“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’” Genesis 1:28 NIV
Be fruitful and multiply. That has been God’s plan for man from the beginning. God wants to fill the earth with His image. So how can we as the church answer this call? By making God’s glory known to all nations. It is our responsibility as the church to respond to God’s call by bringing Christ’s message of salvation to all places, including rural ones.
It is this call that prompted Christ Church, a rural church in Wellsboro Pennsylvania, to take the initiative to plant a second location in another small town, Mansfield Pennsylvania.
“We recognized the need, first of all, for a church plant in Mansfield because there’s a pretty concentrated population, and the church was really underrepresented and there weren’t really many healthy churches there per capita. So we started praying about it, and put together a core team,” Christ Church senior pastor TJ Freeman said.
In October 2023, Christ Church Mansfield met for the first time at North Penn-Mansfield High School. The mobile-church started out with 80 members from the Wellsboro location who volunteered to move to the new church with Joshua MacClaren as pastor. A year later, the church has grown, averaging 100 attendees each Sunday. But behind the numbers is a story of faithful, consistent, prayerful people committed to spreading the light of Christ in small places.
The Fruit of Prayer and Perseverance
Though the Mansfield campus has only been meeting for worship for a little over a year, Christ Church first began the plans for the church five years ago.
“We had been praying for years concerning planting a church in Mansfield. We want to see our area saturated with the Gospel so that every man, woman and child in our town (Mansfield 6,500 people), county (41,000 people), state (12.96 million people) and world (7 billion people) would have repeated opportunities to hear and respond to the gospel. This conviction for saturation by church planting comes from Matthew 28:18-20, the great commission, seeing its fulfillment in the spread of local churches in the book of Acts,” MacClaren said.
The church’s first effort to plant a location in Mansfield was unsuccessful. While initially discouraging, the congregation found that this experience taught a valuable lesson about relying on the Lord’s timing:
“I think when we attempted to plant five years ago and it didn’t take off, it felt like a failure. And really that was God, I think, teaching us that this needs to happen on His timeline and not ours. And I can see some ways that we were kind of forcing it before. So that was a grace actually for Him to help us to be really dependent on Him. And then through this whole process, He’s really gone before us to prepare the hearts of the congregation in both places,” Freeman said.
Prioritizing Leadership Development and Relationships
After the initial attempt, the church in Wellsboro focused on developing leadership within the church-planting team. Investing in relationships among the leadership team and the Mansfield community proved to be an essential part of the process for launching the new branch of the church:
“Relationships for our members as well as pursuing relationships in the community we’re planting in is vital. We seek to practice ‘incarnational’ living, meaning we live as a visible representation of the Lord Jesus to people in our circles of accountability,” MacClaren said.
“We had regular Bible study and outreaches for over a year before we began to form a large core team of about 80 adults and children who agreed to go with us to plant the church. We regularly gathered throughout the week. Now, we have weekly small groups that act as our main arm of discipleship, along with our Lord’s Day gathering, monthly fellowship meals and regular outreaches,”
The planters continued to be present in their community. They got to know the people living in Mansfield by taking the time to frequent local coffee shops and restaurants and by praying for the area’s residents. The group began taking “prayer walks” through the streets of Mansfield, praying over people’s homes, for the people they encountered and for the needs of the community.
Navigating the Unique Challenges of Small-Town Church Planting
Planting a church in a rural neighborhood is different than planting a church in an urban place. It has its own unique challenges that the Christ Church leadership team had to learn to navigate throughout the process.
“You have to understand that you can’t just read a planting book and go do this in a rural place. You have to understand that community and every rural community is different,” Freeman explained.
“Planting a congregation in rural places is much different than a more populated area. We live in a more traditional area where people are used to things not changing. To plant a new church, where there are already churches in a town seemed odd to them,” MacClaren elaborated.
The church has also faced the challenge of finding a stable place to worship. The church is a mobile congregation, and when a building can no longer accommodate the congregation, it can be difficult to find a place for the people to worship on Sunday morning. Christ Church Mansfield has held worship in four different locations just this past year. This has served as another reminder to the church about God’s provision and His grace that they can rely on Him.
“We’ve at times felt like Israel wandering in the wilderness, but God has continued to provide any time we need space,” MacClaren said.
A Commitment to the Mission
Despite the difficulties they’ve faced, the church has remained committed to extending the church’s reach into the Mansfield community. This conviction is founded on Scriptures in Genesis and Ephesians:
“In Genesis 1:26-28, God’s made us to fill the earth with His glory by bearing His image and exercising dominion. And then in Ephesians three, 10 and 11, it’s through the church that the manifold wisdom of God is made known not just in this world, but to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. So God’s plan for His own glory is the spread of His people gathered in the local church to the ends of the earth. So if He really wants His glory to cover the earth, there needs to be churches in rural places. Most of the earth is rural. So there needs to be, I think, an emphasis on rural churches. What seems like the middle of nowhere to us is ground that the Lord wants taken for the sake of His kingdom,” Freeman explained.
Christ Church Mansfield has continued to serve as a light for Christ in its corner of the world. Over the past year, the church has celebrated baptisms, hosted community events and held fellowship dinners. Christ Church has begun considering other locations in need of a church where they potentially could plant another location.
Freeman reflected, “I believe fully in the importance of seeing the church advance into rural places. It was very costly from a lot of standpoints to do this, but seeing the church get behind it and not just embrace it, but really lean into rural church planting for the advancement of Christ’s kingdom has been so encouraging to me.”
“Its also given us some momentum to keep seeing these efforts. I think we’ve identified a number of other communities in our region that need to see a stronger representation of the church that we’d like to move into. And some communities have no church at all… And I think that’s probably the biggest lesson spiritually too, is just trust the Lord and His timing. He’ll enable us to do it, and whatever he calls us to do, he’s going to equip us for.”
“Its also been really encouraging to see other men really stepping up and leading. And it’s not centered on a pastor, but on a plurality of leaders who are working creatively to see the church go into places most of the world would say is not very strategic.”
Emily Fox is a junior at Grove City and a writing intern for CRM. She grew up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and is studying English with minors in Writing and Digital Marketing at the college. Post-grad, she hopes to pursue a career in Public Relations.
