Book Review

Fresh Expressions of the Rural Church

- by Michael Adam Beck & Tyler Kleeberger

The rural church was a community’s centerpiece. The place where people gathered to worship and hear a sermon, break bread together, and support each other through the joys and struggles of life with the land. In many ways, the rural church captured a central aspect of the church’s mission: to be the guiding hand for the life of a place.

Can rural congregations flourish again? Can new Christian communities succeed in rural areas? Could healthy rural churches catalyze a better future for their declining communities?

This book collects stories from the diversity of rural contexts across the US. It lays out a fresh theology for rural life and offers principles for harnessing the potential of what some consider the forgotten spaces. Each chapter includes a helpful Field Exercise - questions for discussion and suggested actions for leadership teams to work through together. Chapters conclude with a Field Story illustrating how the chapter’s main ideas can work in a real church setting.

Fresh Expressions of the Rural Church helps us to reconsider our Wesleyan roots and the gifts of our rural contexts, a seedbed packed with possibility for new communities of faith to form and flourish.

- Heather M. Jallad,

Fresh Expressions specialist, North Georgia Conference, UMC

Beck and Kleeberger have taken a sample of the good soil that is faithful rural mission, identified the challenges, celebrated the riches, and offered us a powerful way to learn and be in partnership and connection with the gifts of God. - - Ken Carter, Bishop, Florida & West North Carolina Conferences of the United Methodist Church