It’s 8:30 in the evening, and everyone is standing around the church’s front steps while their kids yell and tumble across the lawn. The service wrapped up over an hour ago. The sun is inching towards the horizon, and it will only be the oncoming darkness (and the increasing mosquitoes) that will eventually persuade us to head to the cars. It’s just too pleasant, enjoying the cool of the evening after a hot summer Sunday and connecting as a church family in chatter and laughter.
One of the elders and his wife usually nab a few kids partway through the evening and commission us to help them fill jugs of water in the basement, carry them up the ramp and around to the front of the church, and liberally water all the flowerbeds. As a daughter of the pastor, I was almost always one of those chosen for the task. It impresses me every year that, under Mrs. C’s diligent eye, the little annual flowers continue blooming much longer than I can get any flowers to last in pots on my windowsill.
The Simple Goodness of Seasonal Rhythms
One of the great pleasures of life in a rural world is the way that so many of our habits become shaped by the seasons. Even without realizing it, I expect certain things from the summer. There’s a certain slowness inherent to these longer days, and my time with others always feels a little less hurried.
That being said, the calendar for our church is also at its busiest in the summer. It’s the season of Vacation Bible Schools (VBS) around the world, but for the small places in God’s kingdom, VBS can come with an extra share of headaches. Volunteers can be scarce, resources are never very fancy, and reaching out to kids in the community can feel like a fruitless task. But calling off VBS is unthinkable – for myself and other kids growing up in the church, VBS is the one great pinnacle of the year. We don’t care that the crafts are clever concoctions of bottle caps and old magazine clippings, the snacks are cookies made by our moms and packaged in plastic Tupperware, and the skit has been rehearsed exactly once and usually is missing a few props. In fact, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
There’s also our annual church picnic. This is another event that has achieved legendary status. We all meet at a member’s old farmhouse that was surrounded by fields (where we have gone stargazing with a real telescope and shot off pop rockets) and forest (where we have seen beavers build a dam and all joined hands to make a circle reaching around the 11th largest tree in Pennsylvania – it has a sign to prove it.) We eat large quantities of ham sandwiches and Jello concoctions that really shouldn’t be called ‘salads’ while we sit outdoors in a circle of eclectic folding chairs. And we always end the night with a hayride right as it grows dark and the fireflies come out.
Well, it’s not always that idyllic. One church cookout has gone down in infamy.
It was blisteringly hot, and we had set up some little canopies to block the sun, but we were all still sweaty and lethargic. Then, very suddenly, the empty blue sky darkened with clouds, and a microburst – an extremely localized storm that can produce hurricane-level winds and rain – attacked us with a vengeance. Canopies snapped, the food was drenched, kids (and maybe a few adults) were screaming. We ran everything inside as quickly as possible and set to work drying ourselves and our provisions as best we could. My mom drove to the parsonage and collected baskets of dry clothes, and I helped in the kitchen as we tried to dry out the bread in the oven and pour the water off the deviled eggs. I couldn’t help laughing, when I finally sat and began eating my wet hot dog, to spot all our beach towels draped around the shoulders of various members.
Becoming a People through Shared Memories and Experiences
It’s those kinds of moments, of course, that bring a disparate group of people together in laughter and shared memories. But as a church, we have the joy of sharing so much more than just our traditions, rhythms, and stories. We share a salvation that has bound us together as the children of God, working for His kingdom in our different ways as we seek to serve in the place where He has put us.
“Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God,” Peter reminds us in chapter 2 of his first letter. And we are brought together for the purpose of joyful worship – “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9-10) That worship takes place when we are standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the pews, singing and praying each Sunday. But it also takes place as we are watering flowers and collecting bottlecaps, making Jello salads and sharing all our towels. The love of God that we see in the Gospel radically transforms how we live each day in community with one another, and I never see that in such full display as I do each summer in my country church.
Anastasia Brown is a senior English Secondary Education major at Grove City College. She also serves as writing fellow for the Center for Rural Ministry.
