Why Can’t Emergent Get Down with Rural?

I read an arti­cle today (via Brent’s Town Crier) about why rural min­istry isn’t con­sid­ered cool.

This has always stumped me, par­tic­u­larly with regard to emer­gent church stuff. If small com­mu­ni­ties who aren’t play­ing the num­bers game is where it’s at, if we’re inter­ested in peo­ple who are closely tied to their local com­mu­ni­ties, their local stores and their local cul­ture, why is emer­gent cul­ture so tied to urban cul­ture? If we’re sup­posed to be close to poverty and turn away from con­sumerism, fash­ion and stuff-​​ism, why do most emer­gents live in eco­nomic and con­sumeris­tic meccas?

Why is nobody talk­ing about what it means to be an emer­gent per­son in a town smaller than 100,000, let alone a town of 5000, or of 200?

The rea­sons, I think, are only unfortunate:

1. It’s dang hard to find some hippy counter-​​cultural types in Flora, IL. And if you can’t find some­body to agree with you, it’s hard to main­tain any sort of atti­tude par­tic­u­larly if the core of that atti­tude is sup­posed to be lov­ing peo­ple who aren’t like you.
2. It’s just not cool to live in a corn and soy­beans farm­ing town, a town with plenty of white trash and no black gangs, with meth but no crack, with well-​​off farm­ers and a two-​​room library that pri­mar­ily checks out mys­ter­ies and romances. 

Liv­ing that kind of life is not sexy (in both the lit­eral and the overly broad senses of the word) or artsy. To sum up: it’s just not that much fun.

Nobody’s talk­ing about being emer­gent in a small Amer­i­can town because it’s hard and it’s not fun/​cool. Peo­ple like that are doing their best to get out of their small towns and to get to the cities where there’s art and cool­ness and cof­feeshops and whatnot.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that the peo­ple doing emer­gent churches are only doing it because they want to be cool–I’m sure they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

But I AM sug­gest­ing that there’s some sort of cul­tural lie here that needs decon­struct­ing, one that says that if you care about poor peo­ple, you need to live in a city, that says if you’re inter­ested in art, you had bet­ter live in a loft down the street from the gallery district.

That kind of lie mar­gin­al­izes a lot of peo­ple, Chris­tians and nonChris­tians alike, who live out­side cul­tural cen­ters, out in the mid­dle of no where. I don’t know if I can get down with that.