people according to their family history, forgetting that we may not be allowing them to be the people God intends them to be.

Jesus found small towns a fruitful place for ministry. In fact, in Luke 4:43 Jesus says that he was sent for the purpose of proclaiming the good news in the towns of Galilee. Mark and Luke tell us that immediately after his baptism by John and his trial in the desert, Jesus headed straight for the towns and villages, and quickly became known throughout the region for his preaching, healing and miracles. In his own hometown, however, the warm welcome for a local-boy-made-good soon turns into suspicion and even rage: How dare the son of the carpenter preach to us this way? I think the story reveals more about the low self-esteem of the townspeople than about Jesus’s ministry, although in Mark 6:5-6 (NRSV) we are told that Jesus finds that he can do “no deed of power there” and is “amazed at their unbelief.”

Perhaps it was this experience that led Jesus to give his disciples such harsh advice when he sent them out to preach and heal in small towns (see Matthew 10). Those of us who live in such towns might reflect on these Gospel stories when we contrast the warm welcome that new preachers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, receive from us with the callous indifference, or bitter infighting, that so often colors their departures.

Small-town people might find great hope in the fact that in Luke’s Gospel, at least, the disciples first recognize the risen Christ in the village of Emmaus. Significantly, it is in the offering of hospitality to a stranger, and in the sharing of food, that Christ appears to them. We might remember that it is easy to “think small” in a small town, to be concerned only with our family, friends and neighbors. But, as the old hymn says, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,” and God wants us to think big. Christ may appear to us as a stranger, in the most unlikely encounters. Or Christ may appear as someone we thought we knew, who turns out to have needs we never dreamed of. We can resist—thinking it’s only the grocer’s daughter, the plumber’s son—or we can let Christ reveal himself to us in each other.

» See also: Church, Small

» See also: Community, Rural

» See also: Gossip

» See also: Neighborhood

» See also: Unemployment

References and Resources

C. Bly, Letters from the Country (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981); K. Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

—Kathleen Norris