Your Small-Town Sheep

Small-town congregations are not so different from suburban or inner-city ones in the sense that they need compassion-filled shepherds to teach them and love them with the words and heart of Christ. What is unique about small-town congregations are some of the specific ways that shepherds can show them compassion. Here are a few of them.

Develop a Non-Anxious Presence

People live in small towns for a variety of reasons. One reason is that they were born there, it’s all they’ve ever known, and they never had any desire or opportunity to leave.

The second reason is that they moved there to “get away” from the city and live in a safer, more inexpensive, and less confined community. As we give some thought to the former, it means that anxiety, in a general sense, is likely to run high among small-town congregations. The lack of any real interfacing with denser populations and faster-paced societies can produce an escalation of anxiety when even “smaller” challenges arise. This is not a defect in character, but it’s likely a result of lacking experience in high-stress environments, where processing and coping skills can be developed. In small towns, small things can become big things very quickly, which is why small-town pastors would do well to develop a non-anxious presence with their congregations.

The only way to develop a non-anxious presence for your people is to work toward the embodiment of a non-anxious life.

To constantly lay yourself at the feet of Christ, remembering that “He is the vine and you are the branch,” and “apart from Him you can do nothing” (John 15:5). A non-anxious presence is the posture of a shepherd who knows who they are and who they are not. They approach their sheep with a humble-heartedness that sees them through the same lens. Rather than being a demanding pastor, or a reprimanding pastor, or a condemning pastor, we offer our sheep a shepherding pastor who has experienced the rest that our Shepherd has provided for us. A non-anxious presence is a compassionate presence.

Develop a Grateful Character

We live in a grumbling, complaining world, and it’s contagious! One of these easy traps for pastors (and people) to fall into is conversation and communication that become undergirded by constant complaining. It’s a subtle danger because complaining with our people can feel like one of the ways we are listening and being sympathetic to what they are experiencing. In reality, complaining fills up the space we have to show them instead of compassion.

Before you put your eyes on all the text messages, emails, and missed phone calls, you are freshly invited as a sheep to enter His gates, to freshly experience his steadfast, enduring love, and be washed by the reminder of his eternal faithfulness. The more we enter that space, the better we will be at entering into a compassionate space with our sheep.