Away from the big city

The sign at the edge of town says 106 people live there. O’Brien, Texas—130 miles east of Lubbock, 73 miles north of Abilene, and 204 miles west of Dallas—has fewer residents than a megachurch Sunday school class. Small-town pastors get far less recognition, too—but that doesn’t mean their work is any less significant, or challenging.

About 60 people from O’Brien and from nearby Knox City attend the Sunday service of the town’s Baptist church. Chas Shira, the pastor, told me about his break-even budget—a blessing compared with other churches in the area—and the challenge of encouraging his people to fellowship with one another. “We struggle,” he said, “to build close-knit community.”

Though Shira said the challenges facing his church “seem to be the same challenges that every church faces,” he saw how shrinking populations pose unique problems for rural towns and those wanting to minister to them. Shira thought Southern Baptist churches should think more about “a ‘circuit-rider’ type of system” in which several churches share one pastor. If they don’t, “they are going to get nongifted, unqualified, and never-trained pastors, which will only further contribute to the decline of the churches in their area.”

Every small town has its own trajectory. The city of Olive Branch, Miss., doesn’t face the problem of population decline. It had just over 3,500 people at the 1990 census. It has approximately 35,000 today. Robert Browning, senior pastor of Olive Branch’s Christ Presbyterian Church, struggles to get his congregation to invest in the community. “We really are more of a suburb of a big city (Memphis),” he said, “than we are a self-sustaining small town.” The challenge: to get his people to see the surrounding county as more than just “a place to lay their heads before they go back into the ‘big city’ for work and entertainment.”

Shira identified a special benefit of being a small-town pastor: “I know my people.” He can easily identify visitors, given that he addresses every person in the congregation by name, and, he said, being a small-town pastor “makes it easier to know when people have been absent for more than a week.” So a word to O’Brien Baptists: Don’t go fishing more than two Sundays in a row.

The Vatican strikes back

The Vatican City State has charged two journalists, Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, with illegally procuring and revealing information. Nuzzi’s Merchants in the Temple and Fittipaldi’s Avarice, both released in November, describe alleged economic mismanagement at the Vatican.

Alexandra Geneste of Reporters Without Borders came to the journalists’ defense, saying they had “exercised their right to provide information in the public interest and should not be treated as criminals in a country that supposedly respects media freedom.”

The Vatican claimed the issue is not press freedom but illegal activity used to obtain information. Kishore Jayabalan, director of Istituto Acton, the Acton Institute’s Rome office, said the Vatican was “trying to protect the privacy and discretion of the pope and his collaborators.” But he added, “I personally don’t think the Vatican should do anything about the leaks since they are not particularly damaging in themselves and only make the Vatican look like it has something to hide.” —J.B.