How Village Churches Thrive

How Village Churches Thrive, Robert Atwell et al, Church House Publishing, London: 2022, 186pp, £9.99, 9781781402191

Many of our congregations are in villages or rural areas, and these are often small but quite stable.  This book is for such congregations.  It’s not all about growth, although that is part of it, but rather a focus on thriving and flourishing – being a small but healthy congregation that helps people to live out their faith in their local community.

This book is a Church of England resource and so is very much written from that perspective.  A little bit of translation is needed at times and our buildings are less likely to be in the very centre of a village, been there for hundreds of years and automatically be a focus and at times host for community events.  But the chapters point us to actions, activities and ways of being that seem to help village churches and rural communities.

Chapters cover issues that we all grapple with and include welcoming, using the building creatively, festivals, children, ecology, helping the lonely and communicating effectively.  They are written by a wide range of Church of England practitioners and the foreword is by the comedian Hugh Dennis, who grew up in rectories and now lives beside a village church.  In the introduction the bishop of Exeter captures well a key approach in rural ministry ‘We need to release individual congregations from feeling that they have to be everything and do everything.  Working together across an area and working ecumenically has to be the way forward.  Mission and ministry in the countryside works best when people cooperate rather than compete.’ (p7).  

If you want guidance on using facebook, whatsapp, websites and the rest in a small church, this is well addressed.  How we create a welcoming environment during the week and on Sunday morning is fleshed out by case studies.  In many of our small rural churches there are very rarely visitors.  Often we don’t expect visitors and if there is ‘a stranger’ we can be unsure what to do at times, apart from say hello and sort of stare at them trying to work out where to sit.  Having a proactive attitude to inviting and welcoming, even in our small congregations, is important.   Weddings, funerals, infant baptisms and other occasional services are a further opportunity to engage with a much wider group of people than normal and being focused on occasional or one-off worshippers as the important people present is a mind-set that enables us to welcome and seek to include.  They have come to us.  The opportunities exist.  Using the church grounds well in rural areas is as good an ‘advert’ for us as we will get.  Cranagill church turning much of its grounds into a wildflower meadow is a wonderful statement of life, joy, colour, welcome and creation.

While How Village Churches Thrive is very Anglican focused there a lot here that is very helpful to us and enables us see our small rural churches as places of mission not maintenance.

Rev’d Dr Stephen Skuce
Growing Churches Officer
The Methodist Church in Ireland